Page 76 of Blood from the Marrow
“I didn’t know she could do that,” Elena whispered, mouth dry and body trembling.
“Pretty sure she didn’t either,” Zuri said, but the awe in her voice matched the soaring in Elena’s stomach.
“She shouldn’t be here,” Elena confessed to the taunting breeze. “She shouldn’t be?—”
Zuri turned in her arms and Elena knew she’d been expecting this. She’d prepared. In her lives, no one had ever predicted her thoughts like Zuri had.
“Listen to me.” Zuri wrapped her arms around Elena’s waist like she’d be able to stop her from running. “Are you listening?” Her tone was so stern and her eyes so full of love. It was unbearable to sit in so much unworthiness. “I know you’ve been in your fucking head for the last twelve hours.” Her jab hit its target. “Thinking about all the ways you don’t deserve her or me or both of us or love at all.” She squeezed Elena’s hips. “Have you ever considered that you and Marisol aren’t opposites but complements?”
Elena furrowed her brow. “What?”
Zuri shook her head as if she’d read her mental notes wrong. “You’re thinking life and death are opposites, aren’t you?”
Tipping her head to the side, Elena considered the question. She hadn’t put it so bluntly in her mind, but the comparison fit. She shrugged.
“I feel like this is some dramatic bullshit you would say, but what if vampires are just the flip side of Aglion?” She pinned Elena with her unwavering gaze, boring a hole straight into the heart that already belonged to her. “Death and life. Reaping and sowing. Darkness is defined by the presence of light the same way that light is defined by the absence of darkness. One literally couldn’t exist without the other. We need both. All light would burn the world away, and complete darkness would strangle the life out of everything. Don’t you get it?”
Elena wanted to make a wry joke about Zuri having picked up a philosophy degree while they were broken up, but she couldn’t find the will to hide behind humor. Couldn’t make herself move anywhere but closer.
She tried to swallow Zuri’s words along with the spiked lump in her throat, but they wouldn’t budge. Wouldn’t let her run from the ache in her chest.
Her gaze drifted back to Marisol, still kneeling in the grass, her hands pressed to the earth as if she could will life back into it through sheer determination. Since the moment she’d met her, Marisol had been such an intense combination of fearlessness and bleeding empathy. She refused to accept defeat. Refused to give up. Even on Elena.
With her hands in the ground, it was impossible to say Marisol wasn’t strong in her own way. Strong in a way Elena had no language for. Brave in a way she barely understood. Elena looked at Zuri again. Zuri, who saw so much more than Elena ever could. A person capable of holding so much love in her body it verged on terrifying.
“What does that make you?” Elena’s voice was faint and all but lost to the wind pushing her hair from her face. “If I’m dark and she’s light?”
Victory was the flicker of satisfaction in Zuri’s eyes. “The goddamn gray that blends you together.” She pulled Elena downto her mouth, the salt on her lips the only hint that she’d been crying.
Elena didn’t get the chance to ask if she was okay after that morning’s events before Zuri was pulling away. “Come on, I want to see what Hel’s teaching her.”
With their hands clasped, they skirted the pool deck. Vaguely aware that other vampires had gathered to watch from a distance, all Elena could see was Marisol. See Marisol’s wings dimming the more of herself she poured into the sea of roses. Elena held her breath while Marisol finished her work. Watching her, Elena understood how peasants ever believed in tangible gods. Even now, she had to resist the urge to fall to her knees and pray.
There was only the sound of the ocean when Marisol sat back on her heels, hands dropping to her knees while she tucked her wings in behind her. They disappeared a moment later. When Marisol opened her eyes, she grinned at her work. Pink roses, enormous and velvety, filled the night with their intoxicating scent.
Marisol swayed back, bracing herself against the ground. Elena darted to her side, pulling her up and holding her steady.
“You okay?” Elena searched Marisol’s face, pale and damp with sweat.
“Yeah, I just got a little dizzy.” Despite her exhaustion, Marisol’s hazel eyes were bright. “I didn’t know if it would work, but I wanted to try.” Her gaze never left Elena’s. “I wanted… needed to heal something.”
Elena’s stomach clenched, heart so close to pounding despite the laws of science and nature and physiology. And then Marisol was looking at her like she was a wilting plant in need of her beautiful wings.
“Are you okay?” Marisol’s palm was hot against Elena’s jaw. It smelled like earth and life and hope.
Elena closed her eyes. She wasn’t exactly okay, but with Marisol in her arms and Zuri’s hand on the small of her back, she was reckless enough to believe that she could be. She leaned in and kissed Marisol’s trembling lips because words were insufficient.
When she pulled away, there was only the heat on her skin and the smell of roses lifting her heart.
“Sabina’s texts talked around power like this, but seeing it…” Hel’s voice broke Elena’s trance and she remembered that they weren’t alone.
“Somebody talked about turning a graveyard into fucking Eden in your little burn book?” Zuri asked with unabashed skepticism.
“Speaking of the Aglion,” Elena said, Marisol’s kiss reawakening the strategic part of her brain, “we need to make a decision. About all of it.”Wesounded foreign on her tongue but she pushed through. “We need to train our forces to work together. This alliance will mean very little if we can’t function as a unit when Sayah comes.”
“My coven sisters will be here tomorrow,” Zuri said, flexing the fingers of her tattooed arm. Even now, the red ink seemed to pulse faintly in the moonlight. “I wish we weren’t so far from our coven grounds.”
“Do you think it’s weakening your power?” Marisol asked.
