Chapter 5
Evan
Ididn’t know how long I’d been crying or screaming. Hours. Minutes. Time meant shit when your world imploded, and all the fight had drained out of me.
Blood streamed from the gash on my temple, soaking into the muddy shore where it met the lake’s dark water. Each heartbeat sent fresh agony throbbing through my skull, forcing me to grind my teeth against the pain.
When did it start raining? I couldn’t remember. The sky had been cloudy when that bastard abandoned me. Now water fell in torrents, soaking through what was left of my resolve.
I sat up with a start, only to slump back against the sodden ground, my neck craning upward. I lifted my arms toward the storm, grasping at empty air as fever raged through me, so intense that even the freezing rain brought no relief.
“Mom, why aren’t you here?” I shivered.
If I were dead, then why was I in this strange place, stuck in someone else’s body? And who was that mountain of a bastard who’d hurt me and disappeared like I was nothing more than roadkill?
Being left for dead brought back the same aching loneliness that settled in my bones the day the world gave up on me. And the memory of that day threatened to break me all over again.
Two weeks after my twelfth birthday, I’d found her on the kitchen floor, blood pooled beneath her head, spreading across the fissured linoleum in dark rivulets.
Her face had been peaceful, like she was only sleeping.
I stood there for three hours, telling myself she’d wake up if I waited long enough, memorizing every detail of her face for all the lonely years I knew were coming.
“I don’t want to be here,” I mumbled to the storm, tasting blood and rainwater on my lips. I did not want to be anywhere.
What was the point? I’d spent years crafting a persona—tailored suits and frigid smiles—while learning how to make other men crumble with the firm set of my jaw. And for what? To end up bleeding in the mud, still as helpless as I was that day.
A carefully constructed performance shattered by a single bullet, leaving only the scared twelve-year-old I’d worked so hard to bury. That bullet didn’t just tear through my chest; it shredded the only purpose I’d ever known—the promise I made to Mom. Even if it had meant nothing in the end.
Nausea twisted my gut as the fever dragged me under, dizziness sweeping over me while violent tremors seized this borrowed body.
My head struck the wet earth again, my vision tunneling until the tree line writhed into dark, wavering figures.
My lungs were stung by a sudden chill, and each breath came in shaky bursts, forming clouds as the rain hardened into sleet.
Boots formed out of the blackness, churning the earth below them as a cloak dragged behind the figure, swallowing what was left of the dying storm clouds. Where its edge brushed the ground, the grass withered and died. My pulse skipped, panic creeping up my throat.
This was it.
Death had found me. At least, that’s what my fevered mind decided.
“Please,” I managed, the plea a ragged whisper. “Help me.”
When the figure crouched down, a wild, maniacal laugh broke out from beneath the hood, the laugh of a woman who’d crossed a line and never once looked back.
“Hey, are you still with us?” She lightly patted my cheek in a quick, questioning touch before gripping my jaw more firmly. I attempted to pull back, but I couldn’t make this damn body obey anymore—unnatural frost bit into my jaw where her fingers dug into bone.
The hood slipped back, revealing a young woman with warm brown skin and hair the color of a raven’s wing. Tearing from the corner of her mouth to her left eye was a jagged scar, and her one eye glowed with a deep purple hue.
Of course. Everyone’s fucking eyes glowed in this nightmare of a place. But she was stunning, a deadly beauty, the kind of woman who could smile while sliding a knife between your ribs, and you’d thank her for the privilege.
“I can’t believe you made it. I thought you were finished when you hit that tree trunk.
” She tilted her head, her lips displaying a cruel smirk while her finger traced that jagged scar.
“It’s only been a few hours, and you’re already a wreck.
What happened to the fight you had in you this morning? Did you hit your head that hard?”
My thoughts were thick and slow, weighed down by fever; I could not piece the words together. The hatred coating them? That was unmistakable.
“But you survived. I can’t believe you were hiding in this mediocre hole. It’s adorable how everyone lines up to save you. Even my baby brother. Always you and not me.” She pouted. “And look, you’ve leashed another protector. Did you beg that barbarian too? How sweet.”
She dropped my head back into the wet earth with brutal finality.
Offering me no time to process the impact, she was on me, hands searching my body, looting me like a corpse.
The hunt became invasive as she tore at fabric, nails scratching across my abdomen as her fingertips ran along my ribs and then inside my shirt.
Frantically, she demanded, “Where is it?”
“Where’s what?” I croaked, but she ignored me completely.
Hissing in triumph, she ripped something from my trouser pocket—an obsidian-dark crystal, roughly the size of a boulder marble.
“You used it.” Confusion and disgust warred across her features. “But… what for? You don’t need a trinket to jump. Did you open a portal? Where to? Your mother sacrifices everything, faces down the entire Imperial Guard to give you a chance to run, and you waste your energy on this… trick?”
A portal, like a door? That had to be how I got here, right? One minute I was falling, and the next I was here, transported into this nightmare.
Lifting the crystal closer, she examined it.
Cracks spider-webbed across its surface where inner radiance might have once glowed.
Now only dull emptiness remained. “But it doesn’t matter.
The crystal still sings with your magic.
And now I know exactly where the Empire’s most wanted fugitive is hiding.
Catching you both will be a delightful bonus. ”
She tossed the now-useless stone aside, letting it land in the mud. Fresh despair washed over me. I only wanted it to end.
The world blurred, colors bleeding in the downpour as she stood and brushed moisture from her cloak with casual indifference.
“The church’s Inquisitors are already mobilizing.
And the Empire’s war mages…” She inhaled deeply.
“I can smell their disgusting holy magic from here. The Emperor has wanted a cage for that dragon for ages. Gregory’s head will make a fine trophy for the throne room.
” She met my stare. “And you, my dear Evan, are the key to the lock. You’ll have to be returned to them, won’t you? ”
I grasped her boot in desperation. The cold radiating from her was so intense that it burned my palm even through the leather. “My mother. Stella. Where is she?”
The woman let out a brittle, cutting laugh and kicked my hand away like I was diseased. My fingers bent at odd angles, bones grinding, and blinding pain shot up my arm. I swallowed the scream.
She tapped an impatient finger against her thigh.
“Oh, did you forget her too? Don’t worry, she’s not dead.
The Empire was pleased to have their most useful tool back under lock and key.
That little bit of freedom they gave her?
Gone. Now she’s a slave, paying the price for your cowardice every day in a bleak, dark cell. ”
With a final show of disgust, the woman straightened, brushing at her cloak as if to rid herself of my presence. She touched the scar again, her eyes growing distant and vengeful. “She’ll pay for what she did to me. They all will.”
She turned away. “What comes next will make today feel like a mercy.”
Rain fell steadily as she stepped back, her figure blurring into the forest’s edge until she was gone. Only the space where she’d stood remained, and that single black crystal lying discarded in the mud.
Wind pushed the rain sideways. Darkness pressed in from every direction. And I knew I was completely fucked.