Brimstone (Fae & Alchemy, #2)

by Callie Hart

Humans were not good at taming their feelings. They felt everything so rudely, right out in the open, with no awareness of how their reactions might affect those with finer senses.

“Never doubt your powers, sweet one,” she’d told me. “Each one of them is a gift. Each one will prove exactly enough when you have need of it. Have faith in yourself. You will always be enough.”

“Don’t you know? There isn’t much I wouldn’t sacrifice to make you happy, Osha.

But selfishness was not my lot in this life. As if reminding me of my path, the tattoo on my inner left forearm tingled, the ink shivering beneath my skin. Sacrifice. It pulsed often, even stung from time to time, as if the ink were still fresh. But it never changed. Never spelled out some other, less painful future.

I smiled because I was supposed to do that, too, but the thoughts churned relentlessly in the back of my head regardless:

I lost the parts of myself that knew how to feel anything other than pain and sorrow centuries ago. But for better or worse, you have brought me back to life.”

“Nothing is ever easy here,” I muttered. “And no matter how badly we might want things to be black and white, most situations never are.

There were scores of decisions that he would have changed if he could have. Plenty of harsh words he would have taken back. A thousand instances where he would have altered the course of his actions, knowing the consequences they would have after the fact. But it was useless, glancing over a shoulder and wishing to change the past.

And I don’t pretend to know anything of plans made by gods. All we can do is make our own and hope for the best.”

Because what was a book, if not a portal into another realm, another time, another life even.

There’s only one way to learn how to endure pain the way I have. You have to suffer through it. Again, and again, and again. It galvanizes you. Tempers you like steel. But I wouldn’t wish the kind of pain I’ve lived through on anyone.

“I’d spend the fortunes of the universe to protect you. I’d drain the seas dry. Fell every tree. I would sacrifice the sun from the fucking sky and surrender the stars, too, if I could. But those things aren’t mine to give. All I have is my life. It isn’t much, but I’d spend it and consider the price small if it meant keeping you safe.”

Every time I’d managed to solve one problem, another seemed to stand between me and a moment’s rest. I’d had no other choice but to figure out a solution to the obstacle that blocked my path in the knowledge that more would only follow after it. But the alternative would have been to give up and die, and I wasn’t the give-up-and-die type.

“Dreams are just vapor and smoke,” I said. “They mean nothing unless you’re willing to live them.