Chapter 10
Quinn
After taking my pills and washing up for the morning, I came back to my bedroom to the ringing of my phone. My pulse hiccupped. I snatched it up, my heart thumping harder when I saw the call was from Mom.
I’d managed to avoid talking to her and Dad outside of texts for the past three days, but I probably needed to take this. If they didn’t hear my voice, they were going to start wondering if I’d been kidnapped and some villain was making excuses in my place. It wasn’t like I’d ever vanished for this long without warning before.
Drawing my spine up straight as if I could conjure confidence with my stance, I brought the phone to my ear. “Hi, Mom.”
“Sweetheart! I’m so glad I caught you at a good moment. Can you talk for a bit?”
“Sure,” I said, ignoring the churning of my stomach at the thought of all the lying I was about to do. “I’m sorry for the sudden trip. It just seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up.”
“Of course! The conference sounds amazing from what you’ve said, and it’s great that you’re getting to spend more time with a friend.”
I swallowed thickly. My friendships—or lack thereof—had been a constant if low-level point of tension between my parents and me. My sudden childhood illness and the stress around my heart transplant had been too much for a lot of the kids I’d hung out with in elementary school. Most of them had faded out of my life… except for my best friend Brandy, who’d run herself ragged trying to be there for me every way she could.
The symptoms of my impending heart failure had been awful, and recovering from the transplant hadn’t been any picnic either. But it’d almost been worse seeing the toll my condition had taken on the people I cared about.
Mom and Dad—well, it was impossible to tell your parents you shouldn’t matter so much to them. Even when their worries were draining them. Even when the treatments were draining their savings and all the dreams that money had been meant for. But I did everything I could to make the rest of my existence as un-stressful as possible for them.
I hadn’t had any choice about relying on them, but I’d been able to spare Brandy. After seeing the dark circles growing under her eyes for weeks on end and catching murmurs about how her faltering grades had meant she’d missed out on getting into the private high school she’d had her hopes pinned on, it’d become obvious that being friends with me was taking a hell of a lot more from her than it was giving. I’d started avoiding her at school, refusing invitations, failing to return calls—pulling out of her life as much as I could.
Eventually she’d stopped reaching out, just as I’d intended. I hated thinking of the hurt in her voice the last time she’d talked to me, but it’d been better for her in the long run. She’d made new friends who wouldn’t end up at death’s door again by their twenties.
I hadn’t been able to hide from Mom and Dad that I wasn’t exactly a social butterfly in my high school years. I’d made up stories about parties and other get-togethers to cover for my burgeoning urban exploring habit, but they’d known I never brought anyone over to hang out at home. They hadn’t missed the silence of my phone. Thankfully, once I’d headed an hour and a half away to the university in Gainesville, I’d been able to deflect more of their concerns since they couldn’t see how quiet my social life was firsthand.
“Yeah, it’s so lucky I ran into her,” I said to Mom, keeping my voice as chipper as possible. “And I feel like I’ve learned a ton here.” That wasn’t totally untrue, even if she was in the dark about where exactly “here” was.
“That’s wonderful. We never want to get in the way of you getting out there and living your life, you know. I just can’t help wanting to check in.”
“Of course.”
There was a rustle as Mom shifted her position. “Will you be heading home now? I assume the conference only lasted to the end of the weekend. And you have your summer classes still going, don’t you?”
The excuse I’d come up with still sounded flimsy to me, but I hadn’t been able to think of anything better. I was gambling on my parents not poking around much in my room and realizing that I hadn’t actually come back to collect my things. I was pretty sure I’d left my laptop in the drawer built into my bedframe, so it wouldn’t be immediately obvious at a glance that it was still there.
“Actually… Trish asked me if I wanted to crash at her place for a while so we can work through some class stuff together. She’s taking one of the same summer courses as me. We might even ask to do a joint project for it. I think we’ll go to campus a few times to get stuff from the library and chat with the professor, and her apartment is already in Gainesville. I’ll still be back for a bunch of the summer, of course. I’d miss you otherwise.”
I added that last bit in the hopes it’d ease the sting of my unexpected absence. I did miss them—and everything that was normal at home. She had no idea how much. I might have been getting used to the strangeness of my shadowkind protectors, but it wasn’t as if I wanted to be hunted by monstrous fiends for the rest of my life.
If I was here for a couple more days, I’d need to at least grab my supply of medication. But if we weren’t ready to leave the cabin by then, one of the men would probably insist on going alone. I wouldn’t want to drop by while my parents were home anyway, not with the danger that’d be nipping at my heels.
