Chapter 31
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
I would’ve stayed there for hours, keeling on the ground whilst staring numbly at the clearing of thistlebane. I’d stopped clawing at the weeds when more grew in the place of those I tore out by the root. My fingers were stained purple from the smudged petals and broken stems. I rocked back, breathless and desperate. How had I not worked it out? Caym, and his powers, his voice.
A demon. He had been a demon.
Movement caught my eye, reminding me of the world existing outside of my grief. I drew my gaze away, looking down the narrow pathway ahead of me. Just as they stepped out of view, I saw a person. And not just anyone.
‘Romy!’ I shouted, pushing myself to standing. My cheeks were slick with tears, my mind captured by the unfathomable realisation as to what my familiar had been. The lies, and all the questions that came with them.
The one that didn’t leave me was knowing how Caym came into my life. My mother had summoned him to protect me. That proved that she had, in fact, known of the monsters. Was this the power of the Grand High?
A power that would fall into the hands of the Witch Hunters if I didn’t stop them?
‘Find me.’ Romy’s sleepy voice caught on the wind. Just as it reached me, she turned down another part of the maze, disappearing from view. I ran, chasing after her. It took little time to reach the end of the earthy path, the maze walls so thick that light couldn’t penetrate them. They were so high that there was no hope of climbing over them. I turned the corner, which gave view to a shorter, narrow pathway.
Romy stood at the end with her back to me, as if she was waiting.
Tears dried on my cheeks, my chest aching from the sudden use of energy, fingers stained from the blood of my familiar and the smudging of the thistlebane.
‘Romy’ The moment her name slipped out of my mouth, she was running again. ‘Wait!’
It continued like that for a while. Me chasing Romy, calling after her, begging for her to stop. I swallowed the urge to vomit, not from exhaustion, but from fear. Horror. Because no matter how hard I ran, or how I urged myself not to stop, I couldn’t reach to her.
I’d just rounded a corner, so close to Romy that I tried to reach out and grasp the back of her shirt. But she slipped through my fingers. Not figuratively. Literally . Her body evaporated, shifting to tendrils of smoke.
Dread crept across my stomach, making it grip in pain. I was left standing dumfounded at a crossroads. Romy, or whoever— whatever that thing had been, had led me here for a reason.
I quickly discovered why.
My eyes focused on the well-trodden ground between my fingers. A body lay there, waiting. There were the shattered remains of a bow beside the body, a quiver of arrows discarded like toys across the ground. The dread melted to fear, and all of a sudden, I lost the ability to breathe. My first thought was the corpse had to belong Romy. That she was the ghost who’d taunted me, had led me here to find her body.
Dead. Like Caym. Gone.
I knelt on the ground, hands shaking, reaching for the corpse. Their back was to me, so I couldn’t see their face. But I could see that there was so much blood. It soaked the ground, coated the back of the corpse’s head. It wasn’t until I carefully rolled it onto its back that I saw the truth of what waited.
I clapped a hand to my mouth, stifling a gasp. It was Jaz. I could tell as much from the left side of her face. The right side, however, had been completely melted off. I could see the outline of a handprint, a reminder as to who had done this.
Romy been here. Not that ghost the maze had conjured, but the real Romy. And, by the looks of it, she was the only one to go free.
There was a small part of me who felt to blame for Jaz’s death. I understood her need for revenge better than anyone. It was part of how cruel this world was to people like us. But, looking down at the ruination of her face, neck, and chest, I was just glad it wasn’t Romy who was lying here.
‘ My darling boy.’
I snapped my head up from Jaz’s body, searching for the person who’d just spoke. It sounded like the wind had whispered from the path I’d just run through. But when it came again it was at my side.
‘I’m here. ’
But the paths going east and west were empty. Long narrow walkways of towering walls of thorn and ivy, the far end of it shrouded in a mist.
‘ Come, my darling boy.’
