Page 11 of Our Dark Winter Wish

‘Are you okay?’ Archie asks me, his eyes wide. ‘You’re bleeding.’

Dorian sweeps my hair from my face to get a better look at the cuts.

‘Does it hurt?’ Dorian asks.

I hear Shaw’s feet thunder down the stairs, and when I hear the front door hurtle open, I panic and get to my feet to follow.

He can’t leave. I need him. We all need him!

The others don’t bother trying to stop me and let me go without the slightest bit of complaint.

‘Shaw!’ I call after him, following the bloody footprints down the stairs and through the hall.

The front door is wide open, and the bloody trail leads outside. I throw on a pair of boots and Archie’s coat left over the back of a chair and follow.

‘SHAW!’ I call loudly. ‘Please, don’t go!’

The sun is up, but only barely. And the snow is falling hard and fast now, whiting out the trees and any sign of the dream walker fleeing our home.

‘Gods damn it.’ I wrap the jacket tight around my bare body and run after him, following the imprints in the snow.

I’m pretty sure I can’t die of cold. But as the earth goddess, I don’t exactly thrive in the barren lands of winter.

The snow is a good twelve inches deep and a struggle to wade through. But I have a dream walker trying to escape, so I push through

I brush my fingers against the bark of each tree I run past, and they share where he has gone with me. They speak as if they are half asleep. I can almost feel them yawn as they rest in the winter season. I feel his steps through them, like a message passed on just for me.

It doesn’t take me long to find him.

Through the snowfall, I spot his silhouette. He’s sat on a boulder with his face buried in his hands. I approach slowly, but he knows I’m here. He always knows.

My hand rests on his shoulder as I stop before him, and with a wave of my hand, the thick root I had wrapped around his foot releases him. I caught him like a rabbit in a snare. He could have snapped it and walked on. But he didn’t.

My hand moves to his cheek.

I kneel and find his eyeline. But still, he refuses to look at me. So I rest my forehead against his.

‘You didn’t mean it,’ I say softly, my thumb going back and forth across his cheek. ‘And it wasn’t real.’

His fingertips run the length of the cut across my collarbone.

‘It was real. I made it real.’

I know that it’s not only guilt inside him. But fear. His fear of Neve somehow returning to this world. Of the blood curses reclaiming us all. Of Cole coming back to brutalise the woman he loves.

These are his nightmares. Not mine. But it’s us who gets the brunt of it. His last nightmare left Archie unconscious for an entire day when a version of Sethick, the baby-eating demon, appeared.

His hand falls, and he tries to turn away. I climb atop him, straddling him in the snow, and I take his face in both my hands to make him look at me.

His eyes shimmer with the threat of tears. An image I have seen only twice before.

When I died. And when I returned to life.

But it breaks my heart as I watch it now. As it ishispain.Histrauma literally bleeding through the wall.

‘Please look at me,’ I say softly.

With a long blink, his gaze finally meets mine.

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