Our chests heaved as we collapsed under the polar moon after our run, the cabin only feet away, the books we’d stolen at my side. For a while, we stared up at the stars inside the deep Norse Woods, the place where all the wild things were. I turned my head to Fallon, watching her chest rise and fall, her stomach dip, her lashes flutter, her mouth part.
“Do you think they know we’re looking at them?” she asked, keeping her gaze in the sky. “You know, the stars?”
My gaze flicked up at the same sky, then back down to her. Her mind held a universe of questions, most of which she already had the answers to. It was unnerving and nostalgic at once, the way her unceasing willfulness spoke to mine. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she’d even question the significance of my black, rotten heart even after ripping it out of my chest and showing it to her, proving it was a useless thing.
“I think the stars are probably asking themselves the same question,” I told her, tapping my fingers along her wrist, feeling her pulse kick.
“What do you mean?”
“You believe you’re gazing at the stars, when, in all reality, the entire galaxy is gazing at you.” I squeezed her hand, unsure of why I couldn’t just say I loved her. Why I couldn’t tell her something so real and true. I’d never been good at anything, but I’d always been good with her in my own, strange way. Fallon’s blush crawled from her cheeks down to her chest. It was a sight to see, especially knowing it was I who could inflict that kind of reaction. “How was that feeling, Fallon?”
“Liberating.” She rolled over and threw herself on top of me, covered me. “What was that?”
“A second wind. The reason why I run. One of the few moments we experience when our body rejects what our mind is thinking, proves it wrong. A phenomenon that doesn’t happen very often, and one that comes when you least expect it. It’s one of those unexplainable feelings that you have to experience for yourself. Proof that we are so much stronger than we believe.”
Chapter 48
Fallon
If tears could talk,I wondered the words they would form. Maybe a certain name they would spell across his hallway floor.
I didn’t know how long I’d been lying here. At one point, I’d forced myself to stop crying, seeing if by holding back my tears, my heart wouldn’t know it was breaking. It was no use. I was a lost cause, clutching a book close to my chest as the sun descended into the woods through the window.
A brief sense of serenity had gripped me in sweet, sporadic moments of sleep. Julian was there too. Because he was always everywhere and nowhere … And I hated him for it, for what he did to me. For what he did to us! For not fighting harder!
Where could they have taken him? What could they have done with him? Nothing made sense, and I couldn’t understand why his friends—the only three people who were supposed to understand—beat him naked on his bedroom floor. It broke my fucking heart, and there was nothing I could do! I found myself crazy—maddened—screaming and crying and shaking and utterly still. Highs and lows and hollows, again, on repeat, all for him. All for a human who couldn’t learn to love himself the way I loved him. One who couldn’t fight back at all.
It took everything—everything—not to rip out every page from the spine of this book he left with me, and instead, I pitched it across the cabin against the wall. I gripped my hair! He didn’t fight. And now I was left, fighting with myself enough for the both of us. All he had done was steal books, though was it worth taking him like that? Would they take hislifetoo? The unknowns were slowly killing me. I knew nothing anymore. Then after another insane spell, I fell into stillness once again.
Time had passed, and the front door to the cabin creaked open.
I didn’t bother lifting my head to look, yet the footsteps grew nearer, louder. A hand lay over my shoulder.
“Fallon, what are you doing here?” The voice did not belong to Julian. I no longer cared who it belonged to or what they would do to me. Whoever it was circled me, crouched down. My gaze stayed paralyzed on the same spot where the wall used to be. Only faded denim now. “Why don’t you let me take you home?”
“And where is that? Home?” I whispered, recognizing that it was Jonah. There was a long stretch of silence, a big aching void in the air. I curled deeper into the hardwood floors, if that were at all possible. Jonah rubbed my arm, and I yanked it away. “I want to be here for when he comes back.”
“Julian’s not coming back,” he said, and his words sliced into me. I squeezed my eyes shut, forcing my tears not to believe it. I squeezed my heart, rejecting my heart to receive it. I squeezed my mind, wanting to forget it. “He’s in the cell. In the tunnels.”
“Then I suppose we are both imprisoned in this pain. Good. He deserves it.” I didn’t mean it, but I couldn’t contain my anger either. Julian could have fought against them. At least tried. If not for himself, at least for me.
“Then you would also be pleased to know he will be sentenced to The Wicker Man in seven days. If you honestly mean that, you will come with me and let me take you home so you can be safe. It’s the first day of Samhain and a full moon tonight. You never know what kind of mischief the flatlanders have in store.” He paused, gathered a breath. “Then you can say your goodbyes to the town’smonsterwhen the time comes. He’ll want to see you.”Monster.He’d said it with distaste as if to test my adoration, to get a rise out of me.
And I whispered, “All men are monsters in some way or another.” I dragged my gaze to his, narrowed my eyes. “If Julian wants to see me, he’ll have to either break out of that cell or haunt me. And if he doesn’t get out, and you happen to see him, tell him I said he’s nothing but a bitch-bitch.” I lowered my gaze. “You’ll have to say bitch twice because he’s being extra weak.”
Jonah waited for quite some time, and without movement from me, he expelled a heavy sigh, slapped his palms against his thighs, and stood. My gaze returned to the same spot on the wooden wall. My heart rate seemed to return to normal, too, as if now that Jonah was gone, Julian was not in the cell. He was only hiding somewhere in the shadows where this town had put him—possibly running in the woods.
In the short distance, I heard the shuffling of a floorboard. Then a click.
Then footfalls. A pause. And a door open. Then close.
Minutes ticked by, and the wind howled through the cracked window casement above the bed where we had slept less than twenty-four hours earlier, wrestling its way into the cabin, into my heart. A soft cry ebbed and flowed, intertwining with the coming night. A cry that wasn’t my own. I sniffled, rolling my body onto my back then my side to face the sound. Julian’s sheets were still disheveled just as we left them. The hinge of the window moaned as the casement swung slightly.
The cry continued, and I pulled myself onto my feet and walked with caution. It was Samhain, the one time during the entire year where the veil was the thinnest. My knees hit the edge of the mattress, and I crawled across the bed, peeking out the window, anticipating to see more than trees within the woods. But that was all there was, and a gust of wind raked through their branches, bending their tips. I clutched the seal of the window, feeling the ethereal cold trapped in this spot. I pulled my hand back, my nerves thundering.
And the cry came again. Below.
I lowered my gaze to see a bone-white ball of fur. “Casper,” I whispered. “Where have you been?”
