Chapter Ten
Even as a kid I'd felt the magic thrumming beneath the surface of Amber’s, sweet as honey on the outside.
The sign of something older underneath. It lived in the wind that moved around her, in every word she spoke, a living thing woven through her the way roots wound through an ancient, twisted tree.
It had always been there, background noise in my head whenever we'd played together, shared food, or simply existed in the same room. She'd made me feel safe. Calm.
Now that the Hollow's magic was tearing itself apart at the seams, every one of those buried thoughts had come roaring back at once.
Now I understood exactly why she'd always made me feel the way she did, even back when we were kids bonding over stupid games in the schoolyard.
The forest had been restless for weeks, whispers climbing louder, more insistent, like a warning only I could hear.
And when I'd seen her standing in that clearing, staring at the oak with wide, wondering eyes, I'd known instantly.
Known the forest was pulling her in exactly the way it had pulled me.
She didn't understand it yet. Not the scale of it.
I needed to tell her. About the bond, about the magic humming through her veins that she'd spent her whole life mistaking for nerves and bad dreams.
I had to tell her why I left town. Why I ran away from her... had to tell her that I needed her.
I hated that I needed her at all.
That was the part that sat wrong in my chest, twisting tighter every time I circled back to it.
I'd spent three years convincing myself I could handle whatever this town threw at me alone, that asking for help — from her, from anyone — was a weakness I couldn't afford.
And now here I was, about to go beg the one person I'd run away from for the privilege of dragging her straight into the middle of it.
I didn't have a choice. That didn't make it easier to swallow.
The smell of old coffee had gone cold and bitter on the dining table in front of me, mingling with the dry, papery scent of a house that had sat mostly closed up for two decades.
Weak morning light filtered through the tall arched windows, throwing long, thin shadows across the worn stone floor.
I sat at the far end of the oak table, a plate of scrambled eggs going stiff and grey in front of me, my stomach too knotted to consider actually eating any of it.
The room felt cavernous around me, portraits of long-dead Thornes lining every wall, their painted eyes tracking me with the same silent, unimpressed judgment they'd had when I was six years old and getting in trouble for something on the rare occasion my father had deined to see us.
The huge fireplace on the far wall sat cold and unlit, iron grate rusted into something that looked more like teeth than decoration.
Most of the furniture still sat shrouded under dust sheets. Most of the house I hadn't been able to make myself walk through since coming back.
The wind outside had turned vicious, howling through the cracks in the old stone like it was trying to claw its way inside rather than simply blow past. It had been relentless for hours now — days, maybe, though the longer I stayed in this house the harder it got to keep proper track of time, like something in these walls didn't want me counting too closely.
This wasn't ordinary autumn wind. It had a bite that went past skin and settled into bone, dark and deliberate in a way that didn't belong to weather at all.
I gripped my fork tighter, knuckles going white.
The memory of that night hung over the whole room like something with weight, something that never quite lifted no matter how many years passed.
Cian walking into the treeline and simply not walking back out.
I could still hear the exact pitch of his laugh from hours before he'd gone, easy and bright, like nothing in the world could touch him.
I dropped the fork. It clattered hard against the plate, loud enough in the empty room that it made me flinch.
I couldn't sit there anymore. The house felt too hollow, too big for one person to wander through without losing pieces of himself in it.
Stained glass, dark wood, stone walls built more like a fortress than a home — none of it felt secure.
It felt like a shell with something rotten curled up inside it, waiting to be noticed.
I stood and crossed to the window overlooking the estate.
Beyond the rusted iron gates, the woods stretched dark and endless, their silhouettes twisting harder as the wind picked up again, rattling every pane of glass in the room at once.
I pressed my palm flat against the cold surface, staring at the treeline, mind dragging itself back to my brother whether I wanted it to or not.
A gust slammed the glass hard enough to shudder the whole frame.
I stepped back, and the air in the room shifted — thickened, hummed with a magic that wasn't mine.
I frowned as the breeze coiled and moved with something close to intent, and for one gutting second I felt it again.
That same presence from the night before, out in the Pines.
Cian's presence.
His magic had always felt exactly like this. Sharp. Electric. Just this side of feral. Except that wasn't possible. He was gone and gone didn't send a familiar signature through your childhood home on a Tuesday morning.
I turned from the window and dragged a hand through my hair, trying to shake the feeling loose. I couldn't afford to lose myself in the past right now. But even as I tried to walk the thought back, the wind screamed louder outside, and something moved behind me.
