Chapter 34 Into The Dark #2
Panic scratched at my chest. I opened my mouth, but the words stuck in my throat. Only a thin sound came out, a gasp, swallowed by the fire’s roar.
Kyle’s hand brushed mine as he steadied the cup, and the touch burned, too sharp and too close. His face blurred at the edges, but his smile stayed sharp, a slash of white in the dark.
The shadows leaned in with him.
“Easy,” he whispered, as if I was already his. “Just let it happen.”
Then he leaned in and closed the distance between us, planting his lips on mine.
His mouth was hot, insistent, pressing against me with a weight I couldn’t fight. I wanted to turn my head, to shove him back, to say no, but my body didn’t listen.
The world swayed harder, firelight shattering into streaks of orange and black. I could still see Emily and Ethan dancing in the corner of my vision, spinning around each other, carefree, wrapped up in their own orbit. Their laughter floated toward me, bright and distant.
I tried to cry out to them. Tried to make a sound, any sound. But Kyle’s mouth smothered it. His hand slid to the back of my neck, holding me there, forcing the kiss deeper, rougher.
Inside, panic screamed. On the outside, I was still. Frozen. Nothing but a body pinned in place.
My eyes burned as the shadows twisted and curled at the edges, creeping closer, until I couldn’t tell if the trees were moving or if it was me. My last clear glimpse of Emily and Ethan was of their hands clasping, their laughter so far away, so impossibly unreachable.
Then the ground slipped out from under me. Darkness swallowed the fire, swallowed the laughter, swallowed me.
And I was gone.
Cold stone pressed into my bare back. The shock of it jolted through me, but my limbs were leaden, useless.
My wrists were pinned, rough hands tightening whenever I tried to move.
The sky stretched endlessly above me, but it wasn’t the same sky from the bonfire; it was wrong, fractured.
Shadows wove through the air like whispers among the stars, twisting, breathing, alive.
The dim glow around me flickered like dying candles, casting false constellations overhead. Each flicker made the constellations shift, forming patterns that felt ancient, dangerous.
Dozens of eyes, yellow, red, violet, glowed in the dark, circling, watching. Predators, waiting for their turn.
A sound rose from them, low at first, then swelling, guttural syllables scraping against my bones. A chant, endless, inhuman. The hooded figures swayed at the edges of sight, their silhouettes pulsing in rhythm with the words.
And there he was.
Kyle.
Over me.
His knees dug into the stone on either side of my hips, caging me in, heavy and unyielding. My own legs somehow ended up wrapped around his waist, and when I tried to move them, the metal shackles at my ankles bit sharply into my skin, locking me to the floor.
The stone scraped against my skin, rough and unyielding, a reminder that I couldn’t get away.
Panic tried to rise, hot and desperate, but the restraints held, and I was powerless, caught in a tangle of shadows and silent threats.
The chill of the stone seeped in, deeper and deeper, until I couldn’t tell where the ache of my bones ended and the sting of his grip began.
His hands pinned my wrists above my head, fingers spread wide like iron manacles. No matter how I twisted, he pressed harder, grinding my arms against the rock until my shoulders screamed.
He held me down, rocking over me, as though my body existed only for his rhythm. Each movement shoved me further into the slab, grinding me into its chill, branding me with it.
His face hovered close. His breath brushed my cheek, hot and sour, flooding my lungs until I gagged. His eyes caught what little light there was, sharp, glinting, alive with something that felt less than human. He looked at me the way a wolf sizes up prey before the bite.
And his expression. God, that expression.
Hungry. Patient. Almost serene.
Like this was all inevitable, like I’d been made for this moment and he’d been waiting, biding his time until the stars aligned and the chanting rose and the shadows gathered to crown him.
He didn’t rush. He didn’t fumble. He didn’t even smile.
That patience cut deeper than any violence could have.
He had all the time in the world, and I had none.
And when he stayed silent, watching me unravel without a word, it hollowed me out. His silence was worse than cruelty.
It was ownership.
The stone drank my shivers, the air pressed heavy on my chest, and his silence pressed harder still.
The pain blurred. My throat was raw, every cry scraped until it dissolved into the guttural chanting. My voice wasn’t mine anymore. The hooded figures swayed at the edges, shadows crawling closer with every beat of their words.
The stone beneath me. The weight above me. The shadows all around. My body went cold. Numb.
