My blood sprayed the barn siding.
I stared at the splatter, connecting crimson constellations as blood filled my mouth. The metallic taste was warm when it pooled on my gums but instantly cooled when it dribbled down my chin. I only had a second to admire the macabre painting before his knuckles struck my stomach.
A jolt of pain surged into my gut. When my body was slung to the side, the chains around my wrists and ankles yanked me back into place. I pulled myself up, my boots finding the concrete floor covered in dead leaves and blood stains.
My coat had been ripped away, and my shirt was shredded, exposing my chest and stomach to the brutal winter. My joints were stiff and my muscles ached from trying not to shiver.
Four pairs of chains hung from the rafters, and steel plates were bolted to the floor—four more opportunities to restrain four other people inside this barn.
A single light hung from the center of the barn ceiling. It swung slightly overhead. If I craned my neck just enough, I was sure to see the night’s black canvas through a crack.
Though Adora warned me, I still couldn’t understand why I was here or what they wanted from me.
I’d learned that asking questions was useless. People lie. Whether to protect themselves or to protect someone else, they lie. Like how Adora lied to me for six weeks. However, I had to believe it was either to protect everyone from me or to protect me from everyone else.
I was glad she wasn’t here to witness another slash across my stomach and another blow to my back. The man they called Phoenix wasn’t tiring like the white-tailed deer I’d hunted in the mornings when I was younger. Both his eyes and fists were hammered brass.
Each person, I believe, was born into this world with both kindness and wickedness inside them. There was a choice, which to nurture and which to murder. For over a hundred years, I’d coddled the cold. This was how I knew the auric eyes I was looking into weren’t monstrous. Not really. They were deprived and filled with hatred. Whether this man hated himself or the world was still up for debate. Still, his attack on me had become a form of rotten pleasure to hide whatever he didn’t want people to see.
It fed him for the time being.
So he could keep going. But so could I.
It was freezing in the barn, but I kept my eyes open.
I kept them distant and indifferent.
It was agony to breathe, but I didn’t show it.
Though I missed her already, I didn’t let it affect my heart.
I remained solid—stone, not paper.
The three of them wore coats and slacks. They’d loosened the collars of their stark-white shirts, but my blood had stained Phoenix’s sleeves.
They’d demanded my name.
Though I’d refused to give it, I’d learned theirs.
Beck was the younger one. As he blew heat into his cupped hands, he could not watch the torture as he leaned against the barn wall wearing a hat that looked like a head sock.
And then there was Julian—the one I first noticed watching me at the manor from where they had taken me. He hadn’t spoken and hung back with his arms crossed and his knuckles propped under his chin.
Phoenix grabbed my jaw.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he asked me with spit splashing across my face.
I didn’t react, holding on to the image of Adora in my mind, where we were back at the lighthouse together, and I was watching her undress: her skirts sweeping across the old floors, where dust skipped and settled. She wore a smile, and I wondered if she ever felt freer than the moments she spent with me.
Julian dropped his stance. “Look into his eyes,” he said, taking a step closer. “He’s not human. He’s not even animal.” His attention slid to Beck. “Go find Zeph.”
Beck kicked off the wall. “I don’t know, Jules. His powers would’ve come out by now.”
Phoenix shoved my face to the side. “Or maybe he’s just better at controlling it.”
I didn’t know how much time had passed after my swollen eyes cracked open.
My gaze couldn’t land on a solid figure, but I knew night was fading. It was sometime between midnight and sunrise. Closer to sunrise. But everything was blurred and out of shape.
My temples throbbed, and there was an ache from the sides of my head all the way to the back.
I was still chained to this spot. Every tear, gash, and cut burned when an early morning chill swept across my bare chest. It forced my eyes open wider, focusing on the shadows until my vision balanced out and my surroundings took shape.
Three men stood before me. One I hadn’t seen before.
“It’s colder than fuck-you outside,” Beck said, entering the barn.
And then there were four.
Go find Zeph, I remembered Julian saying.
So, this must be Zeph, I thought. He stood across from me with dark blond hair and a mask. And looking at him was as if I was looking at the reflection of my old self. A monster. A wendigo. The version of me everyone ridiculed, but no one saw. Not even myself until Adora.
From inside the mask, a pair of lime-green eyes stared back at me.
Two viridescent globes.
“Did you have a nice nap?” he asked in a shield-like voice. Calm, collected.
I was curious about him and tried to stand straight.
He tilted his head with a disgusted glare and studied me. “Where did you come from?”
They would never let me go. Not at this point. They believed I was a threat to their town. At some point, they would have to decide which one of them would have to kill me. Beck could not stomach it. If I had to guess, my prediction would be the one standing before me.
My jaw clenched as I gritted my teeth. I refused to give them what they wanted. Not out of spite but because I didn’t owe them anything.
But then Zeph flicked his wrist.
Suddenly, the air in the room thinned, and it was more difficult to breathe.
At once, it felt like two concrete fists were squeezing my lungs.
