Chapter Thirteen
Everything went more than it came.
It felt like they were always slipping away from him: the pain; voices; light. The feeling of something beneath him. Cold air, warm blankets. A sharp smell, like the bitterness of tea, and like blood. The back of a hand, the brush of fingertips. All, always, slipping out of reach.
Isaiah tried to cling to them. He tried.
“I think—” he heard “—this time.”
He held on so tight that he could feel his whole body straining. Slowly, like forcing an avalanche back up a mountain, he squinted his eyes open.
“Oh, thank god.” That was Justin. It had to be Justin—Isaiah could smell him, as near as he’d even been when they were still inseparable; when Isaiah hadn’t yet realized that Justin would never love him back the way he needed.
Isaiah groaned.
“I’m not god, but I’ll take the compliment,” said someone who must have been Clementine, though he sounded unusually strained, even for a person of his typically anxious and uptight nature.
“Landon?” Isaiah whispered. His voice sounded like it hadn’t been used in weeks. “Did you find them?”
“Landon?” a new voice echoed back at him.
The haze of shapes encircling him solidified into people: Justin, his fingers locked around Isaiah’s, his sharp eyes wide and his usual bitter smile a tight line, and Clementine, his perfect golden hair a mess and his knit vest misbuttoned as he spoke in low tones to a woman in scrubs, the soft beeping of a heart monitor undercutting their words.
Between them though, someone vaguely familiar pushed forward.
It took Isaiah a moment for his fuzzy brain to understand where he’d seen the person before.
In Landon.
The same beautiful eyes and regal features they shared with their mother, but pale on pale, his thick glasses hiding eyes so light they could have been made of ice.
His expression was just as cold and distant, with all the haughty scrutiny of his mother, but when he spoke, his voice trembled with emotion. “You knew my twin?”
Justin squeezed his hand. “Isaiah, no one has seen Landon since the crash nine years ago.”
A little spark of panic lit in Isaiah’s chest. Had he not told Clementine? What had he managed to explain—before the pain? He tried to lift himself onto his elbows and the heart monitor beeped obnoxiously. His vision swam with stars, but he reached out—reached for Quinn.
Landon’s twin flinched at the touch, but he let Isaiah hold onto him, leaning forward. Tears welled at the edges of his eyes. “Are you saying Landon is alive?”
“They will be,” Isaiah said, knowing the words didn’t make sense. But they made sense to him—and they would to Landon, and now Hilker, too, locked away in a place that barely qualified as living. “If we can save them.”
There was no if in Isaiah’s mind though. He would rescue his princess, a whipping boy in a suit of armor. He could already feel the agreement from his fangs, long and sharp.
He and Landon—and maybe even goddamned Hilker, the bastard—were going to live another twenty thousand days or more, if Isaiah had anything to say about it.