My mind…
Gone.
Then, the world shifted again.
Stone became sterile tile. Shadows became white walls. The bonfire haze burned into the sharp buzz of fluorescent lights. Antiseptic stung my nostrils. I blinked, and I wasn’t seventeen anymore.
I was small again, but in a different way. Not the awkward, elbowy teenager hunched behind her own body at a bonfire, but smaller still, a weakened version of myself.
The world shrank to the four bleached walls of a Midtown walk-in clinic, and the stiff cotton sheet pressed into my back like an accusation. I didn’t know how long I’d been there; time was a smudge, a greasy thumbprint on the windowpane of my mind.
My arms trembled, weak and useless. The nurse, whose name was Petra and had a voice like a tired cello, had to lift the bundle into my arms. The moment he touched me, my baby, the world went silent. All the colors rippled and shrank except the blue glow of his skin.
Mateo. My son. The name was a splinter in my tongue the first time I tried to say it out loud.
He was too small. Too bright. His skin glowed faintly in the hospital light, veins lit faint blue as if lighting run through them. I’d never seen anything like it.
No one had.
The nurse flinched when she caught his hand in hers; the pediatrician, a woman with silver beads around her wrist, turned pale as the bedsheet.
They tried to keep us apart at first. They called it “routine observation,” but I heard the fear in their voices.
I was only eighteen and invisible, and they didn’t expect me to hear what I heard: “Genetic abnormality,” “Neonatal isolation.” They used words that belonged in a horror movie.
I had screamed, I remembered that now.
My voice cracked, begging for someone to help, to tell me what was happening, for someone not to take him away.
Days blurred together. Mateo would cry; I’d cry; the nurse would bring formula and a sad smile. Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw that wrong sky, the bonfire’s smoke, the chanting shadows. I told myself it was just a nightmare, but the memory clung to the inside of my skull.
Mateo slept in my arms, face pinched and red, his tiny hands curling and uncurling like he was grasping for something only he could see.
“Are you sure you don’t want to call your family?” the nurse asked me, one last time, her voice so gentle I almost cried.
I shook my head.
I couldn’t think about my family, my grandparents.
Not after what happened.
Not after how they had reacted and the solution they had offered.
My grandfather’s solution had been marriage. To Mr. Baker. A man old enough to be my father, who smiled as if he’d already won.
The thought of being tied to him sent a chill down my spine, a gut-wrenching reminder of how far removed I was from any semblance of choice.
The night before they discharged us, the nightmares came back. Stronger. Sharper. Hungrier.
Some nights I dreamed the hooded figures were standing at the foot of my bed, chanting, their faces a blur of animal teeth and yellow eyes. Other nights, Kyle’s face hovered over me, waiting for me to open my eyes.
I tried to forget. I tried to move on. Yet the past clung to me with teeth and claws.
That night, however, the shadows didn’t just stay in the corners of my mind; they followed me. I’d woken up to find Mateo’s blanket lit by that impossible blue glow, every hair on my neck standing up, every muscle locked in terror.
I rushed to Mateo’s side, hands trembling as I scooped him into my arms. His tiny body burned with light, veins glowing like rivers of moonlit fire beneath his skin. His cries were thin, high, piercing.
“Shhh, baby, it’s okay,” I whispered, but my own voice broke.
My heart thundered, begging my legs to run, but where could I go?
The temperature dropped until my breath fogged in the sterile room.
Then, they came.
The hooded faces.
They’d followed me here. They’d followed me into New York, into the sterile white of this clinic. Their eyes gleamed, their hands stretched toward me.
And then… The chanting.
Their voices slithered into my ears, hissing. Low at first, a hum beneath the buzzing lights. Then stronger, rising, wrapping around the room until the walls seemed to pulse with it.
“No…” My whisper was a gasp. “No, please, no…”
One of them raised a hand, slow and deliberate. The chanting bent. Mateo’s cries hitched, stuttering like the sound was being pulled from his throat. His glow dimmed and flared, dimmed and flared, as though something was feeding from him.
I dropped to my knees by the bed, clutching him close, sobbing. “Don’t touch him! Take me, not him… Please, take me!”
But the shadows didn’t move closer. They didn’t need to.
Because one did.
Kyle.
