Page 109 of Persephone's Curse
“Whoa,” Bernadette breathed.
“How is this possible?” Clara asked, patting her pocket vaguely for what I thought must be the mythology book, coming up empty, catching a jasmine petal in her fingers and examining it with big, wild eyes. Then: “I think I had a dream about this…”
Which made sense, because sisters shared dreams just like they shared clothes, just like they shared memories, just like they shared ghosts.
I led them down the back stairs to the yard and we stood in a loose circle, Henry following behind us, his eyes trained upward.
The black tear took up the entire sky now. It was blacker than the sky had ever been, and devoid of stars, and echoing andcavernous and horrible. It pulsed down on top of us, sending waves of something we could feel in our fingertips. It would swallow the entire house, just like Henry had said. It would swallow all of us. We couldn’t wait any longer.
Henry stepped into the circle and stood before Evelyn.
“No, Henry,” she said, her voice a little more than a whisper.
“I’m sorry, Evie,” he whispered back, and raised his free hand and brushed her hair with the back of his knuckles. “It’s the only way.”
“You were mine,” she said, her voice small and fragile. “You weremine.”
“I’m still yours.”
Henry dropped her hand, moved to Clara, who was openly weeping, her small shoulders shaking.
“I love you, okay?” he said, and pulled her into a hug.
“I’m going to miss when you would sit and watch me paint,” she sobbed.
“I will always watch you paint,” he said. “Always.”
She pulled away then and looked up at him, her eyes panicked. “But I can’t paint anymore. What if I never paint again?”
“When this is over, you’ll paint again. As soon as this is over.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
He turned to Bernadette next. She stood tall and unwavering, like a sentinel watching us all, the older sister in her age-old role of strength. She had jasmine flowers caught in her short hair.
“Remember the magpies,” he said, a reference I did not get, a secret joke between them.
“I’ll always count them,” Bernadette said, her words a vow.
They hugged for a long time, and then Henry turned to me, and I tried not to let my knees buckle.
“Are you almost ready?” he asked.
I nodded.
Because somehow, in the shower of the jasmine petals, in the circle with my sisters, somehow, without knowinghow,I knew what to do. I knew what to sacrifice, what to give up.
I had always been the only one of us who could see the other ghosts.
Sometimes I had liked it, sometimes I had hated it, sometimes it had made me feel alone in a way I couldn’t really describe. But it had always been mine. My connection toher,to them, to Persephone and Melinöe.
Henry hugged me—still such a new, weird feeling, that he couldhugus—and the smell of jasmine surrounded me, like a blanket, and the feel of Henry’s arms around me, well, they weren’t the arms of a dead boy. He had come back to life in that moment. He had come back to life before dying all over again.
When he let me go, I felt colder than I had before, and I couldn’t watch as he stepped back to Evelyn again.
The three of us, Clara, Bernadette, and me, we stepped a few feet away from them, so we couldn’t hear what they said, so we wouldn’t intrude on their privacy.
