Chapter 62 #3
We’re not in the woods—not even close.
We’re on a slope, one of many across this open, honest land. She’s brought us to one of the few groves of trees I can see. The rest is rolling meadow and cresting blades of grass.
It’d be almost peaceful, if not for the putrid scent of unknown creatures bursting from each corner of this unclaimed land.
But one scent stands out above the rest—rogues.
I can already hear them somewhere to the left—chattering, moving, living, with no attempt to be quiet.
I crouch and scan the valley below. The rogues are down there—at least a hundred of them.
They’ve built huts out of wood, small but numerous, which explains the sparse scattering of trees around their makeshift pack. This isn’t a group. It’s a settlement.
“Goddess be good,” I whisper before I can stop myself.
I stiffen. We’re too far for them to have heard me, but if there are scouts … I glance back in search of one, but stop when I see Aiden.
He’s frozen behind a tree, dark eyes glued to the sight below us. Not with rage, but some kinfolk of shock and fear. It makes him look small, and so much younger.
What is it? I ask through our link.
He flinches, almost losing his step as he looks at me. It’s like he’s forgot I was even here.
“Everything okay?” Katerina asks from behind, her voice barely carrying on the wind.
I look to Aiden for an answer, but he’s back to peering at the scene below, his gaze empty. It’s not fury. It can’t be, because when Aiden’s angry, he doesn’t get quiet.
Looking back to the valley, I mark every exit I spot, gauging their numbers and patterns before I dart over to Aiden’s side. I wrap an arm around him and mumble a curse when I feel him shaking.
“Kat—” I start, only to stop when I don’t immediately spot her, but then there she is, camouflaged in a nook where a sturdy branch meets its trunk. “We need to—”
“Reon!”
The world stops turning.
It just—stops.
The same way it did when I found him—broken and torn apart above a pool of his blood. It slows to a complete halt, bringing with it the kind of silence nothing natural—or good—should ever know.
My head turns, slowly, nervously, fighting every instinct that demands I run before it’s too late. But it already is.
I spot him easily. How could I not?
I’ve stared at that face all my life—first when he was alive, and then through the pictures our parents hung to cope with the loss.
I know that face. The strong jaw that’s our father’s. The cropped blonde hair that’s our mother’s. Always cropped because it got in the way otherwise.
The amber eyes that flare with anger now as he approaches another I recognise too, but the last time I saw those eyes, what was left of them had been hanging out of their sockets.
They’re in place now. Bright, alive, whole and—
“Oliver.”
“What’s that face for, Juli?”
I make a sound, but it’s lost to the endless dark tearing me apart. Aiden’s hands are on me, pulling at me, cupping my face in desperation, but I can’t look away. If I do, he might disappear. And if he does, then what’s the point of all this pain?
I watch Oliver move while my mind conjures his oddly bent legs. I see his arms raise and remember the bones that stuck from their joints, the face so full of life—
“I’m just going out for a run. I’ll be back before you know it.”
The world lurches back into motion, and the moment it does, agony descends with unfeeling cruelty.
It’s shameful how easily I forgot its touch—that I could ever forget how terrible the misery feels when it comes. But I did. And my punishment is that when it comes now, it’s worse than ever.
It’s tangled in confusion and terror, with memories that blur and blend into the nightmare before my eyes.
“It’s not real,” Aiden whispers against my ear—so close the words slide straight into it. “It’s not real. It’s not real. It’s not real.”
He says it over and over again, as if repetition could make it true. But his voice trembles with the lie. He’s shaking—petrified. I can feel his fear in my chest like it’s my own, but I’m not afraid. Fear is far kinder than this.
This is hell.
His fear doesn’t make sense—not at first. The thought barely registers as the world crumbles beneath my feet. Then I remember what my brother’s ghost said when it’d first drawn my attention.
Reon.
I look at Aiden then. Finally see his blazing red eyes, burning with tears and fear. So much fear, and pain, and rage.
The world shrinks again, but this time I barely notice our departure—or our return. Neither does Aiden, because he stays pressed against me, his forehead pressed to mine.
“It’s not real,” he whispers in a near-babble. “It’s not real. It’s not real.”
And it makes sense now.
Those words aren’t for me; they’re for him.
He doesn’t want it to be real. He cannot let it be. Because if he does, he’ll fall apart just like me.
But it is real.
It’s not a dream. Not a nightmare.
It’s real, and there’s nothing we can do to escape it.
I turn, drawing away from him before he’s ready, because if I don’t, I’ll throw up all over him. I collapse to my knees. My body finds something to give, the same way cruelty always finds something left to take.
My stomach empties itself onto the stones while tears stream down my face, and I scream. It’s something, at least. Something to break the silence, to shatter the nothingness, to fill the space, but it hardly does the job.
Misery still descends to batter me until I’m nothing more than the scrawny pup I was when I found him. When he left me.
Left—because he isn’t dead … He’s never been dead.
Oliver is alive.