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Why didn’t I?
You’ll never deserve it, the oily little voice whispered. You’ll never be happy with what you have. You wanted Ash. You have him, and now it’s not enough. You wanted to escape your mother. You’re as far away from her as you can be, and all you want is to go back.
The voice was right. There was something wrong with me. I was broken.
My mind was becoming more and more clouded, and I knew that if I could just have a moment away from this relentless heat, I would be able to think more clearly. But as I stood there, I realised that there wasn’t even a cool breeze coming off the forest this time. No fingers of mist crept from between the trees, trying to lure me in. The wall of heat continued all around me, pressing in from all sides.
Looking up, I stared at the leaves on the trees, silvery and pale in the moonlight.
They were all wilting.
Branches sagged sadly, drooping toward the ground. The grass, so lush and soft under my feet, grew sparser and darker between the trees in front of me.
I closed my eyes and tried to find the chill of unseelie, all the way on the other side of the forest. I could sense it—I could always sense it, like a constant tug at my navel trying to draw me back in—but it seemed further away now. Even harder to reach.
I frowned, my eyes still shut. Why did it all feel… wrong?
My breath caught when a single spot of coldness suddenly prickled my left side, a beacon of frost and ice and chill in an unbroken landscape of cloying warmth. I found my feet moving that way, following the treeline, something inside me instinctively trying to chase down the comfort.
It was coming towards me. I walked faster, desperate to reach it, and it seemed to speed up as well. I couldn’t see anything between the trees, but suddenly I could hear it, crunching over dead leaves and twigs, clothes rustling, those tendrils of cold reaching out to feel for me too—
“I knew you’d come back.”
I stopped dead, sickness thudding into my gut.
Balor was breathing fast as he stared at me from between the trees, just a few feet away. My stomach roiled when his hard blue eyes roamed over my frame, and I took a sharp step back from the treeline.
“You look like shit, Lonan.”
I ground my teeth together. “Fuck off.”
“This place is ruining you. You’re rotting from the inside.”
“I said fuck off.”
Balor threw back his head and laughed. “Turn around and walk away. I can’t follow you.” When I didn’t move, he smirked. “Mm.”
“You make me sick,” I rasped. “I despise you, Balor.”
“I know,” he purred, making me shudder with revulsion. “But you’re still here. You can’t help yourself, can you? In this moment, I am exactly what you need.”
I swallowed back bile. I hated him for it, I hated myself for it, but he was right. He was the single spot of familiarity and I wanted desperately to cling to it. I wanted it enough to not care that it was Balor.
Something was very, very wrong with me.
“Have you thought about my offer?” Balor drawled, leaning his shoulder against a tree trunk and crossing his arms.
“I turned it down the moment you offered it,” I said flatly.
He eyed me. “Yes, but things are different now, aren’t they?”
What?
When I stayed silent, he huffed and gestured around him vaguely. “Time is running out, Lonan. I know you’re young, but perhaps it’s time to start acting like an adult, hmm? Let’s put our petty squabbles aside.”
I ground my teeth together, wanting to fly over the treeline and wring his neck. “You can’t goad me into doing what you want, Balor.”
The condescending smirk dropped from his face, replaced instantly by an ugly scowl. “So you truly are a traitor in every sense of the word, then? You’re just going to stand by the side of your seelie dog while he destroys everything.”
