Chapter 38
EVER
It’s him. The boy from the Calderan forest. From my visions. From shadows. He’s not running away, for once.
And he’s not real.
Like Cam.
I turn to go, but he speaks.
“Wait, please.”
I stop. This wouldn’t be the first time I indulged in insanity.
“I don’t want to be alone anymore,” he says.
I understand that. Of course I do. He’s the making of my own mind. I wring my hands, committing to the madness. “What are you doing here?”
Those familiar eyes look at me, their pain too great for such a small body.
His hands grip his knees, covering the holes worn into his black pants.
Water drips from the gathered ankles onto his muddy bare feet.
Drops roll to the floor. “Zandrite found me in the woods days ago. He said he wanted me for his collection.”
“He locked you up?”
The boy stands and squeezes the water from his shirt, also black. “Yes, behind bars taller than me, but I escaped over the top of them when the room filled with water. Then I swam and swam. I thought I was going to drown until it suddenly went back down. And I ended up here.”
I might as well get answers before my mind sends him running again. “Who are you?”
“Atom.” He scrunches that freckled nose. “I think we should go.”
“You’re not real.”
“Okay.” He shrugs.
“Don’t you want to know why I’m here?”
“I know why.” He drops his voice to a whisper despite the empty passages. “Zandrite wants to kill you for your essence so he can return to the Immortal Realm.”
“How do you know about that?” I match his low voice.
His eyes roll to the side as he considers his response. “Because I only exist in your head, according to you.”
Then this imaginary boy walks right up to me and wraps those thin arms around my waist, the side of his face pressed into my belly, and hugs me so tightly it hurts my soul. The feeling is so foreign, I don’t know how my mind conjured it.
He pulls away and smiles up at me. “Let’s go. Where’s Milo?”
“He’s not here. And how do you know Milo?” I follow him out of the room and down the passage. “Where are you going?”
“To find Eli. He’s the first one.”
“Of course, my mind thinks you met him last year.” I roll my eyes at my own thoughts and further succumb to insanity with a sigh. “The first one for what?”
“The first one we find.” He walks surprisingly fast for his short legs, his feet squelching in the mud with each step.
“This is crazy.” I throw my arms down. “I can’t follow a child that doesn’t exist into passages I’ve never seen.”
What’s wrong with me? I want to believe, if for no other reason than to not be alone. But anyone who smiles, who hugs, whose presence is a comfort—they’re more likely to be my own attempt at company, a fictional friend… someone I can kill off when my own mind turns on me.
“Trust me, this is the way.” He tugs me along.
“I don’t trust anyone. Especially not myself.”
He pivots, stopping short in front of me, hands on his hips. “You’re worse than you said.”
“What? When?”
“Nothing. Come on.” With a final pull, Atom hurls me around a corner.
I trip over a body.
Catching myself much too late, I whirl back. “Eli!”
He lies face up, head lolled to the side, eyes open. Wet curls stick to his light brown skin, now shaded blue, as if starved for oxygen. As if he’d drowned. I kneel next to him, my hands landing on his chest. My fingers tremor as I skim over his smooth skin, cold as night.
“Give him a minute.” Atom waves a hand dismissively.
“I don’t understand. You can’t die.” I grab Eli’s jaw and point his face at me. “You hear me, you beautiful asshole? You don’t get to leave me. You said you couldn’t die, so wake the fuck up before I tack your balls onto the wall to admire before I fall asleep at night!”
“He’s not sleeping. He can’t.” Atom shakes the water from his shaggy hair, utterly unperturbed.
Breathing is impossible, as if I were back underwater, as if his last breath led to mine.
I collapse over his chest, my hair blanketing him.
And I cry. Because no matter how many times he’s told me he can’t die, and even after watching Kelter slit his throat, acceptance of such a concept is inconceivable when his body lies before me. Motionless. Breathless.
But his heart…? Could it truly stop while mine beats on?
I wipe away tears and position my ear over his chest. And there, under brown skin, beneath bone and cartilage…
is nothing. I focus on rousing the magic in me, the pain, and put my hands back on his chest. I shove down.
All my might. All my heart. So his will beat again.
Still nothing. So I pound my fist down onto his ribcage with that same call for pain.
He roars, his hand yanking the hair on the back of my head, then speaks in his usual teasing tone as though nothing had happened. “Wouldn’t you rather admire the feel of my balls slapping against your—”
“Child!” I yell to cut off Eli as I lift my head from his chest and free my hair.
He hitches one brow upward, a questionable reaction to the announcement of a non-existent child.
“You weren’t breathing. Your heart stopped. What… how… I don’t—”
“No,” he says, so firmly that I jolt back and sit on my feet.
I clutch my chest, barely able to get words out. “My heart. It was alone.” This feels dangerously close to breaking my promise.
“Your heart will never be alone. If it tries to run from me, I’ll chase it down and chain it up as many times as I need to, but it’ll never get away—like you.”
I want to let my heart run free and test his claim.
“It could,” Atom says. I look at him, his face stuck in an apologetic expression.
I turn back to Eli and feel the beat in his chest with my hand, reminding myself of how real he is, of every thrust it took to believe it.
“And I never left.” He sits up and sucks in a breath as if testing his lungs. “I was fully aware, able to hear and feel everything. I couldn’t move until my body healed enough from drowning.”
I wince but can’t stay away from death. “What was it like?”
His forehead creases, and his eyes become vacant. “Like nothing was my choice. I never let the water in—my body did. It gave up. Then I was calm. Even with all the panic from Kelter in my head.”
“Why? He knows you can’t die.”
“He still had to feel everything I felt. But that wasn’t why he was yelling. He was worried about you.”
