Chapter 65 Chapter 65

Chapter 65 Chapter 65

Twilight's POV 

Krai was standing in front of me and I already knew I was dreaming because his eyes had that look. The one that meant he was about to say something I didn't want to hear.

"You're getting overconfident." He said.

"I'm not overconfident I'm just confident." I said. 

"There's a difference."

"Is there?" He said and the way he said it reminded me of the way the druid elder had said the exact same thing and that made something uncomfortable move through my chest.

He looked at me for a long time without saying anything else and that was worse than if he had kept talking. Krai's silences always meant more than his words. I wanted to say something back, something that would make me sound like I had everything under control, but even in the dream I could feel how hollow that would sound so I said nothing.

Then I heard it.

The growl, I knew that growl,I sensed him near me but also far.

Low and deep and coming from somewhere  behind me, the kind of sound that you didn't just hear with your ears, you felt it in your bones and in your stomach and in the soles of your feet. I turned around slowly and there he was.

Ryaknorg.

He was enormous the way he always was, taking up more space than anything living had any right to take up, his scales catching light that didn't seem to be coming from anywhere specific.

His eyes were on me and they were not warm. They were the eyes of something ancient that had decided it was not pleased and was in no hurry to pretend otherwise.

I took a step toward him.

He pulled back.

Not away exactly, just back, just enough to make the distance between us stay the same no matter how close I tried to get. I reached my hand out anyway and he looked at it and looked away like the offer meant nothing to him right now. Like I had not earned it.

That hurt more than I expected it to.

"Hey." I said softly.

"It's me. You know it's me."

He didn't move. Didn't make a sound. Just kept those enormous old eyes pointed somewhere past me like I had done something that needed to be waited out before things could go back to how they were supposed to be. 

I stayed with my hand out for a few more seconds and then I dropped it because there was nothing more humbling than being ignored by something that size.

I turned back to Krai.

He was still watching me with that same expression, patient and tired at the same time. 

"You stopped listening." He said. "You were so focused on what you wanted to give her that you stopped listening to everything around you."

"I was trying to help her, Krai, she's my mate.." I said.

"I know." He said. "That's the part that worries me."

I opened my mouth to argue and then I felt someone standing beside me and I turned and my chest dropped straight through the floor of the dream.

My mother.

Carla was standing there looking at me and she wasn't angry, it was so much worse than angry. She was disappointed in that quiet way of hers that never needed a single word to make itself felt. She wasn't frowning, she wasn't shaking her head, she was just looking at me with those eyes and I felt every single thing I had done wrong in the past two weeks land on me all at once like something heavy dropped from a height.

"Mum." I said.

She just looked at me.

"I'm handling it." I said and I could even hear how weak that sounded coming out.

She kept looking.

"I'm trying." I said. "I know I missed things, I know I should have listened better but I'm going to fix it, I just need you to tell me how, just tell me what I'm missing."

She reached out and touched my face with one hand, soft, the way she used to when I was small and had gotten something badly wrong but she wasn't going to come down hard on me for it, just wanted me to sit with it long enough to understand it.

It lasted about two seconds and then she pulled her hand back and stepped away and the dream started going grey at the edges the way dreams did right before they ended whether you wanted them to or not.

"Wait." I said. "I'm not done, please just, wait—"

I woke up.

The first thing I felt was a hand over my mouth.
I grabbed the wrist attached to it on instinct, hard, already calculating in the half second between sleeping and waking exactly what I was going to do with it, and then I heard Isla's voice very quiet and very close to my ear.

"It's me." She whispered. "It's me, don't scream."
I let go of her wrist and lay there for a second just breathing. Isla moved her hand away slowly and watched my face with those eyes that never missed a single thing about me no matter how much I tried to keep things to myself.

"Bad dream." She said. Not a question.

"I'm fine." I said.

"Twilight you nearly broke my wrist."

"I said I'm fine Isla."

"You are so stubborn." She said, but she said it quietly and without any real heat in it and she stayed right where she was and I was glad because I didn't actually want her to move.

