Eternal [HS]

Chapter Thirty-Five

"HARRY!" SHE SCREAMS THROUGH her sobs and runny nose, "Let me go! LET ME GO!"

Her legs kick out wildly from where they dangle underneath her, and she never stops flailing and struggling against Niall and Mitch dragging her away from the portal that is now camouflaged back into the forest with no one near to it. Their hands squeeze her so hard, she knows she'll bruise, but she doesn't care. She doesn't care about anything except the person she just watched disappear through those two trees into another world.

Salty tears flow down her cheeks until she tastes them on her tongue whenever she yells out for them to let go of her, or let her follow him through the gateway. Neither of them listens, though. They only continue drawing her further away from it, knowing that she'll do anything she can to follow him if they let her go, and hold tighter on her forearms.

Her heels now drag through the moss and dirt, creating tracks in the ground just in case she manages to break free, so she'll have a path to follow back to the two trees that mark the entryway between worlds.

They finally let her stand upright when they're far enough from the gate that she can no longer see the two matching sigils in the bark, and when their grips loosen, she immediately moves to run back to them. Two sets of hands stop her once more, but this time, Niall takes her by the shoulders and roughly spins her around to face him.

"Let me go! What the fuck are you doing? We have to follow him!" She cries, "I have to follow him, he needs us!

"You can't! We're trying to help you!"

He shakes her as if he is literally trying to force her to snap out of her hysterical meltdown. And though her mind came up with a million possibilities involving Niall and Mitch betraying them, selling Harry out to Sacrosanct and ensuring that she cannot go after him, she should've known better.

His eyes are filled with concern and...pity.

For the first time since the day she sat down in his townhouse to talk with him and Harry, he is looking down at her with pity lining his features. The sight of his pity is the only thing that makes her stop for the briefest moment and stare at him with wide eyes, asking a question she knows she does not want the answer to but needs it.

"Spit it out. Tell me why you're looking at me like that."

'Like that', like she's a wounded animal ready to lash out at the next person who dares to approach or take the wrong tone with her. If it is how he sees her at this moment, he isn't necessarily far off from reality. If the people who took Harry were still standing here, she would be throwing herself at them with all of the ferocity of a wounded animal whether they're vampires or not.

As soon as she saw Devin taunting him in the garage over a month ago, she knew she would do anything in defense of him, even if it meant cutting a man's dick off or chasing uselessly after people that can run ten times faster than her, it doesn't matter.

That mixture of pity, concern, and guilt all bubbles over to the surface in one look he gives her, and she can tell before the words leave his mouth that whatever he's going to say won't bode well for her.

"I'm not stopping you from following him, you really can't go through there."

The hands bracing her shoulders squeeze once in a silent apology as he looks over her head at Mitch one more time for approval before looking back at her.

He says it carefully, "If you go back through, you'll die."

At first, her instinct is to laugh. Though there are tears blurring her vision, she laughs like it's a stupid joke. She knows he'd never mess with her at a time like this too, but she can't help it. For the entire time she has stayed here, there was always a promise of going back home to visit her family after they kill the people involved in her attack, so to hear that she can't go back is unfathomable.