Eric and Cassia appear beside him, standing a fraction ahead of me.
“Get ready to shift!” Cassia yells.
Someone emerges from the tree line, gasping. Elias steps forward, giving me a proper view of the man stumbling toward us. He wears dark clothes but his pale skin, peeking out from underneath his sleeves, is stained red. “Smithe.” Elias puts a hand on Smithe’s shoulder. “What happened?”
Smithe gasps, resting his hands on his knees as he tries to catch his breath. “Hollowers.” The crowd vibrates and Elias’s eyes fall on me. “It was a small group, maybe six or seven. I killed most of them but two of them got away, and they took Nella with them.”
Beside me, an older woman hobbles forward. “Was she alive?
Was Nella alive?”
“She was alive when they took her but she wasn’t conscious.”
The woman is silent, her face falling as someone comes up behind her and wraps their arm over her shoulders. My insides tighten with guilt as they lead her away. “Why are they out at night?” Smithe’s voice cracks. “Why are they risking it? Why’d they take Nella instead of killing her on the spot?”
Because of me.
Concern etches Elias’s face as he exchanges glances with Eric.
My head spins, the world unsteady beneath my feet. The voices start around me again as I meet Harrison’s stare, in among the others. He glares, eyes sending a clear message.
It’s all because of me.
“Everyone, go home. Those of you who live beyond the forest, we’ll house you in the dining hall in the castle. I don’t want anybody to leave the village until it’s safe.” Elias turns to Smithe.
“Where did the rest of the guards go?”
“They went after the hollowers, to get Nella back.”
Cassia and Eric disperse the crowd, ushering everyone back.
Somebody grips my arm. I turn to find Bastian. “Are you all right?” I nod, slightly shaken. “Come with me and Aliyah. Cassia will be busy for a while.” I let him pull me through the chaos, the night air filled with shouts as people rush to get back to their homes. Aliyah leads the way through the crowds of people.
The streets, while lit with lanterns, feel dark and sinister as we move away from the others. Shadows lurk at the edges of the forest, waiting to snatch unsuspecting victims. I shiver, grateful when after a few minutes we reach a small wood cabin.
Bastian ushers us in, moving to start a fire as Aliyah slumps down at the table and stares blankly at the wall. The room is cluttered with books and pieces of paper scattered over the floor, and the bed in the corner is covered with mismatched articles of clothing.
“Do you want anything to drink?” Bastian asks once he’s lit the fire.
I follow him to the kitchen bench and glance back at Aliyah.
“Is she okay?”
“She and Nella are good friends.” He reaches for a pot and fills it with water before grabbing three mugs from the cupboard above his head. “Tea?”
“You sit down, I’ll make it.” He opens his mouth to protest but I shake my head. “Really, I mean it.”
I pull the pot of water over to the fire and place it on top, my hands burning from the flames. How many of Elias’s people have been affected by the hollowers since I’ve been here?
Did they have attacks like this before I came? My mind races with guilt. I know what I should do, that I should leave the castle without telling anyone. And maybe if I was brave, I would.
But my heart begs me to stay. The small feeling of belonging I get when I’m laughing with Cassia or talking to Elias keeps me rooted here—a deep desire from within that just wants somewhere to fit in. But the longer I stay here the more innocent people are going to die, and yet fear kills all logic. It paralyzes me, keeps me in place, and like a coward, I keep my mouth shut and shove down the guilt.
Pathetic.
“Milena?”
I jump at the sound of Bastian’s voice. “Huh?”
“The water has boiled.”
“Oh.” Embarrassed, I take it off the fire and distribute it into the mugs. “Right, sorry.”
I bring the mugs to the table and place them in front of Bastian and Aliyah, staring at the one in front of me. The thought of drinking or eating anything makes me nauseated, so we just sit in silence as steam spirals in the air between us.
I swallow and shift in my seat. “Maybe I should get back.”
“No.” Aliyah’s voice is barely a whisper. “Stay. It’s not safe for anyone out there alone.” Silence stretches on. I wish I was anywhere but here, having to witness the painful consequences my presence has had on the people in this village. “Why would they come out at night? They would have known they would likely die. Do they not value their lives?”
“They want me.”
“Don’t try to pin this on yourself, Milena,” Bastian says. “Cassia explained the situation. It’s not your fault they’re delusional.”
Before I can protest, there’s a knock on the door. Aliyah and Bastian exchange glances and Bastian gets up and opens it, revealing Elias. “Is Milena here?” he asks.
I step around the corner so he can see me. “I’m here.”
“Come on. I’ll take you back to the castle.”
He doesn’t have to ask twice. I stride toward him, desperate to escape the tension, and match his pace, walking beside him. The emptiness of the streets fills me with an eerie feeling.
“Do you think they took her for the sacrifice?” I ask. “Nella, I mean.”
“Maybe. The other guards followed so it’s likely they’ll get her back like we did Eric.”
