“There you are!” my mother cried.
Not cold. Not calm.
She cried.
The sound of her voice—cracked and thick with something dangerously close to feeling—shook me more than the red on my hands had.
I took a step toward her. Then another.
“Mama?” My voice caught. The last time I’d said that word, I’d been a child. Before everything broke.
Her face crumpled, not with disappointment, but with grief. And something else too, something I didn’t recognize from her. She ran to me.
Arms wrapped around me, tighter than I could’ve imagined, and suddenly I was being crushed to her chest. She smelled like lavender and the sweat of panic, and her hands trembled where they clutched my back.
She was shaking. My mother, who had stood frozen since the day my father’s heart stopped, untouched by seemingly anything, was trembling like the world had shifted under her feet.
“I thought …” she whispered into my hair. “Gods, Helena. I thought—”
Her voice broke.
I was frozen against her. I didn’t know how to respond. We didn’t do this, we didn’t hold or cling or weep. She’d embraced me exactly one time since my father had died, and that had seemed more out of duty than anything else. But here she was, broken open like something cracked from the inside, clutching me like she meant to stitch me back into herself.
“I’m alright,” I murmured, the words tasting strange in my mouth … because I honestly didn’t know if they were true.
“I’m alright, I’m here.” The creature shifted under my cloak, just a small weight stirring against my side, and I moved, making sure my mother couldn’t feel it as she held on to me.
Grigorios sheathed his sword, his gaze still sweeping the trees as if expecting something monstrous to step out and drag me back into the dark. When he looked at me, he gave a small, grim nod, his eyes filled with relief.
“You wandered off?” she asked, her voice tight and cracking around the edges.
I opened my mouth … then shut it again. The words tangled, useless.
How was I supposed to explain that I’d been taken? Drawn in. Swallowed whole by dream and forest and things with too many teeth, who fed on sorrow like it was meat.
Mother’s hands roamed my arms, checking for wounds. She turned my hand over, staring at the dried red still clinging to my skin. The blood that wasn’t mine.
“What is this?” she demanded, her voice pitched with panic.
“I didn’t wander,” I said, the words rasping out. “I—I woke up. I don’t know how I got here.”
Her fingers clenched around my wrist.
“There were monsters … and a tree,” I continued, heart hammering. “It was bleeding. I touched it. I thought—I thought it was a dream.”
My mother stared at me like I was speaking a language she’d never learned.
“You touched—what?”
“A tree,” I whispered. “And then … there were creatures everywhere, and I ran, and—” I broke off, chest heaving. “I know how it sounds.”
Grigorios stepped closer, but I didn’t look at him. Couldn’t. Not with my mother still holding my hand like she was afraid I’d vanish again.
“I didn’t wander,” I said once more, quietly. “Something brought me.”
“You were gone,” she snapped, the words breaking like ice. Her eyes burned into mine. “I woke and you weren’t there. No trail. Nothing.”
“I—I’m alright,” I said again, though it sounded thinner now, less true.
