backpack. She doesn’t stop until she’s pulled out a handful of crystals and a spell book.
In the meantime, Jaxon lays Xavier’s body on the ground several feet from Flint before collapsing on the sand, and Eden drops down between them. She’s trying to keep her face neutral, but I can see the pain in her eyes as she looks at Xavier, and I know that only half her agony is physical.
My own anguish is pressing in on me, making it nearly impossible for me to breathe as I face my friends—really face them—for the first time since Xavier died.
I feel so guilty, I can barely look them in the eyes, but they deserve that from me and a lot more. So I meet each of their gazes in turn as I tell them, “I’m sorry. I never should have dragged any of you into my problems.”
I look at Xavier’s broken body and nearly choke on my own grief. “There’s nothing I can do to bring Xavier back. I would change places with him—or with any of you—in a second if I could. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
“This isn’t on you,” Jaxon tells me, voice hoarse and eyes bruised with pain and exhaustion. “I pushed for this. I insisted that we come. I didn’t listen to your doubts. This is my fault. If I had just—”
“Stop it, both of you,” Macy snaps, even as she drags her hands across her face to wipe the tears away. “It’s not up to either of you to apologize. We all made the decision to come. We all knew what the risks were—probably more than Grace, as we’ve all grown up with stories of the Unkillable Beast. And we came anyway.”
Her tears keep falling, so she clears her throat several times as she, once again, wipes them away. “We flew all the way up here and attacked that poor creature, because we told ourselves we were preventing a greater atrocity. We told ourselves we were doing the right thing even though everything about it was wrong. And that, too, is on all of us.
“We play with magic our entire lives. We do spells and shift forms and even move the earth”—she looks at Jaxon—“when we want to. But the world we live in—the privileges we enjoy—come with responsibilities and consequences that we learn about in school but never truly think about until we have to.”
She looks at Xavier, and it seems like she’s going to break down completely, but then she squares her shoulders and looks everyone in the eye except me. “We—all of us—are the ones who lost sight of those lessons when we decided to come here and play God with Hudson and the beast and even with our own lives—even after my cousin begged us not to. And that’s on every single one of us; it’s something we’re going to have to live with, a lesson we are all going to agonize over for a long time to come.”
She clears her throat. “But we owe it to Xavier and to that poor gargoyle in there and to all the people back at school—all the paranormals in the world who don’t understand what the Circle has become or what it is doing—to learn from this mistake and to do whatever we must to stop them. It won’t right this wrong, it won’t fix this mistake, but it might keep others from making worse ones.”
She points at me. “And that means getting you to that Trial and getting you on the Circle and doing whatever else we need to make things better. So all of you need to stop blaming yourselves. You need to stop wallowing in guilt and sadness and anger and help me get us back to Katmere before it’s too late to stop what the Circle is trying so desperately to set in motion.”
For long seconds, none of us moves. Instead, we stand transfixed by the power and the responsibility of her words. At least until she raises an eyebrow and says, “Or do I have to do this all by myself?”
104
Because We Could
Not Stop for
Death
“We’re in,” Flint says, trying desperately to push himself back to a standing position. It’s painful to watch, at least until Jaxon rests a hand on his shoulder, then leans over and speaks quietly to him. I don’t know what he says, but Flint settles back down and doesn’t try to get up again.