Page 85 of Riot Reunion
I won’t accept it.
I can’t.
Looking up, I see that Dash has pulled Carrie into his arms and he’s holding her, rubbing his hand up and down her back, but his eyes are onme. He looks destroyed. His expression only makes sense a moment later, when a pain, the likes of which I’ve never witnessed before claws at my soul, endless, bottomless, terminal, dragging me down into a sea of black. Presley isn’t gone.
She’snotfucking gone.
I won’t have it.
“Carrie, where’s Elodie?” Wren demands, still standing by the doorway.
This doesn’t make any sense. She fainted in my arms on the way here from the parking lot, but she was feeling better when we left to find her food. She was arguing with me. She was fine. She—
Thrum.
My racing thoughts stop dead.
Wait.
Was that…?
Did I imagine…?
My fingers are still pressed against Presley’s throat. I thought I just felt something. I could have sworn—
Thrum.
The shallowest heartbeat. Barely even there, but itisthere.
I explode upward, grabbing hold of Presley, dragging her limp body to me, pulling her into my arms. “Her heart’s beating! It’s fucking beating! She isn’t dead!”
Relief washes over Carrie; she’s so overwhelmed that she collapses against Dash, covering her mouth with her hands, sobbing. “Thank God. Thank God. Holy shit.”
My mind kicks into action immediately. She has a pulse. She has a pulse. She isn’t dead, but that doesn’t mean she won’t be very soon if we don’t get her help. I didn’t want to carry her through the forest to the car before, because I didn’t want to risk her getting worse. That’s already happened now, though. I don’t have a choice. If I don’t get her down this godforsaken mountain—
“CARINA MENDOZA, WHERE THE FUCK IS MY GIRLFRIEND!”
30
ELODIE
I’ve heardof stress-induced psychosis. Apply too much pressure to even the strongest mind, and eventually it will crack. The worry over Presley, and then the crash together must have proved too much for my mind, because I am seeing things right now. Terrible, awful things, and I can’t make sense of them.
My brain is telling me that Wesley Fitzpatrick is standing in front of me, naked, his flesh mottled with blood. It’s telling me that he’s wearing a wolf skin over his shoulders, stringy pieces of gore plastered to his shoulders and his chest. It’s telling me that there’s an insane light dancing in Fitz’s eyes, unhinged, hysterical laughter spewing out of his mouth. It’s telling me that he has a lethally sharp hunting knife in his hand, the blade of which flashes and shines, spattered with rainwater, as he thrusts it into my face.
But none of this is true.
It can’t be true, because Wesley Fitzpatrick is locked away in a cell on death row in Houston, Texas. He can’t behere. It’s just impossible.
“The gods…the godsloveme,” the phantom chatters. “They…they keep giving me such pretty gifts.”
“You’re not real,” I whisper. “You can’t be. I hit my head. I...”
“I’mnotreal,” the phantom agrees. “I’m a spirit. I ate the wolf’s heart, and I became it. I’m a shadow. I’ve already stolen your soul in the spirit world. When I bleed you here, it’ll—it’ll all be okay, because you have no soul now. It’s all gone. That’s right. You’ll be all gone!” He explains this earnestly, with child-like excitement. He grabs me, clamping my hand in his free one, shaking my arm with a level of excitement that apparently, he thinks we should share.
The moment he makes contact with me, his fingers curling tight around my hand, I realize my mistake. This isn’t stressed-induced psychosis. Neither am I hallucinating from a blow to the head. This is real. Wesley Fitzpatrick is here, in Mountain Lakes, seemingly completely out of his fucking mind, and no amount of blinking on my part is going to make him go away.
Gingerly, I pull my hand from him, backing up a step. “I—don’t want to be all gone, Dr. Fitzpatrick.”
