Chapter 24 #3
I snorted a little. “Got lucky. Delilah said one of her last guests left them.”
“Must’ve been a tall freak like you,” Cliff muttered, noting how the cuffs hung perfectly just past my ankles.
An excruciating hesitation followed as I looked him over.
It was quiet here, all the others’ voices muffled in the lower levels of the house.
Just us, and the falling snow beyond the vast floor-to-ceiling windows.
Acidic tension still cloyed the air between all of us, but for Cliff, it was like walking into a silent hurricane.
It was well past midnight, and his eyes were bloodshot, but I doubted either of us would be sleeping more than a few restless hours.
Adrenaline still surged through our blood—and grief.
“You okay?” I asked. The two words could hardly encompass everything that we’d been through tonight.
Cliff put a hand on his chest pensively. “That healer Zia. She fixed me up. It was…something.”
Physical healing wasn’t what I meant, but judging by the solemn look he gave me, he knew that.
“Even if they made it out of the forest, he’s probably stuck like that,” Cliff said with an unbearably neutral tone, like he was talking about nothing more than another enemy who hadn’t existed to him before tonight.
But his jaw was ticking, and the silence was spreading like a gulch between us until he broke it.
“If he’d walked out of that van, I would’ve had to kill him. ”
“Would you have preferred that?”
“No big difference either way, is it?” He swallowed hard. “He’s practically dead. I mean… I’m happy about it, obviously.” Another beat, and he frowned like he was confused, blinking hard. “I should be happy. Right?”
I wavered, words elusive as I was slammed back into how I felt when my father died.
No, don’t avoid it—when I killed him. The guilt sat with me day after day in the psych ward.
No one believed the truth, of course. They were so focused on correcting my outlandish claims about a ghost that I didn’t have room to process what I’d done.
Yes, my father was dead. But it ultimately meant the rogue spirit was gone and couldn’t hurt anyone else.
Should I have been happy about that?
“You can’t force yourself to feel one way or the other,” I told Cliff quietly.
Anger flickered in his eyes. “If I’m not glad he got what was coming to him, then I’m as much of a fucking traitor as I pretended to be.”
“He’s your dad. No one would blame you for feeling—”
“Feeling what? Sorry for him? For myself?” He chuckled sardonically, his breathing heavy. “Whatever it is, I don’t want to feel it. He is—was—a goddamn monster, and there’s enough of him in me that even Sylv thought I was turning my back on everyone.”
Face set with pain, he started to step back, but I surged forward and pulled him into an embrace. He was so rigid for a second that I thought he would push me away, but after a second, he gave in with a heavy shudder.
“You’re here with us,” I reminded him, a quaver in my voice. “You chose us. Feel however you want about what happened, but you’re here.”
We stayed like that for a minute, and I felt the wetness on my shoulder where Cliff’s face was buried.
I let my head rest against his, the solidity of him easing the lingering horror of pulling the trigger that shapeshifter that had stolen his face.
The very image of that lifeless corpse gazing up at me from the hotel floor made me squeeze my arms a little tighter around Cliff.
As we stepped apart, he hastily wiped his face, not looking fine by any stretch, but a little less haunted.
He managed a smirk. “And what the hell were you up to when everything was going down? Felt like you set off a goddamn bomb in the basement.”
“That’s a lot to explain.” My chuckle tapered off when my gaze caught on one of the windows behind him. I went perfectly still. “What the hell?”
Just over an hour ago, I had been outside to check the perimeter of the building, and now it was as though the house had been placed in a different environment entirely.
The snow had melted, replaced with bursts of fresh foliage all over, unnatural colors caught by the interior lights of the house.
Birds swooped through the air, glittering in the moonlight.
Cliff stiffened as he followed my gaze, eyes widening in understanding. “Sylv was with us the whole time. How the fuck did she manage to grab a—”
“She didn’t.” I shoved my hand into my pocket and held out a few gems I’d managed to steal.
Some had been lost in the shuffle of losing my jacket, and I had been doubtful to snag a working one in the first place.
I didn’t even mention it to Sylvia yet. I wouldn’t have been able to bear getting her hopes up for another disappointment after everything she’d been through.
But I’d fucking done it.
My breathing turned shallow. “Where is she?”
Cliff was all but stammering, his eyes wide as he scanned the foliage, the weight of what I held in my hand sinking in. “Downstairs with the others.”