He stepped out from behind them like he’d been there all along, the smirk curling at his lips like he was savoring this moment, watching me break. His blue eyes glowed faintly, silver in the dark, and his voice was the same one that had coaxed me at seventeen: soft, familiar, lethal.
“You’re doing well, Josie,” he murmured. “Keep feeding him. Keep him strong. You’re just the vessel. But him? He’s ours.”
My baby cried.
His tiny fists trembled against me, his face red, veins glowing with that impossible blue fire.
I cried harder.
The kind of cry that tore out of me with the desperation of someone who knew she was already too late.
But the sound never reached the air.
My sobs folded in on themselves, shredded by the chanting. The voices swallowed them whole. It was like the shadows themselves had teeth, and they were chewing into every sound I made until silence was all that remained.
The hooded figures leaned closer, their voices deepening with their incantations. My throat burned with the effort of fighting against them, but the more I struggled, the more the silence wrapped around me.
Then Kyle crouched beside me, expression calm, like he was admiring his own creation. He reached out. Not to me. To Mateo’s head. And I swore the baby’s glow bent toward him, like a tide being pulled by the moon.
“No,” I mouthed. No sound came out.
Kyle’s smile deepened, smug and certain. “Hush now. You won’t remember.” His voice carried above the chanting, soft and cruel.
A sharp flare of light burst from Mateo, flooding the room in searing blue-white. The hooded figures thrust their hands out, weaving that light into their rhythm, twisting it, caging it.
And then it turned straight into me.
The shadows clawed through my skull. My mind convulsed, memories fracturing, splintering like glass under a hammer. My cries were gone. My terror was gone. Even my son’s glow was gone.
And in their place, a void.
The last thing I felt was the weight of Kyle’s eyes on me, steady and claiming, before even that was pulled away.
Then, nothing.
Until now.
Back in the clearing, the world rushed in. I gasped, the void tearing away like a curtain ripped from its hooks. The forest slammed back into focus: the field, the runes, the scorched earth where the blast had thrown us.
Mateo’s body was in my arms, limp but warm, barely fitting now. My hands clutched at him too tightly, as if I let go even a fraction, the shadows would come crawling out again to take him.
My stomach lurched. The world spun in dizzy spirals. I forced myself not to vomit, not to choke in front of him, not to let the weakness win.
But my body wouldn’t listen; my arms trembled so hard that Mateo’s head lolled against my collarbone. I pressed my cheek to his hair, trying to steady us both, shoving down the bile, the ringing in my ears, the ache where my mind had just been split wide open.
His glow had faded, but faint warmth lingered in him, thrumming against my chest like a second heartbeat.
The battlefield was still frozen. Ulysses crouched where he’d landed, eyes burning in the dark. Aiden was already half-shifted, teeth bared, chest heaving. And Kyle, Kyle was watching me with that same steady claim in his gaze that I had just remembered.
My breath caught, nausea folding in on itself. I was shaking, but not from fear this time.
From rage.
“Don’t,” I whispered, voice shredded by both past and present. My arms tightened around Mateo, shielding him. “Don’t you look at him.”
They had stolen everything: my innocence, my choices, my memories. And they wanted to take him too.
Not anymore.
My vision filled with tears, blinding until I wiped them away with the back of my hand. The skin of my palm came away wet, gritty with dirt. I forced my chin up, forcing myself to look, really look, at the monster across from me.
Kyle hadn’t moved. Not a single step closer. But his stillness was worse than a strike. He stood with his shirt torn, smoke curling from his shoulders like he wore the wreckage itself as a crown. His eyes found mine, and in them I saw it, that flicker.
Recognition. Triumph.
The corner of his mouth bent upward, slow and poisonous. The kind of smile that didn’t need words to say: “You remember now.”
I clutched Mateo tighter to anchor myself. My arms locked around him until the tremor in my hands steadied. My ribs might as well have been armor now; nothing would break through.
Kyle’s gaze slid down to Mateo, deliberate and slow, before dragging back to me. That look was enough to strip the air from my lungs. But I lifted my head higher until the shaking in my body turned into a quiver of steel.
My throat burned when I spoke, voice roughened by smoke, by screams I hadn’t realized I’d let out.
“You’ll never touch him again.” The words scraped out of me, not a cry, not a plea, but a blade.
For a heartbeat, silence ruled. The forest itself seemed to lean in, waiting to see which way the world would split next.