Paper Confines

xxix. Nothing Speaks to You in the Night

PAPER CONFINES.
29. / Nothing Speaks to You in the Night

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Amoret had the most absurd thought as she started dying for the second time, which was that perhaps on the other side of the horcrux, in a bed like the one Tom was setting her down on, her mother was dying at exactly the same time. That the wrongness of that death, the entitled sin of any god to take her, had found Amoret across the universe and said, come with me. Shrunk to a child again, she remembered thinking sickness was love, and she could feel herself smile through the worst of it.

Maybe if she couldn't save her, Amoret could at least die with her.

But then there was Tom's voice pulling her back, and she floated in that odd half-alive place she had drifted to once so long ago.

Her father steered in the sea of it, rickety sailboat swaying on glowing white waters. Amoret watched him sink, and she was calling for him in a younger voice, and the calls turned to screams, and the screams turned to sobs.

Years ago, on a morning in June, she had found his body at the front door.

She wasn't sure she had ever stopped finding him. She wasn't sure time had really gone on since.

"Amoret," Tom said on an echo. Her name on his lips, again and again.

"...Tom?"

"Stay still."

Amoret drifted in the water, struck by flotsam in the big waves; trinkets from her mother's childhood, heirlooms of faeries, the snarling leaves of Bibi's greenhouse. Her head plunged under and came back up for air. The sea sucked her in. Her father waited for her in the deep, but she couldn't beat the current to get to him.

Two arms reached out from the surface and took her by the waist. She thrashed in the hold of them, but they refused to let her go.

She was pulled into a dark corridor where the candles flickered at each one she passed. In the shadows there was growling, grated on the wet sound of froth, a tongue licking hungrily over teeth. She started to run. She could hear its tremendous size, could recall the tall, lithe shape of it, its big claws and milky eyes.

Two arms reached out from a classroom and hid her in the darkness.

The Cat Sìth prowled on.

The door opened and she found him again; the stink of ale, the clothes spilling from his suitcase on the stone, the sound of her screaming, and Reid finally rushing down the stairs.

Two arms reached out, but they were not her sister's.

"Get out," she rasped in a new place. The words cut her chest like she was coughing up salt.

"I've already seen it, Amoret," Tom said. "I know."

She could barely feel the tears slip before he was sweeping them away, thumbs soft on the fine skin beneath her eyes.

She was here with the living, and she knew it like the air Tom had brought back to her lungs: her mother was with them too. Amoret wouldn't have come back if she wasn't. They would have gone together.

"Sit up." Tom uncorked a potion and poured it into a glass.

Amoret took in her surroundings; belts of moonlight were wrapped in diagonals around the hospital walls, stained violet by the blue and red windows. One of the cupboards looked like it had been carelessly ransacked, and Tom was sitting by her legs on the bed, haloed by the light, still stained with blood she had spilled.