My thoughts focused, I rest my tongue in the corner of my mouth and close another step toward her. “The person who spent time in the Lipton basement conjuring the dark arts, that person probably isn’t trying to manifest rainbows and unicorns, Halen. You don’t even have to suffer any guilt—”
“That’s not it.” She shakes her head lightly. “It’s all pointless anyway.”
“Tell me what happened,” I demand.
She drops her camera case and crosses her arms, pensively rubbing her thumb over her forearm where I stitched her wound. “Devyn’s sick,” she says.
I lift my chin, waiting for her to offer more as I watch her lower to her bag and remove a hardback.
She rises to her feet with a medical journal. “I saw this in the stacks that day at the mansion library,” she says, showing me the cover. “I couldn’t make any connection to it at the time. I just knew it felt out of place amid all the other esoteric books.”
“You’re getting real comfortable with removing evidence,” I say.
She releases a breathy laugh. “It’s the least questionable thing I’ve done.”
The large print on the front cover has two words that stand out: Huntington’s Disease.
And suddenly, as I stare into Halen’s watery gaze, I understand the hopeless vortex I feel churning inside her.
She cannot save Devyn.
And she knows this now with finality.
“Devyn’s sick,” she says again, her voice catching. “She’s dying.” She lifts her shoulders in a resigned shrug, a despondent laugh slipping free. “Nothing I do here to try to help her much matters anymore. It’s a lost cause. The only thing I can do is let her escape into her madness.”
Her statement from earlier makes sense now. “Madness is welcomed over suffering and death.”
“Her escape.” She sniffs hard, lifting her head higher. “So…lie to them. Hell, lie to me, Kallum. It doesn’t matter. The case is closed. Over.”
I’m frustratingly at a loss for how to console her.
“Don’t pretend as if this news doesn’t delight your wicked heart,” she says, the venom resurfacing. “There’s no reason for you to threaten her life anymore. She’s no longer any threat to me.”
“What causes you pain causes me pain.” I want to lead her farther into the dark marsh, where I can touch her and distract her from that pain.
I understand why she was hesitant to tell me, to say the words aloud, so she wouldn’t have to face the resulting guilt at the relief she feels. In the dark chasm of Halen’s mind, she’s relieved. She doesn’t have to choose. She doesn’t have to decide who to protect.
She’s such a delicious tangle of emotions.
“So why did you even come to the crime scene?” I ask her. “If it’s pointless.”
She shrugs, her gaze fusing to mine through the dark. “To be with you.”
Every cell in my body strains to be connected to hers, but I can feel all their eyes on us, watching, judging. Hernandez, with his suspicions. Dr. Keller, with her annoying, asinine obligation. And Agent Rana, who knows Halen is hiding something.
“No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.” My mouth twists into a lopsided smile as I offer her what comfort I can. “Voltaire.”
Gaze cast outward, she wraps her arms around her waist tighter. “Voltaire didn’t flay a man,” she counters. “Or crush his face with a lug wrench.”
“That we know of.”
Her laugh tumbles out, and she’s unrepentant for a few brief, blissful seconds before she fights it down with a broken sound. “I think we’re responsible for more than a few snowflakes.” She looks up at the night sky. “I don’t think she’s a murderer, Kallum,” she says softly, her emotions drained. “I just wanted to prove that before I leave.”
“It’s too risky.” I drive a hand through my hair. “All risk poses a threat of ruin.”
Her anger flashes hot. “What the hell am I supposed to glean out of that?”
“I won’t risk you. I won’t lose you to your own ruin, no matter how damn hard you try, Halen St. James.”
I stopped exactly that from happening once, and I’m prepared to do what’s necessary to prevent it again. Even if I have to charge sigils, spill blood, banish her thoughts—risk her forgetting us all over again. Fuck it, that is the risk I’m willing to take.
“For once, Kallum, please… Just tell me what you’re trying to say.”
I eat the distance between us, forcing her head to tip back as I tower over her. “You went willingly with Devyn. While I was locked up, unable to protect you. You went with her and put your life at risk.”
“I get it. You’re upset—”
“No, I’m not upset. I’m goddamn furious.” There’s a pit in my stomach trying to gnaw me from the inside out at my admission. “You already tried to save her once, and you nearly died. Now here you are, with your answers and no hope, and you’re still trying, like you have a fucking death wish.”
The truth burns through us like a destructive wildfire. Unable to douse the roaring flames once the tinder has caught fire.
She won’t deny it, because she can’t.
The ache in the center of my chest flares until I’m strangled by the force of it, constricting my throat with fear’s razor-sharp talons.
“You asked me what I fear,” I say, my gaze holding hers. As she reads my expression, I lower my defenses, allowing her to see the brutal truth of what her death would do to me. “If you want to destroy me, don’t take your next breath.”
A hard swallow drags along her slender throat. “Kallum, I came back,” she says, her eyes searching mine, a promise held there. “I came back for you.”
A deep groan barrels free of my chest. “Fuck them. I’m handing in my fucking notice anyway.”
She came back for me.
Instead of running, she came here to be with me—to fight, and fuck, and hurt—to get what my dark little muse needs that she can’t get from anyone else.
My whole body ignites as I drop the gear and grab the nape of Halen’s neck. I pull her to me, my mouth descending on hers as I crush her body against mine.
Her hand roams my chest, her fingers finding the crescent sigil through my shirt, delivering that sweet hint of pain that screams mine.
Alchemy’s stones and elixirs, the endless quest for eternal life. But what is eternity if spent without the fire of your twin flame?
Fear of loss is such a brutal bitch. But hope… Hope is a cruel and sadistic monster, one of our own desperate design. Yet even the most monstrous of us cling to the frail wisp of it.
OceanofPDF.com
9
OceanofPDF.com
ICEBERG
OceanofPDF.com
HALEN
In one of my psychology classes, we were presented a structural model which displayed the two-dimensional rendering of an iceberg in comparison to the psyche. This was Freud’s iceberg theory, and it essentially broke the mind down into three layers.
The tip of the iceberg is where our conscious exists. The layer right beneath the frigid water is the preconscious. And the rest of the berg below is the unconscious. It is in this vast region below the water where the psychological forces of the psyche reside, there in the dark, endless void.
The deeper the unconscious, the darker the abyss.
I would stare at that iceberg, unnerved, the image evoking a sense of dread and hollowness that left me shaken and suffering some form of Thalassophobia. Possibly the reason why I’ve never used Freud’s model as a reference. That, and his approaches have since been widely rejected.
And I’m only thinking of it now, as I hit Send and fire off the finalized profile to Agent Rana, because of the connections I can no longer deny, the ones stirred by Devyn’s shrine.
