No one’s ever fought me like she has. She’s so self-righteous and so aggravating and so utterly determined to get what she wants. She made everything about her city better, and it was incredible. She’s incredible. And I have the sudden urge to stop everything and make sure she knows that.
But I can’t, of course. Because she and Iris are in my way, and so this is what has to happen. There’s no mystical way to produce water out of nowhere. Somebody has to give up their blood.
I don’t want to do this to her people. Not really. I don’t want them to have to go back to the way things used to be.
But my people are dying.
“Well?” I say.
Verene has two choices left. She can surrender. Or she can do absolutely anything to stop me. Maybe she’d even do the one thing she said she would never do. Maybe, if she thinks I know how to get blood magic, she’ll get blood magic, too, and then I’ll know everything there is to know about magic.
If anyone can make her do this, I think it’s me.
As I wait to see what her next move will be, my heart is thrumming.
And when she meets my eyes again, it nearly leaps out of my chest.
She’s going to fight.
That’s perfect.
I push Theo onto his back. I raise the knife dramatically, like I’m going to hurt him.
I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know how to do this so-called ritual. But Verene is already sprinting up the steps in my direction, so I just have to pretend until she shows me how.
Then, off to one side, I see an unexpected flash of movement. I turn.
It’s Ale. He’s running up the steps from the direction of the Parliament buildings. And he looks furious. He looks so furious that I barely recognize him. There’s a knife clutched in his hand.
“Emanuela!” he says. “Let them go!”
“Ale,” I say. “No—”
He stops a few steps away.
“I know that you know how to stop the vide!” he says. “You were giving it your blood, weren’t you? We have everything we need to save Occhia.”
He can’t be here. I have this all under control, and he can’t get in the way.
“Ale.” I start in his direction. “Go back.”
“I don’t want you to hurt them anymore,” he says. “I don’t want anyone else to get hurt—”
I see Verene running at him. I see her dive and tackle him to the steps. I see a flash of metal as she grabs the knife from his hands. But I don’t comprehend any of it.
Not until I hear him scream.
The blade is in his eye. Verene is digging, like she’s trying to get it all the way into his brain. He’s struggling, prying at her hands and her face, but she won’t stop.
She drops the blade. She reaches in and pries the eye out with her fingers. It trails bloody threads, and she rips them off with a sharp jerk.
I don’t know if Ale is screaming anymore. I can’t seem to hear. My ears have filled up with a loud ringing sound, and everything around me has faded into white. The only thing I can see is Verene and the eye clutched in her bloody fingers.
She stands up and turns to look at me, all fiery determination, and lifts the eye. I have absolutely no idea what she’s about to do with it, but I know without a doubt that this is the ritual, and she’s about to finish it. I can’t stop watching. I’m rooted to the spot.
Then she hesitates. I watch her take in the bloody thing clutched in her hands, slowly, like she’s just realized what it is. She looks around and comprehends just how big her audience is.
She stumbles back. She drops the eye.
All at once, everything becomes very loud. The flames in the cathedral are roaring. The people in the square are screaming and running away. And Verene is staring at her bloody hands.
“I…” she says. “No. I’m not… I’m not like her. I would never—”
She looks at me. The fury on her face makes me lose my breath.
“You,” she says, and her voice is shaking. “You did this. You—you ruined everything. You ruined me. What did you do to me?”
The last words are more like a sob. Behind her, Ale is sobbing, too. He turns on his side, clutching his face, and I catch a glimpse of the bloody, gaping hole where his eye used to be.
And then, it feels like I don’t even have control over my body anymore. I just attack Verene with everything I have. We fall to the steps. And then we’re tumbling down, and I’m driving the knife into her soft body. And I’m doing it again. And again.
When we hit the bottom of the steps, the knife falls out of my hands. I realize, all at once, that Verene has stopped fighting me. I see the blood all over her and back away and for a moment, I just stand there, staring at her as she lies helplessly on the ground, struggling to breathe.
I don’t know if I meant to do that to her. I don’t know if I wanted it to happen. I just did it. She hurt Ale, so I hurt her, because that’s what she gets.
Ale. I look for him and realize that he’s crawled down the steps, dripping blood. He reaches the cathedral square and tries to look around. He’s looking for me. I run to him, and when I touch his shoulders, he makes a terrified little noise and squirms away.
“Ale,” I say, and my own voice sounds odd and distant. “Ale. It’s me.”
I pull him away from the steps. I’ve forgotten what I was even trying to do in this city. Right now, I just want to get him out. But we only make it a couple of feet before he collapses. I kneel down at his side. I take off my jacket and wad it up to press it over the hole in his face.
But the bleeding won’t stop. I watch it soak into the fabric, dizzyingly fast.
I hear noises and look around vaguely to see that Theo is scrambling down the steps toward us. Toward his sister. Somehow, he got the bindings off his wrists. He reaches for Verene and pulls her into his lap. She’s still taking those horrible, rattling breaths. Theo touches something on her forehead, gingerly, like he’s not sure it’s real.
I recognize the red smudge the moment I see it. It’s an omen. A moment later, another one appears right next to it.
She’s dying.
Verene tries to say something and chokes. She coughs up blood.
“Theo—” she says. “You have to—the city.”
“What?” He barely whispers it.
“The city,” she says again. She curls her fingers into the front of his shirt. “Theo, you have to make sure they see me. They have to know that I died for them. For the good of Iris.”
Theo lifts his head to look around the square. It’s emptied out. Maybe people are watching from the windows of their manors. Or maybe we’re all alone with a burning cathedral.
“I’m not scared,” Verene says. “But they have to know. They have to know what I did for them. You can’t let me just disappear without—”
She’s clutching his shirt so tightly. She is scared.
There’s a strange expression on Theo’s face. He’s no longer looking at his sister. All his attention is focused on something clutched in his hand, and he’s just staring at it, like he can’t decide what to do with it.
It’s the eye. Ale’s eye.
And then Verene notices it, too. She recoils. She tries to squirm away.