“Oh.” I suck in my lower lip, pulled too many ways. I never considered Kelter would feel the good and the bad, like the pain every time I put my hands on Eli before. “I need to find him.”
“I know,” he says, with no resentment.
“And I know where he is.” Atom crosses his arms. “He’s kind of important.”
No snide response from Eli about how much more important he is? Then he really can’t see the kid, and I’ve locked myself into permanent delusion. Wonderful. No child. I smile. “You’re not worried I only want another look at Kelt’s ass?”
“You can look all you want. You would have fucked him if you wanted pale, twerp ass.”
I lean in close, my lips brushing his, my voice low and teasing. “You would have felt every bit of the second-hand fuck.”
His cheek twitches once, the rest of his face indifferent. “And I would have felt my knife disemboweling him after too.”
Blood drains from my face. “You wouldn’t? I’d become a Half Link.”
“Maybe.”
“I shouldn’t be surprised. You sent a child-killer to hang out with me for a year.”
“So we’re going to talk about his ass instead of finding it?” Atom asks, kicking his attitude up a notch.
Damn my brain. Disappear, kid!
“Would you rather kick his ass?” Eli asks, leaning past me to look at Atom. “Because that can be arranged.”
“You can see him?”
Eli eyes me curiously. “This is the kid that claimed you could fix my broken immortality and knows exactly what I am.” He gives Atom a second look. “A head taller than he was a year ago, but still a brat.”
I thought I made that conversation up. I thought he was another Cam, a lie, a sign of madness.
“And you’re still a jerk off,” Atom tosses back.
I stand up, still reeling over Eli’s acknowledgement of his existence. “How old are you? And where are your parents?”
He stiffens, arms locking at his sides and chin raised as if to appear taller. “I’m eight and a half.”
“And your parents?” I prod.
“They’re not… ready.” He shuffles his feet. “I told you. I’m alone.”
I suppose I should say something like not anymore or stick with us, kiddo and slap a smile on my face, but that’s not me. I nod. “Same.”
“No parent in this realm wants their kid around past the first year, not since the Separation,” Eli says as he rises, either an unexpected attempt to comfort him or simply a tragic fact.
Atom swallows down feelings with a visible gulp, as though he’s no stranger to pain. “Let’s go. He needs us. And Milo too.”
Eli’s blue tinge remains, a post-death haze in his eyes as he speaks. “I don’t know where you think Kelter is, but he says he’s fine. We’re getting out of the Underbroke and looking for the others in the teva fields. I told them to meet me there.”
“Then he’s lying.”
I stop rubbing layers of drying mud from my arms and kneel in front of him. “What makes you think that?”
“I just know, okay? Please. Zandrite has this huge room where the main roots of the teva plants come through the ceiling. He feeds them bodies, and they give him special drops to keep him alive. His mortal body was never supposed to last this long. And the Centress has been working with him so he would share the drops with her. That’s how she’s lived longer than all the other adults and doesn’t act like a Half Link even though her link died years ago. ”
“I thought he kept you locked up.”
“Yeah.” Atom’s lower lip trembles. “He did.”
“I’ve known him for hundreds of thousands of years and never seen any of that.” Eli looks around the dim, muddy room as though it held answers.
“It’s true. He feeds the teva roots the losers from the Scrape, but first he drains their blood and takes out their bones. That’s how they like it. But it’s not enough for them. So he only feeds the Half Link women the blood of the men to make them weak, but I’ve seen some sneaking meat.”
Saliva gathers beneath my tongue. Nausea rolls through me. Down to my toes. “And that makes them live less time?”
“Yes.” He nods his head slowly, reluctant to continue.
“He adds something to it that eats their bones.” A tear escapes, streaking through the light layer of mud and revealing fair skin and freckles on his cheek.
“They can’t move to eat or drink, so they die.
It takes the work out of it for Zandrite. He only has to drain their blood.”
I grab hold of Eli’s leg to keep myself from swaying too far. I try to stand back up and fail. “We have to find Kelt.”
Eli pulls me up with a yank. “He wants to stay here a while.”
“He can’t. He’s not a Half Link. I’m still alive.
” I make a move toward the passage, but Eli captures my wrist with a bone-bruising strength and pulls me back to him.
I’m about to complain, but his eyes are not his own.
Only specks of dark brown show through the hazel spattering of color.
He twists my arm behind my back and tugs me into him.
“He’s your link, but he’s in my head.”
My throat tightens. “I can’t leave him. Tell him to come with us.”
Brown filters back through his eyes, drenched in so many emotions I can’t pick one out. “He wants us to go without him.”
I nearly buckle at the blow he delivers.
The room shifts, and a crack slithers down the wall.
Everything external seems to shove Kelter and me together, but we push ourselves apart.
He wants to stay here? With hairy Zandrite and Paisel?
I don’t know if he wants to be away from me because of Eli or because I wouldn’t give in to my urges with him.
Or because I push him away and still expect him to be close.
Whatever the reason, it hurts. Like a piece of me is trying to rip itself free from my body, and I need it to breathe.
He’s my friend. I know he is. Everything is just all messed-up right now.
“That’s not true!” Atom tries to pull me out of Eli’s grasp. “It’s not his choice.”
“There’s no point in going after someone who doesn’t want to leave. I’m meeting the others.” Eli moves his hand to my hair, wrapping it around his fist and splattering water to the ground. He tips my head back and kisses my neck. “Are you with me?”
Always. Except that’s the last thing he wants to hear. I push away. “Never.”
He groans, so quiet I feel it more than hear it. He tugs my hair back harder and hisses in my ear, lips cold as death grazing my skin. “It’s so much more fun when you resist.”