He watches me with eyes of stone and a heart of ice. His lip curls. “I guess you were right. We can’t go back to what we were before.”
“Finn—”
His eyes flash. “Never call me that again.” He tilts his head back and pushes—
My glamour shatters and I collapse when the pieces rain down around me. He doesn’t look back when he walks away.
I drag what’s left of this corpse together. Fly home.
I’m the perfect son. The perfect prince.
I enter the sídhe dressed in feathers and blood and a sorrow that makes everyone recoil.
My mother’s in her throne room. I focus on her wide eyes and the flash of real fear in them. She rises and steps toward me; everyone else quickly abandons us.
“Roark?”
I stagger to the foot of her throne and kneel. My knee protests the movement, the subs
ervience of the gesture. The pain is good. Deserved.
“I’ll return to the sídhe as you ordered. Just...” My voice breaks and I don’t know if I’m crying or bleeding; it doesn’t matter anymore because my mother kneels beside me, clutching my face in her hands while my blood drips onto her gown. “His home. Give him back his home.”
“Mo leanbh—”
I am empty. Ravaged. Hollow. “Promise me.”
Her tears shimmer like stars. “I promise.”
I am ash. I blow apart. And she holds me until there is nothing left but an eternity of dust.
Chapter Nineteen
Phineas
He said he loved me.
He knelt there and it would have been so easy to kill him. He couldn’t stop the black blood leaking from his eyes, nose, and ears. His glamour couldn’t do anything but flicker in and out.
Every part of me hurt, even the places I didn’t know existed, and I wanted him to feel it, too. So I threw those words back at him. Words he’d whispered while we lay in bed together and pretended we weren’t doing anything wrong, words he considered true.
I wanted those words to cut him to pieces in front of me.
His head tilted up and he held my gaze, and what I saw was so fucking terrifying because for the first time since I’ve known him, it was all there in his eyes. Nothing but truth, and I knew that if he said a single damn word, I would break.
He said my name. Not Phineas or Finny. He rasped the name only he calls me and in that one word he was laid bare—
I fractured. I gave in and let the ley line take me. Even then, he wouldn’t let me burn out.
It was enough to pull me back from the brink. A final gift. I walked away from him and cut myself off from the ley line, removed the temptation to fall into its energy and let myself slip away from the world. I cost my parents the farm, but couldn’t make them mourn my death on top of that.
Today, I got back from class and discovered Roark had moved out of the apartment while I was gone. It hurt to see that empty space, so I went for a walk. My feet led me here, back to the field on the edge of campus where I turned my back on him and broke both our hearts.
The weeds are tall and dried, ready for winter to come and finish them off completely. It’s easy enough to track our movements across this space. There should be more carnage. It’s eerie that the destruction I feel inside isn’t mirrored out here. I reserved everything for him, apparently. There aren’t even scorch marks on the ground. Just some churned earth from the way he braced himself against the ley line’s power and a few dark spots holding the lingering scent of smoke.
The fluttering in the corner of my eye forces me to pause. There, trapped in the weeds, is a lone black feather. I pick it up and examine it. Black with a blue-and-purple sheen. It’s long, the rachis sturdy and unbroken. I run my finger along its edge and the stupid lump in my throat is so damn heavy I have to sit in the weeds because I can’t carry any more weight right now.
My friends find me soon enough. They huddle around me, watching me watching the field.