Chapter 34

34

I couldn’t stop screaming.

Life . Onyx paid the price.

The screams tore out of me, echoing in the nothingness and reverberating back until every cell of my body filled with horror and fear. I scrambled into motion, and only Livvy throwing her arms around me stopped me from following Onyx off the side.

I went with him, though, in spirit. I went with him into the abyss and I stared at the empty blackness until my eyes burned and every inhalation scorched my raw lungs.

Mom held me as my tears finally broke free and trailed fire along my cheeks.

What had he done?

Why? Why, why, why ?

He’s gone.

We’d gotten out of things before this. We’d done the impossible too many times to count, we’d survived, and now he just—he…

We stayed together, with sobs wracking my body for a long time. Livvy said nothing, only held me in her arms with her breath tickling my hair as I shook.

Noren drifted to my other side, nudging, whimpering. The tip of his tongue flicked at my tears but the absurdity of the sweetness coming from such a monstrous creature wasn’t enough to get me to stop.

Onyx was dead, and it was my fault.

He’d sacrificed himself for me, just like that. Gone.

He loved me and he’d decided to jump anyway. What if reincarnation wasn’t real? What if he’d sacrificed himself for nothing? What if the Abyss was this horrible, fucked-up place and we were never getting out?

I felt half a second away from exploding. Livvy, for her part, did not budge, and kept me sandwiched between her and Noren…

It was almost enough to get me back into my body instead of the black hole inside my head where nothing made sense. Nothing about the world, about what happened, about me. None of it made any sense, and the harder I tried to get it together, the more I lost it all.

“It’s going to be okay, Tavi. It’s all going to be okay.” Livvy’s murmurings were soothing but I did not believe her. “Don’t worry. It’s all going to be okay. Shh, sweet girl. You feel your feelings. I know.”

She refused to move, holding me and whispering those empty words.

Too long passed before I reached a point where the tears ended. My body stopped producing them, as though I’d used up every ounce of available moisture. I licked my lips and peeled back, missing her warmth already.

I blinked, my eyelids swollen and heavy. “Why is there light?”

Livvy shifted to give me an unimpeded view. Right in front of us, the abyss had disappeared, replaced by a stretch of smooth rock. There was no more darkness, no more beach, no more icy water or cliffside.

After so long in the darkness, I ached in the presence of the light.

Slowly, the fractured pieces of me returned, the loss of Self, but none of them fit together quite the same way anymore. And a large piece, a piece with white hair, remained missing.

A rectangular journal, benign and leather-bound, rested against the gray surface of the rock.

Mom must have been sitting there looking at it this whole time. The spell we’d come for was right there, but she’d been here holding me instead. She’d chosen to hold her crying daughter rather than grabbing the journal.

She’d stayed with me .

My heart turned over in my chest. A healing moment, I realized, being held for the first time I ever remembered by the mother I thought I’d lost forever. My lower lip wobbled. Thankfully, the tears were done, every part of me spent.

“The Abyss has returned what it was given,” Livvy murmured. “The cost is fulfilled.”

“Is it safe to touch?” I asked, gesturing toward the journal.

“I believe so, yes.” Livvy pushed to her feet and reached back for me, holding out a hand to help me up.

Somehow, between Livvy and Noren, I managed to struggle into a standing position. My muscles bunched and had frozen in place after too long curled up into myself.

I stretched them out now with a hiss of pain.

“Let me help.” She stepped in front and reached for the journal reverently.

The old book lay dormant in her palms, yet when I reached out to graze my finger along the spine, the leather warmed to the touch.

Without another word, we turned around, finding an opening in the stone and thin tendrils of gray light reaching toward us. Dust motes danced in the rays.

We moved toward the light.

Noren padded along silently beside me. Halfway leaning against my hip. Nothing and no one stood in our way. There were no more hidden traps waiting to spring and no more surprises looming around the corners, no more boat or solid walls.

Our exit from the Abyss was not the same as our entrance.

It seemed Onyx was right. Once you reached the Abyss, it lived inside of you. I knew exactly where every trap lay on our way back out, as if the tunnels were etched on a map in my head, and navigating them felt effortless. As natural as breathing.

The light was magic, not sunlight, yet the tunnels were open and friendly. No hint of the dark river.

Sorrow sucked me under in a beat. This experience connected me to Onyx in a way I’d never expected. I almost felt him in some cavernous, moonless place where the Abyss also lived inside of me, like he’d become a permanent part of this place.

And therefore a permanent part of me.

No matter where I went after this or what I did, no matter who I met or the things I’d see, I’d feel them both in my psyche. In my blood and my cells and my soul for the rest of my life.

A sob erupted unbidden and my throat constricted around it.

We finally emerged into sunlight, each golden strand illuminating the tall, thin tree trunks of the woods around the ruined temple. Even the wildlife had fallen silent.

There was no one here. I didn’t expect them.

Onyx said time worked differently in the Abyss.

Laina was more than likely getting the help she needed for her injuries, and Mike and Bronwen would be with her.

No one was coming for us.

A hand fell on my shoulder and I turned to see Livvy staring at me.

“The journey to the Abyss is not for the faint of heart,” she told me softly, reverently. “Take comfort in how far you’ve come.”

“How can I feel anything when my friend is dead?” I half whispered.

She seemed to consider her next words. “We all make our choices. Some of them are more painful than others, and some of them require a heftier cost.”

I wondered if she spoke about what I’d just gone through or her own journey, and if there was any difference between the two. We’d both had to pay a price for our actions. She’d left me. I’d lost Onyx.

