AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I took his hand. “You don’t need to blame yourself. If we start playing that game, I can find a thousand reasons to blame myself for everything that’s happened in my life but…” I trailed off.
“I won’t play that game if you won’t,” Liam promised me.
Then he said, “I was able to kind of get into Longroad’s head.” And he frowned. “Unless I made it all up. It seems kind of strange that I would have imagined him in the same place where I was trapped for so long. I don’t think Stone really believed me, and maybe he was right. Maybe I just made it up…maybe he’s really dead.”
He looked stricken, and I said, “Liam. Stay with me.”
There was a harsh snap in my words, and he looked at me in surprise.
Now that he was focused, I gave him an encouraging smile. “I have faith in you. Even if it doesn’t work out today…I know you’ll figure out anything you need to.”
Liam’s answering smile crinkled the corners of his eyes.
“Can you tell me about something from Rose’s point of view?” he asked. “Do you know any dreams she’s had?”
I shook my head. “Rose and I haven’t really been telling each other our dreams. Or talking much at all.”
To be honest, I hadn’t thought much about dreams in years. I had always had vivid dreams as a kid, but as I got older, I’d started to forget them by the time I woke up. Now that felt like a loss.
“I was thinking about how I must have looked to Nathan,” Liam said, his voice flat. “What it must have looked like from his perspective. How pathetic I must have looked to someone like him.”
“You’re not pathetic,” I said.
Liam tilted his head to one side as he looked at me. “Of course I’m not. He’s pathetic, no matter how powerful he is.”
Sometimes it was hard to know how to answer Liam. “I’m glad we agree.”
“Tell me something from Rose’s perspective.”
The terrible memory of my little sister shaking me awake after I have been beaten by Nathan rose in my mind. Her eyes had been wide with fear, her face white and crumpled like she was about to cry. She wouldn’t have forgotten that moment.
“My sister found me after Nathan had hurt me, “I said.
“How? I need all the details. The senses. So I can imagine what it’s like from her perspective and try to use that to connect with her.”
Liam had already closed his eyes. Which was good, because I needed to steel myself to remember the details of that day.
I drew on a deep breath. “She climbed the tree outside my window. She’s always been really proud of being a climber…or at least, she was proud when she was a kid. She must have been worried about me because she’d seen him attack me in the first place.” I dug deep trying to imagine what that night was like for her. “It was raining just a little, the kind that’s really just mist. She would have felt the bark against her hands as she climbed, and she must have been afraid because Nathan was dangerous and she had just seen him hurt me outside Lawson’s house.”
My voice dropped a little. “She was being so brave. I guess she probably felt like she owed me…That she caused this…”
“Why is that?” Liam asked.
Panic squeezed my chest. Liam wouldn’t hurt anyone, and he certainly wouldn’t hurt Rose. But what if Liam told Stone and Stone wasn’t so forgiving? I didn’t think Stone would hurt her. She’d just been a little girl. Still, the memory of how hard and brutal Stone could be haunted me. Especially when he was protecting… or avenging…those he loved.
“Siblings just feel guilty for each other I guess. We’re supposed to take care of each other.”
Liam sighed under his breath, as if he knew first hand how true that was. Or as if he knew that I was lying. Sometimes it was hard to read him.
I forged on. “She climbed in through the window. Our bedroom was big, with gaudy furniture, this huge bed with massive carved oak posts. But I wasn’t lying on the bed, I was lying curled on my side on the hardwood floor. She must have seen me and climbed in through the open window. Both Nathan and I liked having the windows open to the forest.” It bothered me that Nathan and I had anything in common, like our love for the forest where I had first met him when he returned to our pack. “She must have seen me lying there, with my face bruised and blood on my clothes, and thought that I could be dead.”
My voice broke imagining how scary it must have been for her, the same way I felt afraid now for her.
“I’m trying,” Liam told me. “but I can’t do it.”
Disappointment rushed through me, but I rested my hand on his shoulder. He looked at me as if the touch surprised him, and I realized no one in the pack probably touched him except for his siblings. “It’s okay. Where do your powers even come from?”
He shrugged. “I’ve been weird since I was a kid.”
