tasted blood and death.
Oh, God. He should have let go.
She couldn’t let him go. Even now, though someone was coming, a white light through the darkness. Probably humans, investigating the explosion. They could have Madelyn, wings and all, and the Guardians would cover up the truth somehow. She’d take Nicholas, and she’d . . .
She didn’t know. Nothing seemed to matter now.
A touch at her shoulder. She could feel the vibration of a heartbeat now, though it wasn’t the one she wanted, the punctuated hum of a voice through the silence. The white light grew brighter, washing out the red glow cast over his skin.
She looked up into Taylor’s horrified face. Taylor’s lips moved, and Ash realized the glow was coming from the Guardian, brighter now, impossible to look at.
Ash only wanted to see Nicholas, anyway.
Taylor sank to her heels on the opposite side of his body. She touched his forehead, and the light was everywhere except in the blackness of Taylor’s eyes. Her voice hummed again in the silence, and echoed in Ash’s head.
And impossibly, impossibly, though he had no breath to speak, no life to shape the words, his voice, his reply—
Taylor’s laugh came from nowhere, everywhere.
She did, not even moving but suddenly outside the light, looking into the blinding brightness, still holding Nicholas’s body to her chest. Her heart seemed filled to bursting, aching with joy that couldn’t have possibly come so close after the devastation, but she was overwhelmed with it, the highest up after the lowest down.
He’d be a Guardian.
She flattened her palm over his chest, waited for the beat of his heart. Oh, it was already there . . . so faint, almost undetectable. The light was growing dimmer, still so bright but no longer shining outward—it was being sucked into the blackness of Taylor’s eyes.
Taylor’s lips formed another word, unmistakable:
Nicholas’s body jerked. His eyes flew open, staring sightlessly into the sky, his mouth shaping into a soundless scream.
And he vanished from her arms.
CHAPTER 18
After two weeks, he could finally walk.
The pain still ate through to his bones, but Nicholas could stand without crumpling, move one foot in front of the other. Slowly, he made his way to the enormous marble slabs that served as the temple doors. He just had to pull them open, and he’d be in Caelum. Then there would be a Gate—somewhere—that would take him to Earth. A Gate that would take him to Ash.
He just had to pull them open . . . but Nicholas didn’t yet know if he could do it.
Strength wasn’t the problem. Earlier that day, he’d lifted with a single finger the red sofa on which he’d spent the past two weeks. But two weeks ago, he hadn’t even had two hands.
The left had regrown into the shape of a hand, but was still fragile. His guts and ribs, shredded by shrapnel, had almost completely pieced together—by the second day, his lungs had mended enough that he could take a breath. Tendons and muscle worked as they should, but the shattered bones beneath were still laced with cracks. Pim, a novice Guardian with a healing Gift, had predicted a full recovery within one or two more days. Of course, she’d said that four days ago, too.
Not completely healed, but he didn’t look like a horror show any longer. He could close his eyes without being bombarded by the screams inside his head, the torturous bite of ice. So it was time to go.
He braced his feet and hauled back against the door. For a moment, a pain lancing through his ankle gave him visions of his leg snapping and folding over on itself inside his pajama pants. He was able to slowly open the door. Light poured into the temple, blinding him.
Nicholas stepped out into a ruin. As far as he could see, columns lay like tossed matchsticks, domes had collapsed into piles of rubble. No single building stood intact, and the towers that were still upright appeared sheared apart, pointed like jagged teeth. Beyond them lay a brilliant blue sky that stung tears from Nicholas’s eyes.
“Not much left, is there?”
Because they never left him completely alone, helpless in a crumbling realm, Taylor sat on the temple’s marble steps. The sun glinted against the gold and copper in her hair, and sparked like fire. It was almost a relief to look away from her, to the soothing white of the broken city again.
“No,” he said.
“You’ll get used to color in a little while. Too much at once is like a kaleidoscope jabbed into your brain. And then later comes the Enthrallment, where one color is so beautiful, you just want to stare at it for hours. Of course, sometimes it just takes a smell, or a sound. Sometimes it’s just a combination of everything.”
“So that’s why I’m still here? To give me time to adjust?”
“That, and your freak hand.” She said it like a joke that didn’t come out right, and finished with a grimace. “Sorry. It doesn’t look bad now anyway. Almost normal. Just—”
“Weaker,” Nicholas said.
“That’s all on me. When Michael transforms someone, he usually can’t heal them with his Gift—just like Pim couldn’t heal you—because most of the time, those wounds are somehow self-inflicted. But during the transformation, he’s altering those people anyway, so he alters the body so that it’s healed. I didn’t know how to do that. It never occurred to me to study anatomy or how to rebuild someone. I thought he’d always be there to give it to me.”
“But instead, he’s like that.” Nicholas nodded toward the city. “Broken down.”
“Yes,” she said, and when Nicholas turned to look at the temple behind them—still strong, still standing— Taylor added, “I think that one is me.”
“I’m glad you didn’t crack while I was in there, then.” And because another pain shot through his ankle and up to his knee, he eased down on the step next to her. “Is she all right?”
“You ask that every day.”
“I wonder every second.”
“Ah, well. She’s still not sure that we aren’t all just lying to her. After Khavi . . .” Taylor shook her head. “It could be argued that she left you alone to die. Or that she single-handedly arranged events so that every decision you, Ash, Lilith, and I made led to your becoming a Guardian. We don’t even know if the stuff about Ash being able to get Michael out of the field was true, or if that was just designed to put everything in motion. And I don’t know what we’re going to do when she comes waltzing back in, but you’re one of us now, and your input will have weight.”
He didn’t care about that. Group decision making wasn’t his style. They could what they liked. He’d do as he liked . . . when he could.
“Why am I not healing right?”
“We’ve got theories. You want to hear them?”
“Yes.”
