I still could not see him, but I didn’t care. If this was what I heard, what I felt, before I died … There was nothing I wanted more.
“Thom?” I was sure I had spoken this time, even though my voice was broken and airy.
“I’m here.” His hand tightened around mine at the shattered emotion of his words. The memory of how he had looked when he cried still so clear inside of me. The way his eyes pinched together, his hand instinctively moving through his short, brown hair, much the way that his brother did.
Everything was so clear, the memory so fresh, that for a moment, the pain didn’t seem to matter. For the briefest of moments, a joy I didn’t think I could feel again took over. The emotion was so backward from the agony that still ripped through me that I was sure the curse had already done its job.
That I had already passed from this life.
“Am I dead?” The question came without prompting, the seemingly childish query more honest than I had meant it.
There was only dead and not dead yet now. I couldn’t ask if I was going to be okay. I didn’t have that luxury anymore.
“Not yet, sweetie, but I’ll stay here until the end,” he said with an exhale, his voice shaking even though I could tell he was trying to be strong. I could tell in the way he held my hand, the way his hand pressed against my cheek, even through the shake of his nerves, of his heartbreak.
It made me ache. It made my muscles twist and writhe. It made my heart beat reawaken with a painful pulse of regret and longing.
In the last moments of life, I felt more alive than I think I ever had. I focused on that, focused on the heat, focused on the hand that held mine. And, for the shortest breath of time, the pain didn’t seem to matter, the fire didn’t seem so destructive, and the blackness that surrounded me fell away.
It faded to a dimly lit room that I recognized at once and a man who, even though he had changed—even though his hair was in long dreads and his skin more worn, his eyes slightly dimmed—it was still the man who had taught me so much about life and love.
It was still Thom.
I looked at him, the pressure of his hands tight against mine, as I saw him for the first time in centuries. As I saw him for the last time.
I didn’t dare say anything. I didn’t have anything to say. He had heard it all before, felt it all, lived it all. Accordingly, I held his hand, staring into him as the world around him began to shift, as the black of the curse threatened to take me back into the disconnected world that it had trapped me in.
I waited for it to come, watching the grey seep into the world, only to have a courtyard materialize before me, the world waving and blending together as my mind took me to a place that I hadn’t seen in what felt like years—the beautiful, perfect world that Talon and I had created inside our T?uha.
Even though I was sure I hadn’t moved, even though I could still feel Thom’s hand around mine, I could see the sanctuary that our bond had created. I could see every brick, the bench we had spent so much time on, the shadowed body of a man leaning against the wall.
My soul jerked at the apparition, the discolored, shadowed form seeming out of place. I knew at once who it was, even though I knew he shouldn’t be there. That I wasn’t there.
“Talon?” I said his name, my voice soft with longing as I stared at the shadowed shape. I was sure he had turned toward me before the entire scene vanished into smoke, falling to the ground around me like smoke and ash and leaving me staring at Thom’s tear-streaked face, his eyes deep with understanding.
My heart pulsed at seeing him there, torn between two worlds, two realities. I was saddened Talon was gone, my heart throbbing for the return of the T?uha. Yet, I clung to Thom, to the past, and to the last moments I would have with him.
“He will be there, waiting for you,” Thom whispered as he leaned close to me, the brilliant blue of his eyes devouring me. “He’s going to be right there ... and ... and you know who is going to be with him?”
The pulse in my chest became a stab of memories, of reminders of the life we shared, of the life I had so willingly chosen to forget.
Never before had I regretted my decision to forget, not because I had turned my back on a life that had been so good, but because I had turned my back on Thom, a man who, for the first time, I realized, was still mourning the loss of our daughter as I was. He was still filled with pain and agony. We had both chosen to run away, although in different ways.
“Rosaline?” The word dug into me, my back arching with fire and gut-wrenching agony that I had thought I had escaped.
You can’t escape something that is wound so deeply in your soul, however. I knew that now. I knew that in the way Thom’s voice pulled me from the pain of the curse and the way Rosaline’s memory bound us together.