Chapter Twenty-Seven
David had cried. Alone in his room in the dark, he had really, genuinely cried for the first time in years, for the first time since moving to Midnight Cottage, pressing his face to a pillow to muffle his uneven breathing and the occasional hiccuping sob.
It wasn’t that he believed crying to be humiliating or unmanly; he simply wasn’t the crying type, or the emotional type in general.
He hadn’t believed himself to be, anyway, but now he couldn’t seem to hold back.
Everything he’d been pushing aside for so long came flooding back at once: The death of his mother.
The distance he’d allowed to develop between himself and his father.
The relationship with his sister that had never had the chance to be.
Admitting to himself that he missed the closeness he’d once had with Harriet; that Charles’s words had hurt him; that he was furious at himself for allowing his infatuation with Jean-Marc to cloud his judgment, for allowing him even the chance to put his hands on Meredith, for remaining oblivious to dangers to which he himself was largely immune.
How lost he felt now, unable to see a clear path forward in life, and the one he’d begun to imagine abruptly cut off.
He must at some point have fallen asleep because he woke at three in the morning to Bianca whining and pawing at his door—quite out of the ordinary for her.
David tried to muster enough annoyance to drown out his misery, failed to do so, and kicked off the covers and opened the door.
“Fine,” he muttered, “I’ll let you out.” Really, it was unconscionable of Meredith to sulk to the point of neglecting his dog.
But when they reached the end of the hallway, Bianca ran not to the door but up the stairs.
“Absolutely not. I’m not going up there.
” David did not like to imagine that Bianca had the mental capacity to stage an attempt at reconciliation, but even if she did, he wasn’t going to fall for it.
Meredith had given him his answer, and there was nothing else but to accept it.
David did accept it, but that didn’t mean he wanted to be around him just now.
Bianca whined insistently.
“No, thank you. I’m going straight back to bed.” And he meant to, but he hesitated. If something was really wrong, he’d never forgive himself for ignoring it.
With a grudging sigh, he started up the stairs. “This had better be important.”
Meredith’s door stood open, his room empty. The bedsheets were rumpled, but as David doubted he actually ever made the bed, that told him nothing.
“So what, he went for one of his walks and didn’t take you with him?” It was more to reassure himself than Bianca, and it didn’t work.
Meredith’s shoes lay where they’d been kicked off; all his jewelry was scattered over the nightstand, including the pearls he’d had on tonight.
David found his gaze drawn toward the obsidian ring and slowly picked it out from amidst the small treasure hoard.
He rubbed at the carved surface of the stone as he glanced into the other second-floor rooms—empty—and made his way back down the stairs, the nape of his neck prickling.
“Meredith?” he called.
No answer.
Absently slipping on the ring, which just barely fit his little finger, David checked the downstairs rooms, and even glanced into the cellar. All were silent and empty.
In the open sliding doors to the deck, the gingham curtains rippled in the night breeze, and upon the table lay a note. David rushed to it, only to find that it was no note at all but a blank sheet of paper.
His heart plummeted. Flying to his room, he couldn’t get Mrs. Jupiter’s bracelet onto his wrist fast enough. He only prayed Meredith hadn’t removed his own—David didn’t think he’d spotted the brass bangle among the others upstairs.
Because no matter where things stood between them, no matter whether Meredith loved him, David wasn’t about to let anything happen to him.
The bracelet pulled him sharply and with no room for doubt in the direction of the Midnight Wood.
Fuck.
It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but still he’d held out hope.
David’s heart raced, but he forced himself to take a breath. There was no time to lose, but neither could he afford to rush into things unprepared. He shoved his feet into his boots and fumbled with the laces, fingers made clumsy by panic. Bianca cried all the while.
“You can’t go,” he told her. “Look, I’m sorry, I know you want to help, but you’ll—” He didn’t have the heart to say, You’ll only get in the way.
“I’d be afraid of losing you,” he said gently. “You know he’d never forgive me. Besides,” he added, inspired, “you’d be derelict in your duties. The royal hound must stay behind to guard the castle.”
That appeared to placate her, and he took a few final seconds to scribble a note of his own, Gone to the Midnight Wood, which he stuck on the glass sliding door. Should anything go wrong—a possibility that David was not going to think about—Mrs. Jupiter would find it sooner or later.
