NEDRA STARED AT me in horror.
My mouth opened. “You don’t like me inside the boy, do you?”
Get out, get out, get out. My soul pleaded with this alien presence inside of me, but I might as well have been speaking to a wall. I felt—an absence. That was the only way to describe it. I had been whole, but now I wasn’t.
Now my soul was pushed to the side.
But two souls cannot occupy one body without knowledge passing between them. I felt Wellebourne’s intent. Nedra had never been anything more than a possible source of power for him, nothing more, nothing less. He was a spider, and she was one of many flies. Wellebourne looked through my eyes at Nedra, and he saw nothing worthwhile.
You’re wrong. My quivering, cowering, fading soul could see Nedra, too, and it saw something different.
We had fought—often and bitterly—over what she had become. I didn’t need a field of dead bodies to remind me that what she had done was wrong. But I still loved her. Love didn’t have to make sense. It didn’t have to agree with everything. It just had to exist, and, when my entire life was spread before me, I knew, I knew, that our love was the only thing I truly believed in.
Be quiet! Wellebourne’s soul raged at mine. In response, my soul flared up, trying to wrest control of my body back from Wellebourne. But my anger wasn’t strong enough. I could do nothing as Wellebourne forced me to stride toward Nedra, shoulders back, sneering down at her.
I felt my soul growing smaller, weaker. I knew, through Wellebourne’s triumph, that he had done this before. He’d expelled dozens of souls from dozens of people, claiming their bodies and using them up.
You can’t win, he taunted me.
I don’t have to.
My body’s steps faltered.
I didn’t have to win. I just had to hold out long enough for Nedra to defeat him. Wellebourne might control my body, but I still controlled my heart.
I love her. And I would do everything in my soul’s power to help her triumph now.
Wellebourne sent me feelings, images, flashes of the torture he would put my soul through for daring to fight back. I knew—I knew—I would never have my body again. This was a sort of death I had never envisioned before, but it would be as sure as the one Nedra’s twin suffered.
I would do it anyway.
I could see now that I had let myself become the monster she had accused me of being. I had let myself fall into the spider’s trap, just as she had. All her life, Nedra had never been in a position to win. Raised by poor villagers in a poor village, she had no hope of rising above her station.
She had done it anyway.
She had been faced with an unstoppable plague that no medicine could ever cure.
She found a cure anyway.
Her whole family had been taken from her, her beloved sister dead despite all her best efforts.
She had brought her back anyway.
Nedra never had a chance. She took one anyway.
I couldn’t let rage rule me. I focused my heart with the calm determination that Nedra walked through life with. The only thing my soul knew, the only thing Wellebourne couldn’t touch, the only thing that kept me real was my love for her.
Nothing had ever stopped her. Nothing would stop me now.