Henrik looked back into the house even as Jens called for him to hurry and shut the door. “You’re letting the cold in,” he complained between spoonfuls of stew.
Gawking at Henrik, I finally found my voice, but it came out only a cracking whisper. “Henrik. I—I’m right here.”
With his hand on the latch, Henrik’s gaze swept right over me and locked on Meya. “I’ll find her and be back soon.”
Of course...that never happened.
Henrik eventually returned, but he never found me. Not outside. Not in the house where I stood, begging to be seen and heard until my voice grew hoarse. Not anywhere.
He never found me. Not that cold night or the next. Or the next.
Or the next.
Or the next.
2
No Ghosts Here
Day 4
It took me three days to realize I wasn’t dead.
For three days and three nights and a handful of hours I was convinced I had somehow died out in the woods, and that it was my ghost begging to be heard and seen.
Maybe I’d fallen and hurt myself and froze to death in the snow. I wouldn’t be the first person to succumb to that manner of fate. Such was life in the Borderlands.
Or perhaps a bandit’s arrow had found and put an end to me. Not an unrealistic prospect.
Perhaps I fell through an ice pond masked by snow. Another possibility.
Whatever the circumstances, I grimly accepted that I was a ghost walking and talking to my family, pleading with them, begging for them to answer me—to see me, to connect with me across the veil that separated the living from the dead.
In those very first few moments when I returned home, stepping in from the cold into the warmth of my family home, I thought they were playing a cruel hoax to teach me a lesson for my earlier tantrum.
Ultimately, I came to realize that was just a desperate, clawing hope. An elaborate ruse involving the entire town to simply teach me a lesson? No. They wouldn’t go to such lengths. I wasn’t thatimportant. I didn’t matter that much. So that left me with only one conclusion.
I was well and truly dead.
Gone from this life, even if I had no memory of the moment I perished. A blessing, perhaps, to not remember. My end must have been sudden and violent. Why else was it a void in my mind?
For three days and three nights and a handful of hours I assumed I was a wraith walking among the living. As everyone threw themselves into the hunt for me, I screamed my throat raw, jumping up and down in front of everyone, waving my hands before their faces, calling out, begging, crying for them to see me. There must have beensomeoneout there who could.
Somehow, I had died.
Wasdead.
It was a frightening realization. The fear so profound it made my stomach sour and pitch. I’d gone to that place my mind never touched on for it was too remote a possibility.
As dangerous as life was in this time of unrest and war, I was young. And the young never considered their own mortality. I never had before.
And yetnowI did.
I’d been dragged to that precipice, fallen over it, and now I was drowning in a deep, dark maw of blinding fear.
I was young and strong. This wasn’t supposed to happen to me. Yes, life was hard, but this? How?Howcould I have gone from pushing for more freedom one moment to having no life to fight for whatsoever in the next?
Wasn’t a pathetic existence better than no existence at all?
