Chapter 44 Harper
HARPER
Liam’s silhouette advances with a strange, mechanical insistence, his boots clipping against the stone as if he’s learned the rhythm of walking but not the meaning of it.
Ares keeps one arm braced in front of me, the other pressed to the hilt of his knife.
Each step Liam takes forces Ares to maneuver us backward, guiding me behind him even as his own uncertainty begins to radiate off him in sharp, uneven breaths.
Liam stops several feet away, lifting his wand almost thoughtfully, as if testing its weight. His expression shifts, something like recognition melting across his features.
“Harper?” he asks, tilting his head. His voice softens into something familiar, something safe, something I've trusted my entire life.
Ares falters. His grip loosens. Confusion drags across his eyes, and for a moment I see the exact moment he questions everything he sensed.
“Liam?” I whisper, stepping out from behind him. I feel Ares pivot sharply, but he doesn’t reach for me, doesn’t grab, he watches, his tension coiled tight.
Liam exhales, a small huff of frustration. “I’ve been searching Anavris like a madman looking for you. Sebastian is losing his mind.” He crosses his arms, gaze sliding toward Ares with disdain. “And I find you hiding in an alley with him.”
Ares’s shoulders drop. His knife lowers. A tentative apology works through his lips.
“I’m sorry… I thought it was something else,” he mutters, the embarrassment roughening his voice.
I swallow down the thundering in my chest. “Let me talk to him,” I say, barely audible.
I step toward my brother. His features soften the way Liam’s always do when I’m close, his smile brightening, his posture relaxing.
But the longer I look at him, the harder something inside me begins to strain.
Something isn't right. Something painfully small, a detail nearly invisible unless you’ve loved someone your entire life.
His eyes.
Where are the freckles inside them?
I freeze.
“What’s wrong?” he asks, but his tone is too smooth, too rehearsed.
“We should go.” Liam grabs my wrist, fingers digging deep as he yanks me forward so hard the sketchbook slips from my bag and smacks against the ground. His grip clamps like iron, his strength wildly out of proportion for his frame.
“Liam, cut it out,” I snap, trying to twist free. His fingers only tighten, digging into bone.
He looks at me. And then the world detonates.
He strikes me across the face, fast and brutal. My head whips sideways, the alley blurring in a sickening spin. His next words slip from lips that no longer sound like my brother's at all.
“There’s always a missing detail, isn’t there?” he hisses.
A sharp whistle slices through the air. Liam’s, no, the thing wearing Liam's face, jerks violently as a knife buries itself in the side of his neck.
His body collapses backward, twitching. I stumble toward him on instinct, but Ares is already behind me, arms locking around my waist as he wrenches me upright.
“It’s not him,” he growls, voice frayed as he pulls me away.
A shrill, impossible screech erupts from the collapsed body. The sound rattles my ribs, curdles my blood. The creature kicks against the ground, peeling itself out of Liam’s skin like it’s shedding a costume. The flesh cracks. Splits. Sloughs off in wet folds.
What rises is a nightmare.
Empty black pits where eyes should be. A mouth sewn together with what looks like sinew and torn tendons. Its hands contort into hooked claws, bone jutting through patches of rotted skin. Its body droops and reforms, twitching as if it hasn’t fully decided what shape it wants to keep.
It grins at us, or whatever the closest approximation is, as pieces of Liam’s voice gurgle through its throat.
“He wants her back, Ares.”
A cold wave runs through me, pinning me to the spot.
The creature yanks the knife from its own throat with a wet scrape and plunges it into the dirt, as if marking territory.
“What… what is that?” My voice shakes so hard the words nearly don’t form.
Ares steps slightly in front of me again, wand drawn with deadly steadiness now that doubt is gone. His entire presence shifts, more predator than person, jaw tight, gaze unblinking.
“One of your father’s mutts,” he says, cold as steel. “A Fetch. A mimic.”
My eyes flick toward the fallen sketchbook lying just behind the creature, its black leather cover half-buried in dust and gravel. My stomach lurches. Everything suddenly feels connected, Sebastian, the theft, the message, the timing. All of it feeding into the same trap.
The creature tilts its head at me, lips cracking apart as another voice, my father’s voice, emerges from the torn mess of its mouth.
“Come home, sweetheart.“
Ares inhales sharply, wand raised, body braced for whatever comes next.
And I finally understand:
My father didn’t send a threat.
He sent a warning.
Without thinking, without any logic or self-preservation left in me, I hurl myself forward.