I pinched my eyes closed, pressing the heels of my palms into my eyes. In the dark of my mind, colours and stars burst. The voice was so familiar, yet so distant that I couldn’t place it. ‘This isn’t real. None of this is real.’
‘Yes, my darling boy. It is real. I am real. Come to your mummy. I wish to get a good look at you. It has been so many years. Have you forgotten about me?’
I felt the shift of something before me, the presence of a shadow passing over light. Slowly, cautiously, I opened my eyes to find both my worst nightmare, and my life’s only wish, kneeling before me.
My mother. She was here. Her pale golden-brown hair floated around her shoulders as if she was in a body of water. She wore a blue flowery dress with brown slip-on brogues and a creamy knitted cardigan, the same clothes I had last seen her in. An image which had been engraved in my mind.
‘This…isn’t real.’
Mother pouted, tipping her head to the side as her eyes filled with sadness. I did nothing to stop her lifting deft fingers and trailing them down the side of my cheek. ‘Of course I’m real. You know my voice, you remember it, don’t you? You’d never dare forget your own mother, would you, my darling? ’
‘Never,’ I sobbed. I leaned into her hands, waiting to feel the soft kiss of her skin against mine. All I felt were my tear-sticky cheeks against heavy air. ‘But I…can’t I feel you?’
‘ Shall we play a game, Hector? ’ Her voice sounded far away. In a blink she was no longer kneeling before me, but standing at the entrance to the path ahead of me. I got up, body moving without thought, already preparing for what was to come next. ‘Just like we used to do. That is what you want, isn’t it?’
‘I want…you. I want you to be here and alive.’
She smiled, so bright and beautiful my entire world shattered. ‘ Then you must catch me and never let me go…not like you did all those years ago when you sat back and listened to me die. Doing nothing.’
The fury in her tone chilled me to the core. Anger that no child, no matter how old they were, wanted to hear from their parent.
Her disappointment in me was palpable.
Before I could justify myself, my mother turned on her heel and ran.
I left Jaz’s corpse as nothing but a forgotten memory. Although I knew, deep down, this wasn’t real—that this vision of my mother was fake—I still didn’t stop running. I needed her more than life itself.
Because her voice had been the same. The voice I had forgotten after all those years, come back to life. That alone made me run fast and hard. The dulcet tones of my mother’s lullaby voice had me ignoring the burning acid in my muscles and the ache in every bone. I didn’t have enough air in my lungs to cry out or plead. I didn’t dare waste or misplace any energy. My only focus, my only desire, was reaching her again.
Whatever game the Dreading wanted me to play, I’d play it. Just to hear my mother again. If I’d have to run to the ends of the earth for a second more of her, I would.
But unfortunately, my body didn’t agree with me. One moment I was running down twisted pathways and the next, I hit the ground. My legs gave out, my feet blistered and bleeding within my boots. I smacked into the ground with such a force that the little breath I did have in my chest was forced out.
Before the world had even settled I was clawing at the earth, trying to pull myself forwards. I could see my mother at a distance, her body outlined with an unnatural wave of shadows. Even with the space between us, I could see the ever-growing disappointment in her eyes. She just stood, looking down at me, shaking her head.
I tried to get up, but I fell down again. Then mother turned her back on me and walked away.
‘Wait!’ I screamed, but the sound came out raspy and small. Dirt caked beneath my nails, thorns and small stones digging into my palms. ‘Mum, please. Come back.’
But she was gone. Her voice was gone. And I was alone.
That was what the Dreading was teaching me. My greatest fear.
I leaned back on my haunches and yelled at the red-washed sky. ‘I don’t fucking understand. What do you want from me?’
The Dreading was meant to make you face your greatest fear. How was this remotely a fear? Seeing my mother was torture, but it gave me hope. I’d already lost her— that had been my greatest fear, and I’d been living it for eighteen years. And Romy—I couldn’t understand how she played a part in this. Couldn’t the maze make me face spiders or deep oceans, or something rational? Whatever it wanted me to overcome wasn’t fucking clear.
