Chapter 36 Theo
THEO
Blood-curdling agony tears through the forest, a sound so raw and so human it rots the air around us.
Every nerve inside me jolts. My hand flies out until it collides with Sebastian’s arm, his warmth instantly grounding me for half a breath before it’s ripped away.
His fingers clamp around my wrist, not guiding but hauling, our bodies pitched forward as he drags me into a sprint.
The earth is uneven beneath us; gravel bites my shoes, moisture turns the soil slick, branches snag at my robes.
His pulse hammers beneath my touch, frantic and unsteady, a rhythm beating faster than the pounding of his feet.
That scream comes again...hers. There is no mistaking the shape of her pain in the air.
It tears through me, steals breath from my lungs, coils dread in the pit of my stomach until nausea rises into my throat.
Liam’s earlier sweep of the forest should have led us straight to her, but he has not returned, and each second he remains missing is a fresh spike of panic climbing my spine.
“It’s her,” Sebastian gasps, breath thinning into something close to panic. His tug turns rough, almost violent, as he jerks me forward. My shoulders wrench under the force of it, but I don’t protest. Nothing matters except following her voice.
Humidity presses damp fingers along my neck, clinging to every inch of my skin. Sebastian’s movements shift, no longer running blindly, but stopping to scan, to read the ground. “Tracks… all swallowed up,” he mutters. Moisture devours traces of their path before he can mark a direction.
Harper screams again.
The sound is worse this time, guttural, tinged with something beyond fear.
My hands tremble uncontrollably, visionless darkness pressing harder against my nerves.
Instinct replaces panic. My wand sweeps upward, magic threading through my grip as I tug sharply on Sebastian’s wrist and send us veering toward the only beacon I can sense: Liam’s presence flickering weakly in the distance, like a dying candle flame waiting to be smothered.
Branches whip against my legs as Sebastian pulls me back into his orbit, his hand clamping around my forearm to steady me. His breathing stutters. Harper’s sobs whisper faintly from ahead, small, broken noises that sound like someone folding in on themselves.
“Jesus Christ…” Sebastian breathes, voice cracking at the edges.
I tear my hand free of his grasp, refusing to be held still when every instinct screams to move toward her. The brush shifts underfoot; gravel skitters. Then Harper’s voice cracks across the space, trembling, threaded with desperation.
“Don’t let him over here, Seb.”
Her plea is soaked in panic, as if even being perceived in this moment could shatter her. It freezes me in place. A strangled sob escapes her, muffled, as though she’s burying her face into someone’s chest to keep from falling apart.
Sebastian’s breathing shifts, rage taking root inside it. “What the hell did you do?”
The low, irritated scoff that answers him is unmistakable.
Ares.
“Harwood, shut your fucking mouth before I walk over there and make you wish you’d stayed behind at the castle,” he snarls, voice strained, as though he’s wrestling with something, or someone, just out of my reach.
Harper’s next sob splinters the air. “Sebastian...please.”
My heart claws at my ribs. Her fear isn’t directed at Ares. It’s directed at the idea of us seeing whatever state she’s in.
“Where’s Liam?” The words rip out of me, the tip of my wand rising instinctively as if it can shield me from the answer.
A sharp inhale. Harper’s voice, thin and shaking, lashes through me.
“Theo… please… stay away.”
My knees threaten to give. The forest closes in, thick and suffocating, her trembling plea wrapping around my throat like a noose.
Something is horribly, horribly wrong.
Ares’s voice cuts through the chaos like a blade, urgent and fraying at the edges. “I’m losing him, Harwood, get over here-”
No part of my mind registers the command logically.
My body simply breaks forward, moving before Sebastian can react, before breath can fully form in my lungs.
Branches scrape against my face as I stumble toward the sound of Ares’s panic.
My foot hits uneven earth. Then softer earth.
Then something slick beneath my fingertips, Harper’s hands catching my shoulders, trying to steady me.
They are trembling. And wet. A metallic stench coils through the air, spreading over my senses with unmistakable familiarity.
Blood.
“Liam… whose blood is that?” The words split apart on my tongue. Every syllable is betrayal, a crack in my voice, a sob strangled halfway into sound.
Harper tries to answer, but her voice fails her. A broken inhale is all she can manage. “Theo… he-”
But I already know.
My foot bumps a body, a subtle recoil of flesh, a faint involuntary twitch. My pulse spikes. I tear myself out of Harper’s grip, fingers slipping from her arms as I crawl forward on my knees, hands sweeping over the ground until they collide with thick, tangled hair.
Liam’s hair.
No. It can't be.
My fingers push deeper, brushing across splattered dirt and cold skin and-
A chest. Too still.
Hands press against that chest in frantic rhythm. Ares. His breath is ragged, uneven, as though he’s forcing life back into the body beneath him with nothing but will.
“L-Liam?” My hand fumbles, searching for a face I know better than my own. My fingers graze the edge of Ares’s arm as he continues compressions, as if repetition alone can summon breath back into dead lungs.
My palm finds Liam’s cheek.
Cold.
I choke on air. My hand slides to the corner of his mouth, hoping to find warmth there, or movement, or anything, but only tears slick under my fingers, his or someone else’s, fresh enough to sting.
Ares keeps working, voice cracking as he counts under his breath.
But I shove him back with a force I didn’t know I had, collapsing forward until my ear is pressed hard to Liam’s chest. Something warm spreads across my temple, the steady seeping of blood pooling beneath his ribs, soaking into my skin.
I wait. Listening. Hoping for even the faintest thrum of life. A flutter. A whisper. A miracle.
Silence.
A cavern. Hollow and dead.
“Come on,” I whisper, pawing at his chest as if noise might wake him.
“Liam… please.” My fingers search for his hand, desperate to feel him curl his fingers around mine like he always did when the nightmares were bad.
But my hand closes only on torn flesh and shredded fabric. His stomach is a ruin beneath my touch.
Harper’s voice breaks in waves behind me, raw, unraveling, repeating his name through screams that don’t sound human anymore. Her grief fractures the air itself.
None of it reaches me.
My entire world is the dead quiet inside Liam’s chest.
“I can’t hear you…” The confession tears out of me with a shaking that feels like dying. “Why can’t I hear you? Liam...wake up.” My voice shatters on the last word. I push harder against his body, as if pressure could force breath into him, force his heart to remember its rhythm, force him to stay.
Nothing.
Ares kneels beside me. The storm raging around us seems to fall away until only his voice remains, low and grim and unbearably gentle.
“He’s dead.”
The words are a guillotine.
And the world goes impossibly silent.