try to force every one of these warriors to back down, and he would let them kill themselves if they wouldn’t.
Erna sent a bolt Marcus’s way and his body flew back toward a cluster of big, gnarled oak trees, their branches winding out as though they were embracing whatever travelers would come into their home.
Numbness settled over me when he struck a branch. His body, the body I’d loved so much, the one that comforted me and made me feel whole, was impaled on the branch. Through his chest, an arm of that tree burst out. His heart. It had pierced his heart.
He held a hand out, very much as Haweigh had done that day, and I watched as the love of my life turned to ash and floated to the forest floor. He was gone as though he’d never been here, never held me and loved me.
The world went silent though I knew everyone around me was screaming.
I’d done it. My worst fears had all come to life. I’d killed the two men in the world who’d loved me the most.
I felt rough hands on my body, but I wasn’t there anymore. I wasn’t in my body.
I stepped away from it, looking back at the scene playing out around me. My mother was screaming, trying to get to my dad. Kelsey was on the ground beside his body. A warrior had a knife to Papa’s throat, but that wasn’t why he was crying. Erna was still talking, still telling me all the reasons I didn’t deserve to live, but her mouth wasn’t moving. Yet I could hear her plainly.
It was like I was in one of the Vampire entertainments, the films they called DLs, and I’d pressed the button to slow it down.
“Is she talking to you?” a familiar voice asked. “How is she doing it? It must be a spell of some sort.”
I looked to my left and my dad stood there. I glanced over and his body was still on the ground, Kelsey trying to help him. “Are we both dead?”
“No, sweetheart,” Dad said, and I realized he wasn’t in the clothes Taggart had given us. This was my father dressed as he’d been the night I was born. He was exactly as I remembered him. “I’m not dead yet, but I will be soon. It’s odd to watch myself. God, I wish I could take this pain away from them.”
He stepped over and tried to touch my mother, but his hand passed through her.
“How are we doing this?”
“Because I’m in the in-between.” My father stared at Papa, the saddest look on his face. “I understand things here, things I won’t even remember if I come back from this. If I move on, well, if I move on I’ll have a promise to keep to my loves.”
“I’m not in the in-between.” They needed me alive. While the guards were being rough with everyone else, they were careful with me. “Can we find Marcus? Marcus can’t be dead. He can’t.”
Dad sighed and came back to my side. “Only you can make that decision. You’re here with me because we share a soul space, daughter. A piece of my soul was used to form you, and that was where she found her way in.”
“Way in?”
“Yes. It was through a weakness in me that the witch got to you, is still getting to you.” He gestured to where he lay and suddenly we were there. Kelsey was on her knees, trying to stanch the bleeding, her hands becoming red with my father’s blood. “I’m dying, and you know what’s going through my head? I’m lying there and there’s a part of me—a flawed and damaged part of me—that thinks I deserve this. That I failed and I deserve this death. It’s a voice I still hear to this day, that’s been with me since I was young. My father would get drunk and tell me I was the reason my mother died. I wasn’t, and logic tells me I wasn’t responsible for her being in the store that night. I was a child who begged his mother for a treat, and despite how late it was, she indulged me. I couldn’t have known what would happen any more than Zoey did the night I turned. Logic dictates that a toddler who can barely speak isn’t responsible for his mother being shot during a robbery, but that child inside me still hears him saying she would be alive if I’d been