Fade (29 page)

Chapter Nineteen

C
helle handled that well,” I said to Dace as he walked me to my car an hour later. The sky was bright blue and crystal clear. I felt as if it should have been overcast and gloomy. The weather would have been more fitting that way.

“So did you.” He looked down at me. Golden strands of his hair shone, the sunlight seeming to create a halo around his head.

I squinted up at him. “That always surprises you.”

He didn’t say anything.

I wrapped my arms around myself and leaned back against my car, deciding to give Chelle’s suggestion a try and tell him what I thought. “I think maybe it’s because I’ve known all of this—this other world, I mean—before. None of this feels as impossible as it should because some part of me already knew all of it. I’m just relearning it now.”

“It still scares you though,” Dace said, very quietly. “I still scare you.”

“Not for the reasons you think,” I told him when I felt a flicker of guilt from him. I chewed on my lip, trying to figure out how to put into words how all of this made me feel. Starting with something I’d considered when he first told me about the wolf, I said, “I’ve never had the responsibilities you do, not even close. I’ve never been responsible for other people. I’ve only ever been responsible for me, and now I find out this entire world is here and that I not only belong to it, but that I’m supposed to help save the entire world because of it. You keep telling me that I’m allowed to be scared and confused and hurt, but I don’t feel like I can be, Dace.”

“What do you mean?”

“Every time I have a bad day or struggle with something, I feel like you’re waiting for me to run away from you. You punish me for being confused and scared when you’re as confused and scared as I am. My mom died and that hurts, but I’m doing the best I can, and it doesn’t feel good enough.
I
don’t feel good enough.”

“You are good enough,” he whispered, his eyes wide.

“Am I? Am I really? You’re waiting for me to leave, and that scares me. It makes me wonder if maybe you’re right. Maybe I can’t do this. Maybe I’m stupid for wanting to be with you in the first place.”

“You’re stronger than you think you are,” he said, pulling me into his arms.

I burrowed into him, accepting the strength and comfort he offered. “I’m not strong enough to be here without you,” I whispered into his chest. “I’m not strong enough to be in this mythical world without you.” Part of me felt as though I was only here because of him. Without him, would I have ever learned any of this? Would I have ever noticed the missing part of me? Probably not, but I had found him, and we were supposed to face this big thing together. I couldn’t do it without him. I didn’t
want
to face it without him, but would he give me that choice, or would he keep me at a distance forever?

“It scares you that I mean so much to you so soon,” he said, understanding.

“It does, and you don’t make it any easier. You block me out and refuse to answer questions or let me in. You don’t trust me or tell me what you’re thinking. You don’t—” I bit my tongue to stop the flow of words before they became even more accusing.

“I don’t want to make it harder for you, Arionna,” he said after a minute, hooking a finger beneath my chin and tilting my head back. His gaze locked on mine. “I know how confused you are. I don’t want to add to that, or overwhelm you. I’m trying to protect you the best way I know how.”

“But that’s not your decision to make, especially when you use it against me.”

“Use it against you?” Dace blinked.

“You set up shop in my head, and you stay there. You see everything I think, everything I feel, and when you don’t like it, you shut me out and claim you’re protecting me. I’m not your dad though. I know about the wolf, and he doesn’t scare me. He scares
you
, and it’s not fair that you hold me at arm’s length because of it.” I took a deep breath before continuing, “You tell me nothing, but you get to know everything about me, and you expect me to be okay with that. That’s not protection, Dace. That’s you arbitrarily deciding what I can and can’t handle, and it’s not fair.”

He seemed to consider that for a moment, his eyes serious and far away. Finally, he met my gaze again. “Letting you sift through everything I think or feel would make this easier for you?”

“I don’t know. How can I when you’ve never given me that chance?”

“What happens when you don’t like what you see, Arionna?” he asked, his voice little more than a whisper.

Did he even understand he held his own issues against me? He didn’t always like what he saw, so he assumed I wouldn’t either. He just assumed I’d decide he was defective like his dad had, or that I’d leave him, so he shut me out without giving me a chance to prove to him I wasn’t like that, to prove that I could handle the truth. Maybe he thought he protected me from the big bad monster living in him, but he didn’t because I didn’t fear the wolf. I never had. Unfortunately, he just didn’t see that. He couldn’t.

“I don’t know, Dace,” I said, exhausted. “All I know is we can’t very well continue like we have been. You either let me in and trust that I’m strong enough to accept you, or you don’t. You can’t have it both ways.”

“I know,” he said and pulled me back into his arms, tucking my head against his chest.

I went willingly, too tired to deny that I wanted to be in his arms. I did want it. It felt so good there, so warm and right. But feeling good wasn’t enough.

“I don’t want you to leave me.” He tilted my head up toward his with his fingertips again. His eyes were wide and earnest. Fearful.

“I know,” I said. And I did know that much. Whatever else could be said for Dace, I had no doubts he felt for me as strongly as I did for him. What burned between us, our bond, held him as tightly as it did me. That should have made the situation easier, but it didn’t. Knowing that he cared made everything all the more difficult because he would have already given me what I needed if he knew how. But he didn’t.

