Chapter 41: Fragile Hopes and Dreams - The Night Market

Another lift.

Pepper was sick of lifts.

Sick of the cramped metal box, of the way they sealed her in and quietly delivered her to places she wasn’t sure she was ready for. But this one, this lift – slow, humming, unhurried – she had grown to hate the most.

Her breathing was shallow. Her phone vibrated for what felt like the hundredth time, buzzing quietly against her thigh in her coat pocket, and again, she ignored it. Sweat crept at her brow, cold and anxious, collecting at the nape of her neck. Her reflection in the brushed steel walls looked ghostly. Hollowed out.

Then the doors opened with a gentle hiss.

The hospital floor greeted her with its too-bright fluorescents’ stench of antiseptic. A couple stepped into the lift as she exited – him holding her gently, and her clutching a handkerchief to her face, shoulders trembling with grief. Pepper kept her eyes low, pressing on the intercom button at the ward door, and announced herself with trepidation.

The buzz gave way to a heavy click and the door swung open.

Same place. Same routine. The same brittle smiles from nurses who knew too much and said too little. Their expressions were soft, voices quieter than before. One mentioned palliative care, seeding the start of a longer conversation. Pepper pretended not to hear.

Inside the room, Claire lay as still as ever, cocooned in tubes and wires, the hiss of the ventilator tracking her breaths. Monitors pulsed softly, lights blinking in careful rhythm. Fragile. That was the word for her now. Pepper stood at the foot of the bed, suddenly unsure if her legs would keep holding her. But she made herself walk forward.

She whispered a thanks to the nurse who clicked the door to a close behind her, leaving them alone.

Pepper dropped her bag onto the chair and slowly pulled open her jacket. She reached inside and removed the Eternal Rose.

It glinted in the light.

The colours shifted faintly as she turned it by the stem, watching the pearlescent glow trace across the edges of the petals. Her fingers came away powdered in shimmer. It looked . . . livelier than she had first seen it. As if it were waking up – like it knew its time had come.

And yet, in all the chaos and sacrifice, Pepper hadn’t stopped to consider how the damn thing actually worked.

Feed it to her? Rub it on her skin? Say some kind of enchantment? A word of power?

She muttered profanity. Racked her brain for clues as she clutched the Rose tighter, her pulse racing. What had been said about it? What did she overhear the Archivist tell Canis? She couldn’t remember. Oh God, she couldn’t remember. Something about a leech, wasn’t it? But leeches steal blood, steal life, they don’t return it.

She panicked for a few seconds. Then she made a decision.

Gently, she lifted her sister’s frail arm and nestled the Rose against the inside of her elbow, beneath the blanket, tucking it into the warmth of Claire’s body.

Pepper sank into the chair beside her with a slow exhale. Her body ached, her soul felt like it had been through a shredder, but she closed her eyes anyway.

She didn’t believe in God.

Not really.

But she prayed all the same.

Please be real, she begged. Please be what they said you were.

Sleep came in fits, twisted by guilt and half-formed dreams. She woke in the early morning, her back screaming from the hospital chair. Outside the window, a pink dawn was crawling across the sky. A nurse was checking Claire’s vitals, clipboard in hand. The woman glanced at Pepper and offered a soft smile and a good morning. Then she was gone, leaving behind the rhythmic hiss of life support.

Pepper leaned forward and took Claire’s cold hand in her own. No movement. No flutter of eyelids. The monitors beeped.

Secretly she hoped that she had woken, and all this had been over. That, by some miracle, the Eternal Rose had fulfilled its prophecy, and her sister was ribbing her over making a fuss. They would laugh. She would cry. And they would finally go home and live a new life.

The ventilator squeaked.

There was none of that.

Just Pepper’s fragile hopes and dreams.

She reached down to adjust the blanket and caught sight of the Rose.

Maybe it was the dawn light through the windows, but she could have sworn that it had dimmed. The shimmer had faded from the petals. It looked pale, muted.

Her heart dropped.

But then she spotted the chart protruding at the foot of the bed. She flicked through it eagerly, her eyes scanning the graphs and notes. And there it was. Ever so slight, but it was very much there:

A slight uptick in Claire’s vitals.

In the days that followed, Pepper kept vigil at her sister’s side. She dozed in the chair more than she slept. Someone would bring coffee she regularly forgot to drink, sustained instead by a ghost of hope. A rotation of kind nurses took vitals, but their conversations were white noise. The doctor on his rounds would never commit to anything, only emphasising the importance of Claire’s stability. The only time Pepper stretched her legs was to go to the bathroom or raid a nearby vending machine. Every time she passed the windows the world beyond carried on – shifting traffic, changing weather – but inside the ward, it was purgatory. Their old flat became nothing more than a storage unit she visited to shower. She would catch herself in the mirror, expecting to see a trinket or furniture of the flat in Leroux Tower, vistas that belonged to a life she had abandoned. No, that wasn’t right. She hadn’t abandoned anything. She had adopted it to lead her to this conclusion. Played pretend to save her sister. That was all. Everything now could be behind her.

She tried not to think about Laik’s fate. Not about the fight. Not about the terrible curse forced upon him. Not about what she had done to him. To all of them. But the guilt was a heavy thing to shift.

But on the fourth morning, everything changed.

Claire opened her eyes.

At first, just a flutter. Then a full blink, groggy and slow. She turned her head weakly toward Pepper, and her lips parted. Her voice was dry and hoarse, barely a whisper. But she spoke.

Pepper sobbed like she hadn’t in years, collapsing forward and hugging her, careful not to crush her with the weight of relief.

