Teskanash, Northern Bria Hungary
A hundred thousand fires burned into Melissa as she regained consciousness.
Her mind didn't quite catch up with her eyes; she lay there for several seconds, her brain feeling as if it was pumped full of lead. She pushed herself up on the bed, gulped in air, and shook her head. A quick glance to her left told her she was connected to an IV, and a look to her left told her that she was in an empty hospital room and it was late afternoon—lazy deep-yellow light fell through pastel blue curtains.
Nathan.
Melissa yanked the IV out of her arm and it hurt, it hurt to kick back the sheets and climb out of the bed. Her bare feet hit the cold floor with a hard slap; the hospital gown was ice on her sweating skin. She limped to the door—a hundred thousand fires—Nathan—and eased it open.
Jake Ecscent looked up at her from an ugly orange armchair across the hall.
He was crying. When he saw her and his brain registered who she was, his chest rose and fell, rose and fell, the increments rapid and violent and terrible. He rose from the chair and what was he doing here and crossed the hall. He said, "Melissa."
"Where's your father?" she asked, leaning on the doorframe for support. "How are you—what are you doing here?"
Was she even in the Shifter World?
"A Bloom Official brought me here, said he was a friend of my dad's." Jake's voice was breathy. Bloom Official. He knew about Shifters. Someone had told him about the Shifter World in the span of time she and Nathan had left for Lydia's and now.
Nathan.
Jake looked small; Melissa felt smaller. She looked down at him, ghost-boy, a watercolor-smudge in a world of oil-painted shapes. The tears were falling silently down his cheeks, which were bright red.
Jake wrapped his arms around himself and said, "The government guy said that you'd know what to do with me."
Melissa would not believe it until she heard the words come out of someone's mouth. "Where's your father?"
Jake shook his head and bowed it so that his chin was touching his chest. Sobs exploded out of him: "He didn't—make—it—and I need you—because I don't have anyone else—"
A hundred
thousand
fires
burned.
Melissa collapsed against the doorframe. When she realized it couldn't hold her and she didn't want to be seen crying in the doorframe in front of Jake, she whispered, "I just need a second, please." She retreated back into her room and didn't even make it to her bed; she gripped one of the boards at the foot of it and leaned all her weight on it, doubled over, and knelt down.
The sobs exploded out of her, too.
Nathan Ecscent. Dead. He'd pushed her out of the way and got shot and sent a fire blazing to burn monsters, and Melissa felt the whole horror of it ripping her organs apart. Heart and ribs and stomach and soul, tattered by He didn't make it.
She smacked the floor with her hand because a bolt of pain just shot up through her leg. "I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so—"
If she hadn't gone to Lydia in the first place—no, if she hadn't blown Finn's head off then Lydia wouldn't have held a gun to her head ten years later and Nathan wouldn't be here, and she knew shooting Finn was the right choice at the time but now Nathan was dead and she didn't want him to be dead. She wanted to tell him how much she loved him, how good of a friend he was, how beautiful of a person he was even when he was a terrible person, how she wanted to be friends with him and how she forgave him and hypocritical she'd been of him all these years—
Maybe it would have happened like this:
"Melissa."
That voice. Those glasses, and the eyes behind them...Nathan Ecscent. Her throat was dry and her head was pounding. She wanted to say something, but it was as if her brain was resetting itself and forgot to turn on her vocal cords.
"Hi," said Nathan, crossing the hospital room to kneel down at her bedside. He wore a white shirt of the Northern Hungrian style, the sort that was made of thin fabric at the sleeves and thicker fabric hugging his torso.
"Mm," she mused softly, still dazed. "You were shot."
"It was a bad graze," he replied with a shrug. "Monsters ate you."
"I'm surprised your glasses made it out okay."
"They didn't. Monsters crushed them. This is a new pair, courtesy of the Teskanash hospital staff."
Melissa raised her eyebrows.
"I doused the flames before they burned us alive," Nathan continued. "The monsters fled and Bloom Officials showed up. Helped us. I blacked out after that. They told me the officials drove us here. I hate we were out for the Jeep ride. Jeeps are my favorite."
"How long since Lydia's trailer?"
"Days. I was just able to get out of bed and walk around yesterday. Turns out Shifter World medical technology is much more advanced than I remember it. You drifted in and out." He lifted a hand as if to gently place it over her own cold hand, but apparently thought better of it and left it hovering in mid-air. "Don't stress too much. Everything is—well, the world hasn't ended yet."
