Page 58

A pull snapped tight around my waist, sharp and sudden. It was not a hand, not flesh. It was immaterial. Maybe it was a part of me. It wove around me like a lifeline, a single unbreakable tether.

Then, a velveteen voice slipped through the dark. I didn’t recognize it, though it was familiar. “ Not yet, Nocturne. You must live. Ask it to mark you instead.”

Nocturne? Who was that? But the words felt like the first I’d heard in a thousand years, the only true words. So, I listened.

“Mark me,” I called out to the darkness. “Mark me instead.”

The silence trembled. For a moment, I thought nothing would answer.

Then, I felt a tight force as I was wrenched upward. It was a violent, gutting pull that sent me hurtling toward the light, the spool of thoughts that had unraveled coiling tight, tight, tight…

The Thread. The Thread had me. I had asked to be marked.

The dark screeched as it tore from my skin, burning.

My veins seared with unbearable force, the motion something that should have shattered me.

But the Thread held fast, unrelenting as it pulled me upward.

The glow expanded, blinding, and then I broke through.

I gasped, air slicing into my lungs like a dagger. My body arched, spine bowing against the cold stone beneath me as the chapel roared into focus.

Hands were on me. Someone was saying my name. All I could smell was peppermint. Someone was— Dorian. “You should’ve died,” he said. “No one in Lower Sixth’s ever done that before.”

I felt the warmth first, then arms crushing me against him, breath uneven.

He held me like he was afraid I would disappear again.

I was shaking too hard to respond, my limbs uncooperative.

I pressed my head against his shoulder as my body fought to adjust to existence again, listening to the thump of his heart as it drummed against my temple, erratic.

I had survived, but not by luck, not entirely. Something, someone , had dragged me back. But survival didn’t feel like victory. It felt raw, unfinished. I was still piecing myself back together, unsure which fragments were mine and which belonged to someone I used to be.

Dorian whispered into my hair words I couldn’t make sense of. I couldn’t process them, couldn’t do anything but let myself be held, the weight of him grounding me. It felt like the only thing keeping me from floating away.

A faint burning prickled behind my ear. My hand flew to it. I should have died. I’d drunk the entire chalice. I’d intended to sacrifice myself. But something had stopped me. No, someone.

I looked up, past Dorian’s shoulder, past the ruins of the dais, past the still-smoldering remnants of ether, and the upturned carafe bleeding the remains of the tar-like tonic down the stone steps. The chapel was empty. I blinked, straining to remember .

The cards. The High King. Dante. How was I alive?

The Arcana Deck lay scattered across the marble, their gilded edges torn and ripped apart. My breath shuddered as I took in the wreckage, the devastation.

“How?” The words scraped raw. “How long was I out? What happened?”

My voice barely sounded like mine. Each word rasped against my throat like my voice was still clawing its way up from the Rift. The words echoed in the stillness of the chapel.

“You broke the Arcana Deck.” Dorian gave a shaky smile. “My father was right. Your blood undid the binding. It should’ve cost your life.” He stroked behind my ear, the tender flesh where the mark still burned.

The words slammed into me. I was alive. The deck was broken. I’d done it. But I was still here, somehow still breathing. “Alive,” I repeated. “Not…graduated ? ”

“No,” Dorian shook his head, studying me closely. “Your heart beats naturally. There’s no ring around your iris. Your mark is contained.”

“Lucky,” I breathed.

“Lucky,” Dorian agreed. “Everyone is safe. Back in the dorms. Well, almost.” He pressed his forehead to mine. “I didn’t care about the damn Deck. I just wanted you to come back.”

I should have felt relief, but it didn’t reach me. My ears were ringing too loud, my mind abuzz. The Archangels were free. I’d done it. My blood on the cards had been enough. I had died, and made it back. The students wouldn’t be forced to take the Rift.

It should’ve felt like victory, but it didn’t. The darkness hadn’t left, it had just changed shape. I could feel it. The Rift might not have taken me, but it had taken something.

Dorian pulled me into his chest again, but this time my eyeline dragged past the fallen chandeliers and the dying candlelight and straight to the only other figure in the room.

He stood a few feet away, still as death, his silver eyes fixed on me. There was no relief in them, no amusement or flicker of triumph. Dante.

I unwound myself from Dorian, rising, my movements clumsy and disjointed like I was still learning how to exist. My vision swam like I was trying to see through a pair of muddy glasses. I hardly noticed how Dorian reached for me, his grip winding around my wrist. My focus was locked somewhere else.

It was all coming back to me now. Dante.

He had saved me, or the Thread had. I still wasn’t sure where the lines of our connection ended and began.

Between us, there was silence where there should have been rage, a yawning stillness.

It was like a candle snuffed out, a great void where something vast and terrible had once stood.

Though embers prickled underfoot, ether warm, the air was freezing.

Dante’s jaw tightened as he took a step forward, eyes gleaming. I had always found them unreadable. But now, as he looked at me, I understood.

“You shouldn’t have survived that,” he said roughly, like all of the regret had been scrubbed from the words before they reached his lips. Instead, there was only hatred. He’d used our connection to save me, to mark me. He didn’t know that my blood, my death would unbind the Archangels.

