Edge of Pathos (Book 4 of The Conjurors Series)

Chapter 29

"I'm really tired," she said. "Can you guys leave me so I can rest for a while?"

"Sure, Val," Cyrus said. "I'll tell Skye and Chisisi that you'll talk to them later, when you've had a chance to recover a little."

"You can do better than this," Thai said, and she heard a thread of anger in his voice.

Even with her eyes shut, she knew that he was still there, as if he hoped that she would get mad at his comment and fight back.

Instead, Valerie found that she could summon unconsciousness and draw its numbness around her like a blanket, so she did.

Valerie's dreams were odd fragments, shards of time that contained memories too painful to touch when she was awake. Her memories were intermingled with Henry's, and she relived with him the loss of his mother and father, and countless nights of terror from Zunya and Sanguina.

Wherever he was, did he see her memories of fending off thugs when she'd lived beneath the overpass in Oakland, foster homes where she'd been beaten or locked up, or each moment when she'd lost someone she'd loved?

The pain kept mounting and mounting, so intense that her head ached. It was more acute than even the stabbing pain in her chest from the wound Reaper had given her. Had Henry seen that, too? Did he know she'd almost died?

Abruptly, her memories and Henry's memories were wiped away, and Valerie knew she was fully in her twin's mind. He was back in Babylon, on the top stone tier of flowers, staring down at the lake, which perfectly reflected the trees around it.

His self-hatred had reached a crescendo, and then it evaporated all at once. She saw his decision. She didn't even have the chance to scream before Henry threw himself off the edge, not into the water, but onto the rocks beside it.

Valerie was falling, falling, falling, and she sat up in bed with a gasp when Henry's body smashed into the rocks, expelled from his mind.

Valerie reached for him, and her certainty that their connection was one that could not be broken so easily obliterated any other possibility. Her mind found his, so faint that it was almost an echo, but completely open to her. His thoughts flowed through her as if they were her own.

He was almost gone, and in his final breaths, he was overpowered by the need to see his sister, his only family, one last time, to look into her eyes when he passed into the ether. If she could be there, she'd see that he was sorry, understand how much he loved her, know that he had to die because he was a plague on the universe.

Valerie had taken a wobbly step out of bed when her body hummed, touched by magic that was within her and around her at the same time. She heaved as she was racked with waves of nausea.

The bed she gripped faded, and she collapsed on the wet sand of the lake in Babylon. For the second time in her life, blood had called blood, and it was a tie that overcame even the magic that Reaper had sewn into the fabric of the molecules in her body.

Henry's broken form was bleeding on soft, green grass, where he'd rolled after crashing on the rocks. He didn't move when he saw her, but the relief in his mind flowed through hers. He couldn't let go without seeing her first. The force of that need had dragged her to his side.

"I won't let you die," Valerie said, kneeling at his side and summoning whatever magic remained in her after using her vivicus power to save her own life.

"You can use your power to fix my body, but I'll always be broken inside," Henry said, his words barely audible. "Please forgive me, and let me leave you."

"I can fix it all," she said, as a strange sensation of weightlessness enveloped her.

Valerie always thought after she used her vivicus power, her magic was gone until she built it back up, but she was wrong. More magic than Valerie imagined could live in the entire universe, much less inside of her, filled her. It was light and love, and she would embrace it even if she lost her connection to the logical part of herself by using too much of her vivicus power, like Darling.