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to fix me. I needed her to make everything right. To make me better.
    Heat surged from Angelina’s fingertips. I jerked back, recoiling from the very thing I sought. But she held on, staying with me, her touch insistent and warm and healing all at the same time.
    My arms locked stiffly at my sides, as a ripple of revulsion flared within me. I struggled with myself not to strike my sister’s hands away from me, not to break the bond she’d forged between us. Shrieks unleashed within me—not my own—like wails carried on a ferocious, icy wind. They scratched at my insides, panicking as they tried to find their way out. But I bit my tongue, tasting blood. My blood. From my body.
    I struggled to hang on. I refused to give up.
    The entire room lit up. I could see Angelina clearly; she burned as brightly as I now did. At least on the outside. From within, my vision blurred and I clenched my jaw as blackness swelled, growing like a tidal wave, threatening to drown me.
    And then Angelina’s hands left me and I gasped, falling in a boneless heap on the feathery pillows of her bed. I was sweating from head to toe, and my chest ached. This time when Angelina’s fingertips grazed my face, skimming my jaw, there was no magic in her touch. Just the tender concern of a sister.
    “How do you feel?” she asked softly, her voice brimming with anticipation. Hope.
    I didn’t have to glance at my skin to see the flickering glow I’d been so desperate for. Still, I sighed. “Tired, Angelina. I’m so tired.”
    She just lay down beside me, settling her head against my chest as if she were listening to the unsteady thrum of my heart, assuring herself I was still alive. That I was still me.
    I wished I knew the answer to that question myself.
    Her arm fell across my stomach, such a familiar gesture, and I knew she was sleepy, that I’d probably worn her out. Guilt suffocated me at having awakened her.
    I listened to the sounds of Angelina’s breathing, while at the same time I searched within myself, hoping and praying I was all alone now, that Sabara was gone. Once and for all.
    I don’t know how long we stayed like that, wrapped around each other in the dancing light emanating from my skin, but I was certain that Angelina, first princess of Ludania, had at last drifted off to sleep.
    It surprised me, then, when I heard her voice, so young, so quiet, fill the air around us. “It didn’t work, did it?”
    I squeezed my eyes shut, not wanting to hear her words. She was wrong, she had to be. But I gave her the only answer I could, the truth. “I don’t know,” I whispered back to her.
    Angelina nodded. “I wish she’d leave us alone.”
    Surely, from where she lay, she could hear my heart’s ache.
    “Me too,” I said, my voice barely audible now. “Me too.”

     
    I stumbled from Angelina’s room, my legs quivering, moving through the passageways of the palace and casting light wherever I went. There was no escape, no place I could be alone.
    I knew, even before I’d left Angelina’s room, even as I’d bent over her sleeping form to give her one final good-night kiss, watching her lids flutter, her eyes flitting back and forth beneath them as she finally succumbed to her exhaustion, that it hadn’t worked.
    She can’t help you. She’s not strong enough to keep me at bay. Sabara was still with me.
    I reached out to steady myself against the wall, and an armed guard—one of the night sentries—turned his curious gaze in my direction. But I glared at him until he turned away once more. The affairs of the queen were not his concern, unless there was a matter of security at hand. And at the moment I knew I appeared safe, despite the fact that I was anything but.
    Black coils of invisible smoke enveloped me, twisting and spiraling through and around me, until they were all I could see or hear or even breathe. I was suffocating in Sabara’s insidious grasp.
    “No!” I insisted, pounding my fist against the wall and