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Pearl-white.The color of no other scorpion in this land. It means something, but I can’t hold onto the thought. The pain is too much.

And the scorpion is gone now.

Into the vines.

Into the dark.

But Eros lets out a sound of fury, like nothing I’ve heard before.

Or not fury: pain.Because that’s what’s in his eyes now, as I slide back to the ground—the world is grey, I’m too dizzy to sit.

“Psyche…”

His voice hitches, my vision swims. But I can still see his look of despair. As though everything is over.

Before it had even begun.

“Psyche…”

All this effort. All this pain. For what? The visions I saw in his eyes…maybe it wasn’t anything fore-ordained. Maybe it wasn’t anything but imagination. Maybe the future I thought we would have belonged to some other universe, but not this one…

“I can’t move it,” I whisper. “I can’t feel my arm.”

The pain has given way to something worse now, a terrible numbness from my fingers to my shoulder, just a flare of pain on its perimeter.

Shedid this. I remember now: the white deer, the white scorpion. The knowledge sings clear in my head. And I know Eros knows it too. But none of that matters now. There’s a blue flush all down my arm, as if I’ve been held under in a barrel ofice.

His golden eyes lock on me as though to claim me all over again.

“The poison. We can’t let it get to your heart.” He takes my arm in his hands, looks for the scorpion bite, puts his mouth to it. He’s trying to suck the venom out, and I don’t have the heart to tell him it’s too late. As I watch it, the blue tint of my arm deepens. I can see the ice creeping past my shoulder now, toward my collarbone, a terrible, cold fire. And where the feeling creeps, the blue flush follows.

Is this death?

The look in his eyes tells me I must be. The scorpion was such a little thing, smaller than my hand. And yet it has poison enough, no doubt, for many mortals.

“I don’t think it’s any use,” I say at last, knowing he must know the same. I want him to be looking at my face when I go.

“Psyche…”

He bunches his fingers in my hair.

This is what it means to be mortal,I want to say to him.This is what it is to grieve.

Once more I think of those visions that swam in my head, when I first looked into his golden eyes. I thought they were a promise. I was so sure—so sure we’d have time.

He’s staring at me. I stare back, until eventually his eyes move to the blue flush that’s been crawling along my collarbone. And then he stares some more.

His hand grazes my neck. The grip of the ice must not be too bad yet, because I still feel his touch.

“Psyche, look.”

His hand shakes. I turn my head, blinking through the dizziness. My shoulder swims in and out of focus. I think I see what he’s staring at, though. The blue color isn’t advancing any more. A little past my collarbone, it seems to have stopped.But perhaps that’s just how this poison works. Perhaps its color fades once it has done its job. I suppose by now it’s working its way to my heart. I want to tell him not to hope too much. The eyes are tricksters, experts in false hope.

But the strangest thing…even as I stare at it, I see a pink flush blooming at the top of my collarbone, pushing back the blue. The pink is warm, healthy. I can feel it, a glow inside me.

What’s happening?

Eros’s eyes shift to my face, but he has no words either. Slowly, very slowly, the pink spreads: from my neck along the top of my chest; my collarbone; the ridge of my shoulder…