Chapter 34 #2
She stood, chest heaving, and stared guiltily at the people who had discovered them: Abigail, Lou, and—to Charlie’s ever-deepening humiliation—Mason. All standing, frozen, between two pine trees a few feet away.
She expected Mason to be the one to tear into her, but he didn’t look angry. He looked … stunned. Maybe it was the alcohol. He was looking between Charlie and Elias like they were a riddle he couldn’t quite put together.
Instead, it was Abigail who stomped forward. “I knew it,” she spat. “I knew this was going to happen.”
“Abigail.” Charlie held up her hands. “It’s not what you think—”
“Not what I think?” she screeched. “I don’t think anything. I saw it with my own two eyes.”
Charlie tried again. “Listen—”
“No, you listen,” said Abigail, jabbing one finger into Charlie’s chest. “You’ve completely lost it.
This guy tried to murder us—literally every single one of us—and you’re over here sucking his face?
You ignore all logic and forgive him for the awful things he’s done because of some stupid crush? I thought you were smarter than that.”
“It’s not about a crush. I’m just drunk.
” This was a lie; she was tipsy at the most. “Elias is drunk.? And we’re obviously attracted to each other.
So. We were…” She searched for the right words.
“This doesn’t mean anything. This was just …
just a drunken mistake. Right, Elias?” She looked to him for confirmation.
What she found on Elias’s face wasn’t confirmation. It wasn’t vigorous nodding or lewd jokes to deflect the tension, as she’d hoped. It was something quite different: a mixture of shock and confusion, as if he couldn’t quite process what was happening.
All at once, the shock dropped off Elias’s face. In its place: dark emptiness. For a second, Charlie thought she saw shadows actually begin to gather around his body, but it must have been a trick of the moonlight.
“Right,” he said flatly. “Just a drunken mistake.”
An invisible knife twisted in Charlie’s chest.
Elias turned away. A strange stiffness gripped his body, as if someone had injected ice straight into his spine. His jaw was clenched tight. Below his cheek, a muscle twitched.
That was the first time she thought it. The first time she allowed herself to ask the question that, in a million years, she never believed would ever cross her mind:
Does Elias Everhart have feelings for me?
No. It wasn’t possible. Just the day before, he’d said that he would rather die than do things like feel or apologize.
But hadn’t he admitted that things were different now? That he could feel again?
And what if … what if what he’d felt had been toward her?
Oh gods.
His jaw clenched even tighter.
Don’t, she begged in her mind, hoping he could somehow hear. Please don’t shut them off again.
I only just got you back.
“It doesn’t matter if it was because you were drunk,” Abigail said, interrupting her internal plea. “That’s not the point. The point is that you’re letting him back in at all.”
“Abigail…” Lou’s voice held a warning.
“I mean, come on,” Abigail went on, completely ignoring Lou. “You skipped two full days of school to hang out with him in the woods. Two days, Charlie. Before this week, you’d never even skipped a single day of school, let alone two in a row.”
“We weren’t ‘hanging out in the woods,’” Charlie said, using her fingers to make quotes. “You know that. Elias was helping me train abilities that I couldn’t possibly access on my own. Abilities that I didn’t even know I had.”
“Right.” Abigail folded her arms in front of her chest, voice sour. “Brilliant, Charlie. Immediately forget every bad thing Elias has ever done the minute he bats his long eyelashes and promises to teach you magic.”
“You think I’ve forgotten?” Charlie was yelling now, but she didn’t care.
Didn’t care if every creature in the forest could hear her.
Maybe it was the alcohol. Maybe it was the heady confidence from before, rushing back like a sudden shift in the wind.
Or maybe she’d finally had enough. “You think I’ve forgotten what Elias did?
Of course I haven’t forgotten, Abigail. I’ll never forget that night.
I’ll never forget what it was like to watch someone I’d trusted—someone I’d begun to have feelings for—try to kill everyone I loved.
