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Yellow eyes,bright as canaries.
Wait, where was I?
Each breath came shallow and sharp, scraping down my throat. My chest ached, each heartbeat thrumming wildly. I couldn’t remember what was real anymore. Was I burning up? No, I was cold. Ice-cold. My skin had prickled and tightened. Damp clothes clung to me like a second, suffocating skin, and I was soaked through.
Had I found water? I looked down, expecting a stream. But there was only a forest floor. Moss, mulch, and gnarled roots twisted beneath me. Next, I raised my right hand. It trembled so violently I barely recognized it. I blinked, trying to steady my vision, but the world kept spinning and lurching sideways. When it finally cleared, I saw that my skin was blotched with blue and purple. Sweat beaded along my fingers, slipping down my palm in slow drops.
Then, I reached for my neck. It was clammy, fever-hot. Just like the rest of me. Was I dying?
I tried to stand. My legs buckled and I collapsed again.
A sharp pain lanced through my shoulder and I gasped, cradling itwith my right hand, but the fire in my flesh only burned hotter. The agony was beyond anything I’d ever known. I cradled my shoulder as if it might help, though it only made it throb worse.
Gods, it hurt.
Then there was a rustle behind me. Even through the haze of pain, I turned.
The light was gone. Shadows spilled across the forest and fear took hold. I gasped. There it was again.
Yellow eyes, bright as canaries, glinting from behind a grove of trees.
Those eyes, I knew them. I’d seen them before, but only when the darkness crept in and took control.
They were dangerous. That much I felt in every fiber of my being.
I had to get away. I had to run.
I tried to stand, to move, but it was useless, my legs were dead weight. Heavy as anchors. All the while, my gaze remained locked on those yellow eyes. My breathing quickened to a fever pitch. My chest heaved, dragging in air like it might vanish at any moment. Then the fire in my left shoulder flared again, the feeling unbearable. I broke eye contact with the shadows and looked down at the wound.
The sight nearly made me vomit.
With my nose so close, the stench hit me first. Rancid and sour, a rot so thick it turned my stomach. A wound was festering, leaking pus in sickly shades of green and yellow. The arrow was gone, but the hole it left behind had widened and warped. No longer was there a clean puncture. It was frayed and necrotic. My flesh that was once pink and pulsing with life, now turned pallid and foul. I knew this wasn’t something I could manage on my own. I needed a mender.
Get up, I told myself. Get up. You need to find water. You need to clean the wound. Anything to slow the infection.
Then, the yellow eyes shifted.
In a blink, they were five paces to the right. Another blink, and theysnapped three paces left. One breath later, they were directly across from me, barely visible behind the trees.
“Who are you?” I rasped.
The eyes blinked once, then vanished.
My vision blurred, and the world tilted on its axis. I turned my head, scanning in every direction until the dizziness nearly dropped me flat.
Was I hallucinating?
It had to be the infection. It was spreading, coursing through my bloodstream, rotting everything it touched. Warping my senses and stealing my grip on reality. Every time I thought I’d made progress, thought I’d crawled one step farther than before, I ran headlong into another barrier. Another stopcock sealing the way forward.
Now I saw the truth. Freedom was too much to ask.
I slumped to the forest floor, the last of my will draining from me. If death came for me now, I wouldn’t resist. There was no point in fighting anymore, no sense in struggling against what felt inevitable. Let the darkness come. If it was death, let it be swift.
I was so tired.
I had spent my life bending to the will of others. My mother, my father, Griffin, Caz… and now Gadriel. Always deferring, always yielding. And now, I wasn’t even sure if anything I’d believed I wanted had ever truly been mine.
