I have to end this. Before anyone else gets hurt.
I grip the knife in my palm, raise it high over my head. Joe doesn’t notice; he’s too busy watching the battle unfold. I could do it now—I have to do it now—and he wouldn’t see it coming. But I hesitate, and in the fraction of a second between blinking my eyes closed and opening them again, he’s turned his head to look at me. Time slows as his brows draw together. His lips thin, betrayal hardening his jaw. I thrust the knife down, but he’s faster than me. One hand bracelets my wrist as the other circles my throat. A grim smile slashes his lips.
“I wanted so much more for you than this.” He angles the knife toward me. “Do you realize,” he says, so quietly I can barely hear him over the screams rending the air, “I could force your hand to cut your own heart out of your chest? That is what you are up against.”
“You’re forgetting … I have something … you don’t,” I say between gasps for breath.
“What’s that?”
Henry appears behind Joe. “Friends,” he says.
Joe’s grip on me loosens as he turns toward Henry, but I don’t give him the chance to gain the upper hand this time. All I have to do is nick him. I slash the black dagger through the air. It cuts a thin line across his neck, barely a scratch, but when my blade comes away, it’s silver again. The veins in Joe’s neck turn black as the poison courses through his body.
Joe lashes out at Henry, pushing him back. Henry flies through the air, striking his head against one of the logs lining the path.
“HENRY.”
I start to run to him, but Joe grabs me, pulling me back. I try to fight him off, but he cups my face with his hands and forces me to meet his gaze. I can’t look away. He holds me prisoner with his stare as the veins in his eyes turn black.
Images swirl through my mind. Varo—the real Varo—standing trial in front of the council, still trying to convince them to change their minds even as they order his banishment. Joe sitting in the back, nodding along with the others, believing it to be a fair punishment for Varo’s crime. No silver lines his hair, and there’s an innocence in his eyes, as if he’s still years away from becoming the man who would kill my father.
The image changes. Joe, wearing a tweed Edwardian suit, strolling past Orton Hall on Ohio State’s campus. Did he take classes there? No—he’s following someone. Walking a few paces, then stopping unexpectedly, shifting his gaze to a bench or a tree, as if it’s the most interesting bench or tree he’s ever seen. When he starts walking again, it takes me a moment to figure out who he’s following, but then I see her. A woman wearing a white dress with a peach sash that matches the ribbon on her parasol, her golden hair swept into an elaborate knot beneath a pretty straw hat. She notices Joe and gives him a small, shy smile.
The memories fly past. Joe and this woman, spending more time together. Taking canoe trips down the Olentangy, picnicking in a park, sharing stolen kisses in darkened alleys and private gardens.
The woman coughing blood into her handkerchief. Looking pale and skeletal in a big, fluffy bed. Joe arguing with the doctor, telling him there must be something he can do. The doctor shaking his head and whispering those awful, inadequate words, “I’m sorry.”
A casket topped with lilies. Mourners dressed in black, surrounding the tombstone, and Joe, watching them from afar, clutching a blood-splattered handkerchief in his fist. Only approaching the tombstone when everyone else has left. Tracing her name with his fingertips—Elizabeth.
Joe confronting Alban and the other council members. Begging them to do something for her. She wasn’t meant to die, not yet. Not yet. They’d barely had any time together. It isn’t fair. But they just remind him this is why they do not encourage relationships with mortals. It never ends well.
In his grief and frustration, Joe picks up Seral’s ledger and hurls it across the room.
Years pass. Joe loses himself in his work, in the wood, trying to forget her. It works well enough, in the daylight. But he keeps her picture by his bed. Stares at it every night before he goes to sleep.
And then comes Dad, Joe’s first real friend. I want to hate these memories flashing past, of Joe and Dad joking around in the wood, going to bars at night, watching football games together. But I feel it, that seed of hope, of love, that Joe feels for him. Undeniable in its purity. That seed grows when Dad meets Mom, and she and Joe develop a sibling-like friendship, and then grows again when I come along.
The love he feels for me the first time he holds me in the hospital is indescribable. I would have thought there was no greater love, if I hadn’t felt the love he’d had for Elizabeth.
“Stop,” I tell him. “I don’t want to see this.”
But it keeps coming. A Varo supporter, meeting Joe in the wood, telling him he doesn’t need the council to bring her back. Joe secretly researching Varo in Dad’s study and the council library. Someone unseen slipping Varo’s manifesto, detailing his convictions, into Joe’s hands. And slowly, over too-long nights and too-short days, Joe becoming obsessed with the idea that the thresholds could be used—no, should be used—by the Old Ones if they so wished. It is their birthright. The council cannot keep them from it.
Joe doesn’t feel the darkness seeping into his heart as a plan forms in his mind—it happens too slowly—but I do. The righteous anger and overwhelming grief mixing with the dark magic he’s begun performing in the wood, to increase his own magic and give himself all the power he needs to overthrow the council. Blackening his soul by the smallest of degrees. Changing him from the inside out. Leading him to—
“No!” I shout. “I don’t want to see this!”
But it’s too late. Dad confronting him. Joe trying to sway Dad, like he tried to sway me. Dad heading for council headquarters, intent on turning Joe in. Joe, in desperation, pushing Dad off the path.
For a brief, flickering moment, Joe feels it. The darkness inside of him. The way it’s changed him. The wrongness of it. But then come the excuses—he should have listened to me; he should have joined me—and the twisted belief that he could undo the damage. I can save him, I can save him—It’ll all be worth it—Stick to the plan—
“Winter.” Joe breathes my name, and then, as if someone has flicked a switch in my brain, everything goes black.
XLIV
When I come to, I’m lying flat on my back, the sun warming my face. Joe’s corpse lies next to me, all skin and bones and spidery black veins. His eyes are glassy, unseeing, and his tongue hangs out of his mouth, black and bloated. I scramble away from it, furiously wiping at the tears on my cheeks.