Page 20 of May: Bloom & Bane

CHAPTER 10

mmph. too much spring

—SAGE

I’m moving on my hands and knees, dragging the weight of my soul through the dirt. I don’t feel like myself. I am merely a starving thing crawling toward the light.

The earth amplifies my panic.

Everywhere my palms touch the soil, thick wisteria vines spear through the dirt. They race toward her hem like they’re trying to tether her to the world before she can vanish back into the glass again.

I can’t stop them. My power is a raw, bleeding vein, and it’s screaming for her.

I stop inches from her feet. The air between us is thick with the scent of rain and her skin.

I lift my hand, and it hovers in the air, trembling so violently that gold pollen drifts from my knuckles like thousands of tiny falling stars.

I want to touch the curve of her cheek. I want it so badly that the back of my throat threatens to close.

But I hold it there, waiting for the snap—for the moment my fingers hit the cold, flat lie of the glass and The Sun turns back into a memory.

“Touch me, Sage,” she whispers.

I can’t. I may have survived the elements, but I will not survive this.

She moves slowly, like she’s approaching a wounded animal. She reaches out and curls her fingers around my wrist. Her skin is so warm it burns. She pulls my hand the final inch and presses it against her cheek.

“Every time you traced my cheek through the glass,” she whispers, “I wondered what it would feel like.”

The world ends and begins in that single moment.

The grove bursts like a thousand tightly coiled springs releasing at once. An eruption of peonies explodes throughout the clearing. The willow trees above us grow twenty feet in a single moment, their branches swaying with new silver leaves.

I’m too afraid to blink—to take my eyes off her for even one second.

Her skin is soft beneath my fingertips, pulse thrumming against my thumb.

She didn’t disappear. She’s real.

A strangled sound escapes my chest as I collapse forward, burying my face in the crook of her neck.

My hands clutch at her as if I’m trying to pull her into my ribs. The dark voice inside my head agrees fervently with that idea.

I can’t stop the tears falling from my eyes and onto her gown. My wings quake, dusting us both in shimmering gold.

“You’re real,” I whisper into her skin, the words barely escaping me. “You’re real. You’re real. You’re real.”

Mmph! Too much spring. A ball of neon blue light bursts from under a mountain of flowers. Droot is buried! Droot is a flower-sandwich, Sage.

He hops and lands on top of my shoulder, his tiny, glowing feet resting on my collarbone. He starts vibrating, a low, purring hum that I can feel deep in my heart.

See? Droot chirps into my mind. The Sun is warm. The Big Bird is green. The box is trash. Now we eat the snacks, yes?

I let out a wet, shaky laugh into the curve of her neck. Even as the world explodes into life and my heart breaks open, Droot is worried about snacks.

“He’s right,” I rasp, pulling back just enough to look at her. “The Sun is so much warmer than I ever thought possible.”

Small hands slide through the wild bird’s nest of my hair, her fingers hooking behind my neck to gently pull me forward.