Unfortunately, we ended up having to shadow travel to the edge of the forests. I argued for good, old-fashioned walking, but according to Acacia we were ‘too far to make it safely,’ and according to Asher I should ‘stop complaining and buckle up.’
Neither of them hid their accompanying smirks very well.
Once there, I looked for a door to take us back to Griffin’s Edge. I’d voted for doing this earlier, but searching for a gap in the graveyard itself had seemed too uncertain when we were short on time, and there hadn’t been any tears in reality where we’d popped up in the forest. Trust me, I looked. But there weren’t any nearby, and I lost the battle between waiting for one to appear and shadow traveling to somewhere safer where a monster couldn’t leap out at any moment. So here we were.
From there it was easy. Turn to the left rather than towards the bar, and back into the endless fog we went. We’d decided it was the safest location to take her. No risk of either of us jumping. Privacy. No danger to any patrons at Griffin’s Edge.
Of course, we still took precautions. Asher had stopped by Oasis to bring some of the thick rope he’d tied Orion to a tree with after the first time he’d tried to strangle me. God, that felt like forever ago. He said it was enchanted and impossible to escape from. I let him tie her up, because I have no experience with knots, but Asher’s were elaborate enough that I’d have believed him if he’d said he was a sailor in a former life. Even without an enchanted rope, there was no way she was escaping those knots.
It wasn’t long before she woke up. With a groan, she began to stir, and a moment later her eyes snapped open. They found me almost immediately, and I’ve never seen confusion turn to hatred faster.
“I should have known,” she spit out, voice dripping with venom. “Only you would pull a stunt like this.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’m flattered.”
Asher yanked on the rope, pulling her into a sitting position with a little more force than necessary. She glared at him, but it was only a heartbeat before her face smoothed over like the ocean after a storm, almost unnaturally calm. She turned her gaze back to me, and somehow the eerie fake calm was way worse than the fury.
“Well, this isn’t exactly the meeting I had in mind, but I suppose it can serve the same purpose,” she said. “I deserve to tell my side of things. You might feel differently about me after.”
I lowered myself to the ground and sat cross-legged facing her. “No chance. But go ahead.” After all, I did want to hear what she had to say. If for no other reason than to actually understand what the hell had been going on for the last few months.
Still, the little voice in my head whispering that she’d killed my Uncle Henri persisted. And there was nothing she could say that would shut it up. So, you know, that kind of ensured that the desire to kill her wouldn’t evaporate.
…But I was willing to wait an extra half hour to get some answers first.
The murderer cleared her throat…and began.
The Ancient One had already told me the first part: we were two pieces of its essence, fragments separated from the whole, that over time had developed our own souls. Eighteen years ago, Henri had found me outside Griffin’s Edge.
The murderer hadn’t been so fortunate. A human visiting the bar had found her on his way home. In theory, it was a kind gesture; he was trying to save a child’s life. “But I have no idea if he was decent or not,” she said bitterly. “Because he couldn’t afford a baby, and he dropped me off at the nearest orphanage. I hardly even remember it, since I was only there until I was five. That’s when I began to travel uncontrollably between dimensions.”
According to her, the jumps had started around the same time mine had. Only she hadn’t had the stability of Griffin’s Edge, situated on the border between dimensions, to return to. She hadn’t even known it existed.
“When I began jumping,” she continued, the bitterness in her voice laced with a note of sorrow, “I had nowhere to turn. I had no idea what was happening or where to go. I was too young to know the address or phone numbers of the orphanage, and I wouldn’t have wanted to go back there anyway.
“For a while, I tried to get help. I’d find a stranger who seemed trustworthy to a five-year-old: a policeman, a doctor, hell, any adult, really. I’d tell them that I had no idea where I was but that I’d been somewhere entirely different and far away just seconds earlier. I begged them to listen.” She sounded wistful beneath the sharp edges of her voice; it was almost enough to make me pity her. Almost. “But the response was always the same: the strangers would ask where my parents were, offer to call them, offer to take me home. I said I had none, and then they’d try to take me to churches or foster centers after that.
“We never made it there, though,” she said. “The first few times, I was so desperate for help I tried to follow them wherever they wanted to lead me. But I’d always jump again before we made it there.” She was staring at the ground as she spoke, and though her bitter tone never changed, I could have sworn I now heard a hint of pain laced in her voice. “Soon I just ran away whenever someone offered to take me somewhere safer. Eventually I just stopped asking for help altogether. I realized that no one believed me. They just thought I was a lost kid with an overactive imagination. Once I realized that, I knew I was on my own.
