Page 96 of The Truths We Burn

I want to cry for her because I hope she didn’t feel afraid, but I know she was. She was alone, wondering when we’d show up to save her, but we never came, not in time. She died thinking she was going to be rescued, and we weren’t even aware she was missing.

Not until it was too late.

She died alone and frightened.

Left the earth in the exact opposite way of how she lived.

She was always the brave one, the one surrounded by happiness and people who loved her.

And now we would die the same.

Alone with no one to save us.

I’m taking in too much water through my nose and mouth. There’s comfort in knowing I’ll see her again. Spots fill my vision, everything suddenly becoming hazy, and I feel high. I’m losing consciousness, falling further and further away from myself.

Finally giving in to the pain, into the water that I knew would come for me eventually.

Warmth coils around me, and I think this is it. I’m dying.

But I brutally meet with the vicious air. It snaps against my skin, this abrupt sense of energy coursing through me, and a violent urge to cough takes over.

My body trembles from my wheezing and the cold.

I’m not sure if I’m happy to be alive or just shocked.

I cling to whatever it is that’s holding me, my hands grasping at it, clinging to it with everything I have because it feels like the opposite of death. It feels like life, like air.

“You don’t get to die,” I hear. “Not that easily.”

Even through my muddled senses, even bogged down with water, I can smell him. Like cannabis and smoke. Gasoline and old leather. He feels firm beneath my fingers, warm below the layer of moisture that’s covering both of us.

My eyes crack open, and through my murky vision, I see him.

Rook.

His wet hair is stuck to his face, cheeks flushed and square jaw tight as he tries to stop shivering.

He looks so ruined yet so beautiful.

Such a pretty boy, but even Lucifer was pretty once upon a time.

The most beautiful.

An angel.

Rook

I knew her coming back would be nothing but a hazard.

It would do nothing but distract us and put us more at risk. Sage had always been a wild card. A slow poison that corrupted you before you even knew you were infected.

Trouble.

“Alistair, wait, Alistair, please, I’m fine—” Briar begs, trying with no luck to slow him down. Blood drips from his hands, his knuckles split and oozing. The damage he’d done to that dude’s face will be permanent.

Sage is sitting on the pavement, a jacket wrapped around her shoulders as she tries to fight the cold. Her wet hair brushes her chin as she lifts her head to the freight train headed in her direction.

Alistair pulls Sage up by the front of her jacket, hands squeezing the material tightly as he presses her into the side of his car aggressively.

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