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Stella bangs her head against the top of the chair. “I did when you told me she saw the blood, but I thought she was with River. I was hoping one of you would say something when I told you to call her and Vaden, but you didn’t. When River came home, I knew she was in danger but by then she had already called you. Besides that—” Stella’s annoyance rests on me. “—she promised she wouldn’t do it without any of us there.”
“I’m sorry.” My hand rests on Stella’s thigh. “I wasn’t sure I was going to until I heard the car pull in. It really was bad last night.”
“All three of you are to not leave our fucking sight.” War shoves his door open and storms up the steps to the front door as everyone slowly rolls out.
This isn’t going well.
“He’s mad.” I stare off into the distance, shivers racking over my body.
“Yeah, well… We knew he would be.” River shoos me out the door.
“Priest!” He stops, his back still turned to me. I wait until everyone disappears through the front door.
I want to tell him. I should tell him. “I’m sorry.”
“You could have told us, Halen.” He finally turns his body, giving me all his attention. “We could have figured it out together, but that doesn’t matter anymore.”
My arms fold in front of myself. “So you all haven’t been keeping anything from us?”
“Honestly?” His brow kicks up and I hate when he gives me this look. It’s too similar to Dad. “Yeah, two things. One of which you’re about to find outrealsoon, and the other is what we do during Devil’s Cockpit parties, which was a new tradition that we carved into our generation forus onlyand is only known byus.The fact that you’ve acted this way only proves you’re not ready to learn what the fuck we do on those nights, but the only real reason why we haven’t told you all about that, is because you haven’t asked.”
Before I can tell him to elaborate, his back is to me and the door slams closed. I have ruined everything. Maybe I made a mistake. Took the wrong turn.
I force my feet forward and run up the stairs, not stopping until I’m in my room. I can’t be around anything right now.
I close my door with the force of my back, bending down to reach beneath my bed until the familiar two books touch my hand. One smaller, agile, and filled with words I don’t understand, and the other all too familiar. The reason I suspect everything has come back.
“It’s ironic.” River rustles with a packet of chips as she lowers herself onto one of the lounge chairs near my window. “How all this time, the enemy was our past.”
“It’s not ironic,” I say, leaving the booklet with the foreign tongue on my bedside table and flicking through the pages of theletters I found to pick up where I left off. “It’s fucking creepy and inhuman. Like everything in our fucking world.”
I woke tonight with an intense pounding in my head. Sweat bled over my face and down the back of my neck. I tried to rethink of what had happened the night before.
I had died.
Someone killed me.
Was I a ghost? Did I imagine the dagger slicing me?
My fingertips brush where the ink dries out over the paper, before I continue.
I pushed up from my bed and made my way to the mirror in my bedroom. Touching my throat, I focused my eyes on the faint finger marks around it, before stepping backward and hitting the counter behind me. I spun around, searching the room. What was that? Confusion ran inside me. It was like being trapped in your own body and not being able to find an out.
I needed an out.
I scooped up my robe and placed it over my shoulders before my hands came to the knob. I wasn’t going to get any answers here. Indeed, I needed to get out. I was going crazy.
The door swung open and the wind whipped around my ankles as I took the first step. The camp was asleep. The night too ripe for anyone to be awake. I lived with one memory that always clung to the back of my mind on repeat. Kind of like a constant reminder of where I was. Who I was. It was like my blood was on fire the longer I stayed. The longer I fought for a love I didn’t know.
I tiptoed down the steps until my feet hit the grass. That was when I saw it. A bright light blew up above my head like a star, before it exploded with a loud bang. I dropped to my knees, covering my ears with my hands. Crawling to the side, I stayedcurled as fire rained down from above. People screaming, shouting, running around the camp like someone was chasing them. I stayed still. Quiet. Curled up in a ball of protection.
I rustled my way into a side bush and opened this page.
This is the final time I can do this, and I’m now in a hurry. I feel the panic reaching up my spine the more that time ticks on. Gunfire erupts around me, but I have to scribble this down, with the hopes that one day, you will find it.
Yes, you, whoever you are that reads this.
I can hear a machine. Or a—automobile? I think that’s what they’re called. There are young men climbing in it. They look like bad men. Maybe even worse than the ones here. Maybe even worse than the ones I come from.
