REAPING INNOCENCE ◦ STILINSKI [3]

vi.

vi. WAKING UP

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CARTER WAS DIZZY; it was hard to concentrate. That had been happening a lot since they had gotten a hold of her in Washington. She was having trouble distinguishing between reality and her imagination. It had seemed that they had broken down the door in her mind — the same door that she had cracked open during the sacrifice — leaving hallucinations in their wake. She kept seeing him. Instead of showing her the person she was dying to see, they gave her the exact opposite.

    His words swirled around in her head. She tried to breathe normally. She needed to concentrate, to find a way out of that nightmare.

    "Goodbye, Car," he said in the same quiet, peaceful voice.

    "Wait!" She choked out the word, reaching for him, willing her deadened legs to carry her forward.

    She thought he was reaching for her, too. But his cold hands locked around her wrists and pinned them to her sides. He leaned down, and pressed his lips very lightly to her forehead for the briefest instant. Her eyes closed.

    "Find your way back to me," he breathed, cool against her hot skin.

    There was a light, unnatural breeze. Her eyes flashed open. The leaves on a small vine maple shuddered with the gentle wind of his passage. He was gone. With shaky legs, ignoring the fact that her action was useless, she followed the delusion into the forest. The evidence of his nonexistent path had disappeared instantly. There were no footprints, the leaves were still, but she walked forward without thinking. She could not do anything else. She had to keep moving. If she stopped looking for him, it was over.

    Love, life, meaning...over.

    She walked and walked. Time made no sense as she pushed slowly through the thick undergrowth. It was hours passing, but also only seconds. Maybe it felt like time had frozen because the forest looked the same no matter how far she went. She started to worry that she was traveling in a circle, a very small circle at that, but she kept going. She stumbled often, and, as it grew darker and darker, she fell often, too. Her heightened senses did nothing to help when her mind was as scrambled as it was.

    Finally, she tripped over something — it was black now, she had no idea what caught her foot — and she stayed down. She rolled onto her side, so that she could breathe, and curled up on the wet bracken with a certain heat shooting up her spine. As she lay there, she had a feeling that more time was passing than she realized. She couldn't remember how long it had been since nightfall. Was it always so dark in England at night? Surely, as a rule, some little bit of moonlight would filter down through the clouds, through the chinks in the canopy of trees, and find the ground.

    Not tonight. Tonight the sky was utterly black. Perhaps there was no moon tonight — an unseen lunar eclipse, a new moon.

    She shivered at the thought, though she wasn't cold. Her inner wolf recoiled at the words new moon not liking that Mother Luna wasn't in the sky to guide her.

    It was black for a long time before she heard him calling.

    He was shouting her name. It was muted, muffled by the wet growth that surrounded her, but it was definitely her name she was hearing. She recognized the voice, but didn't trust that he was real. She did think about answering, but she was dazed, and it took a long time to come to the conclusion that she should answer. By then, the calling had stopped.