XXXIII
One second, the wind was tearing the air from my lungs, the world a hollow drop beneath me.
The next, everything stopped.
No impact. No shattering bone. Just a violent jolt, as if the universe had unplugged my body and shoved it into a colder socket.
Darkness folded in.
I didn’t remember closing my eyes.
But I remembered the cold.
Not the sting of mountain air. Something deeper. Older. It leached into my bones, pressing against my chest like an unseen hand.
Sound bled back slowly: a crackling fire, the lonely keen of wind against logs, and beneath it all, a voice muffled as if from the bottom of a well.
“October.”
I forced my eyes open.
A ceiling of aged, splintered beams.
The room assembled itself in grainy pieces: stone walls, a narrow window traced with frost, the faint orange glow of a hearth.
I wasn’t outside. I wasn’t dead, either.
I was somewhere else entirely.
The air was warmer than the mountain, but still cold enough to see my breath. I shifted, and pain screamed up my side. My ribs exploded in a flash of white-hot agony, copper flooding my tongue as a broken sound tore from my throat.
“Easy.”
The voice was right beside me.
I turned my head as the pain flared.
Heaton sat in a wooden chair pulled close to the bed, elbows braced on his knees, hands clasped so tightly his knuckles were white. He looked as if he’d been holding that position for hours, as if stillness were the only thing keeping him from coming apart.
His eyes found mine.
And every breath left my lungs.
Not from the pain.
Because for the first time since I’d met him, Heaton Dashwood looked terrified.
He shot to his feet, the chair scraping across the floorboards. He crossed the room once, twice, a caged animal in a space too small to hold him. His hand dragged through his already-messy hair, movements sharp and agitated, before he stopped at the foot of the bed with his back to me.
“We’re not out of this yet,” he said, voice low, aimed at the wall. “So don’t get comfortable.”
My throat felt like sandpaper. “Did we—” I swallowed, pain sawing through my ribs. “Did we die?”
A small, humorless laugh escaped him.
“That’s really only on the table for one of us,” he said. “But no. Not tonight.”
“Where . . . ?”
He reached for the side table and turned up an old oil lamp. Warm golden light bled across the room, pushing the shadows into the corners.
This wasn’t my bedroom. It certainly wasn’t the estate.
But I knew this place.
“Winter Quarters.”
Heaton followed my gaze to the window, his expression unreadable in the amber light.
“One of the old mining cabins,” he said. “South side of the ridge. Off the road. No one comes out here unless they mean to.”
“How long was I—”
“Out?” His eyes lingered on the hollow of my throat, as if he were still counting each beat. “A few hours. It’s almost three.”
I shifted, trying to find a position that didn’t hurt to exist, and pain flared up my spine. My hand flew to my side and found the rough, tight wrap of bandages beneath the fabric of a shirt that wasn’t mine.
The angel costume was gone.
“Who undressed me?”
The question shot out before my pride could stop it.
For the first time since I’d woken, Heaton looked away. He scrubbed a hand over the back of his neck, lamplight catching on his long, elegant fingers.
“Relax. I did what I had to do. Nothing more.”
Heat crawled up my neck. “You bandaged me?”
He began pacing again, a tight line between the bed and the dying fire.
“Yes.” His voice went flat, every feeling scraped raw and hidden underneath. “You were hemorrhaging. I had to stop the bleed.”
He stopped and turned back to me. The lamplight carved his face into severe planes of shadow and gray. His eyes swept over me again, clinical and desperate.
“You cracked three ribs. One nicked an artery.”
He said it with the brutal detachment of a surgeon, but his hands were clenched into fists at his sides.
“You counted them?”
“October.” His tone went dry. “I was elbow-deep in the problem.”
A shiver ran through me.
He looked away again, jaw tight. “Modesty wasn’t exactly useful while you were bleeding out. So no, I wasn’t worried about the damn costume.”
He stopped by the window, his reflection pale in the glass. “I stopped the internal bleeding, but it’s a patch. A bad one. Your body will have to do the rest.”
“Great,” I muttered. “So, I’m what? Half-tenderized?”
“You’re alive.” His voice tightened. “That’s the only part I’m letting myself care about right now.”
I looked down at the oversized shirt, my palm pressed lightly over the bandages. I didn’t need him to tell me I had been dying. I could still taste the vertigo of the cliff on the back of my tongue.
He turned from the window. “How do you feel?”
“Like I got into a fight with a mountain,” I rasped. “And the mountain won.”
A torn breath escaped him.
“Ribs?”
“Head. Back. Pride.”
I tried to push myself up, a foolish attempt to prove I wasn’t as fragile as the bandages suggested.
Pain detonated low in my body.
Heaton moved instantly.
“Don’t.”
His hand hovered over my shoulder, close enough that the static-cold of him prickled my skin.
“You’re bruised to hell,” he said. “You took that hill like a goddamn cannonball, October. Your body’s still trying to figure out how it’s in one piece.”
I sank back into the pillow with a grimace. Now that the adrenaline had burned away, everything hurt—deep and dull, like my bones had been replaced with cracked glass.
Outside, the wind combed through the trees, rattling bare branches against the window.
Then the night slammed back into me.
“Penny!”
Her name ripped out of me. I tried to sit up again, and pain flared like a live wire.
“Heaton, I left her. I don’t know where she went. She was right there, and then she wasn’t, and I just ran—”
“Hey.” His voice was quiet. Controlled. A lifeline thrown into a storm. “Easy. Breathe.”
“I can’t just breathe.” Panic clawed up my throat. “Those things were everywhere, and she was—”
“Madeline.”
Just my name.
It cut through the panic, and I clung to the sound because it was the only thing in the room that wasn’t falling apart.
“I sent someone to check her trail,” he said. “One of mine. They’ll find her faster than you could right now.”
“One of . . . yours?”
“It means she’s not alone.”
His voice softened by a fraction.
“And you’re no good to her like this. Not half-frozen. Not bleeding.” His eyes locked on mine, unyielding and dark as the cabin’s shadows. “Let me handle the next few hours. You can handle the rest when you can actually stand.”
Something inside me—small, exhausted, and too tired to fight—finally unclenched.
But as the panic receded, the memories rushed in with the force of a physical blow: the bonfire going dark. The screaming crowd. The creature’s teeth. The blast of golden light. And the cliff—the impossible drop beneath us as Heaton stepped backward into the void with me in his arms.
My stomach dropped.
“The cliff,” I said, fingers bunching in the heavy fabric of his shirt. “You stepped off a cliff.”
His expression barely shifted, but the air tightened. The temperature dropped just enough to make the fire hiss.
“Technically,” he said, voice low, “we stepped off a cliff.”
I stared at him, my brain refusing to reconcile the physics of the mountain with the reality of the room.
“How are we not splattered across the cliffside right now?” I gestured weakly at the stone walls, the bed, the fire. “Gravity doesn’t just pause for people, Heaton.”
A flicker moved through his silver eyes—something remorseful and impossibly old. He leaned back, hands clasped so tightly his knuckles looked like polished bone. Silence pooled between us, heavy and thick as oil.
This time, I didn’t pull away.
“What are you,” I breathed, the realization blooming in the back of my throat, “exactly?”
He looked at me for a long moment, giving me the silence I needed to stitch together every anomaly I had refused to examine for weeks.
The cold. The shadows.
The impossible stillness.
The pieces slid into place with a sickening, perfect click.
My breath fogged in the air between us.
“Ghost.”