"You pushed me out of the way and took that bullet."
"Just returning the favor." Nathan looked down, a thin smile spreading across his face. "You got eaten by night-monsters for me."
"Yeah, well."
Melissa wished it could have happened like this:
"I had to tell Jake everything."
Nathan said these last words so blandly, so tonelessly. She struggled to sit up in the bed; from this angle, she could see more of the hospital ward...the medics bustling in and out, the people in the beds on either side of the long corridor that made up the ward, and the floor-to-ceiling windows that allowed slippery strands of the first light of dawn to spill across the tiled floor.
If it had hurt Melissa to tell Lilly about the Shifter World, how much more had it hurt him?
She looked at him while his gaze was still turned away. His eyebrows were narrowed just slightly and the corners of his mouth had the downward tilt of a person trying to keep their tears in. Melissa had not seen Nathan cry in a long time. She waited, not quite sure how to react and not quite sure how to keep her own complicated tangle of compassion-and-confusion-and-anger on the inside.
"I'm sorry," she finally whispered. Little by little, her emotional guard dropped. It slipped from her grasp, and the harder she gripped it, the more it squirmed away.
"I went to visit him today because he hadn't heard from me," Nathan went on quietly. "The head nurse said I can leave whenever I need to, and I need to be with him right now. After I...after I told him, he just looked at me like I was a stranger. Or an enemy."
Emotion slipped, slipped, slipped out, seeped through the cracks of the guard covering Melissa's face. Tears were falling down her cheeks.
Maybe it would have happened like this:
"I'm sorry," Melissa whispered again. She held out her hand to him. He took it and squeezed.
"I hate myself," Nathan went on, and while the tears weren't in his eyes or on his cheeks they were in his voice. "I lost you first, and now I've lost him."
"You lost me because you were selfish; you saved yourself and beat me with a hammer," Melissa replied. "If Lilly doesn't hate me after all the secrets I've kept from you, Jake won't. He can't. You're not—you're good."
Yes, Nathan had saved himself and the incredible, excruciating pain echoed in her memory. But...it had been years and they'd never talked about it because Nathan didn't know that she knew. He'd been a masked attacker and it was dark and she refused to believe that he could do it.
Nathan's response was quiet, so quiet. "You just said I'm selfish because I saved myself and beat you with a hammer."
"I said you were."
"I was. And I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Mel."
The heat behind Melissa's eyes intensified, the tears ran faster. Fully out of control of her guard now, she heaved a shaking sigh. He'd helped her as much as he'd hurt her. He saved the camp when he helped her mother kill herself. He'd helped her in Belle Village by simply being a familiar Shifter face. And he'd helped her in Lydia's trailer. He took a bullet for her.
Melissa knew it would have happened like this:
She was extremely tired of the old anger, the old pain. She didn't want it anymore. She wanted him in her life. She felt this fact rise up inside her like a tidal wave or a pillar of smoke, valiant and extraordinary, unstoppable and suffocating. He was sorry and he'd changed from the selfish bastard on the inside covered by the polite teenager on the outside to a man who was...who was...what was he? What was Nathan? Kind, quiet, broken-hearted, willing to do anything to keep her alive. And there was that smile that induced ten thousand wishes, and those bespectacled eyes that were always so inquisitive, and the nostalgia of his smell, and the way his hands were hard from all the fire he'd let out of them.
Oh wow, she wanted him back. She really, really, really wanted him back.
And how could she want that after what he did? How the hell did she still care about him, love him with that relentless fiery passion that she'd only reserved for one other person in her entire life, and still hate him at the same time with a rage that was just as hot?
It was that stupid cycle: anger and hope and anger and hope and anger and hope and anger and hope and anger and hope.
Anymore wallowing in this ache and she'd lose her mind.
She remembered their kisses. Their long talks at three in the morning. The training sessions and the prayers and the sobbing into pillows when a leg was broken or a wrist was sprained and they had to sit out of training. Their powers, fire and fire, crashing against each other. She remembered him begging her to tell him why she jumped in front of the red tornado Storm had crafted to steal his magic, why she'd shoved him back, why she'd let Storm strip her magic when she hated him because he thought she was mad about him poisoning her mother. She remembered asking herself the same question. tears, laughter, sprints through spring trees, whispers. With Nathan, friendship was unconditional.
Maybe...maybe she could start all over again. Her god, the Great King, was a god of forgiveness, and although she hadn't prayed since the night she told Lilly about the Shifter World, she thought the King could still be her god...perhaps that's why people called him the Great King. If he was a forgiving god, then she could forgive, too. She wanted to. Needed to.
