Concentrating hard, I felt myself detach a little from her flickering soul. Silvery threads of pain webbed around my mind, but I fought past them. It was like running through knee-deep water, but the struggle was worth it. I heard sounds from my own time, namely, Bella commanding me to stop fighting.

“It’s important.” I didn’t recognize my own voice. Was it Marianne’s voice, or was I Marianne, not recognizing Carrie’s voice? Where did she end? Where did I begin?

“I want to die.” I felt the carpet beneath my knees now, at the same time the marble cooled my back. I shook my head. No, I shook Marianne’s head, and she shook mine. I stood on weak legs, while she delighted in my strong ones. “Nolen, I want to die.”

We were alone in the Soul Eater’s dining room. Nathan’s bed was here, now, with him handcuffed to it, but there was no sign of the madness that had tormented him.

I touched him with Marianne’s hand and felt his skin beneath my own in another time and place. His throat convulsed as he swallowed, and a tear slid from his eye. “I don’t want to kill you again. I kill you every time I close my eyes.”

“You can’t keep me here any longer. It hurts to be in this body.” Was I talking, or was she? Did she speak of the past or what she lived through now? “It hurt, Nolen. You answered my prayers. You blessed me with death. Now let me go.”

In the past, a phantom hand closed over Marianne’s wrist as she reached to unlock her husband. In the present, Max restrained my arm as I tried to release Nathan.

“Let her,” Bella urged, and then Nathan was free.

He fought it at first, trying to hold back the madness. “I can’t. I want to stay with you.”

“You can’t have me.” I heard my voice speaking in a gentle Scottish lilt. Marianne’s voice. “Kill me. For the last time. Set us both free.”

When his arms closed around her body, they crushed the air from my lungs. When his fangs pierced my neck, she cried his name.

Tears poured down his face as he drank my blood. That was a part of me I couldn’t mistake. Though Marianne’s soul was in my body and I was crowded into her mind, my blood was his. It mocked him as he tasted it, but in it he saw the truth and acceptance. No matter how many times he replayed this night, he couldn’t change what he’d done to her, and now he knew he shouldn’t wish to.