My body moves before my mind catches up, driven by a raw instinct I don’t understand, a magnetism toward the sketchbook half-buried in the dirt.
The creature’s grin widens as if it’s been waiting for that single act of stupidity from me all along.
Its arm rises, bones cracking audibly as it prepares to drive its claws straight into my skull the moment my hand closes around the leather cover.
And I do grasp it, my fingers scraping over the engraved initials as my breath catches in my throat.
Ares reaches me in the same heartbeat the creature swings.
He slams into my side, ripping me backward so violently the air tears out of my lungs.
The creature’s claws carve through the pavement where my head had been, stone shrieking under the impact.
A frustrated, guttural groan pours out of its throat, wet and sharp like an animal choking on its own decay.
I don’t look back.
Ares is already pulling me, shoving me ahead of him, both of us sprinting down the alley with a fear so physical it stings the inside of my ribs.
The world blurs into torchlight and startled faces as we tear past people who don’t react, don’t flinch, don’t dive for cover.
To them we’re nothing more than two students running from shadows.
To us, the shadow is real, hunting.
“Why...why aren’t they stopping it?” I gasp between ragged breaths, Ares’s grip a painful tether around my hand.
“They can’t see it,” he grits out, stumbling for a second before righting his pace. “Magic doesn’t reveal Fetches to anyone who does not have Shadeborne blood magic.”
Red splashes the cobblestones behind us, a scattered trail that doesn’t belong to me. I don’t feel pain, just adrenaline, so the realization hits like a block of ice:
He’s bleeding.
Our boots slam through the town gate and into the forest’s underbrush, branches clawing at our arms as Ares drags us deeper and deeper, guided by nothing but instinct and terror. Behind us the creature hisses, its breath rattling through the trees.
“Our magic won’t work on it?” I whisper, my lungs burning.
Ares yanks me down behind a collapsed stone wall, his hand pressed over his mouth as he forces himself silent.
“It works,” he says. “Just not enough. Fetches… mutate.”
The decay in the wind grows stronger. Metallic. Sour. Wrong.
Then he inhales sharply, a deep, involuntary gasp that snaps my attention to his side.
Three long gashes rip across his ribs, skin peeled away in raw slashes. Poison-black veins spider out from the wounds beneath the tattered cloth of his ruined shirt. He braces himself on the rubble, forehead pressed against the stone as he fights the tremor moving through him.
“He got you when I grabbed the sketchbook?” I choke out, pressing my hands against him without thinking.
He doesn’t nod, doesn’t speak, just winces, his jaw locked in a clenched snarl.
“It’s poison,” he whispers finally. “Fetch claws carry it.”
The creature’s scent creeps closer, thick with rot. Footsteps drag lazily through the brush, close enough I feel the vibration in the ground.
My heart stutters.
“Ares,” I breathe, leaning into him. “Tell me what to do. Tell me where to take us. Please.”
His fingers fist in the front of his coat, knuckles white.
“I have a friend,” he says, words slurring at the edges, poison threading through his voice. “But she’s… miles away. I can’t apparate us through this. Not like this.”
“Who? Where?” I push, cupping his face to force his gaze on mine. Sweat beads on his brow; his pupils shrink, dilate, shrink again.
He looks at me like he’s not sure I’m real.
“When did I find you again?” he murmurs, breath hitching. “Gods, you’re...when did I-?”
“Ares, focus.” My hands grip his cheeks tighter, the pads of my thumbs brushing against his cheekbones. “What friend? Give me something.”
He smiles faintly, drunken and distant.
“I have friends,” he insists. “Liam. You. Althea-”
“Althea?” I latch onto the name, desperate. “Althea who?”
“Althea Collins,” he says, as if it’s obvious. “You already know that.”
I don’t. But it’s all I have.
The creature screeches, a hideous, warping sound, and the brush to our left shudders violently. A shadow passes in front of our hiding place.
It’s now or never.
I rip off my sweater, pressing it hard against Ares’s bleeding side. He groans, eyes rolling back for a moment before he tightens his hold around my wrist, anchoring himself to the only thing not spinning out of control.
“Ares, stay with me,” I whisper, even as my wand hand begins to shake uncontrollably.
The creature inhales deeply, sniffing the air.
“I smell his blood.”
Its voice slithers over my skin like a curse.
I seal my eyes shut and focus on the name, his voice saying it, the odd confidence in the way he repeated you already know that, the slight emphasis, the rhythm, the urgency hidden inside it.
Althea Collins.
Althea Collins.
Althea Collins.