Chapter 52
Chapter
Fifty-Two
Even with his closed eyes, Mason could see the hot glare of florescent lights as they blasted through his eyelids. He tried to speak, his voice hoarse and muffled as he realized something was cupping his mouth.
“Dr. Evans?”
It was a man’s voice, calling to him from a distance.
“Dr. Evans? Can you hear me?”
The voice was close now. Someone pried his eye open, another white flash darting left and right across his visual field. He was able to focus in on the beeps, consistent like a metronome. Was he hooked up to a heart monitor?
“He’s awake,” the man said as Mason stirred. “Stop the oxygen.”
He felt cool air against his face, the string that had been cutting into his cheeks finally giving way as the mask was removed. Slowly the room came into focus—white ceiling, white walls. It wasn’t Annabelle’s. It wasn’t home.
“You’re at the hospital,” a gentle voice told him. It was familiar—young and sweet. “You sucked up a lot of smoke.”
“Looks like he’s stable.” It was the man again. He recognized the name on the tag: Dr. Callahan. “I’ll leave him to you.”
As the figure in the white lab coat retreated from the room, another face came into view. “Damn it, Mason, I should have kept you home.”
It was Annabelle, the lines of her face stricken with worry as she peered down at him.
“I’m sorry,” he croaked. He tried to swallow, but his mouth was parched. He looked past Annabelle to see Jazlyn marking something off on his chart, realizing she must have been the woman who spoke first.
Annabelle sighed shakily. “You had me worried sick. You were gone for days without a word.”
Days? How many days? He was afraid to ask, afraid to even think about it. He looked around the room, taking in the brown bulletin board and the poster advocating for a medication he didn’t recognize. “How’d I get here?”
Jazlyn put the chart down and came over to stand by the bed. “There was a forest fire. It was contained, but you were there when it happened. Firefighters found you unconscious on the ground.”
The mention of fire sent a splitting jolt through Mason’s skull. The Dreamwalker’s face invaded him—the pandemonium he had been in the midst of.
“What happened to the search party?” he asked, squeezing his eyes shut to banish the memory.
The two women looked at one other, their expressions wary. “You were the only one they found,” Jazlyn swallowed, “alive.”
Mason’s lethargy dissipated as he stared at them, searching for a hint that there was something more to be said, but neither of them so much as parted their lips. They simply stared back, concern written on their faces as they waited for him to react. Mason forced down the bile.
“I see.”
He mentally thumbed through the people he’d met. They were all gone now, casualties in a war between gods. But why had he been spared? And what of Kai, Miya, and Ama? Were they safe?
Mason had never been so close to the edge, so intimate with Lady Death that he could feel her breath on his face. It was like honey laced with arsenic. He opened his mouth to speak only to find that some invisible force had him locked in a chokehold. His throat constricted, and his eyes stung like someone had poured lemon juice into them. Tears streamed down his face as the acid ate away his mask. His chest heaved as all the confusion that had taken root over the duration of his journey blossomed into something terrifying and exquisite—a hopeless reverence for feelings with no words to describe them, and a crushing awareness of the unknowability, the sheer futility, of his quest for credence.
The poison was the cure.
“I saw her...I saw her,” he sobbed quietly as Annabelle rushed to comfort him, throwing her arms around his shoulders and stroking his hair.
And the wolf. Mason had always known the shadow under the willow was the wolf. Annabelle had told him as much; he just couldn’t bear to accept it. The prospect of a magical world terrified him.
Jazlyn remained frozen. She likely never dreamed of seeing such a display from him.
“I’m sorry.” He pulled back after the tears ran dry. “I’m all right, honestly.”
When neither of them responded, he forced a smile. “Would you mind leaving me alone for a bit? I know you’re worried, but I’m fine, I promise. I just can’t believe I put you both through this.”
“Don’t you worry about us,” Annabelle reassured him. “We’re just glad to see you breathing.” She smiled at Jazlyn, who nodded back as she gathered her shoulder bag under her arm.
“You know where to find us,” she chirped.
Mason kept his eyes fixed on the ceiling. His mouth wouldn’t form words, even as he tried to give her an inkling of acknowledgement. There was a pause before he heard them shuffling around, whispering something to one another as they left the room.
He was grateful for the silence, the quiet helping to calm some of the horror that still lingered in his bones. He tried to retrace his footsteps and recollect every instance in those woods, every decision that led to this moment. But it was all a jumble of madness and incoherence, and there was nothing he could do to fix that. He felt stranded on a plank of wood left floating in the middle of the ocean.
Had he been selfish? Had his idealism been wrong? He remembered Kai, crushing those men to protect Miya. And there was his superior—the tired old doctor he’d sneered at for being too afraid to care.
But maybe Kai and Dr. Lindman were right. They disowned idealism, forsook moral perfectionism, but at the end of the day, they accomplished what Mason couldn’t: they saved lives.
Amanda might have lived twice as long had she been in the care of a jaded man more committed to grim truths than his own ego.
As for Mason’s vacation—he was no closer to overcoming his grief than when he’d left home. He could still see Amanda’s face; he could still feel the painful squeeze of loss deep in his chest.
But there was something besides the grief and the desperate scramble to be rid of it. Finally, he allowed himself to surrender to the humility grief demanded. He was done with Kai Donovan’s blood, and he was done with the Dreamwalker.
Sitting up, Mason unhooked himself from the equipment and tested his limbs. He could still taste the smoke, but he ignored it. There was a world full of air he could breathe. He didn’t have to remain in the haze just to check if he was suffocating.
Grabbing his clothes, he took his time dressing, then folded the hospital gown and left it on the edge of the bed. Glancing down at the admittance bracelet, he caught the name of the hospital curving around his wrist.
Ashgrove & District Hospital.
He tugged on the edge and tore it off.
“I think it’s time to go home.”
As he opened the door, he patted himself down to check for his wallet. It was exactly where he’d left it, though there was something else bulging from his coat pocket. Reaching in, Mason felt around for the triangular object, his fingers running over the familiar cracks. It was different now, smaller, one of the three sides more jagged than he remembered. It was broken, half of it missing.
He couldn’t just banish Kai Donovan and the Dreamwalker. He’d tried with Amanda, and he’d failed. He wouldn’t make the same mistake again. Pulling out the fractured stone, Mason sucked in a shaky breath. The Dreamwalker had taken off her mask and shown him her face. She had given him the truth he so desperately wanted. At last, Mason knew who she was: Miya, the girl from the village.
“Guess you’re here to stay,” he mumbled, then placed half of her favourite stone back in his pocket for safe-keeping.
As he stepped out of the room, there was a group of people passing in the adjacent hallway. Among the many bodies, he caught a glimpse of something familiar—a lock of white hair, stark against a dark leather jacket. Time went still. Amber eyes twinkled with mischief and plump, pink lips quirked in a knowing smile.
The jaws of the white wolf seized Mason by the throat. Her presence reminded him of the only truth he could ever be sure of—a truth that survived the question of whether wolves walked among men, of whether fairy tales leapt from storybooks and crept among alleyway shadows. It came at him like the plague from Pandora’s Box, the final words spoken to him by a phantom living in the dark crevice of a fable.
Everything beats in cycles.