Page 121 of Soulgazer

If I can just hold on. If I can just kick harder.

We break free, but water finds home in my lungs. Aidan is alive, kicking for the surface, his fingers clawing mine because mine have gone limp and I am hollowed out.

Drowning. Dying.

It’s not peaceful as the poets sing, but violent. My lungs battle with the sea, my body twitching and thrashing in nonsense patterns, black spots dancing across my vision as I scream my rage against the absence of life—

Until the last fleeting glimpse of it winks out.

Forty-Six

I taste salt.

Bitter and raw, tears streak down my cheeks as a keening moan escapes my lungs. They were burning with water only seconds ago, trapped inside my brother’s mind. The room forms around me in fragments—the altar and shroud, the soulstone in my palm.

The stains glow like freshly spilled starlight reaching up my arms, just like Faolan’s scar.

My stomach wrenches and my lips part in horror as I stare at the abalone scars and the soulstone, waiting for its light to fade and my own life to crack in two. Neither comes to pass. I feel no pain as the marks glow stronger once, then sink slowly into my skin until nothing, not even a streak, is left behind.

“Holy gods.”

I nearly drop the stone when a strangled scream emanates from the ground.

My father writhes against the edge of the altar, clawing at his throat in the same place his hands trapped mine. The scorching silver marks beneath them do not fade. His skin rips beneath his nails, and I choke on a cry of my own as I shove the soulstone into my pocket, falling to my knees.

“Father? Da?!” His eyes aren’t here, and he makes a sound—gurgling and rasping, as though he’s drowning.

Drowning…just as Conal had. AsIhad in the vision.

When Da grasped my neck, did I somehow drag him through with me?

I catch his wrists and try to drag his hands away from his throat, but he’s too strong. He rolls, throwing me into the altar with an unearthly scream. When he turns on his side and buries his hands in his hair, I swear I see streams of water escape his lips.

“Da, stop—pleasestop!”

“Stop it. Make it stop—I’ll make it stop!” Da says, and in spite of everything I told Aidan, I start to pray. Earnestly and hungrily, I pray I haven’t filled his soul with the ghost of his son—haven’t sliced through the tethers of his mind. It’s too clever for me to disrupt or break. It always has been.

But the gods give no answer, and my father gives in to madness.

Da shifts onto his knees and I reach for his arm to help him up, though my legs tremble like a colt’s—then stop when I see my bloodied fingertips, remembering how they opened the entrance to the gods’ chamber. It’s a mistake. He throws himself to the ground as I hesitate, bashing his own forehead against the stone.

My scream echoes all around us as I jolt forward and try to pin him to the ground. But he is a warrior in spite of his indulgences, and I am no match for his strength.

“HELP! Gods, please, someone!” I wrap my arms over Da again and again, heedless of the scrapes and bruises he delivers every time he throws me off. I’ve just tilted my head back to shout for help a third time when a figure at the door catches my eye.

Aidan, his face a map of horror.

“Please, it wasn’t me—I swear I didn’t mean to! It was the soulstone—Da grabbed me just as I touched it. I didn’t realize myhand was b-bloody until the vision took us both. I think—I think the magic’s breaking his mind!” The words sound like fanciful lies, because I am a fanciful fecking girl with uncontrollable magic, and a family I’ve all but ruined, and whatever ground I gained with Aidan five days ago is wiped free from his face.

One blink, and it hardens into the face of the heir our father trained him to be.

“Don’t touch him.” Aidan shoves me off, grabbing Da’s shoulders to pin him to the ground.

I’m sobbing, powerless to stop it. “Aidan, please—Iswear. I swear I didn’t do it. Not on purpose.”

“Stop—just stop it!” Aidan’s shouting now as he fights our father, who’s intent on ending the torment in his mind, face coated in blood from a nose broken by the ground.

“I didn’t do it,” I plead, but Aidan’s eyes are cold with fury when he finally looks at me again.