Chapters (42)
- Title Page
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Acknowledgements
- Also by Kim Harrison
- Copyright
- About the Publisher
- Cover
Jenks brushed her hair from her eyes, and the pixy woman took a pain-racked breath. “She can take you back to the stump in three seconds flat. And she can turn you big. Just for an hour. You can do that. Please, Mattie. No more arguments. You’ll live then. The spell takes all the pain away. Makes you brand new. Please don’t leave me.” He was begging now, and I felt tears prick. “I can’t be alone for the next twenty years.”
It confirmed something I’d been suspecting for the last few months as Jenks grew faster, while Matalina declined. The curse he’d taken last summer had reset his biological clock. Excited, I dropped to my knees beside them. I’d gotten my twenty years back that my childhood illness had stolen, but what caught my breath was that Jenks wasn’t going to die. Matalina either.
“Matalina,” I said, bending close and making my words soft. “Ceri is here. She can make you well.” They’d live forever, both of them. It was going to be okay. It was going to be okay! Finally something was going to be okay!
I held out my hand to take her, but Matalina’s soft “no” iced through me. No? What did she mean, no?
“Rachel, do this for me,” Matalina said as Jenks tried to hush her, but a sharp gleam came into her eyes and she put a small, beautiful, and deathly white hand to his mouth. Jenks kissed it, going silent as tears fell on it and he wiped his dust from her. “This is my decision,” the woman said, her fervent gaze fixed to mine. “I only ask that you keep Jenks alive through it.”
My tears started, and I swallowed hard, grief rising from hope, seeming all the harder for the brief respite. No? Why?
“Mattie,” Jenks protested, and her bird-bright eyes fixed on his. She was seeing around corners. Damn it. Not again!
“I don’t want to start over, Jenks. I’m tired. But I’m proud of you, my visionary.” Her hand shook as she touched his cheek, leaving a smear of blood. “For you to see the endings of what you’ve started is right, but I don’t want to live beyond my children. I’m a mother first. You’re a force, Jenks, and I thank my luck for having bound myself to you.”
“You can be a force, too, Mattie,” he began, his voice breaking when she shushed him. There was an ugly stain of red seeping from under her, and I knew she had only moments. Still, she smiled, giving him her love to the end.