The bookshelves along the far wall rattled, hard, like the wind itself had found a way through solid stone. My pulse spiked as I turned toward the sound, and a heavy thud cracked through the room — one of the old leather-bound volumes had toppled from its shelf, landing splayed open on the floor.
I knelt to retrieve it, and something else caught my eye first. A small black journal, tumbled loose from behind where the fallen book had been, its cover worn soft and cracked with age. I went completely still, hand hovering over it, staring at the faded initials pressed into the leather.
C.T.
Cian Thorne. The only one in our family who'd ever carried those particular letters.
My chest went tight as I picked it up, fingers trembling despite every effort to hold them steady. I hadn't seen this journal in twenty years. He used to carry it everywhere, scribbling down thoughts he swore were too brilliant for the rest of the world to appreciate.
I opened it with hands that didn't feel entirely like my own, flipping through pages of slanted, hurried handwriting until one entry caught and held.
The voices are getting louder. I know what they are now, but I can't tell Dad. He thinks I'm being dramatic when I say I can hear the woods. I don't like visiting him... let alone telling him anything.
I flipped further.
The darkness is spreading, stronger than I thought. I don't know how much longer I can resist it. It's calling and I — I want to answer.
My breath caught hard in my throat. He'd heard them too. The same whispers that had been carving grooves into my skull for weeks.
Further still.
I think something's coming. Darkness that could hurt all of us. I need help stopping it. Help from someone tied to the Hollow the same way we are.
I gripped the journal tighter, the weight of every word settling over me like something with hands. Cian had been fighting something in the dark, alone, and hadn't wanted me anywhere near it. Years of searching for a reason he'd vanished, and here it sat, finally, in my hands.
I couldn't stop reading. Page after page, until one name stopped me cold entirely.
Yakob says Amber hears the woods too. She keeps telling him about the dreams, the voices.
He's terrified the darkness is coming for her the same way, though for now he's convinced her it's just nightmares.
Neither of us know how much longer that lie holds.
He says he won't let her near the treeline.
Neither of us know how to actually stop her once it starts calling louder.
The wind howled again outside, and for one wild, dangerous second I wondered if Cian was still out there somewhere.
If he hadn't left me at all. If this had been him trying to warn me the whole time, or trying to help, and I'd simply never found the message until now.
I flipped to the final entry, dated the morning he disappeared.
Yakob's plan is set. The Hollow accepted him instead — turns out he wasn't born human at all, just raised believing he was, before he found out he'd been adopted into it. Makes more sense now, why the woods always wanted him too.
One page more. The very last.
The Hollow's magic needs its protectors.
A Thorne and a Halloway. If we don't offer ourselves, the darkness wins — keeps feeding on this town until there's nothing left of it, or of anyone in it.
If I don't do it, one of the twins will.
Amber will. The woods will call for them eventually, and I won't let that happen. Neither will Yakob.
We're going to fix it ourselves.
We're going to fix everything.
I closed the journal with eyes burning, tucking it hard under my arm like it might try to disappear again if I let it out of my grip.
I couldn't stay in this house a second longer.
Whatever darkness Cian and Yakob had tried to fight off years ago, it hadn't gone anywhere.
It had just been waiting, patient, for a new generation of Thornes and Halloways to grow old enough to answer it.
I needed to see Amber.
But not to tell her about the bond. I'd already decided that much, standing there in the wreckage of my own childhood home.
If she didn't feel it — if three years and one clearing hadn't been enough to wake whatever thread was supposed to exist between us — then I'd let it go.
Bury it the way I'd buried everything else that hurt too much to look at directly.
I wouldn't make her carry the weight of something she hadn't chosen, not on top of everything else this town was about to hand her.
I could pretend. I was good at that, after all this practice.
What I couldn't pretend about was the danger. That part she needed, whether either of us wanted to be the one delivering it.
I pulled my phone out before I'd even made it to the stairs, thumb hovering over Orias's name.
Rowan
Talk to her before we meet up? Tell her what you know about her dad.
The reply came back fast enough that he'd clearly been sitting there waiting for it.
Orias
Fine.
I shoved the phone back in my pocket and headed for the staircase anyway, the journal still clamped hard under my arm, the house's old halls echoing with every step.
I still needed to see her myself. Still needed to look her in the eye and tell her the rest of it, whatever that ended up costing either of us.
I just needed Orias to soften the ground first, so she wasn't hearing all of it — the bond, the danger, her father, the sacrifice waiting somewhere at the end of all this — from a man she hadn't fully forgiven yet for leaving in the first place.