AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I don’t care if you’re—”
“Come on. Say it.” Apollo purses his lips, staring at me in the mirror. “If you don’t, we’ll follow you around until you either kill us or say it.”
“Try me.”
“Justsayit,” Ares insists. He’s the oldest, which should make him less of a jackass, but that hasn’t happened yet. “Tell us why you won’t stay with Daisy.She’sgoing to want you there, so it’s pretty fucking weird that you won’t get in the car with the rest of us, get into a helicopter, and—”
All I’m going to do is take the band off the bar, but my hand has other ideas. I’m off the bench before I can stop it. My hand wraps around the bar, and it doesn’t matter that it’s bolted to the studs. The metal underneath my palm feels exactly like a jump bar, exactly like the one I used to launch myself out into open air hundreds of fucking times, and I’m back in it.
Wind in my face. Ollie next to me, his hair visible under his helmet. The parachute we didn’t know was faulty until it was too late.
The fall.
The fall.
The fall.
The landing.
Pain wrenches through my shoulder at the same moment the bar rips out of the wall. The mirror looks like the view from between those stone gates, and there’s nothing but empty air and earth coming up. Earth slams into the mirror, but it’s not earth, it’s Ollie, his eyes already dead, chest not rising, and I can’t reach through glass to get to him. Even when Icouldreach him, it wasn’t enough, I couldn’t save him.
The glass shatters.
There’s shouting. I can’t tell who’s saying anything, only that there are hands on my shoulders. One of them digs into broken bone and I swat at them, completely fucking ineffectual.
“—glass,” Ares says. He’s got his hand lower down on my arm now. “You’ll cut yourself. Stand still.”
He brushes at my clothes. Apollo has my other elbow, and he’s not letting go, like he thinks I’ll make a break for it. Where the fuck would I go? I can’t breathe. I’ve never felt anything like this in my life, unless I have, and I called it adrenaline or emotion or weakness. My teeth feel like they could crack in my jaw. I want to scream, or cry, make an unholy sound. I can’t do that in front of these people. I won’t.
I can’t get it to stop.
“Come over here.” Ares doesn’t have to pull very hard to get me to move, but there’s only so far I can walk. My legs feel all fucked up, too. Ares flickers into view. First, his eyes, which remind me of Ollie’s, and then his hair, which doesn’t. It’s not quite as curly. “Let me have that.”
I don’t know what he’s asking for until he takes it out of my hand.
It’s the bar from the wall, with pieces of the studs in it.
Ares tosses it to the side of the room, where it lands on a rubbery mat. Then his eyes are back in front of my face. His hands at my cheeks. I’d normally tell him to fuck off, not to touch me, except, actually, I can’t remember the last time he was this close.
“Nothing’s going on.” His voice is light and even, like a huge-ass glass mirror didn’t shoot pieces of debris at us. “Do you know where you are?”
Falling through thin air. “Yes.”
“What was in that mirror?” Ares’s eyes briefly leave mine. He looks over my shoulder, then tilts his head toward the door. Someone else moves, close by. I don’t know who it is until he goes past. Apollo. Where the fuck does he think he’s going? I don’t know. I don’t care.
“Ollie died on a jump.” I hear myself say it more than I feel myself say it. My lips aren’t connected to my brain. Nothing’s connected. I’m still in midair.
“Ollie,” he says softly, and then his eyes get wider—recognition. I know I talked about this before. I cameherefrom the hospital. How long was I in that sea of painkillers? A week, maybe two. There was at least one surgery after that. “I thought you meant he got hit when you were on the ground.”
“He fell. We fell. His parachute didn’t work.”
“You don’t want to go in the helicopter.”
“I’m not some—I’m not some pussy. I’ll go in a fucking helicopter for her. You don’t understand.”
“I’m trying to understand, buddy. Keep talking. You need some more air in your lungs. You look like a ghost. Do you know you’re not in a helicopter now?”
Not really. “Yeah.”
