I helped her lay on the stone while Sekhmet waved her hand over it, black candles appearing all around her, fire sparking from their wicks.
“Are you ready?” Sekhmet asked me.
“I am. You touch her feet. I want to be near her head.”
Sekhmet didn’t fight me, surprisingly, and moved to Porschia’s bare feet; grabbing her ankles and holding on. I grabbed the base of her head, my thumbs brushing her cheeks.
Saul stepped forward, but Roman stopped him from coming near. “Don’t.”
This was going to hurt. I was leaving her. She would go on without me. Marry someone. Have his children. Have a life. She would laugh. Maybe for the first time in her life, she might be happy. And that was why I closed my eyes. A single tear fell onto her forehead, my blood leaving a stain that ran into her dark hair.
“Tage?” she whispered.
“Shhh, kitten.”
“Tage, will this work? Are you sure this will work?”
Sekhmet began to chant and rocked her body back and forth, slowly and then more rapidly. I joined her. In the old tongue, we asked for Porschia to be cleansed, for the diseases to flee from her and from the world. Sekhmet focused on the plague of rot while I focused on the vampirism, imagining her tiny fangs receding, replaced by perfect incisors as pearly white as the others they lined up with. I imagined her skin dark from being out in the sun during a hard summer of work, of her stomach never thirsting for blood. And for a moment, we were transported into the sky, floating among the clouds, staring at the stars that weren’t present when we entered the place. Our pleas were heard.
Sekhmet’s chants changed. She pled for Osiris to allow us to remain whole, for our tongues not to be removed, for our hearts not to be weighed against us, for our organs to thrive. She asked for longevity, eternal life, saying that we’d earned as much in the thousand lifetimes we’d had to suffer.
I asked Osiris to fulfill the prophecy. I asked him to be merciful to Porschia and to allow us to right our father’s wrong in the way destiny intended. In the end, I asked him to ignore Sekhmet and do what was right.
A burst of air filled the space with the scent of spice. Osiris had heard our pleas, but which ones? And then we felt it. The Infection and the vampirism flowed from Porschia’s body like water being let out of a drain. I felt it fall away, until even her scent changed. She smelled sweet again, like her blood before she turned. It smelled like it did when I first saw her at the rotation.
Sekhmet began to chant again when the hot wind started to blow and our skin began to dry. We crashed back to earth, the stone landing hard on the temple floor, rocking the foundations. Particles of the stone roof began to shower us. The wind grew angry, scouring everything around us.
“What is happening?” Sekhmet screamed, holding tightly to Porschia’s ankles as our garments and hair thrashed in the storm. Lightning struck around the room. I couldn’t see anyone but the three of us. Where were the others?
Then it became calm and I knew he was near. Death had come for me and my sister.
The wind completely left the room, making way for a cold, gray fog to filter in. “I love you, Porschia,” I whispered. I could feel the hands of death reach out for me and pull me down and away from her. Sekhmet and I had been denied, and our magic was worthless against something so much bigger than ourselves.
But Porschia was free.
She would live.
She was healed.
Free.
“What’s happening?” Mercedes screamed, but her voice sounded so far away. Sekhmet pulled my ankles so hard I thought they’d snap, and then Tage brushed my cheek with his thumb. “I love you, Porschia,” he whispered, and then it was quiet. There was nothing.
I laid there for a moment, too afraid to move. A strange fog rolled through the room, smelling of rot, like a thousand Infected crawling over the floor. But it never rose, never touched me.
When the fog receded, there was quiet. “Cede?”
“We’re here!” she yelled. She still sounded so far away.
“Tage?”
No answer. I sat up on the stone and looked around.
“Tage?” He wasn’t there.
“Tage?” I began to panic. I knew he was going to heal me. I knew it meant he might die, but I still wasn’t prepared for this.
Empty.
Nothing.
A void.
A hole.
I screamed for him. The others ran to me from wherever they’d been.
“Shhh, Porsch. You’re okay,” Cede said in my ear as she gathered the pieces of me in her arms. I was broken, shattered, torn apart.
“He’s gone,” I said. Even my voice was hollow.
“I know. It’s okay,” Mercedes answered gently.
“It’s not okay. It is not okay!” I screamed. “He said he would live!”
“Porschia,” she said, shaking me once. “You’re healed. We all are.”
What? With shaking fingers, I reached up to my mouth. There were no tiny fangs. Nothing. My teeth were normal. I looked at my skin and while it was pale, it wasn’t luminous. “What?”
She smiled, crystal tears flowing down her face. “We’re all healed. He did this for you. Tage healed the world just because you asked him to.”
But he told me he could do it without dying… Where was he?
I hugged her tight, crying into her shoulder as I sat on the stone. Looking around at the others, I saw that they were watching the pair of us. Roman smiled. No sharp fangs. Saul nodded. They were okay. We were all going to be okay.
Physically we would be healthy, normal young adults who might even be accepted back into society in Blackwater. Maybe now, the shunning of different classes of people based on the curses would end. Maybe now, everyone would be considered equal.
