Chapter 34

Thirty-Four

FINN

T he beast’s drool dripped down my back with icy bite as I stared at the remains of the cabin praying Wesley escaped the realm. The shadows pressed in around me with a suffocating weight that made every breath feel like I was wading through thick, dark water. The shadow wolf, its eyes gleaming with malice and contempt, snarled at me for letting Wesley go.

The connection to Wesley grew faint, a dim, flickering light in the back of my mind. My heart clung to it like it was the last ray of sunshine I’d ever see. The curse slid up my body, cold and clammy, like the icy fingers of death. Pain branched out in waves of stinging through my nerves, followed by numbness. My lungs ached as the air chilled, and I closed my eyes.

“Thank you,” I said. “For letting him go.”

“Mine,” the wolf growled.

“Yeah, I guess. Now what? You kill me and we both die. What’s the plan here?” I expected this nightmare remnant of the Autumn king could snap me in half, but trusted Wesley’s instinct and knowledge. The beast was broken, too far gone to be saved or could I fix this?

The wolf's gaze narrowed as it breathed icy breath over the back of my neck and shoulder. The shadows slid up around me, climbing my throat until I could feel them inching over my face like a million tiny maggots of ice. The weight of the darkness a suffocating blend of terror and numbness.

“Weak,” the wolf snarled.

“Because I’m human or because I still feel emotions?”

It huffed, and for a half second I feared it would rip out my throat, but the shadows swelled as if called, coating me in a rising layer of suffocating cold and darkness. I couldn’t breathe, but focused on hope that Wesley was free and safe. The Summer king would protect him. The icy stretch of shadows crawled inside my nose and mouth, forcing me to gasp and draw in splintered waves of chilled nightmares inside my lungs. I gasped and gagged, darkness walloping me hard into unconsciousness.

It passed in one blink to the next without the chance to dream. I opened my eyes back to the sanctuary of statues, standing in the center of the sentinel of memories, the faces all contorted in pain, and staring at me. That was new and creepy. The water had vanished, leaving everything as though it had never been touched by the wave the wolf used to wash us from its sanctuary.

I took a step toward the Summer king, wondering if I could find shelter and warmth there, but banged into an invisible barrier face-first. I gasped and rubbed my nose, surprised to find myself dressed in the same clothes I’d vanished in. Was this a dream?

I stared at my hands, the dark blemish of the shadow curse staining them with a colorful spread of purples and blues. Wesley said it looked like a bruise. My fingers tingled with a numbing spread of needles. I reached out to rest my hand on the barrier, a slight ripple of color the only indication of where it started and stopped. Were all the statues protected? Why now? Did the wolf fear I’d harm them?

My stomach rumbled with hunger making me wonder how much of this was reality. But there were berries everywhere. Not the most balanced meal, but I stumbled my way to a nearby bush of blackberries, checking for invisible walls, and dropped to my knees to gorge myself on the fruit. A juice pop of flavor in my mouth, I devoured several handfuls before feeling full and tempted to lie down and nap.

I couldn’t remember ever being hungry or full in a dream.

“Can you give me a clue?” I shouted realizing all the statues stared at me, a strange imperceptible movement as I was easily ten meters from where I’d started. The only one who didn’t focus its creepy gaze on me, was the Summer king.

“Take care of Wesley, okay? He’s prickly, but that’s armor. He’s a marshmallow inside in need of hugs and warm snuggles.” Like an old cat rescued from a long and terrible life on the street.

I climbed to my feet, holding my hands in front of me to test for barriers, banging into another three. The space to walk between, a narrow spread of berry bushes, some with thorns, but all blooming with endless fruit, and not a bug or bird to be seen. I followed the path studying the faces, their eyes moving with me, gaze focused, though half lidded in most cases.

Beyond creepy. The handful of ghosts or other , as now I thought maybe it was fae or magic of some kind that I’d caught on video, had nothing on the unnerving trail of statues. At one end stood the scariest, the carving a contorted not quite human face frozen in a snarl of pain and rage. Bat-like wings and elongated talons grafted into the tree as though the wood were its final resting place by sheer force.

Maybe they weren’t statues at all, but rather those the Autumn king captured? “I am not going to end up as a tree, you bastard,” I shouted at nothing. The warped statue’s barrier kept me a good dozen meters away. The base of the tree surrounded by a dark pulsing pool of crystalized black shadows. Keeping the curse out? Or in?

I turned and headed the other way, following a defined trail of jagged stones, pausing at each junction, which led down a short path to two or three closely clumped statues, before moving on. The further from the bat-like one I ventured, the smaller the barriers became. Some only a few steps from the tree, though I kept moving until I reached the end, or perhaps the beginning of the path.

Two statues, one male and one female took up a lighted end of the path. The male towered, display more of that of a bear about to attack than a person. The woman serene, almost like that of the Summer king, her eyes closed, and she swaddled a child.

My gut flipped over as anxiety slid down my spine. The numbness not so far spread that it could alleviate the fear of what they might be. Were they my parents? And why did my mind immediately connect with her as if I could remember her from a dream?

I stood a heartbeat away from her statue, realizing she had no barrier.

“Hello,” I said. “I’m Finn.” She wouldn’t know me anymore than I knew her, would she? Whatever I was now, some sort of split creation from the wolf. I studied her face, memorizing the soft expression. “Were you my mom? I mean I had moms who took really good care of me. But no one could ever figure out where I came from.”

She said nothing.

I reached up, hesitating before touching her as I recalled the brief moment I’d been sucked into the dark memory of a statue before Wesley had yanked me out. The Summer king’s youth, and the curse of Winter. Would her memory remain carved into the tree? How terrible would it be?

Statistically humans remembered the negative more than the positive. A survival mechanism to keep a fragile species from offing itself by accidentally repeating the same stupid thing that hurt over and over again. Fear another mechanism of survival, meant to make us hesitate. At least the three semesters at Uni had been good for something. Psychology had bored the hell out of me, but my therapist said it was because I was highly self-aware when most of the population lived in a fog.

How self-aware could I be if I had no idea I was the torn soul of some supernatural being? “Don’t give me nightmares, okay?” I asked the statue as I rested my palm on her face, the tree warmed beneath my touch as though she were real.

I sucked in a deep breath as a swirl of color distorted my vision, and I knew I was being sucked into her memory. All I could do was pray it gave me some sense of a way out of the realm, and maybe back to Wesley.