Send Me Their Souls (Bring Me Their Hearts #3) - Sara Wolf Page 0,31
and crevices of it, one hand limper than the other.
“You can’t keep doing this to yourself.” A plead tinges my voice, and it’s so strange. Uncomfortable and pinching like a brand-new pair of shoes.
“It’s my magic,” he asserts softly.
“You’re my witch,” I fire back. “I’m your Heartless. It’s my magic, too.”
He falls silent at that, and I watch the water ripple around the small of his torso with a helplessness bubbling in my veins.
“You said,” I start, “that whatever I choose, you’d still love me. So I’m telling you now: whatever you choose, I’ll still love you. But I won’t stand by and watch you hurt yourself over and over. You’ve done that enough for the both of us.”
He’s quiet, and then he tilts his head barely over his shoulder, nose and mouth strong. “There’s no other way to stop her.”
“There might be. You don’t know that for sure.”
“I know that when the time comes, I’ll have to fight her,” he says. “Witch to witch. And the thought terrifies me.”
“She—she won’t kill you—”
“No. But I might kill her.”
A thousand weights settle on my chest in an instant. His own sister. The sister he looked up to so fervently, the sister he missed so dearly. The sister who grew up with him, who looked after him. Family. If I could remember what family meant…would I fight them? Knowing I might have to kill them?
No. Not in a million years.
From somewhere completely unknown, I fish up the courage to speak. “It’d be different, I suppose, if you hated her.”
His laugh is the bitter, quiet kind. “Yes. It would be.”
I wade over, ungraceful and uncaring and desperate to touch him. To make things right. Or even just a little righter. I wrap my arms around him, pressing all of me into his back to let him know I’m here. Always.
“I’m sorry.” I say the only thing I can say. His voice this time is hoarse, and on the verge. Of what, I have no idea. I might never know. But I don’t need to know.
All I need to do is be here.
“As am I.”
7
THE IRON LADY
AND THE
STARVING WOLF
A dream again.
I’m— No.
Not me, her.
Varia’s standing on a beach, me inside her body and looking out. I’ve never seen the ocean, or if I have in my past human life, I can’t remember it. Those memories are sealed in my heart. It’s water, so much water, but it’s wide and wild and pulsing like living steel edged white.
She stands on a gray-sand beach and looks out at the ocean. She can feel it calling, a faint bell with only one word, getting louder.
destroy.
destroy.
destroy.
This world must be destroyed.
She looks down at her hands, at her wood fingers and fine nails. She hates the world, and it should all be destroyed. Every last unfair bit of it. No! She doesn’t. She loves it. She loves…a girl. But which girl? Mousy hair, blue eyes, but her features are lost. Lost in the sea of burning and ravaging and breaking.
destroy.
The voice is the hunger, and it is not. It’s the inverse, the opposite, the void where there is presence. It is a voice without sound, thought without intention. It’s a hunger stranger than mine. Different than mine and yet the same. It wants us to be the worst we can be, always.
Our black hair whips around our face, the sea breeze brutal, and we watch it be brutal to the water. To the world.
Beneath the torrid waves, white manes rise like shark fins.
I wake up with a headache and a looming sense of dread. Varia. No mistaking it this time. That was Varia, what she was seeing. But why can I see through her? Why only in dreams? And why is she standing on a beach, staring?
Staring at what?
I think about telling Lucien and Fione and Mal. But then I get a horrifying thought—if I can see through her, can she see through me? Am I endangering everyone? Again? But I have to stop her. I have to stay with them and stop her.
All I can do is put my boots on, one lace at a time.
The village is sorry to see us go.
They stand at the edge of the ruin that was once their home, a nauseating mixture of mud and blackened char squelching beneath so many pairs of boots. The mosquitos are out in full force, the air heavy and muggy with a looming thunderstorm, but they couldn’t care less, gathered as they are, waving their