Gods & Thieves

21. Death and Madness

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Wasn't born to be a friend.

Meant to die.

Resentment stings my eyes harder, but I keep blinking it away. A shaman doesn't deserve my tears. And what's the point of them? Tears are meant to help you live through your emotions, express them, let them go, and move forward. I've nowhere to move forward anymore.

Pulling my knees to my chin, I sit in the middle of the tower and look at the patch of the cloudy sky outside. The rain has stopped, but it is still cold and clammy, and the dusk has long bled into the night into the predawn hour, yet not a star in the sky is visible to keep me company, and the light of the rising sun behind the horizon can't make it through the clouds. It is quiet now, though. There's nobody to scream at me or grab my bruised throat to make my heart drum in my ears. This quietness feels like death already. Like numbness. Emptiness. I knew I started a dangerous game the second I lied about having powers, I knew I had little chance to win, just...for a brief moment, I believed I was winning. I believed I made a friend.

Loretto Tayen.

The very name sounds like a betrayal now.

I've never been betrayed before, I realize. The very idea seems surreal, and at the back of my mind, I still foolishly dare hope Loretto will eventually calm down and come back. That fae will say sorry, will say fae was just angry and not thinking straight as Cale once said after snapping at me when I was a small, tiresome kid. But minutes pass in stillness, and nobody comes, of course. Shamans don't say sorry, right? Shamans don't come back to pick up the pieces of the toys they break.

It's even a little funny, I guess. Just this morning, I saved Loretto's life at the library, and this is what I earn in return--slow, lonely death. What was I supposed to expect, though? That after fixing my watch together and sharing a cake, we're suddenly friends now? That after letting me hold faer hands once and a few smiles, Loretto would start trusting me for real? But it felt real...Maybe it was some kind of a magical trick, too.

Or I'm indeed credulous. But either way, it's entirely my fault, isn't it? My whole life, people taught me not to trust magicians, and I convinced myself I was the smartest one the moment I saw a solicitous face. I convinced myself I could pave my own way.

Shivering at the night wind sending chilly, doleful goosebumps across my skin, I look down at my hands, the ink-black ribbon biting into my wrists, leaving them raw and red. Of course, I'm credulous. Otherwise why would I let myself chase something greater than I was capable of?

If I was actually capable of something greater, I wouldn't have been someone's sidekick for my whole life--they would've been mine! I wouldn't have needed Cale's help, or Kofi's, or Loretto's...I would've made it all right by myself. Starting with squeezing the life out of one particular shaman who tried to squeeze the life out of me.

When another gust of wind sinks through my shirt and prickles my skin with its icy thorns, I can't sit still anymore. I climb to my feet and begin passing around the tower--partly to keep myself warm, partly hoping that if I exhaust myself, I drop dead sooner and won't have to think of all my failures.

I don't know why, but I carefully approach the shattered stairs again, peering into the darkness below for a while. But it still looks impossible to make it down with my hands bound. Maybe if I run and take a leap, though, my crushed body will be lucky to land close enough to the ground for someone to find it in the morning? Then Loretto won't be able to tell everyone I ran off, won't get away with my murder.

Or I can jump off the balcony on the other side of the tower, facing the outskirts of Cabracan, not the old shaman city. There, someone will definitely discover my corpse and my brains smeared all over the cobblestones, maybe people even gather to gape. But it'll look so fucking ugly...Why should I die ugly because of one psycho shaman?