“…Only that wasn’t exactly true,” she admitted after a pause. “Because after a few years of jumps—mostly within the human dimension, though I ended up among inhumans several times too—I noticed a pattern: there was a certain location I recognized, one particular place that I kept returning to. I’d never ended up in the same place twice…except for one familiar graveyard.
“I didn’t know what that meant, but what I did know was that it gave me the closest thing to a home I’d ever had. So I began to stash things there, things that I picked up from across the dimensions in order to survive: toothbrushes, food, clothes, blankets. Turns out it’s pretty easy to steal things when no one saw me appear or vanish, and when no one—including me—knew where I’d end up next.
“As I spent more time in the graveyard, two things became apparent: it was the most stable place for myself I’d ever found—I jumped to it more, but from it less—and someone else had noticed my increasingly frequent presence.
“Things began appearing in my makeshift campsite,” she said now, still staring at the fog rather than any of us. “Gifts, I suppose. Sandwiches. Extra blankets. Things I knew I hadn’t put there myself.”
I wanted to interrupt to ask questions—they were piling up in my head like snowdrifts, multiplying with each passing second—or to hurry her along—because, to be honest, I didn’t enjoy the weird mix of sympathy and stubborn resentment I was feeling—but I was afraid to break the spell. I wasn’t sure she’d continue to the actual important parts if I interjected. So for like the fifth time already, I reminded myself to keep my mouth shut and listen. You don’t have to pity her, Ian, you just have to learn from what she’s telling you.
“It made me suspicious, but I didn’t have many options,” she continued, oblivious to my internal struggle, still staring at the ground. “I couldn’t have stopped jumping there if I tried. Like the dark forests for you” —now she glanced at me, and I squirmed uncomfortably beneath the intensity of her eyes— “the graveyard was my anchor point. I found myself traveling there probably a third of the time I jumped. Plus, I was only eight years old, and I still didn’t trust anyone but myself.
“Then the mysterious gift-giver left a note, saying he was always available if I wanted to talk, just fifty feet away. I’m the pastor of this church, it said, and I’m an excellent listener. My door is always open.
“I thought about it for a long time, watching him through the stained-glass windows of the church, before I finally took him up on his offer. I didn’t expect much to happen from it. I didn’t think he’d believe anything I had to say. I was just…lonely.
“He was a good listener,” she told us. By now I was positive I heard pain in her voice; she was also trying very, very hard not to make eye contact. I wondered if I’d see tears in her eyes if she looked up from that suddenly-super-interesting spot on the silver ground.
“Before I knew it, I was visiting him every few days. Bit by bit, my story came tumbling out. It didn’t even matter if he believed it,” she said quietly. “It just felt so good to say it out loud and know someone heard me. That someone knew I existed.
“His name was David, and though he offered to help however I wanted, he never pressured me. He didn’t call anyone to come pick me up. It was like I was a skittish animal, and he knew he’d scared me off if he overstepped,” she said. “So he never did.
“For close to two years, David helped me. He didn’t question it when I disappeared for days at a time. Once or twice, I jumped right in front of him, but somehow, it didn’t seem to faze him. It must have—I mean, how could it *not—*but if it did, he never let it show. If anything, it probably made him realize that the lonely girl in the graveyard was telling the truth.
“Instead of calling the police or trying to exorcise me—a legitimate worry I had at first,” she admitted, “he threw himself into doing whatever he could. He bought secondhand textbooks and tried to give me some semblance of homeschooling. He converted one of the church’s supply closets into a small bedroom for me to use whenever I was around. And for the first time in my life, I felt like I had a home. I even felt like I had a family.
“But of course it couldn’t last,” she said now, finally raising her head to meet my eyes. Tear tracks ran down her cheeks, but her gaze was hard, any cracks in her voice and expression replaced by their prior bitter hatred. I flinched from the sheer fury in her eyes as she looked at me.
“After all, there were ghosts in the graveyard,” she continued after a pause, keeping her gaze on me. “I’d grown used to them, and they, for the most part, had grown used to me. A few of the older ghosts, like the one who tried to eat your soul, were too far gone to know anything but hunger and violence. Those ones I’d learned to deal with. Let’s just say my campsite was surrounded by several rings of salt for a reason.” She chuckled, but there was no humor in the laugh, just a bitter sharpness that cut the air like a razor blade.
