Chapter 4 #2
Nadia grimaced. “I really wasn’t trying to freak anyone out. I was just desperate and didn’t think it through.” They twisted their rings. “Sorry, Gabriel, but I’ve been telling you to leave, you know you’re wasting your time—”
“I’ll decide what’s a waste of my time,” Gabriel snapped, his hands fisted at his sides. “You had no right to invite them here.”
“This is my shop. I can do whatever I want,” Nadia fired back, nostrils flaring. “And you’ve overstayed your welcome. Excuse me for wanting to get you out of here. You’ve been moping around all week, bringing the vibe down, and I can only take so much.”
Miles couldn’t follow their argument. His brain was still processing the fact that Gabriel was here, totally fine, and apparently put out that they’d come to rescue him.
He hadn’t wanted Gabriel to be in trouble, but he’d been so certain. So worried. He’d put Charlee and Emily at risk, been ready to do something seriously stupid to save him.
To save someone who hadn’t needed saving.
“Then you should’ve messaged someone else,” Gabriel bit out. “Not him.”
Him. The way he spat it hit Miles like a slap in the face.
Charlee made an irritated noise. Miles put a hand on her arm, more to steady himself than stop her.
“Who, then?” Nadia challenged. “Your family? I’m not suicidal.”
“Uhm, sorry to interrupt.” Emily raised her hand like she was in class. “But can you explain what’s going on? Because I’m lost.”
“Yeah, I’d like that too.” Miles could hear the accusation in his voice. Charlee’s glare narrowed in on Gabriel with laser-like precision. “Because we’ve spent the last four days trying to find you. We thought this was a trap, and we came to get you anyway.”
His confusion was fading away. Riding on its heels was a slow curl of outrage.
Gabriel strode forward to grab Miles’s jacket sleeve. “We need to talk.”
Miles didn’t know what else to do, so he let Gabriel pull him into the backroom. Behind him, Emily sheepishly blurted to Nadia, “So sorry about the whole pepper spray thing. If it makes you feel better, Charlee never would’ve actually done it.”
“Don’t bet on it,” Charlee countered.
The backroom was larger than Miles expected, but crammed full, cardboard boxes and wooden crates stacked floor to ceiling.
In the limited space, there was a worn brown couch beside a small table covered in books, papers, and a lonely red mug, a teabag string hanging limply over the rim.
A folded blanket sat on the couch, Gabriel’s wool coat slung over an armrest.
The dark auras were stronger back here, overlapping and battering against Miles’s mental walls. It made his brain rattle like a cowbell was ringing in each ear.
Gabriel closed the door behind them and shoved his hands in his pockets. He didn’t say anything. The silence was unbearable, but Miles let it stretch. Let it ache in the air between them, thicken until it was suffocating.
Gabriel’s shoulders curled, but he still didn’t speak.
Miles caved. “Fine, I’ll start. What the hell?
Seriously, what the actual hell?” Anger rose in him, heat spiking in his chest like he’d taken a big gulp of boiling tea.
“You’re such a jerk, you know that? You have no idea how much I’ve been freaking out, trying to convince myself you weren’t dead.
And Edmund, Bram… do you know what you did to them?
We thought you’d been kidnapped, or that you’d run off and abandoned us.
” Miles gestured around the dimly lit room.
“What are you even doing here? Did you get a sudden urge to go shopping for cursed items? Because we didn’t already have enough on our plate. ”
He hoped Gabriel was listening in on his thoughts and could hear exactly how pissed he was. How close he was to walking straight out of here without him.
Gabriel’s lips pressed into a hard, unwavering line. He was considering lying, pushing him away, Miles could tell. The edges of that cold, cruel mask were sliding up and he knew something awful was perched on the tip of Gabriel’s tongue.
“Don’t. Don’t you dare lie to me right now. The least you owe me after the last four days is the truth, and you know it. If you’re an asshole right now, I swear, we’re done. For good.”
It wasn’t a threat. Just the truth, scraped raw off his heart, and it hurt.
Even knowing he’d sense nothing but a dark cloud, Miles still reached out to try and pick up Gabriel’s emotions. He needed something, a shred of remorse or regret. All he got was that cold, empty void.
Conflict swirled in Gabriel’s gaze, a storm building on the horizon. Then he pressed his palms to his face. When they fell away, his expression was tight with resignation and fear. It scared Miles badly enough that his outrage fizzled into nothing, a hot spark stomped out.
“What?” he whispered, apprehension slithering down his spine. “What happened?”