I gasped for a solid breath, my eyes darting around, unsure of what was happening. I didn’t understand why the air was slipping away faster than I could take a single breath.
“Zephyr,” Beck warned.
“He’s got this,” Phoenix snapped.
And my lungs gnawed at my insides, a painful burn, trying to find oxygen.
Zephyr turned his wrist clockwise, and my throat swelled.
Somehow, someway, the man in the mask was exhuming all the air from inside me.
In the books I’d read, death happened loud, fast, and violently. Steel clashed, men cursed, and both boots and hearts collapsed to earth until it all stopped with absolution. But at this moment, my dying was hushed and unhurried. A slow dance. It seemed that when you drowned, whether it be in water or air, it happened slowly. The absence of air was the only weapon, and it stole any curse right out of the thickness of a desperate throat.
Zephyr’s green eyes stared into mine as he slowly killed me, almost like he was romanticizing it.
“He’s turning fucking blue, man,” Beck shouted, mindlessly counting his fingertips. “You’re going to kill him.”
“Let his magic be his hero,” Zephyr said, his eyes narrowing. “If he has any.”
The room was fading. Dimming. Spinning.
Darkness was within reach.
Just before I succumbed to Death’s embrace, Zephyr unclenched his fists, and a fistful of air slipped into my lungs. I lurched forward to drink it in, my chest heaving to collect a handful of silky breaths. My lungs filled, and a hoarse and rugged cough scratched my throat.
“He can’t help us. He’s no one.” Zephyr’s eyes were callous when he looked upon me one last time. “He’s nothing.”
First, I was a monster. Then I was hers. Now I was nothing.
Adora
To my beloved black sea,
It's why we read romance, to deprive our heart until it becomes utterly helpless, then fill it to the brink with warmth, only to freeze and shatter it all over again; to make sure it still works. I’m certain those who endure persistent heartbreak is either a lonely, sadistic creature or one who has a heart wrapped in thorns with the longing for a novel to struggle past and touch what remains inside, broken flesh, blood, and all.
I've always thought of myself as the lonely, sadistic creature that no one could truly love, but since you, I've realized this hasn't been the case.
Oh, how I wish you could unwrite a story that has already been told. Erase it, press delete until the words vanish, and all that remains is a new brilliant white page to scar.
A new beginning.
There was something about being surrounded by books just before daybreak when fingers made of light probed paned windows and touched embossed spines—a sight of literary seduction.
However, there was no time for belletristic beauty.
Across from me in the library, Alice sat, glasses hanging off her turned-up nose as she indulged in A Long and Fatal Love Chase. As for me, I’d been drifting from the same written sentence for the last half hour because my mind wasn’t with the letter but with Stone.
I despised just sitting here all night, waiting in the quiet with thoughts of him. For hours, I’d spun the pearl bracelet around my wrist.
The last chapter of Alec & Circe had stunned me.
Mom had inserted the black pearls I’d stolen as a girl into the book, but how had she known about it, and how had her story matched up with Mrs. Madder’s story all those years ago?
Stone had found them, and each time they slid across my wrist, visions of him back at the lighthouse, flipping through the pages, immersing himself in the story to find connections collapsed in my mind. Perhaps he was right, and there was a purpose to the story. But for me, these pearls would only whisper empty promises Stone and I may never have the chance to make.
For all I knew, the Heathens could have killed him already.
If this were the case, it should make my life easier. Because if he were dead, I would no longer sink into fantasies or drown in a world where we could be together. If he were dead, I could return to the girl I’d been all along.
But the thought brought on an ache. Inside my chest lived an ice-sculpted heart with sharp, jagged edges that carved his name into the bones of my ribcage. These cuts were severe and brutal, reminding me that this thing we shared was too deep to escape.
When it came to Stone, I didn’t have a choice.
My eyes flicked back and forth from the clock to the window, waiting for daylight to wash over the town in totality so I could go to the west side, where the Heathens lived.
As soon as a baleful sunrise broke as if it cut open a vein, a fresh crimson glow bleeding across the ocean, I shot to my feet, dust threading into the light. “I can’t stand to stay in this manor a second longer.”
Alice set her book down and bounced to her feet after me. “Where will you go?”
I grabbed my cloak that was lying across the couch.
“I just need to take a walk,” I said. “Alone.”
I’m Adora Sullivan, the daughter of a founding family. If the Heathens hurt me in any way, it will wreak a coven war in Weeping hollow. At least, this was the thought I held on to as I left the Cantini Manor.
Town Square was empty except for The Bean, where townspeople gathered outside its doors, looking for caffeine to stay awake. I walked the two miles, dipping between buildings and crossing desolate streets.
There were only two places I imagined the Heathens would keep Stone: Julian’s cabin in Norse Woods or Goody Farms.
Rumors slipped between curious lips about what the Heathens did at Goody Farms. Especially in the barn. Years ago, before the Shadows, when the Heathens were only children, it was their cries echoing throughout Weeping Hollow. No one knew why, but this was the place they had to be.