“Oh, that’s totally all right,” Mom said. There was something bittersweet about her tone, as if she was both sad to be losing the time with me and overjoyed that I was getting along so well with one of my classmates. “Do you need to pick up anything else from the house?”
“I can wash the clothes I brought at her place, and I have everything else I need. Thank you for understanding!”
“There’s nothing to understand, sweetheart. I’d rather you got out and spent some of your summer with friends even if some of that’s schoolwork too.”
“You know what a workaholic I am,” I said with a laugh that was only a little stiff. “But I can fit in some fun around it.”
Saying “fun” made me think of Lance’s comment yesterday afternoon. My heart gave a giddy skip at the memory of his mouth against mine, even though an uneasy twinge still lingered in my gut from his comment afterward.
I was probably reading too much into it. It wasn’t like I expected a marriage proposal or something from him.
“That’s what I like to hear,” Mom said. “Go enjoy yourself, and don’t work too hard in the meantime. We’ll have plenty of game nights and family dinners when you get back.”
She was being so chill about my absence that the guilt twined through my chest amplified. It took me a second before I could say my goodbyes without sounding choked. “I’ll see you soon!”
I hung up and sank onto the edge of my bed, dropping my hand onto my lap. A sudden gloom rolled over me like a thundercloud, punctuated by another of those weird flutters—or was it a tremor now?—around my heart.
I’d done my best to keep busy here and convince myself that I was making progress toward… something. Being able to protect myself? Showing my gratitude to the men who’d protected me when I couldn’t? Keeping up with the work I’d meant to be doing?
But who was I kidding? Whether I could leave this place without becoming monster chow wasn’t really up to me, and I wasn’t sure how much it was even up to my defenders.
From what they’d said, there were a lot of shadowkind in the world. It seemed like nearly all of them other than the three who’d appointed themselves my guardians wanted a piece out of me. How could they fight all the rest off forever?
How could I go back to a remotely normal life while I was a magnet for murderous monsters, drawing them toward not just myself but everyone around me?
I smeared on the sunscreen that was an automatic part of my daily routine, not that skin cancer was at the top of my list of current fears. Then I went out into the living room, where I found Crag just heading out the door.
“Where are you going?” I blurted out.
He glanced back at me with a frown. “I have to check the area farther around the swamp for shadowkind activity.”
I faltered at his tone and his stern expression. “Oh. Okay.”
He considered me, all stony solemness. “Was there something you needed?”
“No.” Nothing that he could give me. At least not nothing more important than making sure a new horde of monsters wasn’t descending on us. “Maybe when you get back, we could do a little more sparring? I’ve been improving with Lance, but it’s probably better if I get different kinds of practice.”
Crag hesitated, and my gut twisted. He’d been patient with me before, yeah, and I didn’t think he wanted to be cruel, but that didn’t mean he enjoyed catering to my whims either. “You don’t have to, obviously,” I added quickly. “Just a suggestion.”
His expression turned a bit gentler even though his tone stayed gruff. “You’re very dedicated. That’s a good thing. I only worry about hurting you accidentally, Softie.”
Even though the nickname highlighted my deficiencies, the fact that he used one at all eased a little of my uncertainty. I didn’t think he meant it as an insult, just a statement of fact.
I managed a smile. “What was it you said to me? If I get hurt, it’ll be my own fault.”
He grunted, but I thought I caught an upward twitch of his lips before he turned away. “If there’s time, then. This will take a while. Lance will be patrolling closer by to ensure nothing reaches the cabin.”
He strode out. The whoosh of his wings as he shifted and took flight carried through the wall.
And now I was alone. Or at least, I appeared to be. Crag had indicated that Lance was out roaming the swamp, but he hadn’t said anything about Torrent.
I wandered from one end of the room to the other, peering through the window. I could have gone outside and called for Lance, but keeping an eye out for murderous intruders was obviously more important than alleviating my boredom.
My restlessness crawled over my skin. I couldn’t go anywhere except in this cabin and around the deck. I couldn’t even climb the freaking trees without becoming a target.
Less than a week ago, I’d been climbing up skyscrapers, and now my world had shrunk to the size of a goldfish bowl.
Did my shadowkind protectors even understand how much it mattered to me to get out of this place? Keeping me here was easy for them. They could come and go whenever they wanted.
