Page 26 of Finding Her (Lore of the Fields #1)

I lay on my back, chest heaving violently from exertion.

The swirling stars in the night sky twinkled for a moment between heavy clouds before plunging the world back into darkness.

I turned my head to search the lake, and all I saw was the sheen of black ink.

Graysen was still in there. I left him .

“Oh, Graysen,” my voice cracked in between heaving pants.

I had seen the features of a demon morph over his face and hands, turning them into weapons.

He had used those weapons to save me. He had held them off so I could get away, and I fled .

Maybe if I stayed we’d both be dead, but I would never know.

The orange glow of water—his glow—had gone out.

The unassuming surface mocked me, not a single ripple to hint he was moving within its depths.

There had been almost ten of those things, all larger than him.

What were the odds that he escaped them successfully? Negligible.

The biting wind was picking up into a sharp whistle.

I rolled to my side to hug my stomach and curl into a pathetic ball, soaked and freezing in the stinging night air.

My face was wet. I couldn’t tell if it was from my uncontrolled crying, my nose running from the cold, or the lake I’d escaped from.

Misery and guilt swallowed me whole. I had abandoned the person who had taken care of me.

I let him sacrifice himself. I was nobody, I didn’t have a past or anybody to return to.

He had a life, friends, and a future that was far more certain than my own.

I should have taken the opportunity to repay him for pulling me out of the forest that night.

He could go back to Mykie knowing he had filled my days with magic, rather than letting me die nameless and disoriented in the middle of nowhere.

Had I died here, at least I would have had an identity to go with.

What now? I could let the seasons change around me, rotting into a pile of leaves in paradise.

Wasting the sacrifice of the man who was perhaps my only friend.

Bile rose up my throat at the thought. No, I had to get back to Mykie somehow and tell her.

From there, I would do what? Find my way back to Earth?

I didn’t care about that right now. Everybody on Earth was a nameless nothing to me, unlike the man I had just left behind.

I would figure out what to do once I had returned his Silvates safely to their home and alerted his community of their loss.

At my core, I was empty with the ache of loneliness.

I hadn’t realized how much comfort bonding with Graysen had provided me in a short few days.

My entire sentient life. Returning to a state of emotional isolation sounded worse than death.

I also couldn’t help but feel that even if there was a world of mysterious and loving people to meet, none of them would be him.

Without any logic to back the feeling, I knew there would be a hole in my heart where he had been. It would never heal.

I rolled my quivering body to its hands and knees, looking around with a squint to try and make out shapes in the dark.

Left or right? I supposed it didn’t matter as long as I found shelter for the night.

I wantedto hide inside the deepest tree burrow, alone with my thoughts.

Somewhere tucked away and safe. I remembered vaguely how I had survived the woods that first night: taking one step at a time. Time to take a step .

My thoughts were interrupted by a gasp behind me. My head whipped over my shoulder, and the faintest orange gleam of light dipped over the ledge. Ten fingers sank into the dirt of the cliff, struggling to gain traction.

I whimpered, my lower lip trembling, “Graysen?”

“Help,” he gasped back, one hand slapping around the grass to find a better hold to pull against.

My palms and knees slipped in the mud beneath me as I frantically scrambled on all fours to his hands, squeezing them with all my might.

I fell back onto my ass as a counterweight to his body, pushing my heels into the earth.

One forearm was able to grasp mine, then the other, then the top of his bowed head rose over the edge, quickly followed by the rest of him.

He collapsed onto his side, coughing, his face twisted in pain.

Faint illumination came from his emblem, like a dying ember against his throbbing pulse.

“I’m so sorry!” I wept, throwing myself over his torso.

I buried my face in his neck and was unable to stop my uneven sobs.

My tears mixed with the water droplets on his throat.

Its warmth was so comforting, I wanted to press every inch of myself into it.

Heat meant my only friend was alive. No thanks to my help.

“Don’t fucking apologize,” he snarled between his teeth, pulling himself up into an upright position and dragging me between his knees to his chest. “I’m sorry, Faeryn.

