Chapter 117
Lirael
"You..." The word came out broken, and I felt tears threatening because oh god, she was real, my people were real, I wasn't alone— "You're one of us. You're really one of us."
She stopped a few feet away, her gaze sweeping over me with clinical assessment, and then she spoke in the old tongue, the language of lunar elves that I hadn't heard since my mother whispered it to me in the darkness before she died.
"Lirael, daughter of Celeste, last of the royal bloodline. I wondered if I would find you before they did."
The shock of hearing my true name, my real name spoken in my mother's language, hit like a physical blow. My knees went weak and I had to lock them to keep from falling. "How—" I started, then switched to the old tongue myself, the words feeling strange and wonderful and painful all at once. "How do you know my mother's name? How do you know who I am?"
She smiled, and there was something both sad and fierce in the expression, something that spoke of old loyalties and older grief. "Because I knew your mother, child. I served her court before the fall, before the purge, before everything went to hell and our people were scattered like leaves in a storm." Her eyes flickered to Sebastian and then to Elwin before returning to me. "My name is Selene. I was one of the royal guard, sworn to protect the bloodline. And I've been searching for you for a very long time."
Sebastian made a sound between a laugh and a cough, black blood flecking his lips. "How touching. A family reunion on a sinking ship. But I hate to interrupt your moment—actually, no, I don't hate it at all—but we're running out of time. This vessel is going down, and unless someone does something soon, we're all going to drown or burn or both."
Selene's eyes narrowed as she looked at him, and the contempt in her expression was so pure it was almost beautiful. "A werewolf. Of course. Your kind is always so dramatic, always so convinced the world revolves around your problems." She turned back to me, dismissing Sebastian like he was beneath her notice. "This ship is lost, but I know a way out. There's a passage to the lifeboat deck the guards don't know about. Follow me, and I can get us off this wreck before it goes under."
"Wait." Elwin's voice cracked as he spoke, his face pale and drawn with pain and grief and desperate hope. "You said you've been on this ship—did you see a woman named Sophia Thornwood? Thirty years old?"
Selene's expression softened slightly, and I felt my heart sink even before she spoke because I knew, I could see it in her eyes, and I wanted to cover my ears like a child and pretend I hadn't heard the question. "I saw her," Selene said quietly, genuine sorrow in her voice. "Three days ago. She was in the experimental wing when they..." She paused, choosing her words carefully. "I'm sorry. She didn't make it. They pushed too hard, took too much. I'm sorry."
Elwin made a sound like all the air had been punched out of his lungs, and then his legs gave out and he was on his knees on the tilting deck, his good hand pressed to his mouth as if he could physically hold back the grief trying to tear its way out of his chest.
"No," he choked out. "No, no, no—"
I dropped down beside him, wrapping my arms around his shaking shoulders, and felt tears streaming down my own face because Sophia had been kind, had been one of the few people in that hellhole who'd treated me like a person instead of a specimen, and now she was gone, another name on the endless list of people this organization had destroyed.
"I'm going with you."
Sebastian's voice cut through my grief like a knife, and I looked up to find him still standing somehow, still upright despite the poison eating through his system and the ship falling apart around us. He was looking at me, only at me, with an expression I couldn't quite read.
Selene laughed, sharp and humorless. "A werewolf? You think I'm going to save you? After what your kind has done to mine for centuries?"
"That's not your decision to make." Sebastian's eyes never left my face. "It's hers."
And suddenly all eyes were on me—Selene's cold and calculating, Elwin's red-rimmed and grief-stricken, Sebastian's amber and desperate and filled with something that looked dangerously like hope. They were waiting for me to choose, to decide who lived and who died, to play god on a sinking ship while time ran out.
I thought about everything Sebastian had done to me. The collar, the cage, the constant surveillance and control. The way he'd claimed me like property, hunted me across continents, refused to let me go no matter how many times I'd tried to escape. I thought about the poison I'd given him, the partial antidote I'd left behind, the way I'd told myself I was walking away and leaving him to his fate.
But I also thought about the way he'd thrown himself between me and Victor's bullets, the way he'd poisoned himself to save me from his father's torture, the way he'd looked at me in that warehouse and told me he loved me with blood on his lips and death in his eyes.
Damn him. Damn him for making this so complicated, for making me care when I should hate him, for being so completely impossible to let go of even when I knew I should.
My hands were shaking as I reached into my jacket and pulled out the small vial I'd been carrying since we left the motel, the one I'd told myself I was keeping for emergencies, the one I'd known all along I would end up using exactly like this. The complete antidote, mixed with my own moon dew, the third component he needed to survive.
"Here," I said, my voice steady even though my hands were trembling as I held it out to him. "Drink it. And then we're even. Whatever debt you think I owe you, whatever obligation you think exists between us—it ends here. Do you understand me? It ends."
Sebastian took the vial, his fingers brushing against mine in a way that sent a shock through me I tried very hard to ignore. He didn't drink immediately, just stood there looking at me with an expression that made my chest ache, and then he leaned in close enough that his lips brushed against my ear as he whispered, "This isn't the end, little one. You know that, don't you? We're never going to be even. We're never going to be done. And when we get off this ship, when we're both alive and safe, I'm going to make you understand that you can run to the ends of the earth and I will always, always find you."
Then he pulled back and downed the antidote in one long swallow, and I shoved him away hard enough that he stumbled, my heart racing and my face burning because fuck him, fuck him for making me feel things I didn't want to feel, for making me care when I should want him dead.
"Enough," Selene said sharply, her patience clearly exhausted. "We're out of time. The ship is going down, and if we don't move now, we're going down with it. Follow me, stay close, and for the love of the old gods, try not to get yourselves killed in the next five minutes."
She turned and started moving deeper into the ship, moving against the flow of panicked people. I grabbed Elwin's arm and hauled him to his feet because we couldn't afford to fall apart now, couldn't afford to grieve when we still had to survive. Sebastian fell into step beside me, color already returning to his face as the antidote started to work, and together we followed Selene into the burning, flooding, falling-apart wreckage of the ship.