22. Ash

Chapter Twenty-Two

Ash

I left the cabin while Lorraine was still asleep and crept across the clearing. I didn’t want to wake her up. I was getting more and more attached to her, and I needed some time alone to think. We’d nearly gotten stuck last night. It wouldn’t have been the first time she was pissed off at me—we’d had our fights before. I’d been just short of being a dick to her when I’d bound her here without her permission. Okay, maybe I’d been a full-on dick there. We’d gotten past it. It wasn’t the fighting part I was worried about. It was the part where Lorraine had asked me if I would be willing to give everything up and live with her on Earth, versus her giving everything up to live here with me. That had pulled me up short. Her reaction had been fair—how could I ask her to give everything up for me if I wasn’t willing to do the same? The problem was… was I willing to give it all up? If it came down to how I felt about her and what we were to each other, then I would say yes in a heartbeat. I’d done it before. Which was exactly what worried me. I’d done it before, and it had blown up in my face. Ava hadn’t given a shit about me in the end. I didn’t know why she’d bothered asking. Or rather, why I’d bothered offering. She’d never asked me. Not outright. I’d jumped to all the right conclusions on my own, and I’d nearly paid the price for it. What if that happened again? What if I gave it all up and Lorraine ended up leaving me? I didn’t know if I could do that again. Living a life on Earth without magic, without a purpose that defined me, was already hard. Doing it with her by my side would be worth it, but having to do it alone… if Artemis hadn’t saved me the first time, I didn’t know how I would have managed it. Lorraine wasn’t Ava. I knew that for a fact. She was nothing like Ava had been, and I was wiser now that I’d been through it once and learned the difference. Knowing what I wanted started with knowing what I didn’t want, right?

It didn’t change the fact that I was fucking terrified at the idea of giving it all up when there was a chance things could go wrong. “You’re deep in thought,” Dolus said, appearing right next to me. He wore all black, a smirk on his face, and a foggy darkness clung to his skin and his clothes. I jumped. “Oh, shit,” I said. “That’s a way to greet an old friend.”

“You scared the shit out of me,” I said. Dolus chuckled. “Yeah, I heard.”

I shook my head, trying to get my heart rate back under control. What was it with Dolus that riled me up so much this time? Something about him was different than it usually was—the fogginess was new. Clingy, possessive, with a hint of fear. I frowned. “What are you doing here?”

“Can’t I visit a friend?”

I didn’t know we were that close. I wouldn’t have thought we were. “Of course you can,” I said. Dolus nodded, satisfied with my answer. “How have you been?” he asked. “Just fine,” I said. “That doesn’t sound very exciting.”

I shrugged. “Same old, right? Same shit, different day.” That wasn’t entirely true. The last couple of days I’d done a lot of thinking, a lot of reading, and things between me and Lorraine had moved to a new level, but fuck if I was going to tell Dolus that. Something about him didn’t feel right; something was strange, and I didn’t know what to do with it. “It’s life, isn’t it? Not much exciting going on in general, just small sparks of interest here and there.”

Dolus rolled his eyes. “That’s what I wanted to hear.”

“Yeah?” His actions and his words didn’t line up. “Yeah. I’m ready for you.”

“What?” I asked, confused. “Ready for what?”

“For you to take your new spot in a new life, doing something else, something away from here.”

I shook my head. “I told you I didn’t want to do that anymore.”

“Yeah, you did. I went ahead and fixed it up for you anyway.” Dolus pushed his hands into the folds of his black clothes. Did he have pockets in there? Not being able to see his hands made me anxious. What was going on with him? “Why? I already said no,” I said. “What are friends for? We should know each other better than we know ourselves, right?”

I didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure what to say. I’d asked Dolus for a favor. We were far from being friends, even though I’d confided in him about things now and then. I’d never told him anything about Lorraine, although he’d done some guessing of his own, too. “What is the job?” I asked. “What would I do?”

Dolus laughed. “I can’t tell you that.”

“Why not?” I asked. “Because you take what you can get. If you want it, you want it, no questions asked.”

I shook my head. “If I don’t know what it is, how can I decide if I want it?”

“You can’t!” Dolus roared, his voice suddenly deep and menacing. “Let me tell you how this works. You choose something, you see it the fuck through without flailing around indecisively. I didn’t stick my neck out for you just so you can be full of shit and pull back because you’re a pussy.”

I blinked, taken aback by his outburst. The more upset he became, the more I wondered if this had been a good idea. “I’m not changing my mind on a whim,” I said. “I already told you I don’t want to do this anymore.”

“And I would have believed you if you didn’t have questions about the new position. You’re curious, though. Curious that it might be something you’d still consider, which means that no matter which way you’re trying to convince yourself you’re leaning, you haven’t closed that door yet.”

