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At last she reached the stretch of road beside the cemetery where gravestones were plunked down like afterthoughts because no one ever remembers they’re going to die.
And yet, there was something to be said about a girl who knew everything about everyone and a boy more mysterious than the moon.
The moonlight bathed half of her in white, the other half in stark shadow. Fitting, for what she was. Half here and now, the other half lost at sea. Ravaged by an ache that could never be dulled.
“Hush,” he cut her off again, clearly enjoying himself. Him and his flowers and his white kitten and those wretched flecks above his brow.
Moonlight pooled in Flick’s hair, tracing each ringlet like the hand of an earnest lover, gradually drifting to outline her profile in dusky silver. She looked at the stars as if they were home, and he wished, impossibly, that he could take her to them.
Arthie smiled, and it shouldn’t have made it easier for Jin to breathe, but it did. She stepped out into the night. “It’s teatime, scoundrels.”
She loved Jin in a way she would never speak aloud, in a way that made her feel weak and foolish. In a way no one but he loved her back. She hadn’t wanted that to end. But one secret had slowly become another, each tangling with the last, and when he looked at her now she realized that somewhere along the way she had pushed him away herself.
Flick knew her mother’s love had been real. What she hadn’t known was that parents could stop loving their children and tire of them the way someone tired of a pair of shoes.
Jin sighed. “You didn’t have to go and ruin my favorite tea set.” “You said that about the last one too,” Arthie replied, straightening her jacket.
The world’s wrath came, a reminder that she was a little girl playing at something too big for her to hold. She had tried though. She had tried so, so hard. And for what? Her life unraveled as she watched, because of a single act of defiance. Because that was the nature of man. Born to nurture, determined to destroy. Fitting, Arthie thought. At least Jin wasn’t here in this nightmare returned. All her life she’d spun a slow dance through a burning room, and the inferno had caught up to her at last.
He squeezed his eyes closed for a beat and saw Flick, vividly alive and unafraid, a queen in her gown sculpted from a piece of the unblemished sky. She was sunshine in a bottle, and he was a storm in a boy, drawn to clear skies, reaching for her hand. Just a little farther, she told him. Just a little farther.
“Killing us is no easy task,” Jin said. “We’re annoying like that.”
No, beautiful wasn’t quite the word to describe her allure. She was cutthroat and deadly, the way a rose appeared entirely different when you saw its thorns.
Calibore. Arthie. His other half in this world of destruction.
In her place was the girl who had stepped between him and death’s scythe again and again and again. She was alive. Of course she was alive. She was Arthie Casimir. She never needed saving.
Metal. Metal flooded his tongue in liquid form. Sweet and tangy and sharp. Blood. And then a whisper. “Live,” said death in his ear. “For me.”