I ponder his words. Would they really have killed Eric that night? Wouldn’t it have been better for them to use him for the sacrifice seeing as it was so close to my birthday? I never really thought about it, but catching a shifter must be much harder than catching a human.
“What was Eric doing there, anyway?” I ask. “Why did he go into the tunnels? We’d never had a break-in like that before.”
“He didn’t go into the tunnels,” he says. “They set a trap to catch him. For the ceremony, I assume.”
“As sorry as I am for what they did to him, I don’t think I’d be alive if he wasn’t caught.”
“You wouldn’t be,” he says, voice low.
At the castle, Elias steps ahead and pulls the doors open for me. “What now?” I ask, stepping into the foyer.
“I have to organize more search parties to go after the guards.”
“Well, thanks for walking me back.”
He smiles and steps past me, heading for the staircase. “I’ll walk you to your room.”
Honestly, the last thing I want to do is to go to sleep. But I don’t bother offering to go with Elias because I know my presence would likely cause more turmoil. The guards don’t want to see me, especially if Harrison has already filled their minds with stories about me.
“Did you enjoy tonight?” Elias asks as we walk the maze of halls.
“I liked dancing. It reminded me of home. Or what I thought of as home, anyway.”
“You seem happy when you talk about that place.” Elias looks down at me, his expression strange. “Were they kind to you?”
“Most of them were indifferent. The younger ones were always nicer, but after they went on their first hunts, they didn’t want to associate with me anymore. I always thought it was because they thought they were better than me, but Darius said it’s because that’s when they learned the truth about me.”
“That you weren’t like them?”
“I guess.”
“That doesn’t seem like a valid enough reason to go from liking you to hating you.”
“Maybe Charles told them about the sacrifice too. He can be very persuasive, and our people basically worship him. Despite everything, he’s a good leader.” We reach my bedroom door. I wish Elias didn’t have to leave, that we could go to the library and talk for hours.
“Did they hurt you?”
“That must’ve been lonely.”
“I never knew any different. It wasn’t so bad.”
“I’m sorry, Milena. I’m sorry you had to live through that.”
His words make me hold my breath. There’s always been something intense about him, and this is no exception. It feels like he carries the burdens of all wrongdoing on his shoulders, like it’s his fault. “You don’t have to apologize for the way they treated me.”
He turns away, his jaw clenching. “What about your friend?
You mentioned her before—Flo? You had friends, right?”
“Flo is . . . she was my best friend. We got on so well, we did everything together and there was never one moment that I felt she wasn’t being genuine. I just . . . I don’t understand her.”
My voice cracks. “Of everything that has happened, that hurts the most. Sometimes I wonder, maybe she didn’t know, maybe she did care about me like I cared about her.” I tuck a strand of my hair behind my ear self-consciously. “I know it sounds stupid.”
“It doesn’t. You didn’t deserve that. You shouldn’t have lived like that.”
My back presses against the door. I don’t want him to leave and I don’t want this conversation to end, but I know he has much more important things to do than stand here talking to me. And yet, he stays. “What about you?” I ask. “Your childhood with Ana, did you have many friends?”
“It’s not all that interesting. You don’t want to know about all of that.”
“Yeah, I do.”
He sighs. “It was mostly just me and Eric.”
“Eric?”
“Back when all the elders lived up there, there were more kids.
But he was the only kid I hung around much.”
“What a joyful companion he must’ve been.”
“He’s not all bad, Milena.” He laughs.
“I know. He’s looking out for those he cares about. I just happen to not be one of those people.”
Elias leans forward, his hand on the door frame. “Don’t concern yourself over that.”
“I don’t.”
The air between us buzzes with that same magnetic tension, urging me closer. A comfortable silence falls over us, his warmth wrapping around me like a blanket. Despite the events of the night, Elias still fills my head like nothing else, filling me with a sense of security, and I know I’m not the only one. The villagers orbit around him like he’s their sun. “Do you miss the mountains?” I ask, voice low. “Where you grew up?”
“I miss the summer. There’s a lake up there we used to swim in. Maybe I can show you sometime, when this is all over.”
“I never learned how to swim.”
He leans his arm against the door frame, dangerously close.
“I can show you that too.” In this hall, it feels like we’re the only two people in the world. The outside pressures seem minuscule, trying and failing to penetrate the walls. I can almost forget the events of tonight, or the constant fear in the pit of my stomach, but a shout wafts from the foyer and snaps us from our daze.
Elias sighs and takes a step back. “I should go.”
“Of course,” I say. “Maybe tomorrow I can help you go through some of Ana’s books to see if there’s anything that might help us.
Maybe you won’t have to go see the other elders.”
“Milena.” He considers his next words carefully. “There’s something I need to talk to you about. I’ll come to see you later.”
“Okay,” I say, trying to mask my excitement. And as I watch him leave, I have to convince myself it would be a bad idea to fol ow.