“One day when I was ten, David ventured out into the graveyard—something he’d done several times before to leave me gifts,” she continued. “He probably thought nothing of it: just another quick visit.”
But there’s a reason graveyards often close at dark. Monsters like the dark. So do ghosts. And unfortunately, ghosts aren’t the biggest fans of priests.
“I guess he’d never been out there at night before,” she said. “Normally he locked up the church and the graveyard as the sun set, before he went home. But that night, he went out there after dark.”
“I’d ended up in Belgium for the day after an unlucky jump, and I happened to jump back to the edge of the graveyard just in time to see it happen. Not in time to save him,” she clarified quietly. “Only to watch it.”
Poor David never stood a chance. Not without iron or salt or any experience fighting ghosts, especially old ones.
“When I popped back into the graveyard, backpack stuffed with snacks and a watch I’d stolen to give to David, I heard awful strangled noises,” she said. “I dropped the backpack and ran around the trees…and the world seemed to fall out from beneath my feet. I remember the feeling like it was yesterday.
“David was on his knees near my campsite, surrounded by several furious, swirling ghosts. Directly in front of him, limbs buried deep in his chest, was one of the oldest ghosts in the graveyard, one that had nearly killed me several times before. Its jumbled silver mess of body parts roared as it swallowed the last puffs of David’s soul from the air.
“I swear he looked at me as the life left his eyes,” she said quietly. “They found me one last time, and I watched the light dim within them. He smiled, just barely, and then he slumped to the ground, dead.”
My heart ached for her. Look, she still sucked, and I hadn’t forgotten what she’d done. But that didn’t change the fact that I could imagine that experience. I’d had plenty of similar ones. And I knew that feeling she’d described all too well, that feeling of the world dropping out from beneath you, like time is standing still and everything is ending.
I’d felt it when I saw Henri on the floor of his office.
Alright, that thought replaced some of my sympathy with rage. I had to bite my tongue yet again to keep from interrupting—especially because I wasn’t sure if it would be a question or wordless fury that came out.
“I screamed in anger and horror and sorrow, and before I knew it, I found herself racing across the graveyard, flinging handfuls of salt from my pockets at the ghosts,” she continued after a long moment. “They dissolved with shrieks of rage, even the old one, but I knew I didn’t have much time before they returned. My vision was all blurry through my tears, and I dragged David by his armpits, desperately trying to reach the church before the ghosts reformed.
“I locked the door behind us just as angry ghosts began to reappear among the gravestones, and as soon as it shut, I collapsed next to David, crying. His eyes stared glassily at the ceiling, the flickering light of the candles reflected in their blank gaze.
“For a man whose entire life was his faith, it was terrible to think that his soul had been devoured rather than have the chance to move on to whatever he believed came after,” she said quietly, the echoes of pain causing her voice to crack. She cleared her throat and returned to staring at the ground. “Then I realized there was something in his pocket.
“Adoption papers. Somehow, despite my lack of records, he’d found a way to get adoption papers, and he wanted to be my legal guardian.” She laughed again harshly. “I have no idea how he managed it. But that’s why he’d stayed late: to surprise me with them. And on those documents was the name he’d called me since their first conversation: Faith.
“First, I was heartbroken that he’d died because of me, and that I’d missed my one chance at a father,” she—Faith, I guess—said. “But that quickly turned to anger. Anger that I’d had my family ripped away from me, anger that it was because of me, anger at the ghosts.
“And that anger turned to hatred. I grew to hate what I was, to hate the inhuman, and especially to hate the two worlds that I knew, neither of which would accept me.
“I stopped going in the church,” she continued, as bitterly as ever. “I refused to go by Faith, because I didn’t want to think about David anymore. Not that I had anyone to call me anything,” she added. “I was back to the same loneliness I’d known my entire life.
“The next few years only got harder. I escalated from small thefts—the kind I’d always performed to stay alive—to larger crimes. Vandalism, then arson. I liked to watch things burn,” she said. The pain had once again vanished, and there was a look in her eyes that I couldn’t quite place, but I knew I didn’t like it. I swear, I was getting whiplash from her mood changes. Not to mention the unease prickling down my spine at the growing madness of her words.
“It gave me a sense of control, and of revenge. They deserved it,” she said bitterly. “Everyone did. The world did. For destroying the one person I had. For making me what I was. And the fires…they were soothing. Even for just a few moments, the flicker of the flames put me in control. For a fleeting second, I could pretend that I had power over my life. I could know that I was making a difference that people would see. That I wasn’t invisible. That they would know I existed.”
