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“I can do it,” I said, rubbing my hand over the back of my head where it ached.
I wanted to prove I could handle this, that I could do what they needed, that I wasn’t useless.
“You don’t need to,” Grant chimed in, despite Kase’s sharp look in his direction. “We can figure out something else.”
“Like what? Does anyone have any better ideas?”
“I could try using my wolf,” Troy said. “Paul didn’t react to more dominant wolves, but those were casual tries. I could try to force it.”
Hunter shook his head. “Bad idea. If you try to do that, you could just as easily end up in the same condition he’s in. We don’t know if this can pass from one person to another, but I don’t think we should go screwing with the chance by having you create that sort of link.”
Troy opened his mouth to argue, but I spoke up between them. “I want to try again.”
Troy’s lips pressed together, a clear sign he wasn’t happy about the choice, but he nodded.
I tried to breathe in, to ignore the pain in my head to ignore the rapidly spreading sense of failure as though I’d tried and screwed it up already.
I used my other hand—the one I’d been using felt as though it had been burned. I took one big breath before placing my palm on his cheek, beside the muzzle, and I focused everything I had into driving back that shadow.
And for a moment it worked. For one second the shadow retreated, but like a wave it crashed back into me with even more force.
This time Hunter caught me, which was good because I would have hit the ground and skidded.
“Enough,” Troy growled out, and one look at him made it clear. We were done.
He had his territorial, ‘don’t fuck with me’ face on that said he’d had enough of seeing me tossed around. No one argued with him—what was the point?
I rubbed my eyes and pulled away from Hunter. I didn’t bother to look at Kase or Grant—I really was in enough pain—as I walked up the stairs.
“Ava?” Troy said, a question in his voice.
“I’m just going to lie down for a little bit,” I said. “That wore me out.”
No one spoke again, and I was glad.
I really didn’t need to think about my failure anymore.
The mist came when I fell asleep. It always came, so why it surprised me each time, I wasn’t sure.
I choked, gagged, tried to cough it out of me. Sometimes the drowning was worse and sometimes it was better, but it was always there. When it was good, if was like walking through a room with smokers in it, and when it was bad, it was being pulled under the water.
This time it was in the water.
Across the way, some of the mist moved, coming closer, the gray of it almost shaped as a person but not quite.
It reminded me of what I’d seen that had driven back the shadow. I’d spotted them before, in this place, but they had never noticed me, to care about me.
This one reached out, and the mist retreated. I could breathe.
“What are you?” I gasped out the words, grateful to be able to speak, to draw air in.
It didn’t answer, only stood there as though it expected something from me.
“Was what you showed me real? Was that my mother and me?”
I got the sense it nodded, but it was impossible to be sure.
“Why did you show me that? How would you even know?”
