Chapter 31 Night Terrors
Night Terrors
The path behind them shimmered like a golden mirage, but Liss didn’t dare look back. She’d had enough of this Kingdom.
The air shifted with every step, colder and quieter than before.
The further they moved away from Radiance, the more an ache settled in her bones.
Tarran walked beside me in silence, our fingers brushing sometimes, sending a zing up my arm that made my breath catch.
She’d been in her own room by the time I’d woken, memories of our night together continuously running thorough my mind.
Finally, I broke the silence. “I didn’t think we’d make it out of there, honestly.”
Tarran’s voice was quiet, rough around the edges. “Neither did I.”
Another long pause.
“It wasn’t fake,” I said, keeping my eyes on the winding path ahead. “What happened…between us last night.”
“I know,” Tarran whispered.
I looked at her then. Tarran’s face was unreadable, all sharp lines and deep stillness. Her arms were crossed over her chest, shoulders tight, like she was tensed for a blow.
“I meant it,” I said.
Tarran nodded once. “So did I.”
That should’ve made me feel better. It didn’t.
A bird called out from somewhere in the trees, mournful, almost inhuman. I stopped walking. The question had been sitting on my tongue since I woke, since she’d sent my heart right off a cliff with no parachute.
“if you were free to choose, truly choose, without this place. Without this book. What would you want?”
Tarran stilled. The question hung in the air between us, fragile as glass. One wrong word, and it would shatter.
“I don’t know,” she said at last. Her voice was low, almost like she was afraid to answer. “I’ve never been free like that. I’ll never be free like that,” she corrected slowly.
“But if you were?” I pushed. I knew I should back off. There was no situation in which this conversation ended favorably for either of us, but I couldn’t help it. I needed to know last night was as real for her as it was for me.
To know I wasn’t crazy.
“I’d want to stop being afraid, Liss.” Tarran’s gaze steeled, pinning me with her multicolored stare. “I’d want…you.”
My breath caught.
Tarran stepped closer, so close, I could feel the warmth radiating off her.
“But that’s the thing, isn’t it?” Tarran added, softer now. “I can’t have you.”
I swallowed hard, my throat aching with the words I couldn’t say. The path ahead twisted into the woods, shadows curling along the edges like ink. I hated that she was right. I hated that, after everything, after all we’d done, I still didn’t get to keep her.
I took a shaky breath. “This blows.”
Tarran’s jaw tensed, and her hands clenched at her sides. “Don’t say that.”
“Why not?” I asked. “It’s true.”
“Let’s just enjoy the time we have left. I want you to take that key. Leave and don’t look back. Not for me, not for anyone.”
The silence that followed was a living thing, crawling between us like a cockroach.
Then, Tarran moved, slowly. She took my hand, her warm fingers entwining with mine.
“If there was another world,” she said, “one where I wasn’t just…
ink and memory. Maybe if I was up there with you. Would you still want me?”
I didn’t even hesitate. “Yes.”
Tarran’s breath hitched, her hand trembling, but she didn’t pull away. “I hope I still remember you when you’re gone.” She couldn’t hide the crack of her voice as she trailed off.
I stepped closer, until our foreheads almost touched, taking her cheeks between my palms and kissing her.
It wasn’t careful this time. It was desperate, aching, the kind of kiss that elicited something from deep inside me, something tender and sharp and much too big for my chest. My hands curled into her hair as hers slid around my waist, pulling me in like she would never let me go.
“Ooooooo,” I heard a Carl whisper, followed by a sharp yelp of pain and a shushing noise.
“I’m afraid,” Tarran said as we finally separated, breathless and dazed, “of what’s coming. Of what I’ll lose.”
“Me too,” I admitted. “But we have one more kingdom, one more key. And maybe… I don’t know. Maybe there’s still a way.”
Tarran nodded, but I could see the doubt clear as day on her face as her fingers tightened around mine.
We kept walking, the light fading fast, the shadows stretching longer and longer.
“Are we going to make it in time?” Carl-Two murmured, looking nervously around the forest. Tarran and Carl-One were frowning down at a map she had pulled, and with a small gasp, she looked to me with guilt.