I’ll never forget the horror. The betrayal.
I’ve spent the last four weeks trying to pretend I’m not afraid, but I’m fucking terrified.
” Her chest was heaving, hands trembling at her sides.
“But above it all, above every other emotion, is the guilt. The knowledge that it was my fault you were all there. My fault that your lives were in danger. My fault that none of you were going to make it to your eighteenth birthday, were never going to get into college or get a job or have kids or have your hearts broken or travel the world or whatever beautiful, painful things life had in store for you. None of that would have happened, and it was my fault. My fucking fault. My—”
A sob racked Charlie’s chest, cutting off her words midsentence.
The edges of her vision went black. It was coming back.
She could feel it. The tightness in her chest. The buzzing beneath her skin.
The pounding of her heart, like a drum beating in her ears, and her gut, and her kneecaps, elbows, ankles, wrists.
Her fists, which had somehow bent themselves into open claws, as if they were trying to grab hold of an invisible ladder.
I’m having an episode, she realized. Just like after homecoming. There was no time to fall back on one of her usual three tactics. No time to research, train, or even recite. It was too late. The terror was upon her.
“Charlie?”
The voice traveled to her as if down a long tunnel. It seemed to echo in her ears. Faint, distant. Something closed over her hands. Big and comforting, like the wool blanket her mom used to drape over Charlie when she would fall asleep during a movie.
“Charlie, look at me.”
The words were closer this time. Clearer. At some point, she must have squatted down, because the ground was far too close to her face. She looked up from it slowly, following the sound of the voice. Finally, she found herself staring into two familiar wells of swirling green.
“It’s okay,” said Elias. His gaze was steady, his hands holding her clawlike fists with a firm but gentle grip. “You’re okay. Breathe.”
She inhaled through her nose. Her breath was wobbly, uncertain.
“Good. That’s great.” He nodded encouragingly. “Now hold it for four.”
She sealed her lips shut. While she thought that holding her breath right now would be awful, like suffocating as the forest collapsed around her, it turned out to be the opposite.
Holding oxygen inside her body was strangely comforting.
Something she could control in a world spinning out of alignment.
“Great. Now exhale. Keep your focus on me.”
Breath hissed out through her teeth. She felt like a leaky faucet, like there was something wrong with the basic mechanics of her body.
Elias nodded. “That’s perfect.”
Over the next thirty seconds, he coached her through the same process over and over.
Every time her eyes tried to look away, to glance wildly about the forest, he brought her back to him.
To his steady gaze. Constant, unmoving. With each exhale, the thundering of Charlie’s heart grew slower, less deafening.
Her fingers loosened. The buzzing quieted. The shadows cleared from her vision.
“That’s really good, Charlie,” said Elias. “You’re okay. You’re in complete control.”
In some distant corner of her mind, she noted that Elias was calling her Charlie again, not Charlotte. It was bizarre to hear her chosen name spoken in his voice. Like finding a flower growing in the middle of cracked pavement.
“None of this is your fault,” he went on. “Do you understand me? You did what you had to do to save your best friend’s life. You weren’t the one who tried to hurt them. Okay? That was me. That was all me.”
His words washed over her. You did what you had to do to save your best friend’s life. You weren’t the one who tried to hurt them.
She couldn’t help it; her eyes darted away from Elias’s, needing to see everyone else’s expression. Lou was hovering close by, her worry obvious. Mason was still somewhat bleary-eyed, but his expression had cleared. When she met his eyes, he gave her a small, encouraging nod.
Charlie looked at Elias. “But the eyaerberries,” she whispered. “I gave them the eyaerberries. I exposed them to the dangers of Asgard. I—”
“Shhh.” Elias released her hands, reaching up to take her shoulders instead.
“Everyone ate those berries of their own free will. You didn’t force them to do anything.
Okay? And some part of you knows that.” His hands tightened on her shoulders.
