As the world spun and the darkness enclosed.
Terror clamored over me like demons. Specters that played over my body.
The metal bar cracked down once more in the center of my upper back, and I couldn’t stop the agony from gurgling out of my mouth.
A second later, heavy footsteps faded into the distance while I struggled to breathe, to force the air into my lungs.
Lungs that were on fire.
Every part of my body in flames.
And my eyes kept drifting closed.
Succumbing.
Falling toward unconsciousness.
“Ryder? Ryder?” Dakota’s frantic voice suddenly carried through the night. “Ryder? Are you out here?”
Her name bubbled in my chest, but it bottled in my throat, silenced on the torment that congealed all hope.
Except that hope didn’t give up, and I could only faintly make out the clattering of the back gate before she was croaking, “Oh my God, Ryder!”
Fumbling to my side over the fallen branches and exposed roots, she dropped to her knees. Her fingers trembled and trembled as she brushed back the hair stuck to my face.
An anguished cry gushed from between her lips. “Oh God. Ryder. What happened? I’m…I’m going to call an ambulance.”
She went to stand, but somehow, I managed to grasp her around the wrist. “No.”
“You’re…bleeding.” She said it like she didn’t want to let on how bad it was.
But I already knew how bad it was.
So much worse than she could ever imagine.
FORTY-FOUR
DAKOTA
Horror chugged through my senses, a disorienting panic as he pulled at my arm.
“You’re bleeding.” I could barely force it out.
God. He was bleeding, and there was so much of it, his face covered in rivulets that streamed in cragged lines from a gaping gash at the side of his head.
Dirt and hair were caked in it, and even beneath the bare light, I could see glistening, dark fluid continue to ooze from the wound.
But it was his eyes that pierced me.
The whites exaggerated in the night. Filled with so much fear that it spurred a riot inside me.
“Are you okay? Oh, God. Ryder. What happened? Are you okay?”
He didn’t respond, and instead he pushed up onto his hands and knees. A discordant moan rolled from him as he tried to get his bearings. To climb to his feet.
“Let me help you.” Frantic, I leaned down so I could get an arm around his waist and help him the rest of the way up. He swayed when he stood. His entire being swerving and lurching as he struggled to find balance.
“Lean on me,” I told him, and I knew the shape he was in when he did. His big body was heavy as we staggered back over the rutted terrain and through the gate. How we managed to get across the lawn, I didn’t know, our movements slowed as we trudged through the violent foreboding that saturated the atmosphere.
I could feel it.
Feel it pulsing and throbbing around us. Could feel it as Ryder was bent at the waist as we stumbled up the porch steps and through the back door.
Felt the oppression of the ghosts that tormented his being.
“Lock it.” It ricocheted a warning. The sliding metal a gunshot in the night as I engaged the deadbolt.
“Let me call Ezra.”
“No,” he said again.
I gulped the words down because I wanted to argue but somehow, I knew Ryder meant it.
That he wasn’t acting like this wasn’t a big deal.
It was just something bigger than anyone else could help with.
And that trepidation only increased as we moved through his house and up the stairs, both of us clinging to either railing while I tried to support him as we took each laborious step. We finally made it into the bathroom, and I flicked on the light and helped him sit on the lid of the toilet.
A cry sprang from my spirit when I got a good look at his face, and I smacked my hand over my mouth like I could revoke its passage. Take it back. But tears streamed free, the pain and confusion at finding Ryder like this so intense I didn’t know how to process it.
Because there was no evading that sense that covered the air.
I sucked it down and tried to focus because standing there losing my shit wasn’t going to solve anything. I went to the sink and grabbed a washcloth from the cabinet then wet it under cool water.
I returned to stand between his knees. Carefully, I dabbed the cloth at the wound. Gathering the blood and debris. I rinsed it then continued the ministrations, neither of us saying anything while that feeling simmered and grew.
Ryder kept looking up at me while I tended to him.
And it was too difficult to breathe in the confined space. Too difficult to get out any of the questions that bottled. Too difficult to say anything at all.