Chosen - Kiersten White Page 0,77
you were dead.”
“I want—”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t care what you want. I let Artemis have what she wanted, and now she …” My fists clench. “No. Nope. No. You might have thought you were being noble staying away, but you weren’t. It hurt. It hurt me so bad, and I’ve had to live with the guilt of killing you every single day since then, so no. I don’t care what you want. I don’t care about your feelings, or whether you think you’re doing the right thing. I’m a Watcher and a Slayer and you’re a half demon, so I’m doubly pulling rank on you. You’ll stay right here in the car while I go get our book from my sister and talk some sense into her. Then when I get back, we’ll drive to the castle, where you’re not going to stay in a stupid pantry anymore, you’re going to take a real room because you’re part of the castle and you’re not going anywhere. We still have a lot we need to talk about.”
He doesn’t look at me. “It’s the best thing if I don’t fight this. For everyone.”
“Wow. You’re being a selfish prick.”
He turns, shocked. “What?”
“You think you’re protecting us by giving up? Protecting me? I was devastated when I lost you. You were the only person who ever saw me for me. When no one else noticed me, or when they saw me as the lesser Jamison-Smythe twin, or when they only saw me as a disappointing Slayer. You’ve always seen me. I see you too. And yeah, you made bad choices. Really so super bad, and it’s okay for you to feel guilty about that. But you made them out of love. She was your mom. And she was kind of evil. But she was still your mom.”
I think about Artemis and how I’ve been lying to everyone to protect her. If I were a good Watcher, a good Slayer, if I were only those things, I could have and would have stopped her at the conference, or even in the library. But she’s my sister. And it’s so much more complicated than a vampire or a demon or anything else in the world.
Like my relationship with Leo. I think it might never be simple between us. But I don’t care. It’s worth fighting for, and so is he. “So reconcile what you did however you need to. Figure out how to come to peace with it. But you dying is not the right way. That wouldn’t fix what your mom did, or make the world a better place. It would just make it emptier, and with everyone and everything we’ve lost, isn’t it already empty enough?” The darkness inside me—the darkness I tried to channel, to feed, to ignore, all to no avail—seems like emptiness to me now. A gaping void that I can’t fill with violence and I can’t fill with happiness, and I’m so scared it’s going to devour me one of these days. “If I can figure out how to live with what’s inside me, can’t you do the same?”
“It’s not that simple.”
“It is. And I refuse to let you die again.” I open the door and climb out, slamming it behind me. I love so many people, and they’re all so stupid. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of them hurting me and hurting themselves and hurting each other. I stomp into the cemetery, my cute purple Docs squelching through mud. I’m wearing Artemis’s nicest leather trench coat and an emerald-green sweater underneath, but I can still feel the bite of the evening. There’s a mausoleum with an overhang, and I make straight for it, standing out of the drizzle and surveying the night. A few stubborn lamps burn overhead, giving dim illumination to the landscape of sleeping dead.
I still need to ask Leo about my power. About the ways it’s changed. The Artemis situation felt more pressing, and then Leo being an idiot took over the conversation. He’s not allowed to die. We have a lot more fights we need to get through.
I pull out my phone and turn it on, not opening all the unread texts from the castle. Nothing new from Artemis. I text her. Here.
A dark figure swoops toward me, ducking into the shelter before turning and staring at me in shock. It’s not Artemis. She’s wearing an elegant dress, long and flowing and black, with a high neck. Her hair