Page 29 of Marginally Yours
What do I even do? Do I call the cops? She has no identity, and they'll think I took her out here to kill her myself. Do I hide her now and come back to bury her under the cover of night? I'll end up getting myself caught hiding a body and definitely go to prison. Or will she just dematerialize or something? What happens to muses when they die? Do they returnto wherever they live when they're not on an assignment? Do they-
Callie gasps as her eyes shoot open, emanating a purple glow. There are no pupils, but I swear she's staring at me.
"Callie?" I gasp, turning her face back and forth by her chin. "Are you-... No fucking way. Come on, troublemaker. Come back to me." I tap her cheek lightly with my fingertips and her eyelids flutter, the light flooding from them blinking on and off with the movement.
Slowly, she turns her head to face me, and I take my first real breath since her last. I lean forward and press my forehead to hers. When I feel her fingers tangle into my hair, the relief is visceral. I plant a kiss on her forehead just as it dawns on me that her neck was in two fucking pieces 30 seconds ago.
When I lean back to check the injury, I'm more surprised than I should be to find that she looks like nothing ever happened. The glow is fading, and her eyes are a normalmortallight blue now. I check her over, poking and prodding around her neck to see if there's any damage, but she just laughs at me.
I'll never take that sound for granted again.
"I'm okay, Devon," she insists, placing her palm flat on my chest. "I promise, I'm okay." She pushes out of my hold and sits up.
"I see that," I say, eyebrows knitting together. "Buthow?"
Chapter Nineteen
All I can do is stare.
A minute ago, she was gone. Her neck bulged with the snapped pieces of her spine, her skin quickly cooling. She wasgone, and I would have gone down fighting Apollo if he hadn't disappeared like a fuckingcoward.
A coward. Who am I kidding? He would have turned me into a walking red mist before I took my first step. There was nothing I could have done to prevent this, and nothing I could do to Apollo in retaliation that wouldn't have ended in my complete evisceration. I'm basically useless in this fight, and I don't know why she would even-
"I'm alive because of you," she says, halting my spiral with a gentle hand on my cheek.
"What?" I'm sure I heard her wrong because I did nothing of any use.
"What is lost in anger will bloom," she recites, her hand drifting to her throat subconsciously. Her eyes find mine and I'm graced with a small smile.
"What's given in love will nourish," I mumble, repeating the last line of the Fates' riddle. I'd been rolling it around inmy head since I woke up, trying to figure out what the hell it was supposed to mean, but I'd been so focused on figuring out how their words would keep her alive that I didn't stop to think that maybe they were just telling me to sit tight.
"They've been watching us," she explains. "The Fates. When we went back to bed after they came to you, they came to me too. They gave us each a part of the puzzle as a test." She slips her hand into mine. "We passed.”
"More likeyoupassed," I correct.
"No,wepassed. Your test was whether you would tell me what happened and stick to the plan or if you'd go off half-cocked and try to be a hero. My test was..." Her gaze drifts to where Apollo had sat before he simply willed her out of existence, and I can see in her eyes that the experience will haunt her for a long time.
"Your test was standing up to him and trusting the Fates.Wepassed," I concede, pulling her back into me. "And Apollo thinks you’re dead so we’re off of his radar. There’s one thing I don't get, though. What was with their whole show with the thread?"
She gives me a sad smile and plucks a pebble from between the floorboards of the gazebo, holding it out in the palm of her hand. She stares at it until she's squinting, but nothing happens. It takes me a second to realize thatnothing is happening.
"Oh, baby..." I wrap my hand around hers, closing it around the pebble. "I'm so sorry."
"It's just magic," she says with a shrug. She's trying to brush it off, but I know she's devastated. "I can live without it. At least I'm alive, right?"
I squeeze her tighter to me. "Yeah, at least you're alive," I agree. My eyes burn at how close I was to losing her forever.
"His deal was that he would take my immortal life for my freedom.The Fates didn't like that he offered an unacceptable deal with no room for negotiation, so they made him keep his word. They told me he would do it, and they said the price of his cheating would cost him. When he killed me, I lost my immortal life and won my own freedom, but they added a mortal core to my thread."
My mouth falls open as the pieces all click together.
"He burned away my immortality - and my magic - and left me with a mortal lifespan." She drops her gaze to the ground. "A mortal lifespan that may or may not be tied to yours."
My eyebrows shoot up at that. "What... what exactly does that mean?"
She squirms in my lap, wringing her fingers together like she's delivering bad news.
"Well, in order to give me a mortal lifespan, they had to... anchor it to something to keep it in the mortal realm, I guess? The Fates don’t really make a habit of explaining themselves. When they appeared to me, they had another thread in front of them. It wasn't mine, and I’m guessing it was yours. They plucked a strand from it and fused it with mine. I thought they were telling me that they were reinforcing my thread to fight him or something, but I realized this morning that the riddle they gave you..."
