Page 127 of Ship of Shadows
A blast of magic lit my peripheral vision, and I winced. This was it, then. I would die here.
“Go!” a voice shouted from above me.
I looked up to see Goji hovering over me, a new wall shielding me: her pixie dust. She couldn’t use that much power. She’d told me herself that once one’s pixie dust was drained, their life was forfeit. The wall stretched longer and taller than my water shield had, and the green from Goji’s skin was slowly turning white, her face paling, her body shaking, her dust flowing into that wall, literally draining her before my eyes.
“Goji, no!” I slowly came to a stand. “You can’t do this. You’ll die.”
“Some things are worth dying for,” she said through heavy breaths.
“I don’t understand.” Tears welled in my eyes. I hadn’t spent a lot of time with Goji, but I knew how much she meant to Bastian. “What could be worth this kind of sacrifice?”
“You, better than anyone, should understand,” she said.
I stared at her, hearing her voice in my head.He’s an idiot, but I suppose we often are when it comes to love.
My eyes widened as tears ran down Goji’s cheeks. “It’s Bastian. It’s Bastian who you love.”
The pixies battered Goji’s wall with their magic, bursts of it blowing through.
“That’s why you’ve done everything you have. Why you rescued me, why you’re helping us. You just wanted to save Bastian. You never expected to leave here, not this time. It was a lie.” My heart squeezed tight. “Goji...”
“Do not let my sacrifice be in vain. He is not complete without you. It will break him if you do not survive, and I don’t want to see my pirate broken. Not when I worked so hard to put him back together, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t you.”
I stumbled back as tears spilled down my cheeks.
Her body shook as her dust continued to flow from her. “He disappeared for a year, and I thought he was dead. I realized then that I loved him. I vowed if he ever came back to the island, I’d give him my magic, free him and he could free me in return. I’d tell him how I felt, and we could be together. He finally returned, but something had changed.”
He’d met me.
“I hoped I could give him the dust, that maybe we still had a chance, but once he took that dust and refused to use it, said he needed to see you first, I knew. I knew he loved you more than anything. But I couldn’t change how I felt about him.”
She grunted, sweat trickling down the sides of her face, plastering her blond hair to her head.
“I’ll never be able to thank you,” I said with a shaky voice as the pixies on the other side of the wall started to break Goji’s magic, cracks forming.
“Love him. Help him become the man he always dreamed of being. The man you made him want to be. That will be enough.”
More cracks webbed in her wall as pixies shot their magic at it. I turned and summoned all the strength I had to run. My legs and arms felt like tentacles, my lungs like a wrung-out rag, but still I ran, and I didn’t look back.
Goji yelled out behind me, a flash lighting up my peripherals.
Pain seared through every part of me, and I couldn’t stop crying, couldn’t stop thinking about Goji’s sacrifice, how much she must’ve loved Bastian to do something like that.
I turned my head to glance behind me and slammed into a hard wall. I screamed.
“Shhh, love, it’s me. Kara and Mia are at the tree line, waiting for us. But the shadows are there, and our torches are not enough light to scare them away. Hey.” He cupped my cheeks, forcing me to look at him. “What’s wrong? Where’s Goji?”
“She—” I couldn’t get the words out. “She—” I sobbed.
“Okay, okay. It’s alright. Here’s what we’re going to do.” He lifted me and cradled my body into his chest as he ran toward the tree line. I looked over his shoulder and didn’t see any pixies, but they’d be coming soon. Goji wouldn’t last much longer using so much magic.
As the tree line came into view, so did Lochlan and Mal—and many of the boys. So many boys. I sniffled, wiping away my tears. We’d gotten this far. We could do this. We had to do this.
Lochlan and Mal came toward us, grabbing me from Bastian’s arms.
“What happened?” Mal said, bringing me into his arms protectively.
I sniffled. “It’s a long story, but the pixies are going to be here soon, and we need to find a way out.”
