“You’re going to love it here,” his mother said.
The plane had just touched down and Aidan wanted nothing more than to pass out and sleep for a week. Overnight flights were apparently not his forte. The four-hour layover in New York hadn’t helped.
But his mum looked excitedly out the window, more energized than he’d seen her in months. Maybe years.
“I haven’t been here since I was a little girl,” she said, staring out at the tarmac and distant fields past Glasgow Airport. “But it’s just as green as I remember.”
Frankly, Aidan was already over this trip. He’d been excited in theory to get out of class, to take two weeks off and explore a foreign country. But he stared out the window at the gray and the rain, exhaustion lying heavy in his bones and a strange sickness in his chest, and he wanted nothing more than to be back in his bedroom. He was already cold, but it beat being in Vermont for the start of winter. Wait, did it snow in Scotland?
Someday, he would move somewhere tropical. Until then, he would do this because it made his mum happy. Because right now, she needed this happiness more than anything. And because this was a free trip, and she promised it would change his life, and even though he would much rather be back with his friends, he’d agreed to go. For her. This trip was for her.
He’d heard her talking to his dad in the weeks and months prior, worried that Aidan was growing distant. That this might be her last chance to reconnect with him before he got too old to want to hang out with his mom.
Just the thought made his chest clench. He stared at her as she stared out the window, tried to find some excitement, if only for her.
He’d do anything to make her happy. Because he knew that, in a few years, he would leave for college and break her heart. He knew that she already reeled from the loss of her own parents. The pain of it was almost too much to bear.
“Why did you do it?”
Aidan turned to the aisle, but he was no longer on the plane.
He was back in the throne room. Back in the room with the frozen bodies. But these weren’t the nameless corpses he’d seen. No. As reality and history crashed around him, he saw them for who they were—Vincent and Jessica and Matthew and Kent. The four Hunters he’d killed at Fire’s command.
They stood poised around him, ashen and frozen, but their eyes...their eyes followed him, glistening with terror, their mouths twisted in screams they couldn’t shed.
And there, above the throne, was Trevor. Nailed to the wall as Calum had been.
Only Trevor was much more alive.
He struggled against the nails in his hands and his feet, and Aidan took a step forward to help him.
One step. And Matthew burst into flame beside him. The moment the fire started, Matthew was able to scream.
Another step, and Jessica went up in smoke.
Aidan took another step forward—he had to save Trevor, he had to—and Kent turned to fire.
When Vincent went up in flame, filling the hall with smoke and the terrible smell of burning flesh, Trevor screamed. “Please! Please stop. You’re killing them. You’re killing everyone.”
The words were a lance to Aidan’s chest. He looked to the burning pillars around him, to the people he had killed without pause.
“No,” came a voice beside him. “You are saving them.”
Aidan’s heart fell to his feet at the sound of his mother’s voice.
He looked over, saw her standing there at his side. Just as she’d been when he’d seen her last—her purple raincoat ripped and dirty, cuts on her hands and face. Blood caking her skin.
She didn’t look sad, though. Not like when she’d forced him away from her, when she’d flung herself in front of the kravens that had threatened to rip him apart.
No. She was smiling.
That smile made his chest hurt worse than any pain he’d known.
He crumpled to his knees.
“Mom?”
She stepped in front of him, half blocking his view of Trevor, the man still crucified and writhing. Shadows curled at her feet. Beckoning like fingers.
His mother smiled. Placed a hand on his forehead as tears rolled down his cheeks.
He blinked, and she shifted, becoming someone else—a woman with long blond hair and pale skin, a woman who seemed more shadow than flesh. Then he blinked again, and his mother was back.
Were her eyes always that dark?
Her hand was heavy on his head, her touch cold, colder than ice.
“Do not fear what you are becoming, my child,” she said. “Do not mourn those who burn along the way. They are nothing. Nothing but fuel for your victory march. Nothing, compared to what you will become.”
She pressed her palm harder to his forehead, and behind her, Trevor burst into flame, filling the cathedral with his screams, with the scent of burning flesh. But as her hand pushed into him, through him, he felt no pity.
No regret.
He stared up into his mother’s abyssal black eyes and felt only purpose.