We eased off the stone and my legs were wobbly. I didn’t know if they would hold me up. Ford came and gave me a bear hug, and then Saul wrapped his arms around me and I cried all over him, too. They were happy and so they thought I was crying tears of joy too, but mine were heavily laden with longing and guilt. I asked Tage for a normal life, and he died giving it to me. My tears left only watery spots on Saul’s skin. They weren’t blood-filled anymore.
Mercedes made a funny noise, so I looked up. “How are we ever going to explain these outfits?” she asked breathlessly.
Ford responded, “How are we going to explain what happened?”
How would we explain? Would anyone believe us?
What happened was as real as anything I’d experienced, yet it felt like a dream at the same time. Piece by piece, the temple turned to dust and was blown away by the wind. Even the stone I’d laid on moments earlier disintegrated. We covered our faces to keep from getting sand and grit in our eyes, but it still stung our skin as every trace of The Sand disappeared, peppering us as it was sucked away. Opening my eyes, I saw that we stood in the forest once again.
It was over.
My fingers felt strange, cold, and...my ring. It was gone. I dropped to the ground, frantically turning over leaves, shoving my hands through the dark soil below it. “What’s wrong?” Ford asked, dropping down to help me look for what he didn’t even know I’d lost.
“My ring. It’s gone!” I cried out. Turning in a circle, I searched for it, but no glint of silver shone in the sun. No foreign bump lay hidden beneath the fallen foliage. It was as if the ring had disappeared along with The Sand, Sekhmet, and Tage. Looking over at Saul’s hand, I noticed that he still had his.
It wasn’t all erased, so where was it?
I had to find it.
It was all I had left of Tage. Although he wasn’t the one to give it to me – Roman was – it held Tage’s blood, too. His blood bonded him to me.
It was all I had left of him.
I scrambled around, making long arcs around the small area I’d been standing in, but there was nothing. Ford stopped looking when he saw me pause.
“Maybe we can come back and look later. I think we s
hould go home,” he said gently.
“No! I have to find it,” I insisted.
Mercedes crouched down beside me. “It won’t bring him back, Porsch.”
I wanted to cry and slap her damn mouth at the same time. “I know, but I need it. Just go on without me.”
“We aren’t leaving without you. We go home together,” Saul said, leaving no room for argument. I would find it; I just needed to come back alone. I could try to find a magnet in the city, but I would find my ring. They waited as I checked again and again until even I realized there was no use.
“We can come back,” Mercedes promised, urging me to leave the clearing. Leaving was the last thing I wanted to do, but also the only thing I wanted to do. I was torn completely in two. Half of me would return to Blackwater, but the other half would always try to find Tage. What if he wasn’t dead? What if he was somehow able to cheat death and come back?
Collecting myself, I started walking toward Blackwater, stepping gingerly through the forest floor. Bare feet were fine on sand, but The Sand was gone. It vanished when he did.
It would be a long walk home, even though the distance was short.
When we came near the Colony, Saul began to hang back from the crowd. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I’m banished.”
“You know what, Saul?”
“What?” he asked, looking at me.
“Fuck that. You’ve earned a home wherever you want it.”
My mind was numb as we crossed into Blackwater that evening. My feet knew the way, and it was that fact, along with my siblings and friends, that were the only reasons I made it home. The sun was sinking below the hilltops, barely visible between the leaves that fluttered happily in the wind. Children throwing rocks in the river were the first to run into the Colony, spreading the word that we were all home, that we weren’t night-walkers anymore. They yelled about our funny clothing and shouted that our fangs were gone. They must have seen the smiles of Mercedes, Roman, and Saul, but I couldn’t bring myself to smile. My heart hurt. It hurt worse than it did when I first turned into a monster, because while that pain was sharp and sudden, this was deep; carving a message into my heart that Tage was dead.
We walked to our row of homes and waved at the new neighbors, transplants from Mountainside. Roman cleared his throat. “We should all go to my house until they come for us.”
I agreed silently. I didn’t know if I could bear to look at the house I shared with Tage.
Ford paused at the sidewalk, hitching his finger toward Father’s. “I should go tell him first.”
“You should,” I agreed. “He’ll want to see you.”
“He’ll want to see you and Cedes, too.”
I hoped he was right.
Roman was right. The council had already gathered and came to Roman’s house to speak with us before we could even figure out how to find some food to eat. We were weak and starved half to death. Roman, Mercedes, and I took turns talking so Porschia wouldn’t have to; Ford occasionally peppering the conversation with comments.
Her father tried to engage her several times, but she just clammed up, withdrawing further into herself. No one asked why I was in Blackwater. I think she would have stood up and told them all what they could do with their mandates if they did.
In the end, the men and women trickled out of Roman’s home; former neighbors, family friends, my own father. He didn’t ask me to come home, maybe because I was still unwelcome. Maybe because he knew I didn’t want to step foot inside his house again.
Mercedes declined their father’s request that she go home, too. “I’m staying with Porschia,” she told him gently. “She needs someone.”
Porschia did need someone. If she were left alone, she’d wither like a rose in winter.
I knew that someone wasn’t me, but I was grateful that Mercedes cared enough to worry about her siblings at all. She and Roman exchanged several meaningful glances and one didn’t have to be a genius to figure that one out. Somewhere in the fray, they’d become close. Friends. Maybe more.