I am. So . Fucking. Sorry. ” His fingers weaved into my stringy hair and pressed into my scalp.

His other hand rubbed my exposed arm up and down to generate friction.

My eyes opened just enough to catch a ripple of water bubbles nearby. The bastards had followed him the entire way out. If I hadn’t still been here to help him find his way up quickly…

“That wasn’t supposed to happen,” he hissed.

I felt a singe of fear in my stomach as he looked at me silently from under his wet bangs, his pupils a dull bronze.

His chest heaved, and his body shook. He looked less beastly than I remembered from the water, but not quite human.

That wouldn’t have bothered me at all, if he weren’t clearly so pissed.

“The males aren’t supposed to leave the bottom of the lake until the end of fall.

We should have had plenty of time. I’m so sorry.

Are you hurt badly?” He continued to hold onto me for dear life.

That’s why he was mad? Because I was at risk? I wouldn’t blame him one bit if he screamed at me for leaving him for dead. A part of me wanted him to.

“I’m okay. Are you okay?”

His arms squeezed around my shoulders, and his cheek rested against my head. “I’m okay as long as you’re with me and breathing,” he murmured against my temple. The intensity of the words was lost to my conflicting guilt and relief.

We sat silently in mutual appreciation that we were both alive.

A morbid air filled the space around us—we knew how close we had cut it.

His breaths were like gospel, and I listened to their promise, reassuring me that I wasn’t alone in this world.

The words he had first said to me echoed in my mind: “ You’re safe now.

I’ve got you.” I absorbed his warmth, hidden between his collapsed shoulders, and allowed myself to be lulled by his heartbeat. He had committed to that vow.

“Can we go back to our tree?” I sniffled, figuring I could be self-conscious about the snot I had running down his bare chest later.

“Of course we can.”

His arms hesitated several seconds before they released me. He rose to his feet. The emblem on his neck was barely visible, and his eyes had disappeared into the night. I felt his hand rest on my shoulder, which I used as leverage to pull myself up.

Splatting footsteps trudged a few steps forward, and I followed them cautiously.

I wasn’t sure if Graysen could see, but I certainly couldn’t.

That brief period of his emblem’s light had made the darkness that much harder to adjust to as it dimmed.

My palms rubbed up and down my arms, trying to reignite the heat that he had left behind on my skin.

Friction would hardly compare, but it was something.

I jumped at a large cracking noise, quickly soothed by light spilling across the surrounding forest. Graysen held a large branch in one hand, its tip now lit with a flame from his palm.

I got a good look at my rescuer and friend.

His shoulders hunched over his heaving chest—exhausted.

His tired eyes were hooded. What grays peered out from under his lashes reflected the licks of flame in his grasp.

He was covered in many moderate cuts, as well as banners of red swelling into fresh bruises.

The worst of the various marks was already purpling around his throat.

His dark hair hung in strands against his cheekbones, sticking to the fresh blood dripping across his skin that I had to assume was his.

When I blinked, I imagined flashes of his more demonic features, finding them somehow more comforting than his current state.

With his rage in the past, he looked utterly extinguished.

“We came from that way.” He nodded his head to the side and drew a thick inhale to straighten his back. “Shall we?’

I stayed as close to the torched branch as I could for warmth.

As we walked, yellow eyes turned in our direction.

It was disconcerting, but at least they blinked.

Those things underwater hadn’t blinked. Logically, I knew that the tree-obscured eyes that sent chills up my spine were the same dragons I had admired earlier in the day, but everything seemed sinister now.

I yearned for the comfort of daylight, when everything would morph back into a fairytale, far from this never-ending nightmare.

The unfortunate trade-off of having such an intense light with us was that everything in the distance seemed that much darker.

It felt like a constant state of walking into the same abyss we had just escaped.

Anything could be lurking in the night. Dread crept up in me again, remembering my sheer panic while swimming desperately for the shore.

“They stay in the deeper waters except for the last day of fall,” he began to grumble after an extended silence. “I’ve swum in that lake my entire adult life and have never seen one leave the floor of the lake on any other day.”