Send Me Their Souls (Bring Me Their Hearts #3) - Sara Wolf Page 0,108
throat, to the bone choker strangling her. The Bone Tree, wrapped tight around her neck.
She traces it lightly, as if making sure it’s still there. “You’re trying to take it from me. So I’m coming for you.”
“All right,” I say patiently. Patience is what she needs, now most of all. She’s not herself. She doesn’t even remember what herself was like before the Bone Tree. But I’ll wait, patiently, and remember for her.
For Fione.
For Lucien.
For the girl who knows what it’s like to make a mistake you can’t take back.
“I’ve…I’ve killed them all.” Varia glances down at her hand. She means Helkyris. Cavanos. Everyone the valkerax meet. “I’m going to kill them all.”
“I know,” I say. She clenches her fist inward, nails biting. Blood in the water.
“They have to die,” Varia snarls. “All of them.”
“Is that you talking?” I ask softly. “Or the Bone Tree around your neck?”
Her wooden fingers move up again to the choker of valkerax fangs ringing her neck. Wringing. Her weapon. Her advantage. Her leash.
“The Varia I know had a plan,” I say. “And it wasn’t wanton carnage like this. She was going to carve the wood of the world, not throw it all in the fire.”
Her black eyes go wide, deep pools in the deep ocean, and she recovers, bristling.
“You are under my command—you will not speak! You will kill! You will kill them like I want you to!”
Something in me buckles, my unheart spasming. My blood thrums hot in my ears, every sensation suddenly very real and not dreamy in the slightest. She’s making me feel. I suffer everything intensely, no longer dream-detached, my body growing heavy and my mind becoming aware of my eyes, six of them opening on my cheeks—
“Varia, stop,” I plead. “Stop!”
Her fingers twist out at me, a cruel, delighted smile on her face. But it’s not her smile. It’s older than her, somehow. It’s lined with so much more pain than a mortal could experience—hundreds of aching years, not two decades. I watch in horror as the bruises on her body start to throb, expanding in their discoloration even farther up her neck, her chest, her wrists and arms, as if they’re…consuming her. A bruise on her scalp moves to her eye, shriveling the white of it instantly, her socket bleeding bright and the shriveled eye hanging loose and useless, a mirror of her brother’s.
“You will destroy,” she rumbles. “For us. You will hurt them, as they have hurt us.”
This isn’t her. It’s the Bone Tree. I can hear it in her voice, her words. That’s not a witch, or a d’Malvane, or even a person. It’s a hunger. It’s something beyond life and death, beyond magic and machine and mortals. Something bigger and older and wounded. Lonely.
I just know.
I just…understand. Like Muro said, it’s that feeling. That feeling of wrongness I sensed first in my dreams. A feeling that isn’t mine, but is so sure of itself anyway. It’s that feeling I felt in my dreams sent to me by the Tree of Souls, according to Muro. It wells up now, aching.
“Are you…lonely?” I manage through my squeezing throat, through the hunger’s sudden urge to rip and tear and consume.
Varia’s eyes go wide again—her withered one bleeding profusely with each inch the lid moves up. A trail of red blood banners behind her, curling around her stream of black hair. I swallow hard and fight to hold on to my thoughts—with how strong the urge to destroy is, I don’t think I can Weep, but the principal of sinking into myself helps keep my mind above water. Or below it, in this case.
Two rosaries, two trees, and the feeling that if I didn’t put them together again, something terrible would happen. That wrongness. The Tree covered in stained glass, and the aching feeling of loneliness it exuded just before all the shards stood on end to stab me. It’s the same. Varia’s face now—no, the Bone Tree’s face—it’s the same loneliness.
And the same stabbing.
I’m sure of it.
I understand now.
“One of them!” Varia snarls in her unvoice. “You’re one of them. You want to hurt us again! Split us again!”
“No,” I try. “No, I promise, I don’t—”
“EMPTY!” the Bone Tree screams, bubbles streaming out of her mouth and her working black eye darting madly around in its socket, wildly, like a berserk animal in a panic, as if it’s trying to escape its lid, driven to the final edge