Page 58 of The Second Death of Locke
twenty-four
W HEN GREY WOKE, HER first thought was that her cantankerous grandmother who was once Locke had been right: there was something after death. Above her, she could not see the sky: on all sides there was only white swirling mist, and rock under her body.
She sat up.
There was solid ground beneath her. She was dripping wet, icy cold from the sea, but she was no longer in the sea.
She was on a rocky cliff. Ahead of her there was only mist, but when she edged forward and looked down, she could see the black rock face, and more mist below.
It had long been called the Obsidian Isle, and she felt the name curling around her now as she took in the inky darkness of the cliffs.
She sat back. To one side, through the gloom, she could just make out the solid stone walls of the fortress. Behind her, when she turned, the fog was ceding, slipping away from the skinny trees of the Ghostwood.
She stood. The cliffs of Locke were solid under her feet.
She turned in a slow circle, searching for—something. Unlike her, the ground was dry, as if the Isle had never been submerged at all.
There, at the edge of the wood, she spotted a shape. A body, face-down on the scrubby ground. She took two steps, three, and then she was running.
Protect me , Grey begged—she was not magic, nothing more than a mostly spent well of power, but she felt the island cave to her requests. She felt the tremulous safety of it.
And she could not think; she could barely breathe. Dripping salt water and mud, she sprinted across the space between her and the wood and launched herself at that broken form, clad in black.
She threw herself to her knees in the dirt beside him, her hands going to his shoulders. She cursed herself, searching for the tether inside of her, but everything felt different here. She grabbed him by the shoulders and heaved, rolling him over.
Everything stopped. Went still as stone.
It was awful—because it was Kier, and for the first time in her life, he was unfamiliar to her.
His skin was marred with purple splotches of bruises and part of his ear was missing and his eye was black and his arm had come loose from its sling so the broken edge of his collarbone pushed at his skin at an awkward, impossible angle.
How could he survive that? How could anyone survive that?
He did not move. He did not breathe. Her heart sank inside her like a stone when she realized that he hadn’t survived it.
That was the unfamiliarity. The uncanniness. His face was lifeless, all spark of what made Kier Kier gone, lost to the sea and the cliffs and the air. Grey reached within herself for a tether that had snapped, torn from the root.
“Kier,” she pleaded, gripping his chin. She rolled him back to his side, not caring about his injuries, and pounded on his back. “ Kiernan . Kier, please.”
Nothing. She pressed a finger to the space under his jaw.
There was not even the trace of a pulse.
The tether inside of her was gone, leaving only raw, aching emptiness behind.
It had been years since she’d gone to reach for it and felt nothing at all, not even the suggestion of his existence.
She hadn’t felt this empty since before they were bound.
“Don’t fucking do this,” she snarled, rolling him onto his back, pressing his chest in a measured pattern, as if she could force his heart back to beating.
“I won’t love you if you do this,” she said, her throat thick with tears, forcing the lie through her lips.
“You can’t make me love you if you’re just going to…
” Her pattern faltered, and she pushed harder, feeling the ribs cracking under her hands. “Come back to me, Kier.”
Nothing.
Grey couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t keep breaking him, couldn’t keep doing this.
Kier was dead, and there was nothing she could do to bring him back.
She ran her hands up his soaked shirt, over the curve of his jaw, cradling his face.
His skin was cold to the touch, clammy with seawater.
Her hand trembled as she reached forward, running her fingertips over the curve of his lips, thumb skimming the cut of his scar.
All of it familiar—all of it devastating in its stillness.
She was the High Lady of Locke. The sovereign of the Isle, restored. The center and master of every bit of power that Idistra had to offer.
And yet there was not a single thing she could do with it, not on her own. She could not force his heart to beat again; she could not open him up and use the threads of her power to pull him back together. Not if the life had already left him; not if there was nothing of him left to reach for.
For the first time in her life, sitting in front of Kier’s body, Grey found that she was utterly powerless.
“You can’t ask me to do this,” she said, her voice breaking. “I can’t do this without you.”
You can do anything you want to, with or without me , Kier would probably say. And she remembered the sound of his voice in the inn: I always knew you were a survivor .
Not this , Kier . She couldn’t survive this. “Please,” she begged, one last fruitless attempt to call him back from death.
But there was no response. Of course there wasn’t—there would never be a response again. His voice would live on only in her memory.
She felt all previous versions of herself splitting apart and converging again, all the decisions they had made: she was a girl of eight, taking his hand and pushing him her power; she was following him and Lot to a village with a letter in her hand; she was a teenager, pressing her fingers to her lips at night, trapping the feeling of the first time he had kissed her on a dare; she was fifteen, watching the determination form in his face as he made up his mind to save her; she was eighteen and his arms were around her, his tears hot against her neck; she was a dying light, a horrified shell of herself, and she was binding to him and changing him forever.
Every decision. Every sacrifice. All of it led to here, to now, to her on the edge of death and the edge of twenty-five, holding his body against her like that would bring him back.
In some world, some reality, there had to be a version of him that lived. A version of her that didn’t make him die for her.
She wanted to take it all back, to claw back every year and every decision that had made them this version: the girl who lived turning into the woman who lived, who lured every person she loved into death by sacrifice.
She fell, her head landing heavy on his chest, and she wept over his body until the darkness claimed her.