CHAPTER 21 #2
I fell back with a horrified cry, frantically scooting backward until my spine smacked into the bathroom wall.
Struggling to breathe, to discern reality from memory, I pulled my knees to my chest and stared wide-eyed at the body.
One second, it was Sydney, and the next, my precious childhood friend.
Back and forth, back and forth, present and past blurred together.
Bombarded by memory after memory, I couldn’t move, couldn’t think.
My eyes stayed glued to the body, burning so fiercely that I thought for sure it would happen this time.
I waited, waited for it to happen. Wanting it to happen, needing it to happen.
The pressure, the guilt was too much. I had to release it somehow.
Cry already. CRY!
Something vibrated in my hand, and it took me way too long to realize what it was. Shaking, trembling so hard that I almost dropped it, I raised the phone to my ear and accepted the call.
“Winter?”
My lips were numb. I couldn’t feel them.
“Winter, answer me.”
I opened my mouth and uttered a sound. “Help.” The word was so threadbare that even I couldn’t hear it. Yet, somehow, he did.
“Where are you?” Thorne said, his annoyance and frustration suddenly gone. In their place was a quiet calm, a reassurance that I desperately latched onto.
“In . . . in the bathroom.”
“Which one?”
Sydney’s body became Juliana’s again, and a panicked whimper left me.
“Winter, I can’t get to you if you don’t talk to me. Now, focus. Which bathroom are you in?”
I forced myself to swallow, to peel my eyes off Jewel’s—Sydney’s—body so I could better focus. Thorne patiently waited, his breaths steady over the speaker, so full and alive that I used them to ground me, to guide me back to reality, to the here and now.
He was alive, and so was I, and I needed to tell him where I was.
The words were garbled and all mixed up at first, but I finally managed to straighten them out, enough for him to roughly guess where to find me.
“I’m coming, Snowflake. Don’t hang up.”
I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t dare. His voice was the only thing keeping me in the present, keeping me sane.
“Keep . . . keep talking,” I whispered, and he did.
He talked about anything and nothing, mentioning the weather and how big the full moon was the other night.
He talked about food, confessing that he needed to eat more fruits and vegetables.
Talked about Oz constantly leaving his books everywhere and Riku sneaking girls into their dorm.
By the time I heard a noise at the bathroom door, I was able to breathe again, the tremors in my body no longer violent. The door opened, and I lifted my eyes, expecting to see Thorne come through. When he didn’t, panic tightened my throat once more.
“It’s just Comet,” Thorne spoke through the phone. “I sent him ahead to make sure you were okay.”
I dropped my gaze and finally saw the large bird, who’d somehow managed to push open the heavy door all by himself. His clawed feet faintly tapped the stone floor as he quickly scanned the bathroom’s interior, taking in Sydney’s body before zeroing in on me.
As our eyes locked, I heard Thorne murmur over the phone, “Good job, buddy.”
The relief in his tone was clear, and I knew that the hawk familiar was using their telepathic connection to tell Thorne what he was seeing.
“He’s going to approach you now,” Thorne said to me. “Just hold still. He won’t hurt you.”
I watched the bird hop-walk across the bathroom, uncertain what he planned to do. When he stopped beside me, I just stared at him, too frozen to do anything else. He was suddenly on my forearm, then my bent knees, climbing up so swiftly that I barely felt the pricks of his claws.
His head was now even with mine, so close that he could easily dart forward and peck my eyes out.
But that wasn’t what he did. Instead, he leaned forward and nuzzled his forehead against my cheek.
The feel of his soft feathers, combined with the weight of his presence, had an instant effect on me.
Some of the panic holding me captive started to fade, along with the icy chill in my veins.
When the hawk rubbed against me again, I lifted my free arm and pulled him closer, surprised when he tucked his body beneath my chin and snuggled down like a pet.
The second I felt the swift rise and fall of his chest, I squeezed my burning eyes shut and released a quiet sob.
I gathered him tightly to me, burying my face in his feathered body. So warm. So full of life.
I heard a chuckle over the phone. “He doesn’t mind the hug, but your grip is a little too tight.”
“Oh.” I relaxed my hold on the bird, and he chirped as if to thank me.
Less than a minute later, the door burst open.
Comet didn’t react, and his calming presence kept me from spiraling into a panic again.
Thorne was the first to enter, and not surprisingly, Oz and Riku weren’t far behind.
They’d been preparing their own students for the upcoming end-of-semester trial, but they still watched me and Thorne train during my free period.
Seeing me huddled in the corner and clutching Comet for dear life while a dead body lay on the floor had them all filing in with somber expressions. As they took in the scene, it suddenly dawned on me how terrible it looked. How damning.
“I didn’t . . . I didn’t do it,” I stammered. All three of them focused on me, no doubt hearing the hesitation in my voice. The uncertainty.
I didn’t kill Sydney Wright. I didn’t.
Didn’t you? a voice breathed in my ear, sending another foreboding chill up my spine.