I swallowed the words I wanted to say for the hundredth time in the last twenty minutes, tasting copper as I bit my cheek hard enough to draw blood. Em’s house had burned down when I was fourteen. Hell, I’d known several patrons of the bar who’d lost their homes or businesses to fires the same year. It had been chalked up to a dry season in Neverland, because the alternative—arson—just wasn’t likely.
Well. That’s what they’d thought at the time, anyway.
Now I wanted to shake her, to yell at her that destroying people’s lives wasn’t control. It was psychopathic. But I was still afraid that she’d stop talking if I interrupted her, considering that last time we’d almost had this conversation, she’d abandoned me with a cave full of massive spiders. Clearly, she was unstable in more ways than just her atomic composition, and I didn’t want to mess with that. No sir, no thank you. Not when she was —presumably—on track to tell us about her murders. You know, the part I cared about hearing.
“When I was fourteen, I jumped to the dark forests for the first time,” she said, eyes shining with a terrifying glint. “And by chance, I happened upon a harbinger.”
My heart sank at her words. I was pretty sure I knew where this was going from my conversation with the Ancient One, and it wasn’t gonna be good. Maybe I should have told Acacia and Asher about their father already. Did they know how he’d died? Would they recognize her story? They were looking at each other now in surprise and confusion.
“I’m the only one who’s ever met a non-monster being in the forest,” said Asher slowly. “And it was Ian.”
She twisted to smirk up at him. “You’re the only one you knew of,” she corrected. “That’s because I killed the one I met.”
Asher and Acacia glanced at each other again, and this time there was an intense recognition there. Asher pulled the ropes around Faith tighter, twisting them around his hand until they cut into her skin. He leaned down near her ear. “Our father was killed four years ago while he was out collecting antidotes. They told us it was a monster. But we always thought he was too smart to die that way.”
“Your story is kind of an impressive coincidence,” said Acacia, her voice harder than I’d ever heard it.
Faith turned her head to smile wickedly at them both, even as bruises popped up beneath the tightened ropes constraining her. “Almost an impossible coincidence,” she agreed smoothly.
They both looked ready to rip her head off; Asher was now twisting the ropes so hard that her face was beginning to turn red, though her smile didn’t fade.
Milo hurried over and placed his hand over Asher’s. “Maybe I should take the ropes,” he whispered pointedly.
Asher glared at him, but after a moment, he released a deep breath and slowly nodded, letting Milo pull his hand away. Immediately the ropes loosened; I could already see the edges of deep purple bruises on Faith’s skin beneath the loops. Asher stepped back next to his sister, though both of them stood there in quiet anger, arms crossed.
Faith, still grinning, twisted back to face me. “As I was saying,” she continued, “I met a harbinger in the forests.”
“He was a middle-aged man with long, dark hair, and he was surprised to see someone who looked human but wasn’t a harbinger. He asked where I was from; I flipped him off and angrily stormed into the forests. He shouted after me that it was obvious that I was suffering, and that he’d pray to the Ancient One to guide me to better days.
“Well, that caught my attention,” she said with a smirk. “I knew a little of human faith, having spent so much time in David’s church. I also knew that inhumans typically didn’t follow religions. But I’d never heard of the Ancient One before, and something about the words sparked my curiosity, a little hungry flame inside me that burned as bright as the fires I’d been setting.” She chuckled at her own joke. I didn’t.
“I turned around and demanded he tell me about the Ancient One,” she continued. “He was happy to oblige, considering that even most of his own kind found his faith to be unfounded. He told me everything he knew: its origins, its presence on the edge of the planes of existence, its power. And immediately I was desperate to find the Ancient One—because it sounded like it could give me answers. If there was any chance of understanding my jumps and finding control over my own life, it had to lie with the Ancient One.
“I pressured him more, demanding that he tell me how I could find the Ancient One. He claimed he didn’t know. Even when I held a knife to his throat, he insisted he’d told me all he could. I was sure he was lying to me, and I was getting more frustrated. And then,” she said now, with another smirk back at Asher and Acacia, “he asked me to let him go home. He said he’d research and try to figure it out for me, but begged me not to kill him, because he had children, and he was all they had, since their mother had died years earlier.”
I could feel the heat of Asher’s quiet fury from here. I don’t know how Faith didn’t spontaneously combust beneath the intensity of his glare. But to his credit, he and Acacia continued to stand side-by-side, making no move towards the woman who’d killed their father…although it didn’t escape my notice that Acacia reached for Asher’s hand and held it tightly at their sides.
