Chapter Forty. Rory
Rory
November melted into December. All that was left of autumn was a small stub of a season, barely there at all.
Rory’s nightmares were back in force. It had been a while—months, at the very least. Not since he and Daye started sharing a bed.
Not since he could feel her in his arms all through the night, warm and whole, the steady rise and fall of her chest under his palm.
But now he woke up gasping, night after night.
Tonight, Rory woke curled on his side, his hands tucked to his chest as if even in sleep, he was afraid of what they might find.
In the darkness, Daye was nothing more than a still shadow, and for a moment Rory was too afraid to reach out and check.
His mouth still tasted of mud and leaf litter.
The skin under his nails throbbed with a phantom ache, as if he were still digging through the finger-strewn muck, trying to find all the pieces of Daye before the mud sucked them away.
Rory rose on his elbow, and for one breath, two, three, he stayed there, heart hammering, hand halfway between them, until he could convince himself to reach all the way. Under his palm, Daye’s shoulder was rising and falling steadily with sleep.
With a whoosh of breath, Rory collapsed back into the mattress.
Outside, dawn started to paint the edges of the window, hesitantly illuminating a thoroughly wintry world, so drab and bleak that it was hard to remember that, officially, there were still two weeks of fall.
Daye would need a transition soon.
He could see it in the way she fidgeted.
In the abstracted way she let him touch her, instead of throwing herself into the sensations.
Three weeks into wearing her autumn body, the withering seemed to hover over her, not an abstract, future thing but a reality of the here and now, winter tightening its hold on her with each passing hour.
She wouldn’t survive much longer. A few days.
A week at most. Not with the frostbitten flower petals he’d cobbled her together from, the shriveled leaves lining her branch-bones.
They tinted her skin a grayish sort of sallow, made her hair dry and chaff-like, its color closer to the rusty brown of dried blood than dogwood red.
He should start gathering the materials for the transition today.
And then what?
He didn’t know.
His solution hadn’t worked. None of the things he’d tried had.
And now he knew that they’d never work. That, at best, they’d delay the transition a few weeks or months.
Maybe even a full season. But that was all they could do.
Delay. Buy time. And once that time ran out …
the full weight of the withering would fall on Daye, pouncing tiger-fast. Too fast. All too ready to swallow her whole.
It would always end the same way—with Daye falling apart in his arms, and him helpless to stop it.
Rory turned on his side, curling again, knees to chest.
His notebook, on the nightstand beside him, was a sea of blacked-out lines and X’d-out pages. He had no more cards to play, no experiments lined up, no new conjectures to explore.
He had no idea what to try next. Had no idea if he could try again, after what had happened.
After how badly he’d failed her. It all seemed too real now, the stakes too high.
He couldn’t comprehend how he had ever been so cavalier, so reckless.
How he had just flung the two of them into experiment after experiment without batting an eye.
Sleet began drumming on the roof.
Daye turned in her sleep, reaching for him.
This, too, was another way he’d failed her.
How could he keep lying beside her, touching her, kissing her, loving her, knowing she had no choice but to stay with him?
All those fears that haunted him last autumn—the ones that seemed so easy to brush aside with the feel of Daye’s lips on his and the promise of a solution waiting just around the bend—were growing louder every day, clamoring around him every time he met Daye’s eyes.
A constant thrum of what-ifs. What if Daye regretted them.
What if Daye didn’t love him. What if Daye had never loved him.
What if Daye didn’t want to stay. What if Daye was afraid.
He knew she wasn’t. That she loved him too, wanted him too. But what if—
The squeeze in his chest intensified, making it hard to breathe. Too wound up to stay still, Rory got out of bed and started preparing for the transition to winter.
Another night. Another nightmare. Rory couldn’t seem to catch his breath. He sat up in bed, hands to his throat. He knew that air was coming in and out, that he was lightheaded because he was breathing too fast, but he couldn’t seem to stop.
The bed was empty beside him, the second pillow undented and cold.
And half wrapped in the dream as he was, he couldn’t tell if it was because Daye was sleeping in the fortress, or because she had never existed at all.
If it really was all a fantasy of a lonely boy yearning for someone to play with, and that if he checked under the blanket, his legs would be the short, skinny limbs of his eight-year-old self, the face in the mirror rounded with childhood, as they’d been in his dream.
Rory staggered out of bed on stiff, too-long legs. Shoved his hands into his coat and his bare feet into his boots and stumbled to the fortress.
He just had to make sure.
Snow lay on the ground and covered the trees, steepling the fortress’s roof with turrets and buttresses, as if to repel an invasion.
Inside, Daye was curled in her nest of blankets, winter-black hair fanned around her.
One bare leg was flung out of the covers, her toe just touching a puddle of snow.
Rory sat down and looked at her, remembering a time when he thought he’d be able to fix this—Daye’s inability to stay indoors for long once snow got a hold on the ground.
Was he ever that young that he thought all he’d need was a couple of months and access to books, and he’d find a way to fix all of it—the winter problem, the withering, the need for transitions?
Was he really ever so sure, so golden and certain? Could it have been only two years ago?
It seemed impossible.
It felt like his life was a series of midnight awakenings, sweat-soaked and trembling with the echo of nightmares. That it wasn’t ten days since Daye transitioned into winter but a lifetime, an eternity of empty beds, strung together like beads.
He could no longer remember a time when he wasn’t afraid.
I can’t live like this, Rory thought, with a tinge of desperation. I can’t keep being this scared, all the time.
The wind swept through the fortress, rattling the shutters.
Rory jolted. How long had he been sitting there, staring?
Long enough that he had stopped shaking from the cold and was now in that floaty, almost-warm stage, where the chill felt almost pleasant on his numb skin.
He rubbed his eyes with wooden fingers. It was almost surprising that his hand came away wet.
On her nest of blankets, Daye turned on her side, lips parted in a silent sigh.
“We can’t go on like this,” he whispered through bluish, cold-stiffened lips. There was no answer but the shushing of the wind and the muffled settling of snow.