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Only a shimmer.
When his bloodied mouth dislodged from my chest, I cupped his cheek and spread the crimson over his bottom lip, not at all surprised when his tongue darted out to lap at it. “You said you watched me from the underbrush in the past. When was that?”
“A long time ago,” he said, and gave a suckle on my bloodied finger. “At the beach behind Tidestone, the day Lorn and I escaped the dungeons.”
So they had escaped together, just like I thought, which explained the connection they’d forged over it. “How did you escape?”
“By wanting to die and not caring who would die alongside me,” he said, his tone so flat and somber, my heart ached at the level of agony one had to endure to reach such a point. “By letting my shadows pour out of me uncontrolled, embracing death. But they didn’t kill me, nor Lorn. I managed to grab the keys from the jailor’s breeches where he’d hung it on the gate right beside his blackened corpse. Together, we ran for the cliffs.”
My throat thickened. “That’s where you saw me.”
“Saw you playing, running, and laughing while I bled, hurt, and fevered nearby,” he said. “It seemed so… unreal, unfair. Made me furious beyond measure.”
Planting hate at his core for me that had only grown over the years. “Maybe we are truly fated only to end in emotional tragedy…”
“Little dove,” his whisper came with a salty kiss to my lips before he straightened and placed his own by my ear, “loveistragedy.”
I hate that I love you.
ChapterThirty-Six
Malyr
Past, Tidestone
My lungs ached as I sprinted through the dense copse of trees, their gnarled trunks blurring together in my frantic flight. Each gasp I took was like swallowing shards of glass when the frigid air collided with my heated, rattling chest. Fever… it must have been a fever.
At my next step, a hidden root snared around my foot, ripping at old cuts and infected wounds. I stumbled, unable to catch my footing. The world tilted, and my shoulder slammed into the hard ground. My head collided with the spongy remnants of a fallen trunk, and pain exploded in white-hot flashes across my skull.
“Malyr!” Lorn stepped up beside me, groaning as she bent over, one hand placed on her swollen belly, the other reaching for my arm, shaking me. “Get up! We have to—” A howl had her gaze snap back toward where we’d come from. “They’re chasing the hounds after us. We have to make it to the top of the cliff, Malyr. Now!”
Despite the nausea, despite the chills that incessantly bit at my sweaty skin, I forced myself to rise, brushing away the disorientation and pain. Yes, we had to make it to the highest part of the cliff and jump. Emaciated as we were, it was our only chance at a shift. Our only chance at death should it fail, the thought of my body shattering on the rocks almost comforting.
Another howl.
Panic threaded through every sinew as we kept running, the salty taste of freedom so near, yet tinged with the acrid fear of recapture. My heart hammered in my chest, oddly out-of-tune, setting a frantic tempo that echoed in my ears and reverberated through my brittle bones, my once sturdy frame worn down to nothing but gaunt remnants.
When Lorn fell behind, I took her hand, but pulling her with me at a faster pace wasn’t possible. Not with how one arm cradled that filthy unborn half-blood they’d fucked into her, her other arm fighting for balance whenever she struggled over trunks, through vines, and around boulders. It wouldn’t be an issue much longer.
If we hit the rocks, it would die.
If she shifted in her state, it would die.
And there would never be another…
Laughter, bright and carefree, drifted up from the bay below—a sound I’d all but forgotten after all this time in the harrowing silence of the dungeons. It felt like an assault to my senses, an affront to my panic… until it eased said panic away. My desperate pace came to a complete stop, my gaze drawn to the spectacle unfolding below as Lorn’s hand slipped from mine.
Down on the beach, bathed in the late afternoon glimmer of the setting sun, a girl spun along the white ripples of waves, her bare feet kicking up sprays of sand while some woman frantically ran behind her. My breath hitched at the sight, at the girl’s bright blonde tresses that whipped around her face at each spin, a strange pull tugging beneath my ribs.
“Malyr…” Lorn waited several feet ahead of me, desperation written across her bruised face as she waved me toward her. “What are you doing? You have to run!”
Yes, I had to run.
I should have never stopped.
My eyes went back to the girl as my mind blurred and my upper body swayed. I watched as she pirouetted through a flock of gulls, her light spirit a stark contrast with the heavy, gnawing darkness lodged within me. The sight of her childish innocence felt like a slap to my sunken-in face, the echo of her laughter a cruel reminder of everything that had been ripped from me by her kind. She was one of them.
Human.