~
After he leaves, sleep is the last thing on my mind. My body buzzes and I can’t stop fidgeting. So, I make my way down to the empty training center and let my energy loose on the endurance course.
The more I do it, the easier it becomes. Repeating the movements over and over, I wonder if Elias is going to come at all. And then Eric appears, passing along the message that Elias has decided to go to sleep and wants me to do the same.
I can’t help but feel disappointed as I wander back to my bedroom. Elias said he wanted to talk to me, and it had sounded important. My arms and legs ache from my training over the past few days, but I’m wide awake still, and the thought of seeing
Elias certainly played a part in that. I stroll down the halls, running my finger along the stone walls as I climb the staircase and pass the slightly ajar library door. There is a shuffle of feet.
Elias is hunched over the table next to the fire, a collection of books spread out on the wood in front of him as he brushes his pencil across the pages. I know that I should turn around, that I should walk away before he sees me, but instead, I stand in the doorway and try to ignore the pressing weight of betrayal that has settled atop my chest. He doesn’t owe me anything, and yet, the fact that he got Eric to lie for him so he wouldn’t have to see me stings more than it should. I take a step back but the floor creaks beneath my feet before I can escape.
“Milena?” I freeze when his eyes flash to me. “Didn’t Eric talk to you?”
“He told me you’d gone to sleep.” He shifts at the desk so that his hand covers the book in front of him. “You said you wanted to talk to me.”
“I thought you could use some sleep.”
I try to read his face but it’s indecipherable. “What did you want to talk to me about?”
“It’s nothing.”
“It didn’t sound like nothing before. What’re you reading?” I move closer, trying to get a glance at the books in front of him.
“Milena—”
“You said I didn’t have to sit around doing nothing, and I’m grateful you’re letting me train and learn to read and not have to work as hard as I did at home,” I say. “But none of that matters when I still don’t know why the hollowers want me.”
He looks pained. “I know.”
“You promised you wouldn’t keep things from me, so don’t.”
He doesn’t respond at first, and it makes me want to scream. A few hours ago, I could’ve sworn he felt the same pull that I did.
The way he stared at me made me feel like we were the only two people in the world. Now, though, he’s apart from me, staring at me like he did all those nights ago when he brutally shut down my line of questioning.
Useless filler, he’d called it. You don’t need to know me and I don’t need to know you.
This confusion is so frustrating, and these mixed signals almost make me turn right around and leave, but curiosity forces me to persist. I close in. “What are you reading?”
I don’t look at him as I lean over the books strewn across the desk, squinting to see what is scribbled beneath his arm. “I’m not reading anything,” he says eventually. When I realize what he means, my heart drops to the pit of my stomach. The books aren’t written by Ana, they’re books of Ana—pages and pages of sketches of her.
“I’m sorry.” I bury my face in my hands and groan. “I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions.”
He pulls my arm away from my face. “Don’t apologize.”
I look at the drawings again. “You’re really good at that, you know.”
“Ana taught me before she passed.”
He mindlessly flips through the pages. I’m both confused and disturbed by how casually he refers to Ana’s brutal murder. She raised him, yet I feel like her death has affected me more than it has him. “She was beautiful,” I say as he pauses on a drawing of Ana and another couple laughing. “What was she like as a parent?”
The shadows in the room make his eyes seem almost brown when he looks at me. “The same as any. She taught me all I needed to know.”
“Did she love you?”
“She took me in when I had nobody else.”
I know from experience that taking someone in means nothing i
n terms of love. “What about your parents? Your biological ones?” He shifts uncomfortably at my question. “You don’t have to say if—”
“My mother killed my father.”
“That’s awful. I’m sorry.”
To my surprise, his lips rise at the edges. “You’re not the only one with a messed-up family life.”
I look out the window. The village looks like a ghost town, the streets between cabins deserted. Compared to the usual liveliness at night, it feels wrong.
“This is them,” Elias says. He pauses on a page with three people: a smiling couple and a baby held in the woman’s arms. But the drawing cuts off just before their feet. “Ana drew it, one for her and one for my parents. I don’t remember much about them, but I remember this moment. My mum was so annoyed because I wouldn’t sit still long enough for Ana to complete the second drawing. That’s why this one is half finished.”
“They look really nice.”
“Ana said she was a really good mother.”
“But she killed your father.”
“It was an accident.”
“An accident?”
“Yes.” The fire is dying down, the charred wood chalky black.
“It’s getting late. You should get to sleep.” I wait for him to elaborate but he doesn’t make any effort to. He stands up from the table and collects the books.
“I’m sorry. About Ana and your parents.”
He doesn’t look at me as he places a book back on a shelf.
“People always end up suffering because of me.”
“Elias, you can’t seriously think that.” He doesn’t say anything, nonchalantly stacking books. “That’s not fair.”
“Don’t worry about me, I’m used to it.”
“What? So you just stop caring?” I scoff, taking a step closer.
“I don’t believe that. I see the way you lead your people; you care about what happens to them.”
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