“I didn’t listen,” she continued calmly, as if she was merely discussing the weather. “I believed that he was keeping me from the answers I craved, so I killed him and left his body in the forest. That was the first murder I’d ever committed—and I liked it,” she said, that terrifying glint back in her eyes. “I found that it gave me an even greater sense of control and satisfaction than the fires. For the next few months, even as I searched for the place on the edge of existence, I couldn’t stop thinking about the fascination of seeing the life leave his eyes, wondering what it would feel like to do it again, wondering if that was how the ghost who’d killed David had felt.
“At first, the desire for answers outweighed any morbid curiosities, and I threw myself into the search,” she continued. Perhaps it was her connection with the Ancient One, like mine, that helped her find it. Because soon she’d found herself in the same silver fog we talked in now, and after wandering aimlessly for hours, the Ancient One called to her, showing the way with a silver thread.
Like it had for me. I didn’t say anything, but I thought about that thread I’d seen leading into the mist. Probably the Ancient One had hoped it could help her, that the answers she desperately wanted would halt the dark path she was headed down.
Unfortunately, it had the opposite effect. “The Ancient One told me what I was,” she spit out, voice filled with venom. She met my eyes with such an intense hatred that it made me nearly stagger back. I hated when she looked at me like that. “And it also told me about you. You, who grew up with everything I never had. You, who got lucky enough to have a stable existence. A father. You, who were exactly the same as I was, but got so much more.”
I had to rip my gaze away to look at the ground. I couldn’t take the pure hate anymore.
“The Ancient One said you could help me. ‘He could teach you how to travel freely between dimensions,’ it said. ‘He, too, wonders what he is. You could help each other.’” Her voice dripped with mockery as she imitated the whispery tone of the Ancient One.
“I was too furious. Furious that you had gotten everything I’d ever wanted without deserving it, furious that you had a stable home and could travel between dimensions willingly. I lashed out at the Ancient One, trying to stab it, but I guess it learned from its mistake hundreds of years ago.” She laughed, a sharp, harsh sound without any amusement in it. “The Ancient One sent me away before I could cause any harm.
“From there, my focus turned to you” —another hate-filled glance in my direction— “and Griffin’s Edge. I watched you for the next few years, you know, learning how to slip through gaps in reality from you. I considered killing you many times.” She grinned at me, the kind of grin I imagine a lion would give a gazelle before tearing out its throat. “I itched to drive my knife through your heart, to satisfy my curiosities and take away what you had. But it wouldn’t have been enough. No, not when you had no idea I even existed, no idea of the pain I’d gone through.” Her words were icy, each one short and sharp. “Not when killing you would still let everyone else continue to thrive at Griffin’s Edge.”
It felt like my throat was stuffed with cotton balls. I couldn’t swallow and my head swirled with a deadly mix of horror, pity, guilt, anger, and discomfort. I could barely even register all my thoughts, let alone process them. To know that she’d been stalking me for years—and that all of this had been driven by a hatred of me when I’d never even known about her—it was…insane? Yeah, that was probably the most accurate word for it. Completely, utterly insane.
“About six months ago, I ran out of patience,” she continued, eerily calm once more. “I returned to the graveyard to find that the church, which had stood unused since David’s death, was no longer empty. It had been restored, and a new priest had taken up residence. Services were set to begin the next week.
“Well, that was the last straw. My resentment had been building, rightfully so, and now the world was taking back the church, erasing the last traces of David. A stranger walked amidst its pews, and he quickly put up a NO TRESPASSERS sign by the graveyard gate. It was clear that even my fragile home was no longer mine.
So, apparently, whatever fraying thread she’d been hanging on by finally gave way. Her meeting with the harbinger, combined with my frequent errands, gave her the idea. “It was killing multiple birds with one stone—literally,” she said with a wicked grin. “After all, the murders accomplished all my goals: taking out my hatred for the worlds and everyone in them, giving me the control I craved, torturing the Ancient One as it observed but was powerless to help, scratching the itch to kill again that had prickled in my mind for years, and, maybe most importantly, drawing your attention.” Cue the intense eye contact and creepy smile at me. Yeah, I wasn’t having fun.
“This time, the fascination turned to exhilaration as I watched the light fade from the eyes of my victims, as I felt their hearts stop. There’s truly nothing like it,” she whispered reverently. “And one of the first people I killed was that new priest in the church. Poetic justice, I think—revenge for the way David died there years ago. Taking my home back for myself. Getting that imposter out of there.
