Page 139 of Spark of the Everflame

I stopped, but I didn’t look back.

“Last night,” he said, “right before the roof collapsed. The vision. The battlefield.”

I couldn’t move, my body paralyzed, my thoughts stunned to stillness.

“What if our story isn’t over, Diem Bellator? What if it’s only beginning?”

Like in the vision, an exquisite ache swelled in the left side of my chest. Without thinking, my hand rose and pressed against it.

I hesitated, then stole a fleeting glance back. Luther’s own palm lay flat below his left shoulder, a plea in his eyes.

I couldn’t give him the answer I knew he wanted. Our worlds were too distant, our goals too aligned with each other’s destruction. If we ever met on a battlefield, surely it was destined to be as enemies, not allies. But there was one olive branch I could offer—a weapon I never should have put into play to begin with.

“There’s a hole in the exterior wall of the palace gardens,” I said. “Hidden under the ivy on the southeast corner. Repair it as soon as you can—today, if possible.”

He nodded, his expression turning stormy once more.

I finally turned my back and ran, feet pounding against the long gravel path to Mortal City. Though I knew from the silence in my wake that he hadn’t followed me, I couldn’t shake the feeling of Luther’s piercing gaze searing into my back every step of the way.

ChapterThirty

Maura took the news better than anticipated.

I had expected anger or perhaps tears. I’d thought she might lecture me or yell at me or tell me how ashamed my mother would be. I’d thought—rather embarrassingly, in hindsight—that she might even fall on her knees and beg me to stay.

Instead, she’d looked relieved.

Not relieved to lose me—my absence, so soon after my mother’s, would put a strain on the center’s resources, and the trainees would need to speed their progression to full healers—but relieved that I was choosing to follow my heart, even if it led me into the misty unknown.

She put on a steaming kettle of tea, and we sat in the back room for hours, sharing stories of my childhood growing up around the center, teasing each other about old patient visits gone terribly awry, and weeping over memories of my mother.

She didn’t ask me what I planned to do next. Perhaps she sensed I didn’t yet know the answer.

And though her warm caramel eyes glittered with questions, she also didn’t ask about my swollen just-kissed lips, or the crusted blood coating my hands, or the tunic I wore that clearly belonged to a man.

When the tea had gone cold and the afternoon began its gentle roll into evening, I washed myself up, and we said our goodbyes. We hugged so tightly I could barely breathe, and through tears, we promised to stay closely in touch.

As I walked away from the center for what might be the last time, a fragment of my heart remained lodged within those four stone walls, forever to stay.

* * *

Henri was a different story entirely.

I’d been standing on the rickety wooden porch of his home for the better part of an hour, staring at his door and trying to scrape together the courage to knock.

Every time I thought I had a plan for what I might say, the questions I might ask and the answers I might offer, I’d raise my fist to the door. Then, right as my knuckles grazed the chipped white paint, every thought would eddy from my mind like the low tide.

On what must have been the twentieth attempt, I thought I’d finally figured out the exact right words in the exact right order. I blew out a sharp breath as I pulled my shoulders back. My fist rose to eye level, and—

“Diem?”

I spun on my heel. Henri stood several feet behind me, arms loaded with overflowing satchels of packages neatly wrapped in sandy paper and tied with twine.

Our eyes met.

Empty. My head went completely empty.

He lumbered up the stairs and dumped his bags against the front stoop. Brows pinched, he leaned a shoulder against the wall and shoved his hands into his pockets, his stony expression giving away nothing.

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