Trees created a tunnel along a pathway to the estate. It took about an hour, with my cloak pulled over my head and the December morning biting and flaying my skin the entire way.
It had been years since I’d visited this side of town and even longer since I’d stepped on to the Goody property.
As a little girl, I adored sunrises. So much that Ivy, Fable, and I had snuck through the woods behind Town Square to get to Goody Estate. We’d watched the sun wake over a sea of golden fields crowning the acreage and not my usual beloved black ocean because it was something different. When you stare out at the same view day after day, you forget to treasure it, and I also believed the same to be true in love as well. Whether it be for a boy or a home, it was true.
But as the trees opened up, snow draped over wilting stalks and weighed them down like dead carcasses. The once reflecting gold specks were no more. Life had gone. Broken, dried out, and deserted.
When I reached the barn, I crept along the back wall, crouched so no one could see me, and peered through a crack in the wooden planks.
The Heathens weren’t inside.
But there was a body. Head down, and arms stretched like a crucifix.
My hand flew to my mouth to suffocate my cry, trapping it inside my chest.
I didn’t know if it was Stone or someone else.
I didn’t know if this person was dead or alive.
Legs shaking, I peered across the grounds as I made my way around the barn. No one was coming, so I slipped inside, careful not to make a sound.
The moment I closed the barn door and faced what was inside, I burst into tears.
I believed there were two ways a person could go weak in the knees, all strength gone with the threat of collapsing to the floor. One way was from being swept by love ... because we entrusted the other person with catching us. The other was from being ripped apart by heartbreak ... because they were gone, and we no longer cared what we’d hit on the way down. We were already broken.
And it was Stone, and I couldn’t fucking breathe.
His wrists were shackled and chained to the ceiling. The toes of his boots were scraping the ground. Though his head hung, I could see bruises and blood covering his busted and swollen face. His hair was no longer brilliant white but matted and clumped together by dried blood. His shirt had been ripped from his body. It hung around his shoulders in tattered pieces, exposing his wounded chest to winter.
“Stone,” I whispered in a croak, stumbling to him with tears burning in my throat. Please be alive, I begged to whatever gods would listen, not stopping until I was cupping his face, lifting his head, and looking into his eyes. Stone could barely open them, but when he did, “Circe,” he whispered, and the name broke me.
“I’m so sorry, this is all my fault.” I ran the pad of my thumb across his teardrop scar. “I’m going to get you out of here.”
In the palms of my hands, Stone shook his head.
It was subtle, barely there.
“You have to stop coming to my rescue,” he struggled to say, the words broken. “You make me feel incompetent.”
I groaned. “Why did they do this to you? What did they want?”
A shallow breath broke apart when it left his lips. “My name.”
“Your name? Why didn’t you tell them anything?”
His gaze dragged across my face. “I promised you that I wouldn’t.”
I was taken back to five weeks ago on the day we’d left for Bone Island. We were standing on the dock about to step onto the boat. I’d made him promise never to answer questions from people in town if he were ever found.
Even after the way I had used him, he still kept his stupid promise to me.
I grabbed the chain, trying to figure out how to undo it. “They’re monsters. I’m so sorry. I’m going to get you out of here,” I insisted, my hands flying from one lock to the next, trying to see if it was a key I needed or a code or—
“Stop.” Stone shook his head. “Don’t. They’ll know.”
“You’re crazy if you think I’m going to leave you here!”
“Shhh,” Stone quieted me, calm, looking down at me with blood sticking to all his features. Some dried, some still weeping. “It’s not as bad as it looks,” he said, though his lips were trembling. “I’ve been through much worse, and I’ll survive this too—” Something painful cut him short, and he sucked in a breath. “It would be a shame to end the story here, isn’t that what you said?”
“Those were stupid words, Stone,” I whispered, shaking my head. “I just said whatever was in my mind to make you feel better. No more pretending, no more telling stories. This is real, and they will kill you if I don’t get you out of here. I’m not about to let you lay your life on the line because of a few ridiculous words!”
Voices came from outside, and Stone’s eyes widened, and he yanked against the chains.
“Please go,” he choked out with rippling black eyes. I didn’t know what to do. My feet wouldn’t move to leave him. He jerked forward, but the chains yanked him back. “Adora, leave. If they decide you’re involved, this will all be for nothing.”
I turned to glance back at the barn door, then faced Stone again.
I shook my head because I didn’t want to leave him.
“Go,” Stone pleaded.
Tears burned behind my eyes when I shook my head again. “No.”
“Adora,” he said, catching my gaze. “I lied, all right? I lied to you. This isn’t the end. I promise.”
A breath tumbled out of me, and I stood on my toes, my lips catching his. A soft kiss. In case it was our last.
Stone closed his eyes and leaned into it, keeping me with him for a second longer than we could afford.
I tasted his blood on my lips and found myself swept by love.
Weak, doomed, a part of me no longer my own.
I was taken by it, the way one was taken by a curse.