But then Death whispers my name, and the sound is so familiar, I wonder if I’ve belonged to him all along.

“Blaise. You’re safe now,” he says, and even in death, tears fill my eyes, though I can’t feel whether they hit my scorched cheeks.

I failed them, I tell Death, but if he hears, he doesn’t answer. I failed my friends.

Death carries me away, but now I’m feeling frantic. Because it’s dark here, and I can’t feel or see, and I can’t bear the thought of my friends following me here all because I failed them.

Please send me back, I whisper. Just long enough to warn them.

But Death just cradles me as he leads me into nothingness.

CHAPTER 90

NOX

The shadows of the paldihv I stole from the man whose throat I ripped out in the inn in Charshon have carried me through the daylight hours.

I’ve been running for a day and night straight, my legs and back aching, the only thing propelling me my overwhelming need to reach Blaise and the human blood slowly draining from my veins.

At first, I wasn’t sure what spurred the urgency. Maybe a duty I felt to my parents. Like if my father could relearn to love my mother, I was honoring them by trying again with Blaise.

Or maybe it was because I felt as if something had been stolen from me. That the Old Magic had taken not just my feelings—my feelings that belonged to me and me alone—but my future as well.

Granted, it was a version of my future that I no longer knew that I wanted.

But I suppose I didn’t know I didn’t want it, either.

Either way, the closer the sun came to rising, that future was racing further from my grasp.

And then there was the fact that, love her or not, I didn’t want Blaise to die. But that proved nothing more than the fact that I have at least a little empathy left in my heart.

Racing across the desert, little to see or distract me by way of terrain, I’ve found my mind drifting to the past, percolating on memories that, while they no longer consume me, feel important all the same.

There was the time she’d folded up a scrap piece of parchment and taught me a game. I remember feeling strange about it. Like games were for children, a way for them to pass the time and befriend one another.

But I suppose that was what Blaise had been doing. Befriending me.

It occurs to me that now that Zora is gone, Blaise is my only friend.

I remember too, the time I brought her onto the roof. The feel of the fresh air had overwhelmed her after being held captive for so many weeks. I remember holding her until she knew she could breathe again, and though I can’t feel anything related to that moment, I note its importance.

She’d told me about her childhood. About the man who stole it from her and the baby she hoped one day to find.

I can’t grasp onto my love, but I can feel her anguish the night she learned of the baby’s passing. Her stepmother had only told her the baby lived so she could blackmail Blaise into sending her family the allowance she earned as a servant.

That, I can feel.

And the night the parasite took Blaise’s body permanently, when Blaise’s bloodsharing bond forced me to kill her.

I can feel that, too. The snapping of her neck. The reverberation of her splitting bones. The ripping of her spinal cord.

Nausea twists in my belly.

The relief I felt when I realized she had Turned. The sorrow at the knowledge she would have to live the rest of her life in the shadows.

None of these are love, I don’t think. At least not the romantic sort.

But they are the sort of thing you might feel for a friend.

It hits me then, that if nothing else, Blaise is that to me.

She has been, since the day she peered up at the male torturing her and instead saw the boy ripped from his family.

Since the day she decided she would die during the spell to separate the parasite from her body, just so I wouldn’t have to choose between saving her and saving Zora.

I can’t think of what else to call someone who’s risked everything to keep me safe. She watched over me when I was stuck in the other realm, reweaving my tapestry, saving me from peril. In her own confused and twisted sort of way, she’s given up everything for me.

And I turned around and let her fall.

So as I race across the desert, something for Blaise starts to bloom inside my chest.

It’s not infatuation.

But it’s something.

She’s already burning by the time I find her, the first rays of sunlight searing through her skin as she lies face-down on the ground. At first, I think I might be too late, and my chest caves in at the thought.

But then I hear her whimpering in pain, and something snaps inside of me.

The shadows of my paldihv catch up to her before I do, swaddling her in a thick darkness that protects her skin from further damage from the burgeoning sun.

The paldihv’s shadows aren’t enough to fully encase both of us, which is why portions of my back have been exposed to the sun the last several minutes. The shadows keep skipping back and forth, trying to douse the flames that have been popping up on my back every few seconds.

It burns, and I have to bite the urge to call out, to bring attention to the vampire set afire by the sunlight and the woman cloaked in shadows.

There’s a cement bunker nearby—one of several scattered about the Sahli in case merchants encounter sandstorms. They’re not exactly common knowledge, and I’m only aware of them because of the time I spent reading Gunter’s books as a child.

I haul Blaise into the shelter just as the flames cut into a deeper layer of skin. I hate that I drop her to the floor, but I have to extinguish the flames, flopping around on the ground in agony as they lick at my skin.

I lie there for a long while in the dark after the flames are doused, breathing heavily and wincing as my skin reknits itself.

Blaise breathes shallowly next to me, hardly conscious after her exerted run across the desert. I had the benefit of coming from a shorter section of the vast desert, since I didn’t have to worry about stopping in inns along the way. Blaise ran almost double the distance overnight.

No wonder she’s passed out.

My eyes adjust well enough to the dark, and now that my skin is healing, the pain is subsiding.

When I roll over to face her, she doesn’t stir. I’m struck for a moment, reminded of the first time I met Blaise. She was lying supine on Abra’s dais, reeking of her own filth and face sallow with dehydration.