He stepped outside, closed the door behind him to prevent Bianca following, and took off at a sprint down the hill. He didn’t stop or slow, not even when he crossed through the trees and plunged into the humid pitch-black darkness of the Midnight Wood.
The pull of the bracelet was stronger than ever. David didn’t think proximity had anything to do with it, since it had been quite weak when he and Meredith had stood in the same room.
Urgency, on the other hand, seemed a likely possibility.
He said aloud, as if it would do any good, “I’m coming for you. Just hang on.”
David kept running. Shadows and rustlings in the darkness terrified him at every turn, and so did the knowledge of precisely whom he was about to confront, but still he didn’t stop.
Vainly he sought something to distract his mind, a poem or song to recite, but couldn’t come up with anything aside from the multiplication tables.
Was that why Meredith went around singing all the time?
But that was nonsense. He was never scared.
He’d stood up to a gang of neo-Nazis and kept his head when confronted by the Erlking and hadn’t even shied away from asking David uncomfortable questions.
David had never seen him intimidated by anything—at least not until his relatives had shown up.
“I’m sorry,” whispered David. “Meri, this should be the other way around. You’re the brave one. You’re the strong one. Not me.”
David was weak and cowardly, no matter how he might pretend.
He’d hurt someone he cared about for the sake of a half-baked plan to impress Maitland Cartier, who couldn’t care less about his existence.
He hadn’t been able to shake off a few put-downs from the Erlking.
He hadn’t put a stop to Florian’s hateful remarks or told off Lisl for her abominable behavior.
He hadn’t even been able to get Genevieve to call him by his proper name.
He hadn’t had the courage to ask Cartier for the one thing that really mattered, to spare the Midnight Wood—as much Meredith’s home as the cottage itself.
In the end, I really just wanted—
David had thought he’d understood, that Meredith’s losing bid had been the final straw after a particularly trying few weeks, but it wasn’t that, either.
It was David’s failure—his refusal—to do the one truly important thing Meredith had asked of him, and his own shameful attempt to flee in the night without so much as a word of warning.
Moonlight broke through the clouds, and the obsidian ring shone on David’s hand.
It bears an enchantment, Sylvania Holland had said, the ability to reveal that which is concealed.
That which was concealed—even from oneself. David understood now.
He was forced to slow as he picked his way through the brush, and replayed his last painful conversation with Meredith in his mind once more.
Whoever it is you’re in love with—if you ever decide to tell them, I hope they realize how lucky they are.
I think I’ve just about got up the nerve to tell him. Soon. Quite soon, actually.
David kicked himself. It was all so clear now, how they’d been talking at cross-purposes all this time. There had never been anyone else. Meredith had been trying to confess to him, and David had misread it entirely.
And when he’d said, Don’t, when he’d said, I can’t bear it, Meredith had thought—
“Fuck,” David said again, this time out loud. He followed it with every other curse word he knew and invented a few new ones. It failed to lessen the sting of the realization, of knowing he’d inflicted the same pain on Meredith that he’d felt himself, and needlessly at that.
And now, because of him, because he hadn’t been willing to admit even to himself how he felt until it was much too late, Meredith was about to lose himself to the Erlking—forever.
“No,” said David. The possibility was too awful to contemplate, and therefore, he could not allow it to happen. A world without Meredith Schwarzwelder did not seem quite worth living in.
Fighting his way through the briars, David picked up speed.
I’m sorry. I’ll find you. Hang on for me.
He only hoped it wasn’t too late.
He ran and ran, and then, all at once, the ground gave way beneath his feet as he slid and stumbled along the soft bank of a pool of black stagnant water.
To avoid falling into its depths, David flung himself in the opposite direction and tumbled to the ground, landing heavily and scraping his arm on a fallen log.
Despair came over him again. If he even managed to find them, what could he possibly do against the Erlking? Every time they’d run afoul of him before, David had had to rely on Meredith to get them out of it, but now it was his turn, and he was at a total loss.
Then there came a strange metallic tinkling, rather like the babbling of a brook, if instead of water it were filled with ball bearings and bits of sheet metal. A small spiky creature scurried into view, glinting in the moonlight.