“It will be.The time is coming, and I’ll get you back.”
I crouched, balancing my weight on my feet, my hands around my head, fingers digging against my scalp, speared through my hair, trying to hold myself together.I shook my head, wanting to deny those words.
“You never really left—you’ll always be back here.”
I trembled, shivering against the chill of this place, the fear that bounced around inside me.It yanked me back to all the nights I’d curled up and hid, the nights when I’d learned how little hiding did.The roars of monsters, the foliage crunching beneath their massive feet, it all warped together into a chorus of horror.
“Yun.”That wasn’t the hated voice, and it struck me like a rush of water against a burn.
“You think they’ll save you?”A dark laugh spread that searing heat across my ear, my cheek, so close and vicious that I tried to curl in more.
I wanted to become a smaller target, to shrink until I didn’t exist, until I wasn’thereanymore.
It took me back to there, to how helpless I’d felt back then, when I’d wanted nothing more than to have it all end.I didn’t care how, so long as it stopped.
“Yun!”The shout shook the entire world that time, though I still couldn’t identify who it belonged to.It struck me as familiar, but this place warped my brain so that I couldn’t figure it out, couldn’t work through it.
The dream collapsed in on itself the same way dungeons did, the sky falling, the sides shifting in, all of it shattering apart until my eyes snapped open and I found myself no longer in that dream.
I yanked upright, sudden pain searing through my face.
I covered my throbbing nose with my hands, trying to make sense of, well, everything.
Kenyon’s blue eyes met mine, centering me, at least until I spotted the red mark on his forehead.
“Were you screwing with me while I slept?”My hands muffled my words.
Kenyon shook his head in a quick denial.“You were making noises in your sleep, so I tried to wake you up, but you wouldn’t come to.I leaned closer, and you jerked upright.”
Which explained the pain in my nose, didn’t it?As it turned out, Kenyon’s head was a lot harder than my nose.
Chalk another point up to the espers.
“Move your hands,” he said, reaching for me.
Except the memories inside my brain ran too fresh, the dream having left me too raw even to consider allowing him to touch me.
I shoved myself backward until I struck the headboard, frantic.
He froze, his hulking frame almost comical in the way he hunched forward, seeming to decide how to respond.“I just want to see your nose.I can smell blood.”
Right.I scolded myself for my over-the-top reaction.There was no reason to be extra right now, to behave this way.All it did was prove how unstable I was, that I was weak and afraid.
So I removed my hands, finding that, yeah, blood coated my palms.
“You really do have a hard head,” I muttered to wrest back some sense of control.
He smiled, though it wasn’t as easy as it had been before, almost as though he humored me.“I’ve heard that before.Can’t really deny it.I don’t think you broke it, but it’s going to bruise.Can I?”
I swallowed down the rejection.Saying no would just prove that I was still out of control.“Sure, just…”
“I won’t touch you,” he promised and came a little closer, crouching beside the bed.
I snorted—despite the pain—at that.As if crouching was going to make him look much smaller.When I’d tried to make myself small, it had made sense, but it did little for a hulking esper like Kenyon.
The moment his powers touched me, relief poured through the throbbing space around my nose.The pain lessened instantly, reminding me that Kenyon wasn’t just a healer, but a high-rank one.This made a joke of the few low-level healers who had tried to work on me.Those had felt like someone resetting a bone, but this?It was more like slipping into a warm, epsom salt bath, the instant relaxation lessening the pain.
I normally avoided healing, having given in only during the few times when it had seemed impossible to refuse it.Once I had gotten into a minor car crash, just a fender bender that had fucked my neck up.Another time, an especially bad virus had left me in bed for a few days.Both times the Guild had sent over a healer, and I hadn’t had a way to say no, and given they weren’t serious injuries, they’d sent bargain-basement-level espers.
