CHAPTER THIRTEEN #2
When I turn at last to find my boys, they’re there.
All three of them. Far enough to let me explore but close enough to watch over me.
But they no longer have their faces. No longer have flesh and substance.
They cling to the shadows, to the vacuum of space between trees as if hiding.
I would miss them entirely if not for twin pinpricks of light where their eyes used to be.
“Why won’t you come closer?” I ask.
“We don’t want to frighten you,” one whispers as low as a breeze.
I narrow my eyes and move back to where they stand, protected by the forest.
“I won’t be scared. Please let me see you.”
A second of silence follows before the darkness shifts and they emerge.
Tall. Taller than they’d been in their human forms and draped in dark cloaks with the hoods pulled low.
“No, I want to see you. All of you,” I correct.
The hesitation is palpable but long fingers unfurl from billowing sleeves and hook into dark folds. I watch, mesmerized as the articles are shed and I’m face to face with ... nothing. They simply vanish into the night.
I blink and take a step back. My gaze swings wildly over the places they’d been seconds ago.
“Here, little one.”
Something brushes a lock of hair off my shoulder, and I turn my head.
He glimmers at the corner of my eye. A faint whisper of movement no more than a trick of the light. He’s gone when I face forward.
“You’re a ghost?” I guess.
“Shadows,” he corrects. “I suppose some have mistaken us for spirits.”
Shades, I think.
Still, I put out a hand and feel my way forward. I barely make it a step before my fingers slip through ... nothing, but something. Like smoke, but nearly tangible.
“Would you like us to wear a face?” the one looming before me asks from somewhere in the tendrils.
I cock my head. “Yours.”
I may not be able to decipher their expressions, but I can almost feel their exchanged glances.
“It might be too soon,” the one on the left whispers with the raspy hiss of sandpaper being rubbed together. “It will only upset you.”
The implication that they either think I’m too weak to take it or that I would ever think them so hideous only prickles my temper.
My blanket slips open down the front with the irate placement of my hands on my hips.
“I’ll be the one to decide what upsets me. I want to see you.”
They don’t seem to be breathing, but I swear they collectively sigh. Still, no one argues. I watch the swirling wisps congeal and shift. They pull back with the reservation I feel coming off each of them.
I may not be the biggest fan of horror, and gore on its own turns my stomach queasy, but these three are mine. Maybe that sounds insane. Unrealistic, short-sighted and delusional. But I am bound to them, to this place, in a way I don’t think has words.
So, when the shadows solidify and slick back from their faces like hair coiling around their shoulders, I’m not scared.
I’m not horrified.
I can see why they would think I would be, but, if anything, their faces are exactly how they should be.
Strong.
Dangerous.
The kind of inhuman features that were carved into the shields of warriors to terrify the enemy.
“This is better,” I tell them softly. “No more masks. I want this.”
It’s a crazy ask, given I will never see them again. But that’s a thought for later as I step forward and extend my arms up like it’s the most natural thing in the world to do.
The one in front scoops me up. Long, clawed fingers curl around my middle and hoists me to the winding shadows. I’m tucked into a wide expanse of muscles.
Eyes the polished whites of moonstones watch me from the heart of absolute darkness.
There are no features. No lines. Nowhere I can definitively find a mouth.
They are overlapping tendrils. Rolling wisps of smoke that lift off an elongated frame.
Bodies woven with thin red threads that weave and bind beneath their .
.. skin? At the very center where a human heart would nestle, the vines knot around a deeply carved symbol.
“What’s this?”
I raise a hand and lightly stroke the deepest carving dug across his chest. A faintly glowing pattern that pulses ever so slightly like a heartbeat.
“Your name.”
My breath catches even as I jerk my head up to meet his gaze. “Does it hurt?”
“Only when you leave.” He tucks me more securely against his warmth, swaddling me in his cloak and in my blanket even though I’m not cold. “It will cease to beat once you’re gone.”
Tears burn. They clog my throat with a pain so deep I almost can’t breathe.
“I’m sorry,” I choke out.
A hand as big as my entire body lifts and sweeps over ... all of me, but I think he meant to brush my tears.
“The time we’ve had with you will always be more than we deserved.”
I wedge my face into him, wishing I could burrow beneath his wisps and hide from everything, but all I can do is breathe in the familiar scent of myrrh and cedar.
Aamon.
No one speaks as we resume our stride through miles of endless forest.
I can’t be sure, but I may have dozed under the gentle rocking of Aamon’s arms. When I open my eyes, we’re passing beneath a shady arch.
Snow gives away to warm dirt the color of red clay.
A bonfire roars at the center. A blazing column snapping at the tangled canopy overhead.
The sweet scent of pine, smoke and cloves intermingle in the most familiar way.
“I know this place,” I croak around a yawn, bunched fist rubbing the grit from my eyes.
Carefully, I’m lowered to the ground. The trio sweep back and leave me to center myself.
It’s all here.
Everything from my dreams.
A movie set displayed exactly the way I remember, except there is no horned beast by the fires, waiting for me to give myself to him. His absence is a cold, iron fist coiling around my chest.
“Where...?”
I pivot to face my boys only to have my attention snagged on the row of stones winding away from the fire and beneath an archway heavy with crimson leaves and ivory branches.
It doesn’t need to be said. I don’t need to be told when my feet are already moving. Running. I’m sprinting down the winding path.
Somewhere at the back of my mind, I’m registering that this has to be a dream.
How else do my feet know exactly where to go?
How do they know to slow when I reach the slick stone steps plunging downward into a cavern as wide as a city block?
How do they know to skirt around the deep, blue pool dug into the center where shapes shift and move beneath the surface with graceful glides?
My brain doesn’t even stop to rationalize that the figures have human bodies, or that I am literally running through a cavernous cave. My focus is a pinprick, a tunnel moving me across the room, up a steep incline and through another gap in the wall.
Rain patters over an iron bridge capped with steep arches. The ground glistens as the water spills over and down into a heavy fog churning far below.
I dash through it.
It dampens my blanket and turns slick beneath my feet, but I don’t stop until I’m half running, half crawling up the other side. Over black stones and mossy dirt. I throw myself over the ridge and down more stairs.
“Rina!”
My name is a bellow. A deafening roar that shakes the ground beneath me. It claps across the heavens with the crack of thunder. It’s the kind of sound that would make a sane person turn and run. Flee from whatever is calling her.
But I’m sobbing.
I’m crying before I can even name the emotion swallowing me whole. I can barely see through the tears as I tumble down a winding pathway, through arched doorways and an ocean of forest guiding my way.
And there he is.
At the very end.
A creature almost resembling a man from a distance, but radiating with a power, a darkness that swells around him.
“Vaelith.”