Chapter 31
Tyler
Getting your neck snapped fucking hurts. You can’t tell anyone about it. You don’t have time to scream, so everyone acts like it’s some quick and painless death.
I don’t know about quick. Time sort of lost all meaning the moment my spine cracked in two. I felt that break reverberate through all of me, right into my soul.
The last solid image my eyes saw before my view was abruptly twisted to one side was Hudson’s face, his eyes filled with all the words we’d only just found the nerve to say.
I heard every single one, too, the final living thoughts in my brain screaming out, begging to reach him as an atrocious ringing ravaged my ears.
I love you. I love you so fucking much, baby boy. I always have. I’m so sorry. For everything.
Like I said, time sort of left me. Or I left it. Dead men don’t get to philosophize, it turns out.
Then darkness hit, and for some unknown stretch in a measurement beyond our limited perspectives, nothing mattered. Whether I wanted it or not, I was at peace. An infuriating, all-consuming slumber in which no fear nor desperate need could touch.
No pain or heartache. No Hudson or Emery.
No me.
But I should have been angry. I should have been furious. My own father had me killed. He ripped away the life and the love I wanted. The love I needed so badly that I had thrown everything away on the fleeting hope it was possible.
Somewhere within the depths of my drifting soul, I was enraged that I didn’t have the ability to be enraged. Something in me persisted even after death, and it was growing more powerful than any emotion I’d ever felt while alive.
Then my peace shattered.
Awareness, however small, found me.
“Hello, Tyler.” A warm, distant voice invaded that bubble of consciousness. Familiar somehow. Frightening, had I anything to be afraid of. But my worst fears had already come to pass.
Who… are you?
“We’ve never properly met, I’m afraid.” A gentle laugh. “My name… is Daniel. And the side of me you’re familiar with, well…”
Sharp stone claws and teeth flashed in what remained of my mind. A dark shadow moving toward me in the woods, surrounded by red, vanishing in an instant.
You’re the one they cursed… the ravager.
“Oh, is that what they call me?” Another laugh, laced with a bitter edge. “Henry always did have a flair for the dramatic. His theatrics made it easier to paint his siblings as the villains.”
They… weren’t? Didn’t they force you—
“No.” His echoing voice cut off my train of thought. “I’ve no doubt they could have placed the curse upon me against my will. The power of blood magic is an awesome thing to behold, but my Theodore never would have allowed Lenore to cross that line.”
Silence. The man’s possessive ringing in my ears.
Your Theodore?
“Hmm…” Daniel hummed in thought. “I suppose that is… unfair to Theodore. I was his, always, unshakably, but Theodore…” His sadness, the aching of his heart, became palpable. “He could never be mine in the way I wished.”
You loved him.
“I died for him. Twice.”
A grassy hillside invaded my mind, torches blazing in a circle around the space.
A dozen souls chanting, and a young man bound in chains beyond their formation, a blade to his throat.
Familiar emerald eyes filled with tears, staring at the center of the ritual where the ravager—Daniel—writhed and roared with primal ferocity.
“Yes… I suppose Theodore and your Hudson do share a striking resemblance, don’t they?” Daniel sighed in defeat. “Even their mannerisms remind me of one another, and both were faced with an impossible burden, yet… your Cursekeeper…” He chuckled softly. “He keeps his curses far closer than most.”
The weight of Daniel’s pain, his fight and his loss, weighed heavily in that impossible place. I wanted to wrap arms I could no longer control around him and hold him tight. To tell him I understood, and even though Hudson may have loved me in return, I had lost my witch as well.
“Giving up so easily?” Another soft laugh, closer this time. “No, Tyler. You made a promise.”
A promise?
“You swore an oath to a Garland, though you may not have fully comprehended the weight of your words.” Daniel’s voice grew stronger, bolder.
“You approached the Maledictuus, and you freed me by taking in the single drop of blood that was placed inside my stone remains. A fragment of my curse. Dormant. Waiting, but no longer.”
Feeling returned to me in searing agony, as if someone had reached into my chest and filled it with hot coals. I couldn’t scream or flinch, only endure as blistering heat and bright red became my only existence.
Stop. Please. Please let me go back to sleep.
“There is no turning back,” Daniel whispered, words echoing through that empty void. “The last living Garland bestowed you with the key, and you made your promise. The door opened in response, and what was meant to be… shall be.”
What… promise?
The glittering shore at the edge of the Garland property flashed in my mind. The feel of the cool lake air on my skin and the light of the setting sun on my face. Hudson’s fingers caressing my neck as he slipped the silver necklace over my head, and his beautiful smile at my own words.
“I’ll bear any curse for you, Hudson Garland.”
“Do… what I could not, Tyler.” Daniel’s voice began to fade. “Save the man you love.”