I swallowed, my throat raw. He wanted me to know that I owed him. “I know.”

There was a long silence. He glanced over me, assessing. I felt Dorian shift beside me, but I couldn’t tear myself from Dante. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something had changed between us, something irreversible.

At last, I asked the only question that mattered. “Where are they now?” The words scraped up my throat. “The High King. Verrine. The Archangels. What happened, exactly?”

Dante stilled, his hesitation so slight I almost missed it. “Where is he?” He echoed the question as if only for the enjoyment of hearing it bounce against the walls of the devastated chapel. “That’s all you have to say for yourself?”

“I—” I started, my head beginning to pound.

“I warned you.” Dante’s voice cracked. “Do you have any idea what you’ve just set in motion, Arabella? What your little trick has done ?”

Of course I did. I knew exactly what I’d done, and I’d do it again. The silence of that chapel, the fear in Ruby’s eyes, the hundred or so lives just waiting to die, or be erased, hadn’t left me. They never would.

The air between us was charged as my heart thudded. “Everyone in that room was going to die! I did what I had to.”

Dante drew closer and I worried he might hit me.

Instead, he wrung his fists at his side.

I had nothing to apologize for. He’d pretended to tell me the whole truth, but he’d left out all of the most important details.

“My father left,” Dante said at last. “The moment the deck broke. He didn’t waste time. ”

“The High King fled ,” Dorian interjected, voice laced with something bitter. The words struck deep, sinking past flesh and into something far more fragile.

“He wanted me to deliver a message,” Dante said. The look on his face looked like nonchalance at first glance, but I knew better. He studied me, eyes dark as the storm churning beyond the chapel walls. “You really messed things up for him, you know. And for me. That won’t do.”

My stomach dropped in understanding. I scanned the room, panicked as I turned back to Dorian. “Everyone’s back at the dorms, right? Safe? ”

“Well…” Dorian started, the words trailing off.

“That’s the thing.” Dante descended the steps, the tonic the chalice had spilled squelching beneath his boots. “He has your father, Arabella, at his court in Elsewhere. And Ruby. Bargaining chips, I suppose.”

“Bargaining chips?” I asked. My pulse thundered in my ears. I had no idea what to do, no idea how to get them back.

“Your debts are still unpaid, but you’re marked now. You have a year to graduate and join us in Elsewhere.” Dante’s voice dipped, something grim settling behind his words. “Before he kills them both. Before he kills every soul who bypassed the Rift today. Your soul is still indebted to us.”

The floor beneath me might as well have cracked open. My knees locked, my chest turning to ice. My father wasn’t dead? The thought was unbearable, not because he was alive, but because he’d suffered alone in Elsewhere while I’d mourned him.

My breath caught. Hope hit hard and bright, like a falling star. My father was alive. He hadn’t died that night, either. The accident was all a fabrication.

The torches flickered in the still-burning remnants of ether, warping the room. My fingers curled into fists as the weight of those words settled over me like the tightening of iron chains.

This wasn’t over.

The High King had not gotten what he wanted, and now, he was playing a different game. And I had no leverage, no loophole. Only the rules he had written, and a choice.

“That means you have a year,” Dante called, already striding toward the chapel doors. A year. “A year to graduate. To make the Fall. To present yourself to his court… properly, this time. When you are of age.”

I drove my nails into my palm. One year. As if that were a choice.

“Dante!” I tried, but he was already through the doors. I broke Dorian’s grip and raced after him.

“Where are you going?” The words broke raw from my throat. “You can’t just—” Leave me. Not like this. Not again . But he didn’t stop. Didn’t look back. Didn’t say a word. I should’ve felt hatred, but all I could feel was the echo of empty space as he turned away.

The Thread hissed in the back of my mind then retreated somewhere I could not feel it, a ghost of the force that had pulled me back from death.

The Archangels had been sealed away because their power threatened the High King’s rule.

My death had shattered that seal. I’d brought the Archangels back to the After, and now the High King would stop at nothing to make me pay for it.

I could feel it then, the shape of the year stretching ahead. A cage of ordinary days, bars warped around an inevitable future. I would have to return to Evermore, pretend nothing had changed while my father and Ruby rotted in Elsewhere.

I dragged my hands through my hair, tearing loose the elaborate curls they’d forced into place. My fingers stilled on the raised patch of skin behind my ear, still burning. My mark.

“What is it, Dorian?” I asked, as though I did not already know.

“A crescent moon,” he said sadly. Pity. His hand rested lightly on my shoulder.

My mark. I’d Fallen. I was halfway there, but the final Fall, the one that would seal my fate as an immortal, could not be so easily taken. It had to be given .

As the smoke curled skyward and the wind howled through the ruins of what we’d survived, I realized. There was no way forward that didn’t end in ruin, but maybe my life could still have meaning.

Now I knew there were things worse than death.

I used to fear it. Dying. But in the end, I envied those who still could.

They would grow old, drift into sleep with full hearts and faces lined like maps of memory.

They would get to drift peacefully toward their end, while I would never reach mine.

I had been marked by something far crueler, an eternity without rest.

Death was my beginning.