“I’ll go straight to the source,” she said.
She’d never know how any of them heard her words, but silence seized the room within a breath. No one moved.
Hunter’s voice cut through the quiet. “No.”
“Yes.” She looked at him, felt his love through their connection, and sent some of hers back. It wasn’t flowery, she didn’t do flowery on a happy day, let alone in today’s doom and gloom. But it was fierce and layered with a healthy dose ofI love you, now shut up and let me be a badass.“Yes, Hunter. It opened because of me. I’ll be the one shutting the damn door closed.”
“You heard Dorian, it’s dangerous. Besides, he’s working on it right now, and I’m going too, as soon as their plan starts working.”
She rested her hand on his chest, on his thundering heart, and pressed a little. “No one else but me.”
“Damn it, Daphne.”
“It might be the only way,” Lachlan said quietly, his face solemn.
Everything in Hunter rebelled at the idea, but he also respected her too much to stop her. He capitulated with a vicious curse. He spun around, hands on his hips. “Fuck it. Fuck it.” He took a long breath, closed his eyes, and she felt deep into her bones the weight of how hard it was for him to pull back. “I’ll be theretoo,” he said then. “Youdo this. But you won’t be alone. Not this time.”
She nodded, trying to untie the knot in her throat.
“Can ye give us power while ye’re with her, safely?” Lachlan asked. “I’ll understand if ye pull out.”
Hunter scoffed. “Please. It doesn’t even make a dent,” he muttered.
It made her laugh, for some reason. Maybe nerves. Maybe love. Maybe both. The swagger really was stronger than anything else in this demon.
“Alright,” Daphne said. “Time’s a-wasting. I guess I have to sleep to do this, so... anyone want to knock me out real quick?”
Melisandre came forward with her doctor’s bag. “Let’s get you comfortable in the guest room.”
~*~
Daphne opened her eyes.
She was back in the forest with the weird, mirrored-bark trees.
Okay. Not what she had expected. She would have put good money on being taken back to the night dear father killed her mom.
Alright.
It looked the same. Same tall trees, their bark silver and slick. The only noticeable difference was the black sap dripping, slow but steady, from invisible cracks, like feelings bleeding from a wounded soul. It was darker, though. Emptier. It might have been because of how it felt, but her steps, when she took them, echoed. They blurred into the faint ripple of an off-key lullaby–her mother’s voice? She couldn’t tell.
She neared the closest tree where the smoke in the bark, in the mirror, writhed and twitched as if waiting, waiting. But nothingcrept into views, no face seeped out this time. Only the smoke. Only the emptiness of it.
Slowly, carefully, she walked deeper into the forest until it surrounded her like a prison made of twirling reflections shivering with breathless wrongness. The whispers started low, slurred. Convoluted, confusing. She couldn’t catch more than a few words–forgot. Pretend. Fake.
And as the whispers started aligning, as they grew louder, her heart kicked into a panicked rhythm, her breaths tangled and sharp. Because she knew the voices coming from the endless depth ofthe smoke-warped mirrors. The voices were hers. They all were her voice. And,like something dragged straight out of misery, she knew what those voices hiding behind smoke were saying.
The little girl in the corner of her bedroom, too scared to cry, said,You forgot me.
The teen who planned to escape said,What had been the point of surviving?
The young woman, mastering self-defense and calling it closure, said,You pretended too well. Even I forgot it was fake.
There was no danger, not real. None of them came out for the mirror. But they begged, and accused, and demanded why, why did she leave them behind, why did she let them rot and molder. Louder and louder, everywhere at once, until they were all that was real, all that was her.
And that she could not stand.
She clamped her hands over her ears and fell on her knees as her eyes shut and the scream tore out of her throat. On and on until her throat was scraped raw, until her voice fractured, and her muscles trembled from coiling so tight.
