My arm lifted, unbidden, but I didn’t step forward.
“Bee,” Will said. His voice was a ragged ruin of its former self, but it wasn’t only the hacking coughs strangling it now. Desperation choked him. “I would have done anything for this—to be you. For it to choose me. Why—why—”
He broke off into coughing again, so hard he couldn’t stand upright. He dropped to his knees. I looked from him to the covered Stone.
“You sound like her,” I said.
He looked up at me, his face a grim mask of death. A viscous, bloody bubble clung to the edge of his lip. His eyes met mine. He knew who I meant.
“It chose you over her,” he whispered. “Over me. It chose you over every other alchemist who ever came near it.”
I walked to the bed and drew back the handkerchief. The Stone was different than when I had last held it. It was a dark red now, the light in it smoldering rather than blazing. My finger brushed its surface, and hot joy sparked from my hand to my heart.
It chose me. It was mine. All I had to do was take it. No need to bind myself to Will, no need to offer it to Valentin afterward. If it could really, truly be mine …
I hadn’t allowed myself to hope that far. And yet what other hope did I have? I had hoped that perhaps Father could make a place for me, but he couldn’t. I had hoped Will and I could make one together, but we wouldn’t. Mother was right. There was no place in the world for me. But with the Stone, I could change that. I would not need to change myself to suit the world. I would change the world to suit me.
I took it.
I held it out in my palm. A thrill traveled up my arm and through my body, waking every part as it went. My spine lengthened, my vision sharpened. The Stone’s power was threading through me, claiming everything as it went. It traveled into my chest, up my spine to the base of my skull. The Stone’s movement through me was bliss. I didn’t want it to stop. I didn’t want anything else. I could have let it drag me down into the sea of pleasure it offered. I could have drowned there. I lifted my hand to bring it to my chest. The cabin pitched, and I held my hand out to brace myself. We had set sail. I lifted the Stone again.
My father’s cry called me back almost to myself.
“Don’t, Thea— Drop the Stone! Your mother wouldn’t want you to take this risk for her sake!”
He had thrown open the door. He walked toward me, holding out his hands in supplication. He was looking at me as he had in Dominic’s prison-room, as though he felt for me. It was pity, yes, but not the kind I could not bear, which seemed a mere half-step from contempt. He looked at me as if he truly wanted something better for me than this. And once more, I believed he did.
Perhaps he was even right about my mother. Perhaps if she were truly here, she would look at me that way as well. A wave of longing rushed through me, pushing back the Stone’s advance. Longing, not for the Stone, but for my mother.
Your mother would have sacrificed you a thousand times to have what is in your grasp.
The Stone pushed its way into my mind again, but this time I resisted.
You don’t know what she would have done, I told it. You don’t know her.
I knew her well before the end.
I lowered my hand. Fear pulled at me. I didn’t want to think about what it meant, but I did want to drop the Stone.
Power surged through me, flowing downward. Will had thrown himself at my feet and wrapped his arms around my legs. The Stone was reaching through me, working on him. Light spilled through my fingers onto Will.
His coughs quickened, then turned into gasps. The hollow, rattling sound of his breath deepened into deep, full gulps of air. It was healing him. We were healing him. The power was like an extension of myself, knitting Will’s broken places, cleansing his organs of illness. I hadn’t chosen this. I didn’t have the power for it. And yet I was doing it.
The Stone was not fused with me. I still felt the distance I had set between us—but somehow it was using me, pouring through me. I knew why. It wanted to show me what we could do, together.
Will fell back. He let go of my feet. Slowly, he rose. He stepped back from me and brought his hands to his chest.
The Stone hadn’t cleaned him. He was still covered in his own dying blood. But even so he was beautiful again. His stained shirt hung open, showing his once again perfectly formed chest and shoulders. He patted himself down, a slow smile forming on his full, glowing face. I stared, too. I couldn’t stop. It wasn’t simply that he was beautiful, muscular and glowing, like a Greek statue come to life in a cramped ship’s berth. It was that I had made him that way, when moments ago he had been nearly a corpse, and not a pretty one. Many dismissed the mythical claims about the Philosopher’s Stone. They said those powers couldn’t be bestowed by anything in nature. And they were right. This was magic. Magic that could be mine. For a moment, my guard fell, and the Stone threaded its way further into me.
Will looked up at me, and warmth filled his shining blue eyes.
“Bee,” he said. “You truly are a goddess.”
I took a shaky breath and tried to speak. I couldn’t. My