“But the thing is, Charlie—guilt is a bully. It yells. It taunts. It throws sticks and stones. It ties you to a chair and tries to beat you down, to torture you until you believe whatever it says. And right now, you’re letting it win. ”
Charlie breathed in and out through her nose. Counting silently. She wanted to believe him, but it felt so selfish to do so. Like she was cutting herself a break she didn’t deserve.
“No one here blames you for what happened on homecoming.” For the first time in five minutes, he looked away, dropping his hands from her shoulders and turning to speak to her friends and her brother. “Right?”
“Of course we don’t,” said Lou, smiling sadly.
“Absolutely not,” agreed Abigail. “That’s ridiculous. Elias is the asshole here.”
Charlie’s eyes drifted nervously over to her brother.
In the last two days, it had felt like Mason was beginning to warm back up to her.
To, if not forgive her for not telling him about Sophie, at least understand why she’d kept it a secret.
But this … this was different. She knew Mason blamed her for dragging them into this world.
Knew that he wanted no part of it, that she had forced his hand by telling him about Lou’s capture.
She was certain that, when she met his eyes, she would find nothing but frost.
Instead, her brother looked oddly distraught.
He was staring down at Charlie, lips parted, like he knew he had something to say but couldn’t remember what.
Thoughts seemed to be flitting quickly through his head.
She braced herself for a lecture, for a disdainful remark like How dare you let him be the one to calm you down, or How dare you feel anything positive toward him at all.
After a long, tense pause, Mason took a step toward Charlie. Another. He moved slowly, twigs and dead pine needles crunching under his zombie-like steps. For a bizarre, fleeting moment, Charlie thought her brother might hit her.
Then he dropped to his knees and pulled her into a hug.
Until that moment, Charlie had thought that she could be fine without his forgiveness.
That, though it might hurt at first, she could drift apart from her brother.
It was only natural, right? That’s what happened when you grew up.
Even if he hated her for the rest of their lives, she would be fine.
And probably she would have been. Probably she would’ve been able to carry on, to live a decently full life.
But it wasn’t until that moment in the woods that she realized, no matter how happy her life would be, how much good she did in the world, how successful she became …
there would always have been a hole somewhere within her.
An emptiness she would never have been able to identify but would have felt nonetheless.
The space where her brother went.
“Charlie,” Mason said into her hair. “Our father is a god. I’m pretty sure we would have been dragged into this mess whether you gave me that berry or not.”
Charlie laughed. It was a messy, snot-laden sound, and it was only then that she realized she was crying. That she probably had been crying for some time now.
But these tears didn’t feel like sadness; they felt like relief.
Mason pulled back and turned to look at Elias. “How did you know to do that?” he asked. “What you did for Charlie. The breathing thing.”
Elias’s eyes fell to the forest floor. After a short pause of consideration, he looked decisively up and said, “My little sister, Olive. She used to have panic attacks. Her therapist taught our family some techniques.”
Mason nodded. Charlie had no idea if her brother understood the significance of what Elias had just shared. She was fairly certain that she was the only person he’d told about his sister in years. The fact that he just told the rest of the group, too …
“Thank you,” Mason said genuinely.
Elias inclined his head.
“But this doesn’t mean that I like you,” Mason clarified. “Or that we’re friends.”
Nodding sagely, Elias said, “I couldn’t think of anything worse.”
The corner of Mason’s lip twitched.
“How touching,” said a raspy voice from the shadows, causing everyone in the clearing to jump. “I do so love a family reunion.”
Dread, cold and slippery, slithered across Charlie’s skin. She knew that voice. It didn’t matter that she’d never heard it before. She’d known this moment would come, and that, when it did, she would recognize him instantly.
The squirrel, she realized with horror. The squirrel that ran up the tree just before Elias and I kissed. I didn’t check. I didn’t even think …
“Children of Loki,” said Rattatosk, ground crunching as he crawled out of the shadows. “I found you at last.”