‘Is this the best you can do?’ I screamed, unsure who I spoke to anymore. ‘I’ve spent my life chasing ghosts, and you think that is what I’m most scared of? Pathetic. This attempt is pathetic…’
Footsteps crunching over earth sounded at my side. I refused to look, to even pay mind to whatever the Dreading had conjured for me again. Who else would it make me chase? Who else would it taunt me with, knowing I would never reach them?
Was that my fear? Forever chasing those I loved whilst never being able to hold on them? Maybe. Either way, I ignored the footsteps, knowing whatever this illusion would be was only here to taunt me.
Then came the voice that turned my ice to blood.
‘Hector Briar, on his knees. What a pretty sight.’
I scrambled up, Gift brightening my eyes, ready to use it against the speaker. For once, I wished it was a ghost I was to face. Pretending was far easier than the truth.
Salem Tanner walked up the pathway at my side, shoulders back and a smile plastered across his face. His hands were outstretched beside him, a gesture that usually preceded the offer of a hug. And yet that was the very last thing I was willing to do.
Salem trailed his fingers across the thorn-knotted wall at his side, not caring for the pricks that would tear at his skin. ‘What do you fear so terribly that it has you howling at the sky?’
I didn’t speak, refusing to play this game with him anymore. Salem was the Witch Hunter. Romy had confirmed that. And whatever he’d done to her in the days she was missing had left Romy haunted. Broken. I refused to contemplate what that could’ve been.
‘Silent treatment? Oh, come on. Don’t be like that.’
My flesh prickled up my spine like hackles. ‘I have nothing to say to you.’
‘I only want to help you,’ Salem said, coming to a stop before me. ‘Don’t you want my help? Shouting and pleading to Hekate isn’t going to get you anywhere. Haven’t you worked it out yet? She turned her back on witches a long time ago.’
‘Just as you have?’ I asked, every limb of my body shaking.
Salem leaned his weight on one hip. ‘Well, between me, you, and these walls, I do have some personal issues I’m here to… exorcise. Witches, the Coven—they all let me down. They allowed my parents to die that night, then treated me like something so forgotten I could just be handed around, given up on. A lost cause.’
I felt as though I was finally seeing the truth behind his carefully constructed mask. Intuition never lied, and the boy I remembered Salem to be was the same nasty little prick I’d watch kill that helpless witch during the Culling.
‘I know what you are,’ I said.
‘I don’t doubt it. But have you worked out that the people around you are vipers? No one joins the Witch Trials without having a motivation.’
A shiver raced across the walls that cornered me in. My Gift leaked out of me, threading in with the maze, readying myself for the inevitable. ‘That isn’t an excuse for hurting people. Turning your back on witches. Painting them all with your tarred brush.’
‘Rich, Hector. Truly. How blind do you need to be to see that you are no better than me? How many people have you killed during the Witch Trials? And before it, how many lives did you take? Witch Hunters—are they all the same? Because last time I checked, you are the murderer. You are the monster. More than half of those Witch Hunters you ‘dealt with’—’ Salem used his fingers to make air-quotations to really drive home his point, ‘—they weren’t even born when their predecessors murdered our parents. Did you think about that when you slaughtered them like a wolf in a lamb’s pen?’
Murdered our parents.
Anger unfurled in me like a flower bud in bloom. ‘Do yourself a favour and keep their names out your mouth.’ One by one, twigs and thorns dislodged from the maze around me. They floated at my side, readying like fangs to strike Salem down. ‘Just as you so beautifully put it, I’ve hunted enough Witch Hunters in my time to know how you tick. Lies. Manipulation. I know the real viper, Salem. I’m staring at him.’
‘All this animosity, Hector. It pains me. I’d think you’d treat me with a little more kindness, considering you are the reason my entire family was killed.’
That stopped me. Like a fox in a trap, Salem ensnared me with his perfectly poised words. I opened my mouth, then closed it again, knowing there was no excuse or way around what he’d said. Finally, it was out in the open, the very thing I had toyed with since seeing him. The responsibility I felt on my shoulders the moment he stepped up to me during our first night here.