“Of course, you were my ultimate target,” she said to me. “I’m sure you can understand.” (I couldn’t understand at all). “I wanted you to know what I went through, how good you had it when you didn’t deserve it. I want you to know my pain…firsthand.” Her eyes bore into mine, and even as the pit in my stomach deepened, I found myself unable to tear my gaze away. “I killed your uncle, as my David was torn from me. I will burn down Griffin’s Edge to destroy your home, as mine was taken—what home I barely had in the first place. And only once you have known my suffering will I let you die.”
I was torn between gasping in horror or laughing at the sheer insanity of all this, but I didn’t get a chance to do either, because as she finished speaking, she sprung to her feet, tearing the ropes around her apart as she did so.
I looked to Milo in bewilderment. He stared down at the ropes dangling from his hands—which had been sliced neatly down the middle. Faith held up her knife and smirked. “Magic blade. Come now, surely you didn’t think a few ropes would hold me?” She saw my face and laughed. “Oh, it appears you did. A bit naïve, I’d say.”
Asher was advancing on her slowly, pulling his gloves off and letting them fall to the silver ground. “Don’t need the ropes to beat you.”
She made a tsk-ing noise and danced away from him as if they were playing tag. “Your deadly little touch won’t do anything to me, remember?” she taunted. “Your daddy tried the same thing, right before I slit his throat.”
It was Acacia who screamed and ran forward to attack. “I can still strangle you the old-fashioned way,” she spit out as she reached for Faith’s neck.
But Faith was ready. With a quick step back and a sweeping hand gesture, she avoided Acacia’s reach and conjured new, silver ropes from the fog. I watched in shock as the tendrils of silver, seemingly made from the mist itself, rapidly entwined around my friends. And the fog was apparently stronger than it looked, because as much as they struggled, the tendrils only tightened, squeezing and wrapping around them like thick silver snakes.
Faith looked at me and waved her fingertips with a wink. “We have more power than you realize,” she said. “Too bad you’re out of time to figure it out.” Then, before I could respond or, better yet, *figure it out—*she glanced back at my friends. “Can’t have you interfering. You understand. I need Ian alone. Have fun.”
And in one fluid motion, she closed the distance between us, closed a hand around my arm, spun me around so that my back was against her chest, and placed the cold blade of a knife to my throat. “Struggle and I kill you.”
It was Asher’s eyes I found as she dragged me backwards into the mist. I kept my gaze locked on his deep, dark eyes and the hope in them until they, too, vanished behind clouds of silver.
I knew that hope. I knew what he’d been trying to tell me silently: I could beat her. She wanted me dead, sure, but I wanted her dead too. For Asher and Acacia’s father. For the priest. For Uncle Henri. For Griffin’s Edge, which she would surely destroy after killing me, along with everyone inside.
She was filled with hatred. Well, so was I. All I had to do was picture Henri lying on the floor his office, and the fury flooded my veins, red-hot and fiery. I could do this. I would do this.
So when she dropped the blade from my throat and started to say, “First of all, I—” that was far as she got. I whirled around and lunged at her, throwing all my weight into it to send us both sprawling on the ground, me on her chest, hands at her neck.
But no sooner had I started tightening, watching her gasp for breath, did I realize that my own vision was darkening. I felt icy fingers on the small of my back and wandered vaguely who the hell could even be here, let alone causing me to black out simply by touching me. She began to lose consciousness—her eyes were fluttering shut—I tried to fight it as my own mind blurred—what was even happening? —
I had just enough time to curse as my grip slackened and I fell to the ground beside her. Then the swirling silver fog faded as my eyes closed uncontrollably and I slipped into darkness.
Everything reformed immediately, or maybe it was hours later. Hard to say. All I know is that when I woke up, I found myself in that same dark subconscious place I’d visited several times before. And just like those times, silver eyes were shining in the endless black expanse, glinting like steel as they stared at me.
I groaned and sat up, head aching; another groan came from beside me. Faith was sitting up too, managing to give me a hate-filled glare even as she rubbed her neck in pain. But I didn’t get a chance to talk to her—or better yet, to try and finish what I’d started when I’d wrapped my hands around her throat—because suddenly a familiar voice echoed in the nothingness, seeming to come from everywhere at once.
Hello, Ian. Hello, Faith. Welcome back. We have much to discuss.