Page 215 of Where Your Scars Meet Mine
Her fingers don’t close around mine.
Outside, sirens start to rise.
At first they sound unreal, like memory or punishment. Then they get louder. Closer. Red and blue flood the window in pulsing waves, painting the room in emergency colors. Thelight catches on blood, on the dead man by the bed, on the torn curtain, on the silver moth at her throat.
That is the last thing I really see.
Not the lights.
Not the corpse.
Not my own hands shaking over the wound.
That necklace.
Those red-slick wings against her skin.
Everything else becomes noise after that, the operator in my ear, tires outside, doors slamming, voices shouting, boots pounding toward the room. Even when the police lights flood the whole motel in flashing color, even when the doorway fills with movement, even when the room erupts into orders and hands and urgency, none of it reaches me the way it should.
There is only Octavia in my arms.
Octavia fading.
Octavia bleeding through my hands.
And the bright little moth at her throat, soaked red, trembling each time her breath barely moves it.
CHAPTER 45
Octavia
Reality does not return gently. It claws its way back in through pain.
Heat blazes along my side first, so sharp and merciless it feels as though somebody has laid a strip of fire beneath my skin. The force of it jerks me upright before thought can catch up. A sound tears out of my throat, broken, while the room swings wildly around me in a blur of white walls, dim machines, plastic tubing, a hospital smell so clean it feels violent after the filth of that motel.
Terror arrives before reason.
My breath turns thin, my hands flying to my body, searching blindly for tape, for rope, for blood, for any proof that I am still there, still trapped, still too late to save him. The movement sends another searing line of agony through my side. My whole body folds around it, trembling, trying and failing to outrun what memory has not yet sorted into order.
“Honey, it’s okay.”
My mother’s voice reaches me from too far away, then all at once she is there, one hand at my shoulder, the other hovering uselessly near my face as if she cannot decide whether touchingme will soothe me or break me apart further. Her eyes are swollen, her mascara gone, every bit of her composure washed out by fear and sleeplessness. She looks nothing like the version of her I carry in my ordinary life. This is a mother dragged to the edge of losing her child and left there long enough to age years in a night.
My father stands on the opposite side of the room, though “stands” is almost too steady a word for the way he holds himself. Something about him looks caved in. The man who usually fills a room with quiet confidence now seems to be bracing against invisible weight, shoulders stiff, mouth drawn, eyes ringed with exhaustion. Seeing him look at me that way hurts almost as much as the wound in my side.
The room comes into focus piece by piece.
Hospital bed. IV pole. Monitors. A narrow chair in the corner. Pale morning light pressing through half-closed blinds. No motel wallpaper. No Handler. No tape on my wrists. No blood on the floor.
No Silas.
That absence slams through me so hard I think I might be sick again.
He must be all over my face, because my father speaks before I can.
“Silas is outside,” he says quickly, voice rough from disuse. “They got him bandaged up a few days ago.”
A few days.
