Fixated on the sea lapping the shoreline at the border of the valley, Zion murmured, “I don’t know. I don’t…” His reply was barely audible as the currents of air snatched it away. “Know.”
Compressing his hand in my own, I inhaled to my lungs’ capacity and opened my mouth in a scream. The howl rocked through me, and I let out everything that had been festering inside me for more than two months.
For weeks, I’d been searching for a goal to seek, for a trail to follow, for something,anything,to pull me out of dreaming about going back to the night I’d met Gedeon. When he’d been only a dark figure hidden in the treeline of the clearing near Ilasall.
When he’d been more than just a ghost haunting me since the day I’d plunged my knife into him.
My vocal cords strained as my cry reverberated off the clouds above.
But I continued. My lip corners ripped, and my tears scorched my skin until my voice disappeared, and I drowned in my wish to go back to that early morning when it’d all changed for the worse.
Sniffling, I collapsed onto myself. Zion curled around me, tucking me under his chin, holding me while I fell apart.
“Pretty birdie, you can fly, you can,” he purred, and I half-snorted, half-choked on a sob at his insanity. I couldn’t pinpoint what exactly it was, his obsession with unexplainable things or simply the most freakish sense of humor, but it lifted the weight off my shoulders.
There was a time for a breakdown.
There was a time for silence.
There was a time for peace.
And there was also the time for war.
So I scrubbed my face dry with the sleeves of my yellow parka and stood up. With my head held high, I extended an arm to Zion kneeling beside me. “Come on.”
When I was thirteen, I’d vowed to myself I would raze the land the cities stood on.
It was time for my promise to come true.
For once in his life, Zion remained speechless, not a single remark. We tightened the straps of our backpacks and trekkeddown the mountain, navigating the uneven terrain and the frozen mud path—or more like what I imagined being a path.
Our beat-up ride glinted in the sunlight, parked on the side of a desolate road, the asphalt cracked and full of potholes—nature’s plant pots.
A memory of how Gedeon and Zion had come in frantic search of me to Damia’s compound in this exact car last autumn resurfaced.
It was the night I’d chosen to be theirs. Fully.
Shooing the thoughts shriveling my soul away, I yanked open the back seat door?—
And froze.
From the inside, a set of green eyes studied me.
“Zion,” I whispered, the leather straps of my backpack digging into my forearm as I didn’t dare to make a single move.
Rounding the vehicle, Zion asked, “What?”
“Shhhh,” I hissed.
But my backpack slid off my wrist and landed on the ground with a clonk.
The dark fur ball’s tiny ears flattened. It watched me from the back seat, curled up on top of another sweater I’d borrowed from Jayla, this one vivid green. I could swear it on Alora’s non-existent grave that Jayla physically couldn’t wear anything that wasn’t shouting in color.
“There is…somethinghere.”
Coming to a stop beside me, Zion cracked up, causing the creature to lower its head. But it didn’t flee.
As much I enjoyed Zion’s laughter—free, unrestrained, and so beautiful—I glared at him.
