Page 102 of The Alchemists

“Lily,” he said, trying to speak around the dam in his throat. “What’s happening? What happened?”

She looked up at him, her face pale.

“Are you breaking up with me?” he asked softly.

Better to just get it over with. He could spend the rest of break getting shit-faced in the city with Asher and Tori. Mrs. Vis wouldn’t mind having him. Or he could stay at the townhouse if Reg wasn’t using it, but he didn’t really want to be alone.

Lily looked kind of like she wanted to laugh. Instead, she tipped her face to the blank sky and bit her lip, collecting herself. She breathed in hard once, then faced him, gaze level, strong as ever, except for the tears swimming in her eyes.

She wiped her nose with one sweatshirt-mittened hand. “Do you still want to know my curse?” Her voice frogged.

He stared at her. Somehow he’d forgotten, assumed it wasn’t relevant, assumed it was…assumed. His heart beat very fast. He opened his mouth. Nothing came out. She nodded with pursed lips, and he wanted to throw himself at her, derail the train. It was like the one car crash he’d ever been in—realizing everything was fucked just a split second too late to do anything about it.

“It’s not my curse, actually. Technically. It’s my mother’s. They were clever that way. Two birds, one stone.” She sounded manic.

He could tell, from the way she was stalling, spinning out in the details, that she’d never told anyone.

“Lily…” he pleaded.

“Right.” She did a strange little repetitive head bob, and he wondered, briefly—as awful as whatever this was for him, how much worse it was for her. “I’m going to die.”

He blinked at her.

“Sorry, I’m cursed to die. In June.”

“Which June?” he said stupidly, imagining one five, ten, fifty years down the line.

“This one.”

His mind went suddenly blank of emotion, ruthlessly rational in its effort to protect him. “How do you know?”

She recited, “You will lose that which you hold most precious in the year of the Chalice on the full Wanderer’s Moon.”

“That’s what they cast on your mom?”

“Yeah.”

“So, how do you…oh.” Of course.

Lily had a normal family—well, normal-ish—with at least one parent who loved her unconditionally. Wasn’t it writ in stone somewhere that there was no love greater than that between a mother and her child?

“And the full Wanderer’s Moon. That’s midsummer. Almanacs, you know.”

She stared at him.

He stared at her.

“I should have told you, I just…”

His face was wet. He brought his fingers to his cheek and realized he was crying. His body, again, getting it before his brain. His glasses fogged. His brain stopped protecting him then, all that armor of rationality stripping away and clattering to the ground. Lily kept staring at him, and in that moment he hated her as much as he loved her.

He loved her.

“Fuck!” he screamed it into the sky, at the maples branching her backyard. The snow muffled his anguish. He shouted it again, his voice cracking. His spine curled in on itself, and he shuddered violently.

“Fuck, Lily. Fuck.”

When he gathered the nerve to look at her, she was crying silently, tears hovering on her chin.