a few buildings away.
I turn around just in time to see Edith summoning another spell, but don’t realise what’s happening until she’s already placed the palm of her hand over her heart. “Nobody can help me,” she says.
There’s a flash of light, bright enough that I have to close my eyes, and then Edith Carlyle slumps over in my arms. Dead.
Chapter 18
And just like that, it's gone. Any hope of getting my powers back vanished right before my eyes as the witch shifter goes still and limp, her face still twisted in a confounding mixture of emotions. I would try to decipher them, but I find myself suddenly feeling disconnected from the experience, a bit like I would imagine a person might feel after a doctor tells you you’re too sick to recover from something. Melodramatic? Maybe. But that's what I'm going through.
The world around me seems to go suddenly quiet, as if with Edith's death, the commotion in the apartment has abated all at once. And how appropriate, considering that all the colour in my world seems to have faded in the same moment, leaving my perception as grey and hopeless as a rainy day. Except this time, there's no sun to break through the clouds.
Edith. Gone. Forever out of my reach. Disappeared to the one place where I can't follow her. Anger and devastation battle for dominance in my harried mind, and it's all I can do to keep from throwing my head back and wailing. It feels like part of my soul has been taken away from me, no longer kidnapped but murdered, the ultimate insult for someone whose life revolved around magic she will never get back.
The fucking bitch. How could someone be that bitter, that resentful, to someone of her own kind? What would drive a person to betray everything the shifters stand for, all for a man who's proven about as trustworthy as a snake? Was screwing me over like this really worth it? Was she that jealous of my nature, that it led her to committing suicide?
Questions without answers, all of them. What are the stages of grief? Disbelief? Anger? Bargaining? Where am I now, I wonder? Somehow the "acceptance" feels like a foreign concept right now, as absurd as telling someone with an incurable disease to "just get over it". It feels like my breath is caught in my chest, adrenaline rushing through my midsection in spite of the fact that the immediate danger is out of the way.
A sick lump has risen in my throat, and it's only after a few moments that it dawns on me that I'm sitting here holding a dead body. A belated wave of disgust crashes down on me, and I let Edith's body drop to the ground, aware that I'm not exactly being respectful, but that's about the farthest thing from my mind right now.
Scrambling back on my hands and knees, I move away from the body as if it were a landmine, my breath coming in harsh gasps. It's not like I've never seen a dead body before; it's not even about the corpse. It's about what the corpse represents.
The battling emotions finally overwhelm me, and I turn away from the dead shifter, retching. There goes my breakfast, I think bitterly, my eyes watering as I clench them shut. And there goes my only chance.
The thought that I might still be in danger doesn't even occur to me until I look around, tears blurring my vision. It's eerily quiet on the roof, but now I'm becoming aware that the fighting is still going on, muffled by the building and beginning to spill onto the street, by the sound of it. Heart racing, I get to my feet, but whatever fight was left in me when I got up here seems to have died along with Edith; what's the point of even trying anymore?
The sound of the lift chiming makes my breath hitch. I whirl around, already fumbling for the empty shotgun—it might work as a club, if nothing else—but relief washes over me when the doors slide open and a familiar-looking timber wolf scampers out onto the terrace. If the situation were less bleak, I might have laughed at the absurdity of a wolf taking the elevator, but you can forgive me if I'm not exactly in a laughing mood right now.
Shade's eyes connect with mine from across the rooftops, and before I can stop him, he's bounding across the roof, not even slowing