The ghost of Teren’s words comes back to me so strongly that I feel like I am standing once again in the Inquisition Tower, staring up into his ice-colored eyes. You are an abomination. The only way to cure yourself of this guilt is to atone for it by saving your fellow abominations. We are not supposed to exist, Adelina. We were never meant to be. And suddenly, I know why Raffaele needs my help. I know it before he can say it.
“You need my help to close the breach between our worlds.”
“Everything is connected,” Raffaele says, a phrase that Enzo once said to me when he was alive. “We are connected to the point where Laetes fell, where immortality meets mortality. And in order to fix what has gone wrong, we need to seal the place that birthed us, with the alignments that we each bear.”
We need to give back our powers.
“We are the children of the gods,” Raffaele finishes, confirming my fear. “Only we can enter the immortal realm as mortals.”
“And if I refuse?” I reply.
Raffaele’s quiet nature has always both calmed and unnerved me. He lowers his eyes. “If you don’t,” he replies, “then in a matter of a few years, the poison of the immortal world will kill everything.”
I look back down at my sister. Violetta’s body, collapsing under the weight of her powers. Lucent’s hollowing bones. Sergio’s eternal thirst and exhaustion. Teren’s never-healing wounds. And me. My worsening illusions, my nightmares within nightmares, the whispers in my head. Even now, they are chittering, chittering, chittering.
“No,” I say. The voices hiss at my sister’s body. You owe her nothing, they growl, stirring now and climbing out of their caves.
Raffaele watches me. “You are running out of time,” he says. “She will not last long like this.”
I glare at him. “And what makes you think I care if she dies?”
“You still love her. I can sense it in you.”
“You always think you know everything.”
“Well? Don’t you?”
“No.”
Raffaele narrows his eyes. “Then why come to Tamoura to find her? Why ask for her? Why hunt for her all over the world, as you conquer your new lands?”
At that, the whispers turn into shouts. Because she doesn’t get to turn her back on me.
I lash out so suddenly with my illusions that the archers along the walls don’t even have time to react. My powers wash across the others in a wave—knives in your hearts, twisting, barbed, tearing—barely within my control. I can even feel the pain of it myself, as if it had turned its head on me too and sought my own heart. Lucent gasps in agony, stumbling backward with wide eyes, while Raffaele clutches his chest with one hand, turning pale. The crossbows draw back.
“Quickly!” Raffaele manages to call out.
Something heavy hits me. Not an arrow, I manage to think before I’m knocked to the floor. All the air rushes out of me. I struggle to breathe, and in this instant, my powers flicker out, scattering from my grasp. Someone has managed to throw a net, I realize dizzily. No, it had dropped from the ceiling—Raffaele had guessed how I might react. Rough hands grab my arms and yank them painfully behind my back. I struggle to gather my power again and strike, but the whispers have grown so loud and disorienting that I cannot focus.
Leave this place and finish your conquest, the whispers snap. Show him why he will regret what he’s done to you. Violetta stirs restlessly in her bed, oblivious to our presence and lost in some nightmare of her own.
I hate you. I throw the thought at her, willing her to hear it. I think of how she had cowered in our childhood, unable to protect me, and how she had turned on me before leaving my side, trying to take away something that is mine by right. I try to hold these images in my head as Raffaele orders the Tamouran soldiers to take me away. I have become so good at remembering these moments during the past year, letting them strengthen me—recounting Violetta’s failures in order to push my power to new heights.
But now, the images that flood my head are of a different sort. I see Violetta and me running through the tall grasses behind our old estate, hiding on summer afternoons in the shade of giant trees. There’s Violetta wrapping her arms around me on a moonlit floor, holding me as I sobbed for Enzo. And Violetta curling up beside me during a thunderstorm, trembling. Her hands in my hair, braiding flowers between the locks.
I don’t want to see these. Why can I not clear them from my vision?
If she dies, you lose yourself. This time it is not the voice of my whispers . . . it is my own voice. If you do not go, you will die too.
As the soldiers force me to my feet, Raffaele takes a step closer. “We were never meant to exist, Adelina,” he says. “And we will never exist again. But we cannot take the entire world with us.” He meets my gaze. “No matter how it has wronged us.”
Then he nods at the soldiers. I try to lash out again, this time with Raffaele in my sights, but something strikes the back of my head, and the world goes dark.
Raffaele Laurent Bessette
When Raffaele checks on Violetta again that evening, she is awake, her fever lowered somewhat. Even though she had been unconscious while Adelina was in the room, it seems as if the presence of her sister had offered Violetta some semblance of comfort, however small. Something that helped her fight back against the deterioration of her body.
It is the opposite effect that Adelina seems to have on Enzo. Raffaele had left the prince pacing restlessly in his chambers. The dark energy surrounding him had felt elevated by Adelina’s nearness, agitated and ready to strike.
“She’ll never agree,” Lucent says to Raffaele as they and Michel look over the Tamouran ship at port, still bustling with sailors loading cargo. “And even if she does—how will we travel with the White Wolf? I can hardly stand being around her. Can you?”
“It’s a shame I ever taught her how to focus her illusions,” Michel says. “You heard what happened in Violetta’s chamber. She attacked the soldiers and all but tried to kill you.” He nods at Raffaele. “You said yourself that she is beyond help. What makes you think a voyage with her will work?”
“I don’t,” Raffaele concedes. “But we need her. None of us link with fury, and we will not be able to enter the immortal world without each of the gods’ alignments—not if the legends are at all true.”
“This could just be a waste of time,” Lucent says. “You’re placing your bets on a theory of something that, according to myth, happened hundreds of years ago.”
“Your life depends on this, Lucent,” Raffaele replies. “As much as any of ours. It is all we can do, and we have very little time to do it.”
Michel sighs. “Then it depends on whether or not Adelina thinks her life depends on this too.”
Raffaele shakes his head. “If Adelina refuses, we will have to force her hand. But that is a dangerous game to play.”
Lucent looks ready to reply—but in that instant, a young guard hurries up to them. Clutched in his hand is a parchment, freshly arrived. “Messenger,” he says, bobbing his head once at Raffaele before handing him the paper. “A new dove. This is from Beldain, from the queen.”
Queen Maeve. Raffaele exchanges a look with Lucent and Michel, then unfurls the message. Lucent falls silent, and her eyes widen as she peers at the paper with the others.
Raffaele reads the message. Then he reads it again. His hands tremble. When Lucent says something to him, he doesn’t hear it—instead, it sounds like a muffled, underwater sound, coming from somewhere far away. All he can hear are the words written on the parchment, as clearly as if Maeve were standing with them and telling him herself.
My brother Tristan is dead.
Raffaele looks back toward the palace. A jolt of fear rushes through him. No.
“Enzo,” he whispers.
And before the others can call him back, he turns toward the palace and runs.
Lost life by stab wound in sacrificing self for the sake of his child.
May he rest in the arms of Moritas,
adrift in the Underworld’s eternal peace.
—Epitaph on gravestone of Tau Sekibo
Adelina Amouteru