“Of course not.” I’m half-shouting in her face. She has me locked against the wall and she’ll never back away. And she’s almost right, and she would’ve been right a week ago, but he’s killed for me and for her and he isn’t like them. Not anymore. “He’s the only one of all of you who doesn’t deserve a knife in his throat.”
Her eyes fill up slow and delighted. “You don’t know,” she says.
“Fuck you,” I spit, and I push her away.
She doesn’t lose her footing. “You don’t know,” she says again. And she grins damned triumph and says—
“Your golden boy is as guilty as all of them.”
You knew enough, I told Mack, and I was right. But he hated them for it. He killed them for it. He burned their kingdom down.
I stand my ground. “No, he’s not.”
“Jade,” she sings. “Poor little Jade. He’s the one who gave you the drink.”
It hits me hard in the chest, in the heart, in the teeth. The whole room glows searing and brighter until the lights explode and the ceiling catches fire. And I’m back in Duncan’s house with the music pulsing loud and the lights spinning. Back with the plaster masks of dead kings’ faces.
Back with the dazzle-smiled boy hidden behind the static—
And I know it as sure I’ve ever known anything.
She’s telling the truth.
Then I’m screaming and screaming and screaming. There’s a blade in my ribs ripping through me and spilling my blood, and I hate her so much that nothing in the world will stop it—
I push her so hard we both fall. She shrieks and I scream again—
and everything spins, everything flashes too bright—
and I see him in front of me, I hear him, and he’s saying, Elle—
saying, Pretty name—
saying, But not as pretty as you—
I struggle to my feet and I kick her hard, and again, and she’s shrieking and scrambling away and into the wall. The blood rushes in my ears, louder and louder—
and the dazzle-smiled boy says, They know everything—
and the dazzle-smiled boy says, They’ll ruin us—
And Piper pulls herself to her feet with one hand clutched against her ribs and the other grasping at the wall. She coughs. She gasps. She says, “It was him. It was him. It was him—” and she won’t stop—
and she said, fine, go fuck some roofied slut and she left me there—
and she says, it was him, it was him, it was him—
and my hands grab at the swords on the wall. Grab the top blade and pull with all my strength. The wires snap. I fall hard to the floor.
it was him it was him it was him—
I stand up and stagger with the sword hanging heavy and blunt from my hands.
it was him—
And Piper is still shrilling and scrabbling against the wall, grabbing at her stupid needle-thin sabre with its dull button end and she’s nothing, she’s no one, she’s helpless and hopeless—
I swing the sword with all my strength.
it was him—
The metal slashes against her side and cuts through her jacket like it’s nothing, like it’s ribbon, like it’s skin—
and she falls and the gash spits red—
I promise. I’ve never loved anyone more—
And I scream.
And I raise the sword.
And blood flies from the blade and paints the wall and even in my rage I see the beauty, and it’s devastating.
I scream. I hate. I rage.
I swing the sword again with all of it, with all of me, straight for her neck.
I scream.
it was him—
I kill her.
Ruin
Mads finds me in the white room with the spinning lights.
She runs blurred fast across the floor and my vision twists and twists until the floor is over us and the ceiling is below—
My hands clutch the sword tight against my chest. The second sword hangs swinging over my head from one wire.
The floor is red.
Piper lies next to me with her amber bird-eyes fixed on the ceiling. Her right hand is still caught around the handle of her sabre. Her mouth is a shocked little circle.
Mads says, Jade.
Kneeling in Piper’s blood. Kneeling in front of me, in front of the splattered beautiful red arc on the wall above us, in front of the sword that hangs over me and the sword that killed Piper.
I say, It was him. It was Mack. The boy who gave me the drink—
—and my hands grip the sword so tight it almost cuts through my gloves.
I say, I lost control—I ruined everything—I’ll kill him, Mads, I have to—
Mads says, Jade, oh, Jade—
—and she is life but I’m death. I’m drowning in Piper’s blood, and in the wild and violent sea that carried Banks down. In what we’ve done.
And in what we’ve left undone.
I’ve lost control. I’ve lost myself.
My face is wet but I don’t cry. I don’t cry even when I kill, even when I’m locked in a room with four wolves, even when I drown in the truth and the ruin I built with my own hands.
I slash one glove across my cheeks and it comes away wet but red.
It’s Piper’s blood.
I don’t cry.
I say, He’s no one—
I say, They’re nothing—
I say, They’ll never make me anything I wasn’t before—
And then I’m crawling away from the wall, scraping long red gashes into the floor. Crawling to Mads.
I don’t cry.
My shoulders shake. My lungs wrack. I feel the horrible sounds that rip out of my throat and bury themselves in Mads’s shoulders.
I don’t fucking cry.
Finally I stop shaking. Finally I stop making the sounds that ruin me. Finally every muscle in me aches and hollows and I’m so tired I can see sleep hanging from the ceiling and crawling out of the two bright gashes that set Piper free. I say, slurred and catching—
“What do I do? What do I do?”
I don’t have a plan. I don’t have anything. I want to curl close to dead Piper and slip under into the darkness she already knows. Burrow down into the red and the nothing—
Mads says, “We’ll call Jenny’s father. Self-defense—I don’t know—”
I unfold. I am outside myself. The way I would have been that night if there was any justice in all the world—
I stand up. The sword is impossibly heavy. “No,” I say, and it echoes high.
She stands up after me. She’s a shadow in black and I’m a ghost in white and red. She says something and I say, “No.” And I say, “What’s done is done.”
I let the sword fall against the floor. It thuds hard—
the door swings shut—
—and little red drops scatter onto the white.
I stare at Piper lying dead and done. Piper who said, I didn’t do anything. Piper who said, You’re her. Piper who said, fine, go fuck some roofied slut.
Piper, the girl I killed.
I crouch down next to her limp, lifeless body. The room spins and hums and I hear feathers and wings and my own pounding heartbeat.
My vision floats up high into the rafters and I look down on us. Down on the bright-lit white room. At Mads in her perfect dark black. At me balanced on my toes and bowing reverence to a dead girl who was never worth saving. At Piper in her sea of red.