Page 6 of Sorrow & Strangers

Hate is easier than grief. Anger is easier. Anything is easier. Grief is the inescapable tide on a storm-torn beach. It consumes everything in its path with no survivors. She’s wrapped that maelstrom around herself so tightly she’s suffocating any other emotion she might feel. Hate. Anger. Denial. That never-ending tide has eclipsed all of them.

Even as I watch Morningstar House, her new residence, I know with unwavering certainty that a single truth echoes through her head.

It should have been me.

She’s no doubt spent the last three months imagining every way the outcome of that night was her death and not her angel’s. But nothing can change her reality, and so she forces herself to relive his death every night. When I walk in her dreams, I can sense they are driven by her own power and follow her own plan. She creates the nightmares herself. She wants this pain.

She wants to die.

Never.

My teeth grit at the thought. She will not die. I will do whatever is required to force her to live. Even if it means grabbing the heart from her chest and stoking the fury that lies there. I don’t care if she then directs that fury at me. She can paint me as the target for all her rage and hatred so long as she lives.

I can feel her eyes boring into my back from where she is watching me from inside the house. Purposely, I glance back at her and crook my finger, coaxing her outside. I infuse that single gesture with every ounce of insufferable arrogance I can manage, and I can manage quite a lot. It’s time to incite that rage she needs so desperately.

She locks her eyes with mine and snaps the curtains shut.

There she is.

Beneath the layers of grief and devastation, the hopelessness and agony, she is still in there.

I know exactly what it is like to lose everything. To scream for revenge and relief until your throat is raw, only for no one to answer. To struggle against your reality until your soul is nothing but an open wound, scrubbed raw by all you have lost.

Unknown

How long are you going to avoid me?

The sound of her phone smashing against the wall echoes from the house, and I smirk. It doesn’t matter. The phone is runed against damage and will instantly repair itself.

Unknown

That was petulant.

This time, I feel more than hear the blast of power from inside.

I am poking at her, intentionally riling her up, but she still hasn’t come outside. Time for my backup plan. Lazily strolling across the lawn, I take the steps up to the porch and knock resoundingly on the front door. Everything is silent, and I can almost sense her anger building, boiling inside her. I knock again. She needs this. She needs to feel something else. Anything else.

I press my palm against the door as if I can summon her rage, her power. As if I can summon her.

This has been a long summer, compounded by the distance I kept between us for those three months. I was just trying to give her the space to breathe through the worst of it. Or so I thought that was what she was doing until she returned and I dreamwalked through her nightmare.

The distance is gone now, and I have no intention of allowing her to keep running from me.

The door whips open and she glares at me with hatred. “Leave me alone.”

“No.”

She slams the door in my face.

I smirk at the show of defiance, the proof of life. If anyone can provoke her into living, I have the distinct honor of being that person, and we are just getting started.

Pushing the door open, I narrow my eyes as I close the distance between us. “How long will you wallow in your self-hatred?” She snarls, sending a bolt of power at me. I swat it aside easily, letting it mark the wall with a flash of purple light. “Weak.”

She’s lost weight, and I know she must not be eating, yet her eyes burn with barely contained fury. I can work with that.

“Why are you here?” she demands. “Why now?”

“Because I will not allow you to get your wish.” You will not die. “So fight.”