Page 91
“How do you know?”
“Dried blood.” He stood, crossing back to us. “Nothing fresh or coagulated.”
Did that mean we were safe?
I leaned on the tree, careful to avoid a barbed stalk rising from the ground and twisting around the lower half of its trunk.
“Wait here,” Cyn said before darting back the way we came.
I closed my eyes, not wanting to see the corpse any longer.
Something would come to feed on it sooner or later.
We’d passed smaller scavenger creatures throughout our trek through the underbrush, some in trees, others slithering over the ground with missing limbs.
The guys said they were harmless scavengers and wouldn’t attack us in our current state. But if we didn’t survive the forest’s curse and the subsequent metamorphosis into whatever monstrosity Feranzis wanted us to be, our corpses would provide nourishment to the dozens of creatures we’d passed.
I hoped we’d be long gone before they came to feed on the infernal impaled on the tree.
“I’m sorry,” Zeke said, breaking the silence.
He hadn’t said much after what happened between him and Cyn, and I assumed it was fatigue from remaining in his alternate form.
“What for?”
“We wouldn’t be out here if it weren’t for me.”
I opened my eyes and squinted at him.
“Don’t look at me like that. You know if I’d paid more attention, they wouldn’t have pulled you into the car.”
“Are you for real right now?”
He shrugged, crouching to pluck a blade of blackened grass from the ground.
“Zeke, no. None of this is your fault.”
He twisted the grass around his fingers over and over, not responding.
I crouched in front of him, keeping my knees together so I didn’t flash him with my ripped dress and high slit. “Zeke,” I whispered. “Look at me.”
His gaze lifted from the fraying stalk to my face.
“Every one of us could have blamed ourselves. No one kept me from ending up in that car—not even myself. But we all tried. It wasn’t your responsibility alone to prevent it.”
“But I was right there.”
“And? Maybe I’d have ended up in worse shape if you hadn’t been right there. Did you ever think about that?”
“No,” he mumbled.
My heart melted.
Whenever Zeke wasn’t sure of himself or the situation, he seemed to regress to someone much younger. And while I recognized that, I wouldn’t infantilize him the way I’d seen others in the palace do.
He was a man.
A man who experienced immense suffering at the hands of people meant to protect him. A man left with profound scars that caused him to hide his light from the world.
