The floor tilts, and the room spins, forcing me all the way down. The pain in my bones keeps me from moving. I’m swathed in light, but I can see Maks’s hand dangling over the side of the bed.
Slowly, his finger twitches. He lifts his hand, reaching, reaching. And I’m not there to hold him. I need to be there.
My sisters are shouting. Lady de la Muerte calls my name. I turn to her. She uses her spear to stab at Alex’s shield. The red light fills the room, pulsing to the beat of my heart. Death stares down at her hands. Her spear vanishes in an iron-gray cloud.
Then Death is still.
The shadows that trail at her back disappear. The names that scrolled on her forearms are gone, leaving nothing but translucent white skin.
There’s ringing all around, but I realize it’s not in my head. The machines Maks is hooked up to are emitting a round of sirens, whistles, and rapid beeps.
Maks’s finger twitches again. I try to raise my hand, but it’s like I’m magnetized to the floor, like I’m at the eye of a storm and for the first time in so long, my heart is full. The wound on my arm is starting to sting. But I have to let him know that I’m here, that I saved him. I push and push until I’m there.
When I touch Maks’s hand, hold it in mine, the sound of sirens disappears. Even La Muerte is gone. No one calls my name anymore either. There is just his hand in mine. He squeezes once. Just once.
Then, his hand goes slack, and I hear one more thing—the endless, unforgiving trill of a flat line.
8
La Tristesa lives alone in a river of salt,
filled by all the world’s tears.
—Book of Deos
“What have you done to yourself?” a doctor asks me, her voice full of pity.
I float between waking and unconsciousness as my body is rushed down a hallway. Dark faces surround me, each one is like staring an X-ray, down to the radioactive skeletons beneath their skin.
“You have betrayed me,” La Muerte says. Her voice is inside my head, louder than my own thoughts and memories.
“You betrayed me first!” I shout. “Where did you take him?”
Strong hands pin me down to the bed. Something pricks my arm, then a numbness travels along my skin. I lift my head to look at the hands sewing up my cut, but the fingers that holds the needle are nothing but bone.
“You’re all dead,” I say, thrashing and kicking. I scream until my voice is hoarse and it takes half a dozen people to strap me down. My body no longer feels like it’s mine. The pain is there, like it has become part of me and I’ll never be rid of it.
“I need a psych eval,” one of the skeletons shouts into the darkness, shoving a syringe into my good arm.
And for a long time, I lie still, staring at the lights on the ceiling, like white suns floating over me. I don’t realize I’ve been asleep until I hear the steady beep of the heart monitor.
? ? ?
Maks was pronounced dead at 2:18 a.m. two days ago.
Two days since both my cantos failed, since my magic failed, since I failed. Two days of questions and tests and people walking on eggshells around me.
When I woke up today, I pretended to still be asleep to avoid the shrink they keep sending in. I don’t want to see anyone. Not doctors or nurses or my parents or Alex. Rose is the only comfort because when she’s with me, she doesn’t force me to talk.
Maks is dead, I think.
Lady de la Muerte took him. Then, she just disappeared. One minute she was there, and the next she was gone. Like Maks. One minute he was awake. The next he was gone.
I try to swallow the terrible taste on my tongue. I’m thirsty. I ache in parts of my body I didn’t know could ache. Through the open blinds, I can see Alex talking to the police as Rose lingers against the wall by herself. My parents talk to the doctors. Maks’s mother is there too, dressed in mourning black. She keeps her head bent into her husband’s chest and a fresh swell of tears streams from my eyes.
None of them are aware I’m awake except for one person—the nurse that stopped to speak to me on the way to Maks’s room. I wonder if he’s mad, if he regrets not making me go back to my room the night of the canto. I want to close my eyes again, but it was so hard to open them that I stare back at him. He makes for my room, and I sink my face deeper into the covers.
The door opens, and I hear him walk across the floor. I can feel him standing beside my bed.
“I’m sorry about your boyfriend,” he says, picking up my medical chart.
He’s the first person in this hospital to say that to me. I choke on a sob because I don’t want sympathy. I want Maks’s mother to shout at me. I want Detective Hill to throw me in jail for murder. I want blame, not forgiveness.
“But you’re stronger than this,” he says softly.
“How would you know something like that?” I ask reflexively.
“I suppose I’m speaking from what I’ve seen so far.” The sound of his pen scratching against paper bothers me, and I pull up the covers over my ears.
“Your family wants to see you. Should I tell them you’re awake?”
“I don’t want to see anyone.”
“Well, you have to. No one has ever seen anything like this.”
“Like what?” Not even Rose would tell me what happened after I passed out the first time. I bring down my covers and look at him. His brown hair is still tied back, and the dark circles around otherwise young eyes are deeper than last I saw him. I wonder if he’s gone home at all.
“I’ll tell you everything I know if you promise to let your family see you.”
“Yes, okay. Tell me.”
He takes a seat on the chair beside me. He sighs and shakes his head slightly. “One of your sisters went to get a nurse because Maks’s vitals were showing he was waking up. You were on the floor. They carried you out and gave you a blood transfusion. Thankfully, you didn’t damage anything vital when you slashed open your arm.”
That doesn’t make sense. I heard him flatline. How could I have heard him flatline if I wasn’t in the room? But saying that would send me to the psych wing.
“Are you sure they took me away?” I ask.
He nods. “We took him off life support because he was trying to breathe on his own. For all intents and purposes, Maks was awake. I checked his vitals. He called out for you. Said your name once. He tried to fight the nurses and ripped the stitches in his abdomen. We were able to sedate him. When we sent him for X-rays, they showed that his bones were healed completely. The bleeding stopped in his stomach. He didn’t look like he’d just had his spine shattered or had a metal pole driven through his torso. But by all scientific reasoning, he shouldn’t have been alive.”
I shut my eyes, fighting the ache in my skull. “Where did you learn your bedside manner?”
“I guess that happens when you’re around a lot of dead people. You forget how to talk to the living.” The corner of his mouth quirks up, not quite a smile. He licks his lips and sits forward, like he caught himself getting too comfortable. He looks over his shoulder at where my family is huddled, gripping coffee cups like lifelines. Maks’s parents are gone.
“Keep going,” I urge him on. Maks was alive. I didn’t completely fail. So what went wrong?
“We called his parents and told them that Maks was awake. They’d gone home for the first time in five days. They came in to see him. He even smiled at his mother. Then, he started seizing. Apparently when he was born, he had a hole in his heart. It was repaired, but the doctors say despite the miracle, his heart gave out.”
I try to stifle a cry and it comes out as a whimper.
“Sometimes there are signs of recovery, and then—”
“I don’t need to hear that.” My canto went wrong. My magic failed me. I’ve never felt so helpless and alone, and I don’t know how to start fixing all the things I’ve said to my family. “Please leave.”
He nods once and moves toward the door. “I’ll send your family back in. We had a deal.”
I sit up, every muscle in my core and arms throbbing angrily.