Page 118 of Tracking Snow

Green eyes, this is Six? The one who can make illusions. Oh fae lords...

Panic claws through the drug, slow and useless. I try to scream. It comes out as a wet sound behind my teeth.

"Don’t worry," he says.

A van pulls up beside us, quiet as a held breath. The side door slides open.

I try to move, but I can’t even twitch a finger.

Six gathers me closer even as my vision floods with darkness.

"Mother will help you," he says, voice calm and certain. "She’s going to help all of you."

Chapter 38

Awakened by True Love’s Kiss

SNOW

It’s been twenty-four hours since Ariel disappeared.

I sit in our living room in the dark, my arms wrapped around my legs.

I have work in a half hour, but I don’t think I can get up from this spot. The dark heaviness in my heart has turned my body to lead. There’s no use getting up.

Ariel’s tea mug is still in the sink. Her blanket is bunched up on the end of the couch where she always leaves it. One of her copper hairs is stuck to the armrest, bright as wire in the streetlight leaking through the window.

Her lipstick is still on the bathroom counter, the cap off, because she always leaves the cap off and I always put it back on and complain about it drying out. I put it on this morning. Then I took it off again because the apartment felt wrong with everything in its place, like the rooms already decided she’s not coming home.

And I don’t understand.

Ryder said it was me who came and picked up Ariel. It wasn’t me. I was too busy running the roofs, using HAM flyers as target practice for my daggers, and feeling generally shitty about life after the fight with The Seven.

I had no idea I could feel worse.

But here I am. It’s like I've eaten something poisoned, and it’s rotting me from the inside out, slowly killing me until all I want to do is lie down, close my eyes, and never wake up.

Rosie’s unicorn pencil case is clutched against my chest so tightly the bent tin edge digs into my palm.

I pulled it from my bedside drawer after scouring the city for the past…I don’t know how many hours straight, only to come home with no Ariel, no answers, and no more roof left to run. I haven’t let go of it since.

The unicorn on the lid is almost rubbed away from where Rosie used to pet it with her thumb. I drag my own thumb over the faded rainbow mane, over and over, trying to find some piece of her still living in the metal.

My chest hollows until I feel scooped clean. No heart. No ribs. No guts. Just a dark, scraped-out place where my friends used to live.

I keep losing Rosie. In different bodies, with different faces, and every time it takes another piece of whatever is left in the middle of me.

My fingers clamp harder around the pencil case until the metal creaks.

I built myself out of my friends. Rosie first, then Ariel, then all of them, my whole heart divided up to each for safekeeping because I never trusted myself to hold it. Now I'm learning what's left when they're taken.

Nothing.

There's nothing left.

Just skin around an empty space.

And there is only one realization I can come to.