Chapter Three

Freya

Pain was the first thing that registered. My shoulders, ribs, my head.

I tried to open my eyes and the world came in smeared pieces.

Dark. Then green. Then a ceiling of black branches scribbled across a gray sky, moving in a wind I couldn't feel. Mud against my cheek. The smell of it—wet earth, rotting leaves, something metallic underneath that I understood, dimly, was me.

The woods. I was in the woods.

How long had I been out? An hour? A night? I turned my head and the movement detonated through my skull. A sound crawled out of me—half moan, half word.

"Help…"

No one answered. Of course no one answered.

They'd left me here. That was the thought that found its way through the fog before any other—they left me here—and with it came the rest, the whole terrible reel, Adrian's face over the edge of the balcony, his fingers loosening one by one, Selene's smile—

The tears came hot and shameless, mixing with the mud on my face.

He let me go.

I'm voice slipped out, barely a breath. "He really let me go."

Three years. Every account I'd balanced, every night I'd stayed up building his future while he built my replacement. And when the scale came down—two seconds, maybe three—I'd been the lighter weight.

A sob hitched out of me, and I bit it back so hard my jaw ached. Because no. No, this was not the place for it. If I lay here crying about Adrian Kingsley, I would die in these woods thinking about Adrian Kingsley, and I'd be damned—damned—if that was the last thing I ever did.

Get up, Freya.

I planted my right hand under me and pushed.

The world swung sideways and dropped me back into the mud. A white bolt of pain shot from my shoulder to my teeth. I lay there gasping, vision swimming with black spots.

Again.

This time I got an elbow under me. Then a knee. The ground kept tilting, treacherous, like the whole forest was leaning me back down. I made it to my hands—and my left arm buckled instantly, folding under me with a sensation like fire poured into the joint.

I cried out, tears stinging my eyes in pain.

And from somewhere—far off, muffled by the trees—came an answering sound. The mechanical rhythm of a vehicle.

Hope flared in my chest.

A vehicle. That meant, a road, which meant people.

"Okay," I panted to no one, . "Okay. Okay."

I dragged myself.

There's no word that does it justice. I pulled with my right arm, pushed with my right leg, and left the rest of my body to follow like something I was hauling. Thorns caught my dress, my arms, my face—I felt them rip and didn't stop. A branch lashed across my cheek and the warmth that followed told me it had drawn blood before I even felt the sting.

Mud swallowed my hands to the wrist. Every yard cost me a minute. Every minute, the roaring sounded a fraction closer.

And my body—God, my body. This goddamned body I'd been apologizing for since I was five years old, the weight I'd carried through every sneer at every family dinner—now it was truly dead weight, dragging me back into the earth with every pull, and for the first time in my life I truly hated it. Furious at it.

"Move," I hissed through my teeth, tears spilling faster. "Just—move—"

The fog was closing in again. I could feel it—that soft, seductive pull toward the dark, toward lying down, toward resting. My vision narrowed to a tunnel. The trees blurred into one smear of green and brown.

Just this once.

I didn't know if I'd ever prayed before. Calloways didn't really pray; we networked. But there in the mud, bleeding into the roots of the world, I made a bargain with any god that was listening—any god, any devil, any force that had ever once spared a worthless thing.

"Just this once," I gasped. "I'll never ask again. Just—this once—"

Then I looked up, through the trunks, and it flickered. A.small, faint, stead light at the edge of the road. Standing still through the dark. Beckoning me.

Something inside me caught. It was now or never Freya.

I stopped crawling and started fighting for it. Elbow, drag. Elbow, drag. The branches clawed at my face and I shoved through them. My ruined arm dragged behind me through the mud and every thorn it touched sent lightning up my spine, and I kept going, because that light had my name on it now, that light was everything, that light was mine.

The trees thinned. The ground turned from mud to gravel under my hands.

Finally, the road.

I hauled myself over the last few feet of ditch and collapsed at the very edge of the road, cheek against the gravel, one arm flung onto the asphalt. The roar was right there now, and I lifted my head with the last strength I had.

Headlights.

Two of them, swinging around the bend, sweeping over me. Light so bright it erased the world. I raised my hand—feebly, barely—and I tried to call out. What came out was less than a whisper.

The headlights caught me full on. The engine note changed—brakes, a flare of high beams—

And the car flashed past.

The wind of it slapped my face. Red taillights shrinking, shrinking, gone around the next bend. The roar swallowed itself into the distance until the road was silent again, and I was alone on the gravel with nothing left.

My eyes trailed towards the other edge. At the still flickering lamppost that had given me hope. And then my body was shutting down.

Clinging hard to consciousness, I tried everything in me to keep my eyes open.

But, the tunnel closed all the way to a pinprick. My cheek settled against the cold stone. Somewhere very far away, a voice inside me noted, with terrible calm, that the light at the end wasn't the lamppost anymore. It was just dark. That was fine. Dark was a place too. Dark was where you went when—

Headlights again.

Behind me. Growing. The same engine note, bigger, faster—the car had turned around.

I couldn't lift my head. I couldn't lift anything. Gravel crunched. A door slammed. Footsteps—fast, uneven, heels on stone—coming closer, closer—

A shadow bent over me. A voice. Female. Older. Somehow familiar.

"Freya Calloway?"

My lips moved. I don't know if sound came out.

The dark took me.