Page 4 of Walking in Darkness

His words came out in a torrent of dread.

In relief.

In confusion.

Frantic, he kept brushing a quivering hand down my head and back, as if it were the only way to assure himself that I was there.

“Where were you?” he finally demanded, his voice raw.

“It’s not over.” I choked on the words, pain still obliterating my throat as the harsh, horrible reality sank down into my spirit.

It’s not over.

It’s not over.

Those three little words pelted him, and I felt him stiffen against me before he peeled himself back and held me by my arms.

Fury contorted every line of his severe, glorious face. Every sharp edge hewn in brutality.

“What do you mean, it’s not over?” he growled.

I gulped around the chaos that thrummed through my being. “It wasn’t the Ghorl who was really after me, Pax. It was something ... someone greater. The man. The one I saw at the diner and then outside the fast-food restaurant? The man whose face flickered between his and the little girl’s? He was the one who sent the Ghorl. He is the one who was trying to stop me.”

Rage clouded his expression. “You saw him again?”

My nod was shaky as my thoughts spiraled through what had transpired. “Yes. I felt something when we were hunting the Kruen last night. A force.”

Confusion hitched my voice, and my brow pinched as I tried to make sense of it. “It was almost like the gateway from Tearsith into Faydor. How we know what direction we’re supposed to go because we’re called to it. But it was so much stronger than that. Irresistible. I couldn’t do anything but reach out for it, and when I did, I was pulled through. He was there, in this ...”

I swallowed around the throbbing thickness of my throat, the words a quiet rush of disbelief when I managed to expel them. “It was another plane. As if I were standing in the middle of a dark, frozen snow globe, stranded and completely contained. It was quiet. Still and cold. Tearsith’s opposite.”

But I also had a feeling it was Tearsith’s dark mirror. A resting place for whoever this man named Ambrose really was. A plane that held his darkness.

Pax’s palms trembled on my arms, and I could hear the grinding of his teeth. “You were dragged away from me? From Faydor and into this ...?”

He trailed off on a ragged breath. His eyes closed for a moment before he opened them to me. “But you’re here. You woke up here.”

He said it like the truth of it might ground him. Like it might be the only thing keeping him from flying off the bed and going on a rampage.

Though I wasn’t sure that would remain true when his attention tracked the spot on my cheek and down to my throat, both of which I was sure burned a fiery red. A sound of wrath left him, yet his touch was gentle when he lifted his hand and caressed the spot where Ambrose had dragged a fingertip down my cheek. “Who is this monster?” Pax could barely grit out.

My mind spun through the things I’d learned, though most of it had only caused me more confusion. “He called himself Ambrose. He said he’d sent the Ghorl to end me. He ... he called me aValient, Pax.” I nearly begged it. “He called me what Maria Lewis called me. What she’d believed her husband had been ... the only one with the power to defeat a Ghorl.”

Maria Lewis was the only person I’d ever heard use the title Valient. There had been no mention of it in our history, other than the vague intimation of a stronger type of Laven in the great book. Our teacher, Ellis, had only heard myths and tales of one.

“He said he’d ended my kind for generations. I think he meant Valients,” I continued. “He said there was nothing I could do because he was going to end me, too. Right then. At least, that’s what he thought he was going to do.”

Turbulence rolled through Pax’s being. “But you got away.”

He said it as a statement, though I could hear the question behind it.

How?

How was I here?

How did I survive?

Above all that, I knew he wanted to berate himself for not having been able to stop it.