Angry waves of regret rise up and flood me.
He’s been here. Right here, and I’ve been here too. He’s been alone and lonely, and I’ve let that happen.
A chopped, broken sound seeps out of me as I pick up one of his blankets and lift it to my face.
Nothing.
There’s nothing but cold air and the fluffy scratch of fabric tickling my nose.
I pick up the next blanket, and the next one, and the next one until his neat nest is in disarray and there’s only one blanket I haven’t scented yet. I hold it in my hands and look out his window as the rain beats down steadily. Silvery rivulets pour down panes of glass, distorting my view of a landscape I know like the back of my hand.
I don’t move until the air in the room changes. Shades of gray lighten. Thick, heavy air thins and turns golden. Muted colors around me sharpen and become a little more vibrant each time I blink.
I’m dizzy.
Drunk.
Disoriented.
Every time I inhale, the room changes. Edges sharpen. Curves soften. Particles of dust expand, skipping around the room as the light hits them. I close my eyes and breathe in through mynose, filling my lungs until my chest aches. I hold my breath for as long as I can, and when I release it, the room spins. Yellow light flickers around certain objects, pale pink around others. Translucent, glitterlike floaters sink slowly to the earth and bounce up again.
An old, brand-new dimension bursts to life around me.
I raise the threadbare blanket I’m holding to my nose, waiting, shaking, before closing my eyes and inhaling again.
The scent that envelops me is distant. Far, far away. A wisp of a thing. A faded notion more than something concrete.
The antidote is working, I’m certain of that. Something is here with me in the room that wasn’t here before, but the suppressant I’ve taken for years still runs through my system. Diluted, but still in me.
What I have isn’t much, but it’s enough. Enough that when I leave Jensen’s room, I follow a filmy mist. A thin, invisible thread. A tattered and torn cord that leads from his room to the orangerie. From the orangerie to outdoors.
I follow it, steps lengthening as I make my way to the stables. Gregor stands, saddled, ears cocked and twitching as he considers me. We haven’t been out in this kind of weather before, so I understand his trepidation.
Fortunately, Gregor is a creature I know better than most, and I know that, like me, he was wild once. I offer him my palm, letting him sense my urgency as I stroke the back of my fingers over a soft velvet muzzle.
He stamps a foreleg and nickers as I mount him. He rears up, throwing a long, high-pitched scream at the sky, and takes off with only the slightest encouragement from me.
I follow the misty film of Jensen’s scent down the road Sid and I traveled earlier. After a mile or so, it veers left, turning off-road toward a clearing in the shrubbery and meandering down the slope to the heart of the valley.
I breathe in frantically, sniffing loudly and repeatedly as my olfactory region lights up. Gregor gallops at full speed, his trust in me absolute as we chase an invisible trail.
I stop and dismount when the gradient of the slope becomes unsafe for Gregor to tackle. It’s still raining. A slippery slide of mud and rainwater do their best to slow me, but ahead of me, in front of me, so close I could reach out and touch it, something soft and gentle calls to me. It’s a flimsy, light thing. Thin and nowhere near as full-bodied as it would be if I were completely free of impairment and the weather wasn’t doing everything in its power to wash it away.
As it is, what I smell is more of a hazy shadow than something with roots in reality. A call, a dream that takes place in the early hours, when slumber lightens and releases its grip on the conscious mind. I breathe in and follow it where it leads. It’s a phantom. A specter. A memory more than a scent. A distant recollection of four walls and a ceiling. Warmth and connection. A distant place I visited a long time ago and haven’t been able to find my way back to.
A happy, safe place I’ve missed without knowing it’s what I’ve been missing.
The memory thickens, swirling around my feet and growing clearer.
He’s close. He must be.
“Jensen,” I roar into the fading light. “Jensen!”
There’s a sound in the distance, a squeak I hear over the rain. I narrow my eyes, searching the landscape for something out of place. I see it at last, the rustle of a bramble bush a hundred meters or so away.
My heart thunders, wind whipping my hair into my eyes as I sprint toward him. I move faster than I’ve ever moved before. Faster than I thought I could move.
He’s on the ground, a puddle of a person drenched by the rain and covered in mud. He’s soaked to the bone, teeth chattering from the cold. He’s curled up on his side, leaning against a big, smooth rock with one leg stretched out in front of him.