Roman groaned out loud, closing the door after Carson Grant and Ford. “Where are we ever going to get something to eat?”
“We could go hunting,” I teased.
“I don’t think I’d make it over the crossing again. That trunk is slicker than I remember, and the bridge is on the other side. There’s no one strong enough to lift it across.”
Everyone voiced their sadness over that. The bridge was great, but now we were hard-pressed to move from the comfort of Roman’s living room couches.
“We will. In time, we’ll be able to make some contraption to get it across and put it in place. There’s nothing for us to keep out of Blackwater now.” They were the first words she’d spoken in hours, and everyone’s attention snapped to Porschia with that surprisingly hopeful statement. “You could figure it out, Saul. If you get to the point where you can work with Brian and the carpenters again, you could,” she added.
“That’s a big if, Porsch,” I said softly.
“Nothing’s as big as the obstacle we just crossed,” she whispered.
A knock sounded on the front door. Mercedes offered to get it and sluggishly walked to the door, wrenching it open. “Uh, I think you guys should see this,” she called out over her shoulder.
My first thought was, What now? What are they going to do to us now? but that was before I saw the food. That was before I was thankful that they ‘got’ it; they understood we’d been through hell. And maybe, just maybe, they could offer our scorched tongues and souls a drink of water.
We feasted on the food our neighbors gave us and then decided we should all crash at Roman’s. He had plenty of room. I slept like I hadn’t slept in a hundred years—until Mercedes shook me awake. I sat up straight. “What’s wrong?”
“Saul! I can’t find Porschia,” she whisper-yelled.
Groggy, I slipped out from beneath the blanket and followed her out of the room. “Where have you looked?”
“Everywhere. I’ve been all over this house, the back yard, and even next door in their – er, her – house. I’ve looked everywhere I could think of.”
“Would she go to your Father’s house?”
Mercedes shook her head no. I scrutinized her a moment, noting the dark bags hanging beneath her eyes and the snarled mess of her hair. Then it hit me. “Did you look in the basement?”
Her eyes widened. “She wouldn’t go down there. Why would she want to go back there?” she wondered aloud.
“Give me a few?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she agreed.
I padded down the steps and into the cool, damp room of the basement where I saw Porschia huddled on the cot inside the cage, curled up beneath a blanket she’d taken from upstairs. “Hey,” I said quietly in case she was asleep.
“Hey,” her voice broke.
“You need a pillow.”
She shook her head. “I’m fine, Saul. Go back to sleep.”
“Nah. Not when I’m on pillow duty. Sit up.” When she raised herself, I slid into the space, bracing my back against the bars behind us. I patted my leg. “Pillow.”
“I can’t lay on you,” she argued.
“You can. I’m warm and I’m your friend, so it’s completely not weird.”
Surprisingly, she laid down, resting her head on my thigh. In a few minutes, her breathing steadied and I could feel the muscles of her body twitch as she fell into a deep sleep. Mercedes crept down, holding a lit candle. She clutched her chest when she saw her curled up on the cot.
“I can stay with her if you want,” she whispered.
I shook my head. “I’m good. Get some sleep, Cedes.”
She pursed her lips together before she slowly turned, making her way back upstairs.
One second at a time.
One minute at a time.
One hour at a time.
One day at a time.
One week... it had been a week. Mercedes brought me clothes yesterd
ay. They actually fit. While I loved Maggie’s dresses, so had he, and they reminded me too much of him. His hands on my waist. His breath at my ear.
The last thing I wanted was to forget him, but I also couldn’t let his ghost keep me from living. He sacrificed himself so that I could have a life, because I’d asked him for just that. He gave up his life to give me normal, and I’d be damned if I was going to waste his gift.
In my jeans and navy blue t-shirt, I walked across town to the carpentry shop. Former neighbors still stared as I passed them by. It may have been curiosity, and it may have been fear, but my decision had been made. I didn’t want to stay in Blackwater, but I did want to be near my family. The city was a mess, and I certainly didn’t want that. What I needed was help, and I intended to ask for it.
Inside the building, Brian Yankee hammered nails into two long pieces of wood. I walked up close so he couldn’t ignore me in case he still held a grudge over his Father’s banishment. His eyes caught mine. “Porschia?” He laid his hammer down and stood up straight. “What brings you here?” A mixture of surprise and trepidation swirled across his features.
“I need your help.”
He ticked his head back. “Sure. What kind of help?”
“The house-building sort.”
“We’ve never built a house in Blackwater. Sheds and the big barn, yes, but not houses. There might be a few empty. A lot of the people from Mountainside and The Glen are staying in the city. Some of the buildings are run down, but not ruined. Not like those that are crumbling.”
I shook my head. “I want to build in the forest.”
“Why would you want to do that?”
Standing silently, I let him figure it out. I could tell when he did, because he squinted his eyes and crossed his arms. “You are welcome here. This is your home.”
“It doesn’t feel the same. I want to be close, but I need space.”
Fraud (The Frenzy Series Book 5) Page 7