All this power, but Loren was still going to die.
Felix’s entire life, he’d run. From bad turns of luck, from those who dared get too close. From belief and from himself. Choosing flight was his long exercise in ensuring no one hurt him again. Choosing flight was all Felixcouldchoose in a life that had made him a pawn. Every lesson he’d ever learned had been at the hands of fear.
Until now. Until Loren.
This last lesson was from love.
‘Not you,’ Felix whispered. He reached into the murky space between life and death. He grabbed Loren’s hand. And he let the power go in one charged rush.
Thunder rolled.
His vision washed black.
A splitting white sting.
Clarity engulfed him, followed by . . .
Pain like nothing else.
‘You’re glowing,’ Loren breathed before his eyes rolled backin his head.
Felix trembled.
He was certain he could see his father now.
This time when Felix ran, there was no field of poppies. His bloody feet beat against barren land. Scorched earth, rancid and bitter and black.
Chapter XXVIII
LOREN
All was white in the aftermath.
Loren came back to himself in pieces: a phantom touch along his shoulder blades. Gravel in his knees, tacky blood drying down his leg, suffocating dust thick on his skin. Silence, and the acrid stench of seared flesh.
He opened his eyes to a dead city.
Ash still flurried like tufts of poplar-seed, drifting slow and settling in mounds on the empty street. Loren knew this street. Via Stabiana, the city’s pulsing artery. Four days ago, Nonna slipped him a date roll here. Honey coated his tongue, a sour sense-memory.
‘We have to go,’ a scratchy voice said. ‘Please.’
Hands dragged him upright. Pain radiated from his foot, and – oh. Yes. His ankle had snapped. The thought occurred that perhaps he shouldn’t put weight on it, but then again, it was a little late for that. It was a little late for anything.
Loren moved forward in a drunk daze, though he could have sworn he was sober before.
Before.
‘Be still. I’ll lift you. That’s it.’
Then, unexpectedly, he was on a horse. And Felix –Felix –slid onbehind him. Arms wrapped around Loren’s waist, and Felix smelled like burning skin, and the world slid backwards.
They galloped hard and fast from Pompeii.
Loren didn’t look back. He didn’t look forward, either.
Hours blurred, and their pace didn’t slow. Time passed jagged. The ground trembled. Vesuvius billowed. At the crest of a hill, Loren choked on bile as another black surge swept the valley. All cruel, all cold. What he had witnessed in his dreams was child’s play next to this reality. The smell of it, taste of it, that he inhaled remnants of a life he’d played a hand in ruining. An ungodly disconnect.
Grief hit not in rolling waves, but individual doses, stinging like poison-tipped arrows. But grief was no good when accompanied by equal measures of guilt. Loren had no right to mourn the dead. Not when he should be numbered among them.