Gabriel came to a decision. “Okay,” he started, sinking onto the brown couch. “The truth, then.” He knit his slender fingers together, knuckle bones straining to press free of his pale flesh. “I saw your death.”
Miles heard the words fine, but it took a second for them to make sense. Of all the things he’d been expecting Gabriel to say, this hadn’t been one of them.
“I…” He shook his head, trying to clear away the white noise droning in his ears. “What are you talking about?”
“I saw it in a dream the night we banished Florence.”
“You—I died? You actually saw me…?”
“Yes.”
The world tilted. I saw your death. Such a short sentence. Only four words. They shouldn’t have the power they did.
Miles didn’t realize he was sliding to the floor until Gabriel was there to catch him and guide him down.
“I’m fine,” Miles reassured him. And he was. It wasn’t panic rushing over him, not even the tell-tale dizziness that he was going to faint. He was just… processing. And his knees had decided they didn’t want to stick around.
He’d known at every step of this quest that he could die. And he almost had. The car accident, the tunnels, the graveyard—he’d been dodging death since the moment he decided to help Gabriel.
This felt different. It scared him more, an icy clamp around his ribs, squeezing so tight he thought his cowardly bones would splinter beneath the pressure.
Gabriel was still on the floor with him, holding his arm tightly enough that it throbbed.
“Maybe it’s not—” Miles tried weakly.
“It is.”
He didn’t argue. Gabriel would never say it if he wasn’t sure.
“How do I… how does it happen?”
Gabriel’s words were barely a murmur in Miles’s ear— as if he was afraid to say it out loud, to make it real. “It’s the same place from your visions. The tomb with Jocelyn. I don’t know why, but it’s you now. I saw you there”—his breath hitched—“on the floor.”
A painful laugh bubbled up. What a hideously ironic twist of fate.
“Was it… the same as when it was you?” Miles touched his head.
“No.” Gabriel’s grip tightened, the bones of Miles’s wrist grinding together. “I saw… blood on the front of your shirt and the ground beneath you. I don’t know if you were shot, or stabbed, or…” He sucked in a sharp inhale. “I don’t know.”
A bloody death. Apparently, that was all that was waiting for anyone who dared to go up against the Hawthornes. Miles shouldn’t have thought he’d be an exception.
“Okay.” His voice only trembled slightly. “So, I—I mean, it’s me now. Okay, I—” Something plinked onto his sleeve. He blinked down at the droplet, confused and uncomprehending.
“Don’t,” Gabriel pleaded, his voice aching. The last time they’d been this close, he was kissing Miles breathless in the graveyard. How could that feel so long ago? “Please, Miles, don’t cry.”
“I—” He lifted a hand to his face and sure enough, it was wet. He didn’t know why he was crying. “I’m sorry, I don’t know where they’re coming from.” He wiped his eyes hastily, mortified.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated. Gabriel hadn’t cried when Miles told him about his death premonition. “Really, it’s not—it’s just been a stressful few days. I think it’s all catching up with me.” He took a deep, quaking breath, letting his lungs swell to the point of bursting.
Gabriel’s jaw was steel, tight enough to crack teeth. “This is why I didn’t want to tell you. I didn’t want you to know how this felt.”
“I’m not a child, I can handle it.” Miles was aware of how ridiculous that sounded considering he was currently sobbing on a dusty backroom floor. There was nothing to do but accept it. If wishing things were different worked, Gabriel would’ve been saved weeks ago.
Wait.
“Your vision doesn’t make any sense.”
“I don’t understand what changed either, but denial won’t—”
“No, I mean, it can’t make sense.” Miles’s head was stuffy, the dust in the room making his nose itch. “Jocelyn came to me the day you left with another warning—the future remains unchanged. Florence deserved to go, but she wasn’t the one who was going to kill you. You’re still going to die.”
Gabriel frowned. “But how? My premonitions are never wrong. I assumed banishing Florence somehow saved me, but damned you. It’s the only thing that made sense.”
“Could we both die?” Miles dismissed the idea as soon as it left his mouth. “No, wait, that wouldn’t make sense. In my vision, I see you die, and in yours, you see me. They can’t both be true. One of us would die first and make the other vision impossible.”
Focusing on this latest puzzle helped rein in his fear, quiet his mind.
“When Jocelyn came to me in my dream, she mentioned other paths. What you saw could be a possible future. The path we’re on now, you die.
We step off it onto another path, I die.
” That wasn’t exactly reassuring when they had no idea what the path looked like, let alone how to know if they were already on it.
But it proved what Miles had been fighting for—one could exist where they both lived.
And if it didn’t… Miles would have to make it.
“Why do you sound excited?”