The doctors were baffled. Claire was conscious. Alert. Eating. Sitting up. Her vitals were improving rapidly – far beyond what was medically explainable. The inflammation markers were vanishing. Her strength returned day by day.

The Eternal Rose was gone. Sometime during the night, it had crumbled into dust beneath her skin. When Claire asked why she had to sleep on half a flower so dead it belonged in a graveyard, Pepper had insisted that it was a good luck charm. One that Claire agreed must have worked.

When Claire was having her first shower in what felt like an eternity, Pepper scooped up fragments of the debris from the bed, dropped them into her open locket and snapped it shut. Fingers wrapped tightly around the souvenir. Her heart sank as she reflected upon the grim transaction. A life saved for a life taken.

And now . . . she would have to live with that.

Two weeks passed, and the world hadn’t ended.

That, perhaps, was the strangest part of all.

Outside, the buses still came late. The neighbours still argued over bins. The kettle still whined in the morning. And inside a nondescript flat above a corner shop, two sisters lived like it was always meant to be this way: normal.

Claire was alive.

She could walk. She could eat without flinching. She could laugh again, bright and ugly and unashamed. The kind of laughter that couldn’t exist when you were counting tiles on a hospital ceiling.

They watched films. Bickered over who got to pick. Drank hot chocolate like children. Pepper sat curled on the couch, knees drawn to her chest, smiling at the right times and offering sarcastic jabs when they were expected.

Sometimes, Claire would grab her without warning and squeeze, whispering thank you into her shoulder like it was a prayer. Pepper would smile and hug her back, breathing soft words into her hair, telling her that she would have done it all again. Because that’s what family does.

And it was.

But it wasn’t the whole story.

Late at night, when the television dimmed the room with a soft blue glow and the streetlight shadows crept along the ceiling, Pepper would sit silently. Claire asleep in her favourite chair, a blanket twisted up in her arms. The empty seat beside Pepper barely noticeable.

Except it wasn’t empty. Not in her mind.

She could still see him there. Elbows on his knees, shoulders hunched forward, tossing her a look at the ridiculous vampire flick they had decided on. He’d mutter something dry, roll his eyes at the liberties taken and pretend not to enjoy it – even though he secretly did.

And then he’d be gone. Just like that.

Just a shape. A scent. A ghost.

A few nights later, they ordered Chinese. Claire was craving something from their childhood, and Pepper, without thinking, said she knew a place. A good one. She ordered the chow mein. The first bite was like a wound reopening.

That table. That little restaurant. She had sat there, alone, texting her sister goodbye without saying it, and telling herself she was making the right choice. Not even knowing if she was going to last the next few hours.

She smiled throughout eating. Didn’t flinch. Didn’t explain. Let Claire ramble about old shows and terrible takeaways, but in her stomach, the food curdled into something worse than guilt.

Sleep never came that night.

Pepper paced in the centre of her bedroom, alternating between crossing her arms and stripping her fingernails with her teeth, as if her body didn’t quite belong to her anymore. The flat shunned silence thanks to the struggling hum of the fridge and the tick of a clock she hadn’t noticed until now. Tonight, they seemed obnoxiously loud.

She had done it.

She had gone from managing dealings for secret creatures and private bars with stunning skyline views, to choosing out washing-up liquid and counting her change for coffee. She had saved her sister. She had tricked the reaper. Pulled her from the edge and brought her back into the light. She should be happy! She should feel peace.

But something inside her was hollow and loud, chewing at her composure no matter how much she ignored it. And it was gnawing deep, reaching her core.

Her eyes snapped to the small bedside table. She pulled its drawer open and set eyes upon its contents.

The phone was still there, sleeping.

It had stayed that way since the night everything fell apart. Since the night she abandoned the Cavendishes and gave Laik a fighting chance – or damned him for good. Either way, Pepper chose which life mattered more.

God, why did it have to be like that? Why did she have to feel this way? Why couldn’t she just forget it all, shove it somewhere, drown it with drink and weed and easy men like everybody else?

She picked up the tether to a dead life, stared at herself in the empty screen.

The moment it powered on, it began.

One vibration. Then another. Then a cascade.

The screen bloomed with missed calls. Voicemails. Texts. The device trembled in her palm from the sheer weight of it all. Names she hadn’t allowed herself to see lit up the screen like ghosts come calling.

Reese. Canis. Quinn. Swan. Duncan. Even Mortis.

Ping. Ping. Ping.

But noticeably, no Laik.

She didn’t dare open a single one. Didn’t breathe. Because opening them meant they’d know she was alive. That she was still here. That she hadn’t vanished – just disappeared from them.

For a moment, her hand shook. Her vision blurred with tears. And she wished, desperately, that things had gone differently. That she hadn’t had to trade one life for another. And she desperately wanted someone – anyone – to tell her she had done the right thing.

But there was no one. Just the humming of the fridge and the ticking of the clock that would not let up. Peace was for other people. Those who deserved such a thing. And Pepper knew, in the deepest part of her that she wouldn’t – couldn’t – have that. Serenity was a prize for those with a clean conscience.

With a cry of frustration, Pepper brought the phone down hard against the corner of the bedside table, splintering the screen until the notification chimes finally stopped and the screen light flickered to darkness once again.

She sat down slowly on the edge of the bed, her hands resting in her lap, sobbing. Her shoulders slumped in defeat.

This was what peace looked like.

A dingy flat in a crap part of the city.

A sister dragged from the brink of death.

A future built on the unknowing sacrifice of others.

And a heart barely held together by lies.

Pepper had gotten her miracle.

But finally accepted that it had come at far too high a cost.