Comet squirmed in my grip, and I quickly dropped my arms, certain he’d picked up on the uncertainty as well, the guilt. With a flutter and hop, he left my lap, and I immediately felt lost again.
They didn’t believe me. Of course they wouldn’t. I’d killed before, after all. The body splayed in the grass had looked just like Sydney’s. Untouched. Not a mark on it. No sign of how the murder had happened, only that it had.
And I was the only one who could have done it.
Panic shortened my breaths once more, the suffocating guilt making the walls around me cave in.
Murderer. Murderer!
Just when I felt myself start to break, to shatter, the sound of a glass rolling across the floor reached my ears.
“Look,” Oz said. He bent down to pick up whatever Comet had nudged out from beneath the sinks, lifting what appeared to be a potion vial.
One experimental whiff, and he jerked the bottle away from his face.
“Yeah, that’ll do it. A student last year took Nox Serum to stop their own heart.
Looks like Sydney drank the whole bottle. ”
I heard his words, heard Riku sadly mutter, “Another suicide,” but I was still lost. Still drowning in guilt, so much guilt.
My gaze dropped to the body again, but before I could see if it was Sydney or Juliana this time, a big muscular wall blocked her from view.
Long legs crouched before me, and a hand reached out, hesitating a moment before gently grasping my chin.
“Winter.”
My eyes flew up to Thorne’s. Expecting his face to be twisted in anger, hatred, or that terrible devastation I’d hoped to never see again, confusion swamped me when I found tenderness instead, his expression soft in a way I didn’t know it could.
“I didn’t do it,” I repeated, waiting for that soft look to vanish, for condemnation to take its place.
Murderer.
Unable to keep the guilt inside any longer, I cried, “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to!”
I braced for the look to drastically change, to fill with hatred. No matter what I said, no matter how many times I apologized, he would always hate me for what I did.
And I couldn’t blame him. I didn’t blame him. Not even a little.
But the look only softened more, filling with worry instead of hate. How? How could he even stand to look at me, to touch me, after what I’d just done?
“Winter, you didn’t do this. She killed herself,” I heard Oz say.
I frantically shook my head, almost dislodging Thorne’s grip on my chin. “No, she didn’t. She would never do that. She was a ray of sunshine, overflowing with joy and always making me laugh. She would . . . she would never do this. Never leave me.”
Another sound left me. Broken. Shattered. Dredged from the very center of my being. A violent tremor ripped through me, clacking my teeth together.
“I did this. I did this. I—”
“She’s in shock,” another voice said over my repeated confession.
Riku.
“I know,” another voice replied, this time Thorne.
Why did he sound so sad? Knowing that I had caused his sadness, more guilt pressed down on me.
A choked cry left me, and I tried to lower my head in shame.
Thorne cupped my face in both hands and lifted it back up, forcing me to meet his eyes again.
“Come back to me, Snowflake. You didn’t kill her. This isn’t Juliana.”
Looking into his eyes was too much. The pain. The pain in them. I couldn’t breathe.
“Just kill me,” I whimpered, begged him. “I know you want to, and it’s what I deserve after what I’ve done. She was your sister. Sister. I can’t live with myself anymore. Can’t live with the guilt. So just kill me, Thorne. Please. Just—”
“Winter, stop.”
Horror had flooded his gaze, but I couldn’t stop now that I’d started. A dam that I’d tried to hold back for far too long had just cracked, just burst, and everything I’d been suppressing was gushing out.
“I’m a monster. I’m dark and evil, and witches like me shouldn’t exist. I’m dangerous, and I need to be stopped, so just do it already. Just kill me.”
“Winter, stop talking this way!” Thorne roared, shaking me hard enough that I felt my brain rattle. “It’s not her. It’s not Juliana! So just stop. Please, stop!”
His pain, his horror, his panic. It hit me all at once like a sledgehammer, and I stopped, just stopped, staring at him with wide burning eyes still dry as a bone, feeling lost, so very lost.
“Thorne.”
One little whimpered word, and his expression crumbled.
“I know, Snowflake, I know,” he whispered, the softness returning. “It’s okay. Come here.”
I didn’t understand, too frozen in confusion to resist when he reached forward and pulled me to him.
Still in a crouched position, he fitted my body between his legs and banded both arms behind me, locking me against him.
My head fit perfectly beneath his chin, pressed to him in such a way that I quickly picked up the strong thump-thump of his heart.
Everywhere. He was everywhere.
In the back corners of my mind, alarm bells went off.
But as his scent, his warmth, his life force wrapped around me, the warnings faded away.
Relief, soul deep relief hit me like an avalanche, and I buried my face and fists in his shirt, melting into his comforting embrace.
When a shuddering sob left me, he tightened his arms even more, his powerful thighs bracketing my lower half.
“It’s okay, Snowflake,” he breathed against my hair, warming my scalp. “I’m here now. You’re safe.”
Safe. There was that word again. A word that didn’t belong in my world.
But in his arms like this, being held, being surrounded like I was something worth protecting . . .
I could no longer deny that I felt absolutely, assuredly safe.