He didn’t sound nearly as menacing as a moment ago, and he wasn’t wrong with what he was saying, either. “Are you really willing to give it all up?” Dolus asked. I frowned. “Give what up?”

“Your immortality.”

“How…?”

Dolus laughed. “I’m a god, Ash. I know what’s going on around here. I’m not fucking stupid, and I’m not deaf or blind either. Do you think we don’t know what’s going on with the enchanted beings that live among us?”

I hadn’t really thought about it. It made me feel like an idiot that I’d tried to hide things from Dolus—like my relationship with Lorraine—thinking that he wouldn’t find out. He’d known it all along. It made me wonder what else Dolus kept an eye on when it came to what happened between me and Lorraine. “Look, I know all about your little stint with the human three centuries ago. You were the talk of the mountain back then.”

“Really?” I asked dully. That was depressing to hear even though I’d already known that. “Really,” Dolus said. “We all thought Artemis was soft to give you another shot, but she’s always been pathetic. You’re about to do it all again, though. She should have just left you to your own devices.”

“What happened to me is none of your business,” I snapped. Anger boiled under my skin and I balled my hands into fists. “The choices that I make have nothing to do with you.”

Dolus’s magic rose around me, getting thicker and thicker, and it was like clouds blocked out the sun. When I glanced up, it was still a bright, sunshiny day. It was the darkness in his magic that did the trick—an illusion that served to terrify. It worked. How hadn’t I picked up on this magic before? Dolus had a signature like every other god, but he’d been fucking good at hiding it. The god of deception. “Challenge me again, and see where it gets you,” Dolus warned. I knew he would follow through. He wasn’t the type to make empty threats. I swallowed my anger and hung my hands loosely by my side, trying not to let my fury get the better of me. “Look, if you’re ready to go to Earth and live like one of those pathetic humans, be my guest. If you want to keep going on with your pathetic existence here, then I guess that’s on you, too. What I’m offering you is a change. The chance to start over, to do something you could be proud of. Doesn’t that sound a hell of a lot better than the possibility that she might not stick around for you in the end?”

I didn’t know how he knew what my fears were. Was it an educated guess? Or could he tell not only what I was doing, but what I was thinking, too? “It’s a guarantee,” Dolus said when I didn’t answer him. “I can tell you that you’ll get exactly what you asked for if you go through with it. If you decide to throw it all away, you’ll be stuck here for an eternity—no more Hail Mary passes—and if you go with Lorraine you’ll always live with the uncertainty that it could end in a blink.”

The fear that clutched at me when he said that made it hard to breathe. He knew my deepest fear and he was preying on it, and even though I shouldn’t have let him use it to get a hold on me… for some reason, it worked. “When do you need an answer by?” I asked. “All Hallows’ Eve is fine,” Dolus said with a nonchalant shrug. “I’m nothing if not generous.” He disappeared as if he’d never been, but his voice echoed around me and the air grew significantly cooler. I rubbed my arms and shivered. I didn’t want to lose Lorraine, and if it were up to me, I wouldn’t. It wasn’t just up to me, though.

It was up to her, too. It always took two, and if I’d learned anything from Ava, it was that I could only trust myself and no one else. What if I lost Lorraine? What if this world, this life, me, wasn’t enough for her and she decided she would go back to her life without me? I couldn’t handle that pain again. I couldn’t deal with what I did the last three centuries, dealing with heartache while going through the motions and looking everyone in the eye who knew I fucked up. In that case, going somewhere else—wherever that was—wasn’t such a bad idea. Maybe I had to call it before it could get to the point where it wrecked me. If I broke it off with her, then I would know what was coming and deal with it. If I left, then nothing else would matter. I didn’t have to get rid of Lorraine just yet. We had until All Hallows’ Eve, which had been the plan from the start, right? She’d had to stay here until then, and the idea had been to send her back after that, and that would be the end of it. It had only been lately that we’d thought of other ways to go about it, other endings to this story. Was I a fool to tempt fate all over again? Maybe it was better this way. Have my fun, end it when it was meant to end, and start a new chapter in a new life, away from everything in the past that had brought me here. Just the thought of losing Lorraine and never seeing her again made me sick to my stomach. Letting her go would be a bitch, and to deal with that—no matter where I was—wouldn’t be easy. How the fuck had things become this complicated? How had I gotten myself to a place where I didn’t know which way to turn? Before, I’d always known what I wanted. To find love. To be happy with Ava. To live a life by her side even if it meant giving up my immortality. To escape the hell that she’d left behind. To escape the life I’d been bound to live for the rest of eternity. Now that Lorraine had come into my life, I didn’t know what I wanted anymore. I knew I wanted her, but I also wanted to avoid the pain that it would cause when I lost her. I wanted to stay, I wanted to leave. I wanted to be mortal, I wanted to live forever. Fuck, I was so torn.