‘You owe me,’ Salem said. ‘And I’m willing to look past it all, to let bygones be bygones, as they say.’
‘I’m sorry…’ I said, my Gift faltering enough for Salem to step in close to me. ‘But?—’
‘But?’ Salem’s brows narrowed. ‘Didn’t your parents teach you never to follow an apology with a but… oh, wait. No, they didn’t, did they.’ His twisted laugh rolled over me. ‘How insensitive of me.’
I lifted my balled fist, ready to clock him on the jaw. But Salem was quicker—his movements so precise and effortless that they were clearly the result of training. All the pieces of this fucked up puzzle were slotting together in my mind.
‘I owe you nothing,’ I spat, ‘but the freedom from your fucked-up brotherhood.’
‘You’d take my family from me, again?’
His admission was sour and sweet. And clearly, Salem enjoyed this back and forth. He looked alive, bright-eyed like a child enjoying the thrill. Just the same as he had all those years ago. Pinching and pushing, playing with me like some toy he could break. For a second, I was back in the school playground, knee bleeding as Salem towered over me.
‘They are not your family, We are.’
‘ We as in the witches? Look around you—all families fight. You just have to pick the one you’ll survive in for the longest.’ Salem’s hot breath warmed against my face. ‘I could be your family. If you decided, we could do well together, you and I.’
It was my turn to laugh. ‘I’d rather die.’
‘Careful what you wish for, Hector.’
‘Shut the fuck up,’ I hissed, the monster inside of me thirsting for his blood.
I tried to pull free, but the spark of electricity itched beneath his palm and over my skin.
‘Don’t fight me,’ he drawled. ‘Remember, you owe me, I lost everything because of you.’
‘And what do you want me to do about it, Salem? Do you want me to bring them back? Do you want me to drop to the ground and grovel for your acceptance?’ I leaned in, teeth bared. ‘Because that’s not in my power, is it?’
‘Actually, you’re right,’ Salem said plainly. ‘I think getting you back on your knees is exactly what I want.’
A rush of sharp power crested over my body. It was a burst of electricity which didn’t scorch through me, but found the nerves in my body and manipulated them. For the second time since this Trial began, my legs gave out. Salem didn’t release my wrist, so my arm ached in its socket.
I reached out with my Gift, snatching the severed thorns from the ground. Salem twisted my arm, wrenching it from the socket completely with a pop. The pain was so sharp, I hissed in a breath and the world went black. When I opened my eyes again, it was to find two devilish eyes glaring at me, inches from mine. He’d opened the eye with the scar running through it, revealing a milky white colour coating a faded iris.
‘We don’t need to hurt each other, Hector. We can walk out of this Trial, both victors in our own right. But it’s important we do it together, okay?’
I nodded, giving in to him, pretending to play along. If I could manipulate him, make him think I was giving into his power, then I’d hope I got the chance to hurt him in return. ‘I don’t want to hurt you either.’
I want to destroy you.
‘Can I tell you a secret?’ Salem asked, but left me no time to answer before he continued. ‘I’ve always wanted you, Hector. I don’t enjoy seeing how others have wormed their way into your life, when I’m the one who has known you for the longest time…’
What surprised me next was not more pain. It was Salem crying. It was a strange sight to see. His single good eye filled with tears, and I couldn’t understand how a monster was capable of such emotion. ‘You can make me wait. You can play with my emotions and try to make me jealous. But you cannot deny that there is something between us. A tension that has only thickened in all the years we were kept apart.’
When I didn’t reply, his grip tightened, and I was confident now that my arm was no longer connected to my shoulder. If he dropped it, the arm would hang limp and useless. My other was pressed to his chest, slowly sensing the added force as Salem leaned closer and closer. His mouth was inches from mine. Cracked lips, stubble-lined jaws and the deep gouge left in his skin from the night his home was attacked by Hunters searching for my mother.