I sat up slowly and looked around the camp. Devonye was asleep on her side with her cloak pulled over her shoulder. Isma was on the other side of the dying fire with her back to us, still, not moving.

I looked at the sky. Still dark but the heavy settled kind that meant it had been dark for a long time and had more dark left to give. I pulled my knees to my chest and let my mind go back to where it had been trying to go since I opened my eyes.

Two days ago.

The torches in the dark, the circle closing in on all sides, the way every angle had been covered like someone had studied exactly how we moved and prepared for each of it. We had gotten out through the east gap because Devonye had caught something none of us had, a slight hesitation in the movement on that side, just enough space to push through if we moved fast and didn't second guess it. 
We had run and fought and run again and eventually the torches had stopped following but the feeling they left behind had absolutely not.

I pressed my fingers against my eyes trying to push the memory back down.

It wasn't working.

I dropped my hands and stared at what was left of the fire instead, watching the low flames shift and settle, and that was when I saw something that made every single thought in my head go completely quiet all at once.

Isma was standing.

She had been lying down with her back to us and now she was on her feet in the middle of the camp, standing in a patch of moonlight that came down through the gap in the trees above us and lit her up like she had been placed there on purpose. She wasn't moving anywhere. She was just standing with her face tipped slightly up toward the sky and her eyes open and her lips moving in that quiet rhythmic way that I had now seen twice and could not stop thinking about.

I watched her and I told myself to stay calm.
Then I blinked.

And for just one second, one single fraction of a moment, the face in the moonlight was not Isma's face.

I knew that face. I had driven my nyx blade through the body that wore it. Twice. I knew the cheekbones and the set of the mouth and the way those eyes sat in that face like they were always working something out underneath the surface, always three steps into a plan that nobody else could see yet.

Athena.

Then I blinked again and it was Isma standing there in the moonlight looking perfectly normal and perfectly still.

I sat completely still and told myself I was exhausted and the dream was still sitting heavy in me and the light was low and my eyes were doing what tired eyes did in the dark. I told myself all of that very carefully like I was explaining it to someone who needed convincing.

But I knew better than that.

I started to get up. I didn't have a full plan, I just knew I needed to get closer, needed to hear what she was saying to the dark, needed to stand close enough to look at her face properly and know without any doubt what I was seeing.

I had one foot under me when Devonye's hand closed around my arm from behind.

I looked at her. She was awake, both eyes open, watching Isma the same way I had been watching her. She had probably been awake for longer than I had. That was the thing about Devonye, she could lie completely still with her eyes shut and be taking in everything happening around her and nobody would ever know.

"Don't." She said. Just that one word and barely even a breath behind it.

I looked back at Isma.

And something in my head clicked into place so cleanly and so finally that it almost made a sound.
The druids. The ritual. Isma walking through that curtain looking exactly right. 

The blocked connection to the council that Isla hadn't been able to get through no matter how many times she tried. The torches herding us in circles in the dark. And then the thing that had been sitting at the back of my mind for two days without me letting myself look at it directly.

We still weren't there.

Two full days of travel and we were no closer to where the egg was supposed to be than when we started. Devonye had mapped the route herself and I had checked it and it should not have taken anywhere near this long. But every path we followed seemed to bend back on itself somehow, every landmark kept appearing from the wrong direction, like the land around us was being quietly rearranged while we weren't paying attention.

Or like someone walking with us was making sure we never arrived.

Someone who needed us moving so we wouldn't notice we were standing still. Someone who needed us tired and turned around and too caught up in each other to look at what was actually happening. Someone who had been with us every single step.

I looked at Isma standing in the moonlight with her lips still moving and her eyes still open and her face still tipped up toward a sky she wasn't actually looking at.

And the cold that went through me then had nothing to do with the night.

We were never going to find the egg this way.

Because the thing standing twenty feet from me in the moonlight was never going to let us.

I was going to stop her and that I knew.