My gaze settled on the patch of shadow under the makeshift shelf I’d fixed to the wall by the head of the dining table. I couldn’t tell whether Torrent was there—or in any of the other shadows around the room. But he didn’t seem to venture out of the cabin as often as the others did.
I debated asking him to show himself and balked. He stayed in the shadows most of the time for a reason, didn’t he? I didn’t want to put him in pain just to ease my loneliness.
He could still hear me in the shadows anyway, like he’d said. Maybe… maybe I should make sure he knew why I wanted to get home so badly. I’d gotten the impression I’d earned a bit of good will from him with the chair and the wall fixture. If he could see how much I was losing with every day I had to spend here, he might work toward a solution a little harder, right?
It couldn’t hurt anything to tell him.
I sank sideways into the chair at the head of the table, which put my face level with the patch of shadow. Staring straight at the wall felt strange, so I leaned my shoulder against the back of the chair and gazed vaguely toward the kitchen.
“I want you to know that I appreciate everything the three of you have done for me,” I said, tuning out the awkwardness of talking to empty air and my doubts about whether anyone was even here to listen to me. “I mean, you saved my life. I would have died without your help. I’d be dead right now if you all decided it wasn’t worth the hassle of looking after me anymore and took off. So I don’t… It’s not that I’m ungrateful.”
No response. No indication at all that anyone had heard me. Oh, well. I soldiered on determinedly.
“The only reason I’m impatient to get home, or back to my old life however I can—well, okay, there are a lot of reasons—but the biggest one is that I really don’t know how much life I have left at all. I told you about my heart transplant…”
My hand rose to trace the line of the scar where it ran down my sternum. “I guess you wouldn’t realize because shadowkind don’t do things like organ transplants. You only have to worry about dying if some bigger creature attacks you. But there’s a time limit on these things when it’s not your own organ, a lot shorter than even a regular human life. The average transplanted heart lasts twelve years. I got mine nine years ago. Since I was so young, the doctors say there’s a good chance I’ll get a little more time… but I could also get less. You never know for sure. It could start to fail on me any day.”
I dragged in a breath and kept going despite the silence around me.
“I’ve accepted that fact. I don’t know if you can grasp what it’s like to not just know you’re going to die, but that there’s a significant chance you could die really soon, but… it sucks. It sucks, but I dealt with it. I might get another donated heart, if there’s one that’s a match at the right time—or I might not. And even if I’m lucky and do, that’ll just add another ‘average twelve’ years to my life. It gets me to my thirties. Still not even half a full life for a human.
“So I’ve been busting my ass trying to cram everything I can into the life I’ve got. Experiencing things, accomplishing things…” I glanced toward my bedroom, thinking I should have brought my sketchbook but hesitant to interrupt whatever momentum I’d built up. “I want to design buildings—for people to live or work in. I might be able to see at least a couple constructed if I can finish college soon enough, if I make connections with the right people.”
The room around me stayed perfectly still. I swiped my hand across my face, emotion starting to clog my throat. I willed it down like I had so many times over the past several years.
“Anyway, that’s the thing. There are monsters waiting out there to kill me. But this heart could kill me without my ever leaving this cabin. And I’m not sure whether I’m more scared of the ‘beasties’ or the possibility that I might lose my chance to do and feel and have at least a little more of what this world can offer. So if there’s anything at all we could try or that I could help with that has even a tiny chance of letting me leave here, I’d want to give it a shot. I thought you should know that.”
In the continuing silence that followed, a heavy weight sank through my abdomen. I rested my arm on the top of the chair back and tipped my head against it, closing my eyes.
This was stupid. I’d probably been talking to no one but myself the whole time.
Then a gentle pressure grazed my temple. As I opened my eyes, it stroked tentatively along the side of my face, warm and velvety soft.
I raised my head slowly. The thing that’d touched me retreated, but I could still make out the tip of a tentacle, a few inches of burgundy skin dappled with a couple of pale suckers, protruding from the patch of shadow as if part of that swath of darkness had condensed into solid form.
When I didn’t recoil, the narrow tip lifted toward me again and brushed over my cheek. It wasn’t a suggestion or a solution, but it felt like an answer. A confirmation that I wasn’t anywhere near as alone as it’d seemed a moment ago. He didn’t have answers yet, but he’d heard me. And he wanted me to know that.
“Thank you,” I said quietly. An ache spread through my chest that was as bittersweet as Mom’s voice on the phone.
I might not get to leave this place alive. This dull existence might be how I spent the last of my days. But I wasn’t on my own. That counted for something.