‘Tell me what you really want from me, Salem. I need to hear you say it.’
What I needed was time. I could blast his body away from me with a thought, but it would truly ruin my arm and make it impossible for me to continue to fight anyone else who attacked me. But there was no point worrying about surviving the Dreading if I didn’t survive Salem.
‘Everything,’ he hissed, spittle hitting my face.
Revulsion made my skin prickle. ‘That’s a lot to ask of someone you don’t know.’
‘I’m the only one that knows you, Hector. The only person who knew the boy from before, and will know the one that comes after…when you give me the chance. I want everything. I’m going to win this contest, become champion, and take the mantle of Grand High. It’s what I deserve. And you, dear Hector, will be waiting for me at the finish line.’
Salem was so close that I could feel the itch of his ruined lips against mine. I dared turn away even as I feared it would incite more of his electrifying sparks. But I couldn’t let him kiss me. I saw his desire for it glowing in his eye, the knowledge of what he wanted to do.
‘How…’ I stammered, cringing away as much as his hold on me allowed. ‘How do we get through this Trial?’
He traced a nail down my face, brushing it over my jaw and down my neck. I bit down on the inside of my lip until all I could taste was blood.
‘Face your fears. The Dreading looks inside your mind and plucks out your deepest fear. Instead of giving into it, play along. Prove to the Dreading that you are more than what rules you.’
Face your fears. Don’t play along. All this time, I’d been running after the conjurations of those I loved, when I had to prove to the entity behind this Trial, that I was stronger than it was.
My fear was being alone. Having everyone I loved taken from me. But how could I be scared of my reality now?
‘Hector,’ Salem exhaled against my mouth, ‘how about we give into our desires before beating this trial, together?’
Panic overwhelmed me, so thick and fast I thrust my skull up and cracked it into Salem’s nose. It shattered upon impact, and the sound was beautiful. Although my arm was numb, I relied on the heavy flop of it against my lap to prove Salem had released it. Then, as blood gushed down his face, I threw my free hand up, casting a wave of energy outwards. It tore Salem off the ground, throwing his body into the waiting wall of the maze.
With the help of my Gift, I rose to standing, clutching my limp arm. It was dislocated, but not broken, thank fuck.
Energy pulsed off me in undulant waves, keeping Salem pinned to the wall like a butterfly to a cork-board.
‘I’m not yours to touch, Salem Tanner. I wasn’t before and I’m sure as fuck not now.’
‘Then who do you belong to if not the boy you owe, the boy whose life you destroyed?’
‘Me,’ came a deep baritone voice from our side. I followed it, eyes tracing across the ground to where Arwyn stood. He was breathing heavily, his cheeks flushed red. His tense body took up most of the path, one hand fisted at his side, the other holding a familiar athame, its metal blade coated in fresh blood.
Salem spared a glance over his shoulder, directly to him, snarling and hissing as bolts of lightning lanced off his skin and charred the shrubbery around him. I silently begged for Arwyn to look at me, but he refused to take his eyes off Salem.
‘Like the mutt you are, brother. You never do stray far from your bone,’ Salem spat, eyes wide, his demeanour frantic. ‘It’s why you couldn’t be trusted alone.’
‘You don’t get to speak to him.’ My good hand tightened, encouraging my grasp on Salem’s body to do the same. I closed the space between us, refusing to allow such a sick and twisted prick get the last word. ‘You’re no one’s champion but death itself.’
Salem looked frantically between Arwyn and me. ‘You’d rather trust the fox to keep your flock safe, or the rifle that would kill it?’
He was desperate and making little sense. I didn’t know who he spoke to, or what it meant. None of it mattered.
When Arwyn spoke again, his words were so tempered, so hot that I was surprised the very air didn’t combust beyond his lips. I froze to the spot, inches from Salem, allowing Arwyn’s words to bore deep into me.
‘Lay another finger on what is mine , and you’ll die.’