iAm leaned in close again and whispered something else.

Trez took a deep breath. “Selena, do you want to see your sisters? Phury? The Directrix? They’re all here. They’re right outside.”

In response, she closed her eyes. Once. And then kept them that way until he felt a fresh needle of panic go through him.

But she opened them again. She was still with him.

Now, her tears were coming faster and faster, and he wished he could concentrate enough to try to get in her mind, but he couldn’t. He was too wrung-out, too emotional, too filled with grief. And he understood what she wanted anyway.

“You don’t want them to see you this way.” Blink. “You love them, though, and you want them to know you’re going to miss them.” Blink. Blink. “You want me to say good-bye for you.”

Blink. Blink.

“Okay, my queen.”

Then there was this weird pause.

Later, when he obsessively reviewed every single thing that happened, every hour that passed during the crisis, every nuance of the room and the people, every twitch of her face and each word he spoke to her, he would dwell on that moment. It was, he would suppose, rather like staring down the muzzle of a gun just before you got shot.

“I love you,” he said. “I love you forever.”

Tenderly, he stroked her face and prayed she could feel his touch. He didn’t know whether she could or not; there was an alarming gray cast seeping into her skin.

Switching hands, so that his right one was grabbing hers, he patted around thin air, searching for—

iAm, as always, was right there, grabbing onto his palm with strength, steadying him.

He was not going to make it through this unless his brother was holding him up off the floor.

“Okay,” Trez said to whoever was listening, “we’re ready.”

Manny went over to the IV line, a syringe filled with fluid in his hand. “The first shot is a sedative.”

Trez sat forward on the chair he had been given. Putting his mouth right next to her ear, he said, “I’ll love you forever…”

He repeated the words until he wasn’t sure how many times he’d said them. He just wanted them to be the last thing she heard.

“This is the final shot,” someone said. Maybe it was Manny, maybe not.

Trez started saying his words faster. And faster.

“I love youforeverIloveyouforever…”

Moments later, he stopped.

He wasn’t sure how he knew it exactly.

But she was gone.

Sitting back, he looked into her still-open eyes. They were as beautiful as they had always been … there was no life in them, however.

That mystical spark that had animated her had gone out.

And her soul, no longer possessing a viable home, had left with it.

The silence and stillness of death was a void in and of itself, a black hole that sucked everyone and everything around it in; and so powerful was the pull, the lives of others were halted, too, momentarily crippled by the tremendous, contagious force.

Trez put his face down on the exam table and released the two hands that had sustained him, hers and his brother’s. Then he wrapped his arms around his love, and he wept over her with such grief that glass exploded all around the room, the doors of the steel cabinets splintering and falling free of their frames, even the screen on the computer and the segments of the medical chandelier above cracking into shards.

He had been preparing himself for this terrible moment ever since he had found her outside of the Sanctuary’s cemetery, subconsciously bracing himself, trying on the grief as one would test how hot a stove burner was or how toxic a smell.

The reality was indescribably worse than he had predicted even in his most pessimistic moments.

In reality, he was just another piece of glass in the room.

Utterly shattered, beyond repair.

SIXTY-NINE

Well, now he knew what it was like to see someone you love get mowed down by a car, iAm thought as he watched his brother sob.

Trez’s emotions had put the clinic into a deep freeze, the air so cold, breath came out of everyone’s mouths in puffs and stripped whatever clothing they had on to metaphorical shreds. Glancing up, iAm noted that the three medical professionals were likewise in extremis, Manny rubbing his eyes with his thumbs, Ehlena taking a tissue out of the shirt pocket of her scrubs, Jane wiping her face with her palms.

iAm sat up on his knees and massaged his brother’s back. He wasn’t sure whether the contact was annoying or helping—more likely, it was a neither-here-nor-there that wasn’t even noticed.

Eventually, Trez took a shuddering breath and eased back.

There was a table stand within iAm’s reach, and on it, there was a stack of folded white and blue towels. Snagging one, he put it up toward his brother.

Trez was outside of any Kleenex capability at this point.

The guy scrubbed his face and took a number of deep breaths. Then he sat back in the chair he’d been using and stared ahead.

“I want to go through the preparations,” he said hoarsely.

“You got it,” iAm replied. As the medical staff gave a collective brows-up, he said to them, “I have everything he needs. I put it in the locker room a couple of days ago.”

It had been something he’d done before he’d left to go to the Territory, just in case he didn’t make it back.

Although that had been kind of stupid. If he’d been captured and held there, he wouldn’t have been able to tell anyone where to find the shit.

“Is it okay for him to use this room?” iAm asked, even though it wasn’t really a request.

“Absolutely,” Jane said. “He can be assured of privacy.”

“Thank you.” iAm patted his brother’s knee. “I’ll be right back, okay. I’m going to go get the supplies.”

“Thanks, man,” Trez said dully.

iAm got to his feet, and as his knees cracked, he realized he’d spent quite a while crouched on the tile floor.

He couldn’t bear to look at Selena. It was just too damn hard.

Going over to Manny, he hugged the guy in a manly way, and then gave Jane and Ehlena something gentler.

“Thanks for taking such good care of them.”

Manny just shook his head. “Outcome would have been different if we’d been able to do that.”

“Some things…” iAm shrugged. “There’s nothing you can do.”

Heading for the door, he pushed on the panel … and frowned as paint chips came off in his hands. Jesus, the steel had warped, the fit in the frame no longer right.

Outside, there wasn’t, as the saying went, a dry eye in the house.

“What can we do?” the King asked, stepping forward and putting his palm out into thin air.

Approaching Wrath, iAm gave what was offered a shake, and then was surprised to find himself yanked in against that incredibly huge chest. For a moment, he allowed himself to sag into all the strength of the King’s body, to the point where he was quite certain Wrath was holding him up off the floor.

But then he needed to pull it together. There were practicalities that had to be dealt with.

As he stepped back, the group of Chosen in their robes registered, and he felt a special kinship to them as a sibling himself.

“Trez is going to tell you later,” he said, “but she wanted you to know she loved you so much. It was hard, at the end … she couldn’t really communicate. The love for you all was there, though.” He focused on Phury’s yellow eyes. “And you, too.”

“She was a female of great worth,” the Primale said in the Old Language. “A credit to her tradition and duties, and also an individual who mattered for her own special gifts. There is a place in the Fade open to her this night and e’ermore.”

iAm nodded, because he just couldn’t bear to think that the female’s life was just over. That one moment a person was in her body and then … poof! … she was gone as if she had never been, nothing but the translucent, ever-fading memories of others to testify she had, in fact, been born and had lived.

“I have to get something for him. In the locker room.” God, he felt like he was talking through molasses. “It’s for our way of tending to…”

He left the rest of that one just dangling in the breeze.

As he passed by Tohr, he stopped. The male was white as a sheet and shaking in his shitkickers, his dark blue eyes pools of suffering.

“I’m so sorry,” iAm found himself whispering.

“Jesus, why would you say that?” the Brother choked out.

“I don’t know. I have no idea.”

He hugged the male hard, and felt a deeper connection with him. Then he pulled back, squeezed Autumn’s shoulder, and thought, Man, it was going to be a long couple of nights for the pair of them as Tohr processed his PTSD.

The Brother knew exactly where Trez was in this moment.

Rhage was the last of the line-up, and strangely, he seemed to be in the worst shape. At least his Mary was by his side.

“It’s going to be okay,” iAm lied.

The truth was, he didn’t know what the fuck was going to happen next.