This can’t be happening.
This can’t be happening.
This isn’t my life.
I shake off my father’s arms and walk woodenly back up the trails, past the paramedics, past the police, past everyone who is staring at me. I walk straight up to Finn’s room and collapse onto his bed.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see his journal.
I pick it up, reading the familiar handwriting written by the hands that I love so much.
Serva me, servabo te.
Save me, and I will save you.
Ok.
Ok, Finn.
I close my eyes because when I wake up tomorrow, I’ll find that this was all a dream. This is a nightmare. It has to be.
Sleep comes quickly and when I wake up, I’ll save Finn.
Because really, he’s all that matters.
If he’s dead, I want to be dead.
He can’t be dead.
I’ll give anything for him.
I’d give my life.
“You could,” the hooded boy says, and he’s here on the edge of my bed. “You could give your life. You could jump, you could sacrifice yourself, and then it would all be over. Or… you could offer your mother instead.”
“What?” I ask stiffly.
“You heard me. You’ve heard me all along. You have the power to change it. You always have, and you always do. Change it to the way it should be. Do it.”
I’m appalled, I’m frozen, I’m filled with dread, because I would rather. I would rather give anything than my brother.
I fall asleep with the sheets wrapped like a rope around my hands, and I dream the dreams of the tormented.
Chapter Seventeen
I dream.
I dream of Sabine and her raspy voice, and of words that she said to me.
“You must choose,” she’d said, and she says it now in my dream and I don’t know what she wants me to do.
So I ask her.
“You know,” she nods.
But I don’t.
She nods again, and all I know is that if I could choose anythinganythinganything in the world, it would be for my brother to be with me, to be alive. I’d give anything.