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I was relieved when light pierced the forest, opening up a clearing ahead, though it was short-lived as shadows movedacross the golden grass and began to form a line of starving death.

They were everywhere.

There was nowhere to hide.

A sob caught in my throat, rocking my chest, and I wished that I could peel my skin off—could climb out of my body and fly away, leaving my scent in a pile of flesh and bones for them to devour on the ground.

But I couldn’t.

The Malum had enlisted an apex predator for a long hunt. Speed didn’t matter when you couldn’t hide. Sight and sound were irrelevant when the description of the target was a smell that couldn’t be discarded.

I am going to die here.

I made it to the clearing, and I stopped running.

The pungent reek grew more and more unbearable as they closed in around me, skin as grey as the bathroom walls had been when I left the House. Their hoods were up, tattered cloaks billowing out behind them, but their tongues were as red as blood as they extended out of their eye sockets and tasted the air swirling around me.

I closed my ears against the sound of their rumbling hunger until the world went quiet, and not even the rustling grasses pierced my mind.

Heartbreak was silent. Death was silent. I didn’t want to hear a single thing as they killed me; I wanted the world to shut down the same way it had ten years ago, so the circle of my life could be completed at last. The debt would be repaid.

“Do you hear me?” I whispered shakily. “The debt will be repaid.”

None of them smiled this time.

They were close enough for me to strike, but my hands hung limp at my sides.

Maybe they’ll beat me to death.

I hoped they would. That would be fitting.

Sinking to my knees in the grass, I closed my eyes. The line of caenim already treading across the field would get to me soon.

A scream rang out in my head—sharp, soul-wrenching, and final. My mother’s scream as I sat on the floor like a discarded tissue and remained quiet.

A memory.

The memory that had haunted me throughout my life, which would hopefully be laid to rest at last in my death. We deserved that peace.

I thought about Brynn in the brief moments before I died. The happy moments—picking strawberries at the farm two towns away from our home, flooding the kitchen stove with more popcorn than we had room for in our bowls because she had accidentally tipped the entire bag of corn kernels into the pot, reading stories about unicorns, fairies, and mermaids before she fell asleep in my arms—because those were the memories I wanted to take with me.

Those were the memories I needed to hold onto when I inevitably found myself in some hell loop on the other side, reliving the worst day of my life until my soul had been ground down into nothing.

Brynn smiled at me in my mind, twirling a curl of her blonde hair around her finger like I once did to soothe her to sleep, and used her other hand to point behind me.

The caenim was reflected in her eyes, a clawed hand hovering over my head, aiming to swing down and—

“No!”

I screamed and ducked to the side.

She can’t see this. She isn’t supposed to see this.

My eyes flew open, desperate to show her something else, but there was nothing but dark, lumpy figures closing in around me on all sides.

The one she had seen, with its arm hanging over me like a guillotine, took another step to close the extra distance and—

Its head fell into my lap, green blood squirting into my face as its mangled body became limp and flopped to the ground.