No more life lived on the fragile, teetering foundation of wishes of could-bes.
"Can we try again?" she never got to ask and hated herself for not being able to ask. He'd never stopped being her friend. She didn't want to stop being his, too.
Melissa stayed there, kneeling on the ground for a long time, until she was able to climb back into her bed again and a nurse walked in and sighed, "I hate that you ripped out your IV," and added slowly, carefully, knowing full-well the news she'd just received because she'd quietly watched from the doorframe while Melissa broke open, "You have a letter. Terrible timing, truly. It's about your cousin."
"I'll take it." Melissa felt empty, gutted, drained. Her voice sounded dead. She sat up a little straighter, tore open the bright blue envelope, and read a letter detailing Lilly and monsters and a very angry Stem Sankta and a very dead Lydia.
Slowly, the gutted, empty feeling gave way to naked fear.
Melissa looked up at the nurse. As emotionlessly as she could, she asked, "Is there any way I could get to Elliott Way from here?"
"Um...your blood pressure is quite low, and that scar on your leg needs time to heal, and I'm not sure Elliott Way is letting anyone in right now anyways—"
"Forget about my body and get me into Elliott Way."
"But Miss—"
Melissa shifted her weight and swung her legs off the bed. She tried to suppress a groan of pain that would very well prove the nurse's point. "Do you have children?"
"An infant daughter."
"How would you feel—" Melissa paused to swallow down another hiss of agony as her whole body protested with pain, "—if she was about to get arrested for something she had no control over?"
The nurse folded her hands together in front of her and sighed. "I suppose...I suppose I could get an emergency Jeep ready for you. Elliott Way is under lockdown, so it could take you to Faevil. And Doctor Ross can't know. He'd have my head."
"Good. How long?"
The nurse bowed her head. She tucked a curly blond strand of hair behind her ear and fiddled with a loose string on the hem of her purple scrub sleeve. "I'm sorry about your loss, Miss Stowe. Maybe you should take a deep breath and gather yourself."
Melissa pulled in a long, long breath through her mouth. Her throat closed. She took a moment to steady her shaking hands and remember the current problem—Lilly, Lilly, Lilly, she could not retreat into grief just yet—and eventually said, "The young boy eavesdropping outside the door right now. Is it just him?"
"Just him. A Bloom Official dropped him off."
"Lovely. Secure him a spot on the Jeep, too."
***
Melissa had stolen a Bloom Official's wine, not because she wanted or particularly liked wine, but because she could. She'd also stolen the Official's knife because she both wanted and liked knives. It was the night after Nathan had poisoned her mother because she was sick with strawberry-plague. She went out to the woods late at night and had gotten to the far edge of the training camp before she was grabbed from behind. Her attacker snapped an iron cuff over her upper arm, making her magic useless. She was hauled and everything was a mess of dark trees, muffled screams, and fast breath hissing through the attacker's teeth.
He threw her in one of the weapons sheds that dotted camp Trenchkast—it had been emptied earlier that day because they were planning on moving everything further north. She'd dropped all of her knives when she was grabbed, and she groveled on the dirty sawdust floor, defenseless, as her attacker raised a hammer and slammed it into her thigh. Over and over again.
He didn't stop until she screamed.
It was the first time she'd screamed in her life; she'd never screamed since.
An incredibly smart psychic with a love of red lipstick and diamond chokers told her after she'd managed to crawl out of the shed and call for help that it was Nathan; the man who'd helped her mother die to save camp Trenchkast from strawberry-plague. The boy she was in conflicted, terrible love with. At first, Melissa hadn't believed Lydia. Later that day, she saw Nathan's blistered hands and noticed his inability to look at her.
"I knew the deal," Lydia said. "I eavesdropped. You told Nathan you stole that bottle of wine and the knife. The Official knew it, too, and he wanted you to pay for it. He knew how close you were with Nathan. The Official pried a confession out of Nathan and told him he could either go to jail or torture you. Some boy you've got. He chose to shatter your femur."
Maybe it could have happened like this:
"I made horrible decisions that made Lydia hate me and I'd be dead if it weren't for you. You saved me. I've been nothing but hateful to you all these years, and you still shoved me out of the way of that bullet. I forgive you. I should've forgiven you a long time ago and I was so hypocritical because we're all just trying our best and that's all that matters. "
Melissa wished, wished, wished.
Wishes were useless.