A soft breeze stirs through the rows of plants, brushing against my cheek like a whispered promise nurtured by Earth’s good graces. I smile, breathing it in and basking in the peace. The buds are opening, each petal unfurling like they’re reaching for the sun, reaching for the stars, even, and for the first time in years, I feel whole again.
My fingers tingle, a familiar prickle that dances from my palms up to my wrists. I glance down and frown when I notice faint threads of light weaving through the dirt, trailing from my fingertips. They shimmer like veins of gold beneath the soil, but the beauty is as frightening as it is stunning.
“What…?” The word falls from my lips with a gasp as I draw my hand back, soil sifting through my fingers in slow motion. It isn’t dirt anymore. It’s gray ash, as if the golden light burned the soil.
The flowers close and blacken one by one, their petals shriveling and curling inward. The greenhouse windows crack, splintering with a sound like bones breaking. The air turns cold, heavy, and my voice trembles when I call out, “Thane?”
My breath comes out with a cold chill as I glance around the greenhouse, searching for him the way I always do when fear sets in. “Thane…are you there?”
No answer. Just the faint echo of my own voice bouncing back at me.
Then I see him.
He’s standing at the other end of the greenhouse, half hidden by a shadow of curling smoke. The same Thane I remember—broad shoulders, dark hair, those forest-green eyes that once made my heart skip a few beats. But something is different.
Something is wrong.
The light behind him flickers, twisting his shadow until it stretches unnaturally across the glass floor, appearing sinister, an eerie chill flitting down my spine.
“Thane…?” I whisper again, but my voice sounds smaller this time, meek, trembling with the fear that’s settled in the base of my spine.
Especially when Thane doesn’t move, doesn’t speak. His eyes only glow faintly—not green anymore, but molten gold—and when he finally does step forward, the sound of his boots on the floor is like thunder.
The walls melt away, the glass dissolving into darkness until there’s nothing but the two of us, standing in an endless field of dead flowers. The earth beneath my feet is cracked and dry. My hands tremble as I look down and realize that the ash coating them is bleeding into my skin, marking me, seeping under my flesh like ink.
Thane’s voice cuts through the darkness, low and distorted.
“You can’t run from what you are, Willow,” he bellows, his voice echoing in my mind long after he says the words.
“I don’t understand,” I choke out, but when I reach out toward him, my hand passes right through his chest. The world tilts, and he’s gone, swallowed by the dark.
Suddenly, I’m alone again.
Except for the whisper. It slithers around me like smoke, threading through the cracks in the air, brushing against the back of my neck where the fine hairs prickle with an unsettling alarm.
“Witch….”
The word isn’t spoken—it’s breathed down my neck, prompting me to gasp and snap my head back in search of the source of that whisper, but there’s nothing.
My pulse spikes as the whisper multiplies, voices rising until the sound fills the sky.
Witch. Witch. Witch.
The ground quakes beneath me, the world splitting open as fire bursts through the cracks. I stumble back, but something catches my wrist—a hand, rough and burning.
I look down.
It’s Thane’s hand. But his skin is scorched, his veins pulsing with golden light, and his grip is unyielding. His eyes blaze through the smoke, wild and desperate.
“Don’t fight it,” he growls.
Then the fire swallows us both.
I wake up with a start, my throat blazing with the fire from the nightmare I’ve just woken up from, my heart hammering uncontrollably as I desperately lug in a breath.
“It’s okay, Willow. You’re okay,” a gentle voice is a grounding force that I believe, and I turn my face to its sourceto find the woman from outside—Rissa—standing over me and holding out a glass of water.
I reach out for it tentatively, sensing safety but still wary that she might try to poison me the way she did with her revelations outside. But I’m spurred on to drink the water by my burning, parched throat, and sit up to drink the water as if I’ve been dehydrated for years.