Noren bounded off between the trees with a flash of silver, and within a heartbeat I’d lost sight of him. Even so, Livvy and I stood there a moment longer. Staring, watching. Feeling the weight of the air in this sacred, awful place.

Were her thoughts as deep as mine?

Would we ever voice them out loud or were they too personal for us to admit even to the other?

Eventually her hand fell from my shoulder and Mom walked ahead, leaving me no choice but to follow her. I trailed her along a path that wasn't a path, past the ring of stones toward an opening in the trees beyond.

Here, stones decorated with moss rested on either side of the trail and soon the trees thinned enough to offer a glimpse of intensely blue water in the distance.

Not the farmland I expected to see, but a slight slope in the land rolling down to a massive lake with clear water.

We reached the shore in the next five minutes and I hung back. No way I was going back into water anytime soon. Even the beach brought back too many ghastly sensations for me to get close.

“I hope you don’t mind.” I turned my back to the water. “It’s too soon.”

She squinted against the sunlight. “You don’t need to explain yourself to me. Not with this. We’ll stay here tonight and wait for your friends to return.”

I barely heard her talking about resting here while she searched for the ingredients she needed for the spell. Barely saw her disappear back into the forest. One foot in front of the other took me to a spot where the land leveled out and I sat, the grass prickling against my backside.

Even anticipation and excitement for the spell did nothing to clear my head. Trekking out here might have gotten us the journal but I’d lost someone I cared about, someone who loved me.

Was the price really worth it?

I wished Onyx was here. Wished someone would come along and bespell me so that I wouldn’t feel a damn thing, or maybe even rip my heart out of my chest.

I wished there was a spell to smother the horrible voice hissing inside my head that Onyx died for me and I did not deserve it.

I failed him despite the victory of navigating the Abyss. And no matter how I tried to quell that part of me, it never quieted.

How did I fix something like this? How did I make it right again?

How did I stop feeling ?

The clear water of the lake spread out like a sparkling mirror. Tall pines and deciduous trees rose around the rocky shore. My eyes blurred again, stinging, and I curled in a fetal position.

Nothing was going to be the same again.

Livvy returned softly. “Tavi?”

I sprang up, my head visible above the grass. She caught sight of me and came forward.

“Here,” she began. “I gathered some of the things we need. Lemonberry, wild rosemary. These small white blooms are greater toadblossom. Then uvelas, night milkbalm. The journal says we need water untouched by human hands, a small flat stone, and you see those reeds over there?” She pointed in the distance. “It is amazing for us to find every ingredient we need to work the spell.”

Amazing? No. It wasn’t amazing, and it wasn’t luck.

She opened her palms and the herbs dropped down to the small spot of crushed grass.

My chest clenched. “Are you sure this is going to work?” I asked in a hoarse voice. “Are you sure this will unlock my powers?”

She bobbed her head. “This is the spell we need. The ingredients will ensure its potency.” She cleared her throat. “I read through the journal while I foraged. It’s all there. Everything we need.”

I should say something to her. I wanted to crush the excitement lighting her eyes and say something foul to squash her smile before it grew.

What if I didn’t want it to work? What if I wanted to stay exactly the same as I was now, because the person I was now felt normal. The opposite of special, even though I’d never been that way so I had no real comparison.

But it seemed I didn’t have a choice and there would be no stopping Livvy. She was determined to see this through and fulfill whatever prophecy Faerie told her.

The lake provided the perfect backdrop for what we planned to do.

I sat and watched her work, setting up the area to work the spell with reverence in every move. Day shifted slowly to night.

Magic, midnight, an epic quest. A reluctant heroine who would rather just spend time with the mother she’d thought had died. None of those things were going to happen now. They’d never been in the cards for me.

Why was it so hard to accept, then?

From somewhere in the distance, a lone howl cut through the taut silence of evening. Noren was close. I let out a breath and finally lifted my chin to face Livvy fully.

She stared at me, eyes the same color as mine boring holes through my skull. “Are you ready?” she asked.

I dipped my head once in a silent acknowledgement.

No going back. I’d come this far, hadn’t I?

The magic was always mine, if I chose to believe her. Sealed down in the depths of me and so far I’d never known it existed.

The ruins behind us, the unseen entrance to the Abyss, were an ageless witness to the moment.

“Then sit across from me and get comfortable. I’ll say the words.” She lifted the journal up, squinting in the moonlight to check the words.

Cross-legged, we faced each other and she left the journal open on her lap.

I sucked in a breath to tell her to wait just as the first syllable of the spell left her mouth.

A sharp, awful breeze split the space between us and settled in my bones. I didn’t recognize the words. They were foreign, strange, garbled yet clear at the same time.

Goosebumps lifted the hair on my arms, my legs, my neck. My teeth clenched to keep from chattering, and Livvy kept reading, intoning words of power, precious and sacred, drawn from the land itself. I felt them inside of me and they mingled with the chill and set my veins alight like little fizzes.

I squeezed my eyes shut and braced for the strike I knew was coming. The strike that would split me open and carve out my insides to make room for everything she thought I had in me.

Livvy reached the end of the spell and the last word dropped, detonated in the night like a bomb.

Still I waited. Ready. Unwilling.

Then pried my eyes open when nothing happened.

She stared at me again and this time the fingers holding open her journal were white, her knuckles tense, hands shaking.

Nothing had happened. The spell didn’t work. We failed.