Immortal Consequences(64)

“I’m fine.” Irene dusted off her knees as she stood up. “Let’s just keep moving.”

“Do you…” Masika cleared her throat. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Irene stalked forward, ignoring Masika’s question. “We need to find the next door.”

“Look,” Masika sighed, following after her. “You don’t have to pretend like everything is fine. If you need to talk about your mother—”

“Don’t.” Irene whirled around, eyes blazing with anger. “I’m serious, Masi. That topic is off-limits and you know it.”

“Your past doesn’t go away if you ignore it.” Masika knew she was pushing her luck, but she figured she’d never have another opportunity to talk about it. “The more you pretend it doesn’t exist, the more it consumes you.”

“You’re one to talk,” Irene spat out, venom lacing her words. “Taking nightly trips to Memorium. Crying yourself to sleep.” Masika flinched, only fueling Irene’s tirade. “What? You thought I didn’t know? That I hadn’t noticed you writing those pathetic letters and leaving them in Memorium.”

Masika clenched her fists. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Irene let out a bark of laughter. “Seriously? You can’t lecture me about accepting my past when you’re still so clearly living in yours.”

“That’s…that’s different.”

“How? I mean, we’ve been friends since I got here, and this entire time you’ve refused to tell me who you lost to the Demien Order. How the hell do you expect me to open up to you about my old life when you don’t tell me anything? We’re supposed to be friends, and it feels like there’s just this…this trench. This massive, gaping rift between us. And no matter what, you’ll never open up and just tell me—”

“Her name was Catherine.”

Silence fell between them as the words tumbled out of Masika’s mouth. She hadn’t meant to say them out loud, but they’d sprung out of her without warning.

Irene blinked, stunned. It was hard to decipher what she was thinking, but Masika could sense a cloud of uncertainty hovering over her.

“Catherine.” Irene repeated the name slowly. “And she was your…” Her voice faded as she struggled to find the right answer.

Masika sighed. “Friend…at first. And then I suppose you could have called her my girlfriend. Though now it’s hard to tell what was real and what wasn’t.”

She waited for Irene to say something. The streetlight creaked above them, the noise mixing with the roar of the wind.

When Irene finally did speak, her voice was softer, no longer equipped to kill. “Did she…did she tell you why she left?”

“Kind of.” Masika swallowed the lump in her throat. “If you count a barely legible note left on my nightstand.”

She would have preferred for Catherine to have left nothing behind. Her note had only made things worse. The part that didn’t make any sense, that still didn’t, was how quickly it had all happened.

Shouldn’t Masika have noticed something? A change in her demeanor? A shift in her tone? But everything had seemed fine, until it wasn’t. And once Masika had realized what had happened—it was too late.

She had lost her.

But that had always been Masika’s fatal flaw—she could delude herself about anything, convince herself that everything was fine, even when reality itself was crumbling.

When she was crumbling.

“She shouldn’t have left without saying goodbye.”

The words caught Masika by surprise, bringing her back to reality. “What?”

“Catherine. She shouldn’t have left without saying goodbye. Properly. She should have at least had the decency to tell you to your face.”

They stared at one another for a moment. Irene seemed to be on the precipice of saying something else, her mouth opening and closing, but she must have changed her mind, because she simply shook her head and said, “We should keep moving. We’ve already wasted enough time.”

Masika wasn’t going to push her luck. It was clear that Irene had no intention of continuing the conversation, and that was simply going to have to be the end of it.

They walked along the paved road in resolute silence. Time moved differently in the Ether, so it was nearly impossible to tell if it had been five minutes or five hours. Everything seemed to bleed together, like the feeling of waking up from a dream. Eventually, they crossed through the final door, which led them to another landscape—a forest of redwood trees dotted with powdery snow. The sky above them was a pale lilac shade, two crescent moons illuminating the dense forest, enveloping the landscape in an ethereal glow.

Masika shivered, wrapping her arms around her chest. “We’re close. I can feel it.”

And that was when she spotted the small yellow cottage tucked within the trees.

Thick, rotten branches encircled the house like a cage—jagged thorns sticking out from each one. Dark storm clouds hovered directly over the rooftop, thunder rumbling deep within.

“Great,” Irene muttered, teeth chattering. “That’s at least two different wards over the house.”

She was right. Various protective wards had been placed around the target soul, each one more complicated than the last. It was normal for lost souls to create their own wards, a way for them to prolong their inevitable crossing, but these barriers seemed deliberate. Expertly detailed and complex.