“What?”
“We took a wrong turn. I was so distracted. Oh, no, no, no.” She was frantic, that hint of madness bleeding back into her face as she wrung her hands. “We aren’t going to make it before nightfall.”
And that was when the scream came.
High. Piercing. Inhuman.
We all froze.
I turned slowly, dread pooling in the pit of my stomach. The trees behind us rustled like they were moving—and then I saw it, just barely. A shape slipping through the trunks, all smoke and eyes and teeth, as the last of the light disappeared, faster than it should have.
A night terror.
My blood turned to ice.
“Tarran,” I whispered.
“I see it,” she said, already stepping in front of me, as if she could protect me from whatever monster was here to kill us.
But it wasn’t going to be enough.
The creature didn’t move like anything real. It slithered instead of walked, its form flickering in and out of the shadows between the trees. It wasn’t solid, more of an absence of light. A tear in the world, sucking the warmth out of the air.
The night had fallen fully now, thick and absolute.
I tried to step back, but my feet were heavy, rotted deep into the ground like they had been planted. My breath came faster, much too shallow. The world tilted, and I realized I could no longer feel myself, could no longer feel the world around me.
Tarran’s voice reached me, distant and muffled. “Liss, stay with me. Look at me.”
But her voice sounded wrong—not hers and much too far away.
“She doesn’t exist,” something whispered in my ear, though nothing had moved. “She’s made up, remember?”
I blinked, and suddenly, I was standing alone. No forest. No Tarran, no Carls. Just blank white walls stretching forever.
Everywhere I turned, there I was: smaller, younger, afraid. Versions of me whispering the worst things I’d ever believed about myself.
“You’re not real either.”
“You don’t matter.”
“They only care because the book makes them.”
I covered my ears and screamed—but no sound came out.
And then, I saw Tarran. Or at least, it was a version of her. Her face was blank. Empty.
“You used me,” she said without emotion. “I’m just what you wanted in the moment. You wrote me into the cracks of your loneliness, and now, you’ll leave me behind, just like the rest.”
“No,” I said. My voice barely broke through the thick air. “No, that’s not true.”
“Then why can’t I exist anywhere but here?”
The pain bloomed in my chest, sharp and pungent. I dropped to my knees, the cold biting into me. I was losing myself.
“Liss.”
The voice was softer this time. Real. Tangible.
“Liss, come back. Come back to me.”
I blinked. The walls flickered, the void trembling.
Warm hands touched my face. So, so warm, almost hot. Grounding.
“Liss.”
Tarran.
Her real voice, ragged with emotion.
“Hey, you’re not alone,” she said. “I’m here. I won’t let them take you from me. Not until you’re on the other side of that door.”
My fingers closed around hers like there were my last lifeline, the last thing I could grab on to so I could save myself from drowning.
The forest came rushing back in a snap. The cold remained, but the hallucinations shattered like glass. And the night terror, the not-thing, the shadow, recoiled. It hissed, curling in on itself like smoke dragged into a fire until it disappeared completely.
My knees gave out, and Tarran caught me. We collapsed together in the dark, breathless, clinging to each other. Nearby, the Carls looked on worriedly.
“What did you see?” Carl-Two asked, hesitantly sidling over to me, pressing a concerned hand to my arm.
“It didn’t attack us,” Tarran said, her brows pulled in tight. I could tell from the tone of her voice that it confused her, that it wasn’t normal for the night terror to only attack one person. “Only you.”
I stared between them, only now realizing they hadn’t been in there with me. They hadn’t seen what the night terror had wanted me to see, and for that, a part of me was grateful. They didn’t need to know. She didn’t need to know.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said finally, righting myself and gathering my discarded stuff, already setting off toward the faint golden lights I could see in the distance.
It couldn’t be anything but the Kingdom of Will, and a nod from Tarran confirmed that.
They didn’t push me, instead falling in step behind me as I set off.
But deep down, I knew why the night terror had spared them. Why it had only come for me.
This godforsaken book wanted me to stay here, and it was getting harder and harder to say no.