There was not much left of me. Just enough to remember who I was, what I’d been. Faces in my memory, but I didn’t know them anymore. It was all falling away.
Falling like snow into the dark.
The snow turned to light. Sunlight. I was standing in a meadow full of grass that was too green to be real, and there was a woman walking toward me through flame red flowers. Her white gown shifted in a wind that didn’t stir the fields.
White hair like a cloud. Eyes the color of deepest amethyst. Beautiful and cool and peaceful.
“Sara.” I didn’t know where the name came from. “I’m dead, you know.”
She reached out toward me. “No,” she said, and caressed the satin of my hair. “No, my sweet. Not yet. There is a part of you that remains. Humans are like that.”
I remembered a coal black hunger, ice-edged shadows. “Ifrit?” I whispered.
“You would be,” she said. “But there is another way. And perhaps we owe that to you.”
“We?”
When she pulled back, I saw she wasn’t alone. There was a man with her, big and muscular, running a little to fat, with a Scandinavian-blond unruly shock of hair and eyes as blue as a Caribbean sea. I knew him, and didn’t know him. He smiled at me, very slightly, and I saw pain in it. And courage.
“I’ve lived too long,” Sara said. “I’ve stolen life from others. Patrick betrayed you to buy it for me. There is no honor in what I’ve become.”
I didn’t understand. The wind that rippled Sara’s dress touched my face, combed cool fingers through my hair. It was gentle and beautiful and peaceful, and I knew it wanted to take me with it, into the dark.
“I did this for Patrick. I started the rift. What David did for you only accelerated it. Do you understand?”
I didn’t. It was all falling away, sliding into the shadows.
“We do the worst things for love,” she whispered. “So Jonathan was created. So David created you. So I created Patrick. And none of us should exist. The balance is gone.”
If balance was required, I was restoring it. Going away…
“Stay,” she said, and touched my face with those cool silver lips. “There is a gift only Patrick and I can give. One last gift, in return for what you have given us.”
Words drifted up from the darkness inside of me. “What have I given you?”
Her smile was beautiful, and sad, and perfect. “A way to be together. And now I offer you the same, my love. Take it.”
She opened her arms. I looked at Patrick. There were tears shining in his eyes, and he backed away. Afraid, after all.
I stepped into Sara’s embrace.
“No,” Patrick gulped, and turned back. He flung his arms around us both and hid his face in the pale lace of Sara’s hair. “Both of us or nothing. As it always was.”
Something wrapped hot around me, like clinging tar, and I thought, I should have said no, but then the pain dug deep and I screamed.
And screamed and screamed and screamed, until the universe exploded in a silent dark pop like a shattering of glass.
It didn’t feel like a gift.
It felt like a betrayal.
When I woke up, someone was holding me in strong, warm arms. I tried to burrow closer and felt the embrace tighten. “Jo?”
I lifted my head and saw that it was David. We were sitting against a wall in a hallway, next to a giant brushed-steel vault door. I felt… empty. Clean, but empty. Exhausted and powerless.
I felt wrong.
He was stroking my hair gently, letting it curl around his fingers. Crap. Curly hair again. Something hadn’t gone right…
“Easy,” he murmured when I tried to get up. He rose to his feet, still holding me, and set me down on shaky legs. “Oh God, Jo. My God. You’re alive.”
Sara. Patrick. It had seemed so real, hurt so much… I drew breath. It felt… wrong. Clumsy. Mechanical. “Maybe.” Memory slammed back with a vengeance and flooded me with alarm. I turned to look inside the vault.
It couldn’t have been the hours it had seemed, up there at the top of the world. It had been seconds, minutes at most.
The confrontation was still going on.
Lewis was still standing, but even as I watched he swayed and collapsed to his knees. The white burn of energy I’d seen him giving to the motionless, broken body of Kevin Prentiss was almost spent, just flickers now, pulsing in time with Lewis’s labored heartbeat.
God, he was dying. I couldn’t believe he’d held on so long, or that Yvette had let him… but then I saw the look on her face as she watched him, and I knew why she’d waited. He was suffering.
She liked that kind of thing too much to stop it prematurely.