And with those venomous words, Niklaus hooks his hands around my ribcage, throwing me into the creek.
“Your father is as good as dead. And you’ve all but killed us too, you evil bitch.”
Cold, murky water splashes around me in a small explosion of mud, algae, and mushy grime. I spit out the small amount that splatters into my mouth, gasping as goose bumps run ramped over my chilly skin. I squint against the blaring streams of sunlight, panting in shock as his haunting figure stands over me.
My eyes fill with tears, hot and fast with a lump swelling in my throat. Impossible to ignore or hide. I swore he’d never make me cry again after last time!
I inhale sharply through my nose but am unable to stop the tears from burning miserable pathways down my cold cheeks. The cry is pressurized in my chest, threatening to cause those obnoxious, embarrassing hiccups.
Why am I crying?
Those insults about my father don’t hurt me anymore.
They don’t hurt me.
They don’t hurt me.
He’s lying in a bed. Alone in his own mind. Left my mother. Left me. Left Krimson. Left DaiSzek. Left his family. Not by choice. I never knew him. Will never know him.
My mind spirals uncontrollably with fury and grief.Stop crying!I don’t care about Patient Thirteen. I’m not a child anymore. I’m a grown woman. But the well of tears are heavy, slow, and that of a wounded little girl as they drop into the foggy creek.
Niklaus’s cheek and brow twitches, but then morphs back into the careless, ruthless, soulless expression he loves to wear so proudly.
Patient Thirteen means nothing to me… He can’t hurt me. Those words can’t hurt—
“Whoa, everything okay here?” a man calls out from just over the hill behind Niklaus.
Shit.
“We’re fine here,” Niklaus shouts back, but doesn’t take his punishing eyes away from mine.
“I know a lover’s quarrel when I see one.” The man’s strange voice gets closer. “You okay, little miss?”
Those buttery summer beams blasting from the afternoon sky take my breath away as they land on a young man. His sun-kissed skin and golden hair shimmer before me. Though he’s missing the aged smile lines and minor hint of crow’s feet around his eyes from laughing every day…there is no mistaking the man who has approached us.
It’s my Uncle Niles.
At least twenty years younger than the man I know from my time.
I nearly shout his name, exasperated and speechless. More tears blur my vision as I recall my last encounter with Uncle Niles. We left him behind. I don’t even know when! I have no concept of the year, day, or time he is lost in right now. All I know is he’s in Vexamen.BeforeAunt Ruth took the throne and ended the Meat Carnivals. When it was a federal offense to be from the shining Chandelier City.
He must be so confused. So lost.
We left him behind.
The ache and hollowness of guilt dissolve into my chest, pinching my lungs together in a tight fist that won’t unclench.
I can’t breathe.
“Oh, fuck…” Niklaus loses his sinister glare. It falls so quickly as he stumbles back a step, gawking at his dad.
My eyes bounce between the elevated tension and shock emanating off the two men standing in front of me. I shiver in the ice-cold running water as they stare wordlessly at each other.
“That’s no way to treat a beautiful young lady, friend…” Uncle Niles says with a smile.
He reaches down and holds his hand out to help me get to my feet. The action is all so familiar. It’s as if he hasn’t changed at all from the many times he picked me up off the ground when I scraped my knee playing. How he’d kiss my forehead when I’d cry, tell me he’d always take good care of me—that he loved my father dearly. That when he found out he’d fallen asleep and can’t wake back up, he promised him he’d love me as much as he loved their friendship.
Yet even though he looks much younger as he greets me with that warmhearted grin, I catch a strange flicker in his dilating pupils. They stretch wide then small then wide again, nearly consuming his blue-green irises. Even at the age I currently know him, his eyes don’t look this tired and sunken in shadows.