Dace and I weren’t the only factors here, nor were our individual pasts. We had his wolf to deal with, too. And not just Dace’s fear of the animal, but the other stuff. The stuff that really frightened him.

He and his wolf both wanted things from me, and it scared Dace to think that his wolf wanted them as much as he did. Even if he could get past his fear that I’d leave, I didn’t think he could get past his belief that he’d be forced out of his own body by the very thing his dad had taught him to fear. How could he simply flip a switch and shut that off when he’d been taught his entire life that he needed to be cured of the animal in him? His wolf was a punishment from God, his dad had told him.

A burden that massive had to be hell to live with under the best of circumstances. And in no way could our situation be considered the best of circumstances. The loss of my mom had wounded me deeply, and then I’d learned that a fundamental part of me was missing in action. And every time Dace lost control for even a minute, I’d been hurt in some way. Passing out from overwhelming emotion, a bump on my head… . minor aches to me, but each little incident only reconfirmed his belief that he protected me by shutting me out. Nothing I could say to him would change that.

I wished, desperately, that today hadn’t happened because I
knew
what we could be together. I knew what we had been, and I wanted that. It didn’t matter that we’d only found each other in this life a few weeks ago. I had a millennium worth of memories of him inside me, and I wanted everything those memories contained. I wanted the love and companionship, the fierce devotion and easy acceptance. But all of that felt as out of my grasp as everything else did.

Maybe I had been powerful in my past lives, but in this one I was only me. And
me
didn’t feel like nearly enough. Not for Dace, not to protect Chelle and Beth, or to stop Sköll and Hati. I didn’t feel good enough to change anything.

“Hey.” Dace’s voice was surprised, concerned. “Don’t cry, love,” he murmured, wiping tears from beneath my eyes. “Please, don’t cry.”

I couldn’t stop the tears. Everything seemed so messed up, and I resented the hell out of it. Why did we have to do this thing? Why us? Why now? I just wanted to be a normal girl in a normal relationship with her normal boyfriend, but I wasn’t. I was a broken girl in a fragile relationship with a scared boy.

How the hell were we supposed to save the world when we were both clueless? When we both felt like everything in our lives no longer made sense? We couldn’t even fix ourselves, but we were supposed to stop Sköll and Hati. That felt like a big cosmic joke. Fate couldn’t be satisfied with taking my mom from me, so now I had to remember how it felt to be loved unconditionally by Dace, and watch that slip through my fingers, too. I had to settle for the little pieces he could give me, or I had to walk away. I didn’t like or want either option.

Dace pulled me back into his arms, cradling my head against his chest and crooning to me softly as I cried. His heart beat strong beneath my ear.

“I’m sorry,” I mumbled into his shoulder, my heart aching.

“Don’t be sorry,” he said, his lips at my temple. “This is hard for you. I know it is, and I’m sorry I’m not making it any easier. I want to let you in; you know I want to. Please, don’t cry,” he pleaded.

I sniffled.

“Will you do something for me?” he asked.

I nodded, still listening to the strong beat of his heart. “Anything,” I promised.

“Remember that, whatever you decide, so long as you’re safe and happy, I’ll be fine. You’re all that matters.” He said it so gently, so earnestly, that my heart broke.

And just like that, tears poured down my face all over again.

Chapter Twenty

D
ani’s funeral tore my mangled heart in two. By the time I hugged Chelle at the cemetery late Tuesday afternoon, I felt like I’d done nothing but cry since my conversation with Dace on Thursday. My head hurt. My throat hurt. I was scared, confused, and sad. The story of my life kept on making the same sad circuit.

When I arrived home from the funeral, I wanted to escape the sorrow for a little while. I climbed the stairs to my room and quickly changed into a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt before throwing my hair into a messy ponytail. Once I completed that task, I grabbed my iPod and headed back down the stairs and out the door, my cushy headphones over my ears and the music blaring.

My feet immediately turned toward the woods lying on the other side of the park. The encounter with the unnamed wolf no longer frightened me. Now that Buka had accepted me, I didn’t think he would hurt me. I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d tried to attack me in the first place because he’d sensed what Buka had from the beginning: I was kin. Maybe the wolf thought I’d encroached on territory that didn’t belong to me. I wasn’t sure.

As January slowly faded into February, the days gradually thawed. They weren’t quite warm yet, but the frigid bite in the air lessened every day. The sky was still that crystal blue color it’d been on Thursday when Dace and I argued. I had hours and hours of daylight left, and I intended to use them.

I needed to clear my head, and walking did that for me better than anything else.

I neared the park, deciding to try and find the pond where Dace had taken me to meet Buka and Kalei. I don’t know why I wanted to go back there, but I did. Maybe I needed to sit for a minute and remember life didn’t have to be as chaotic as it felt. The pond seemed like as good a place as any to accomplish that.

Nothing had been resolved between Dace and me. We still walked the same tightrope, and I still didn’t know what to do. Every time I saw him, I wanted his distance to not matter. I wanted to believe he’d let me in someday and everything would be sunshine and daises in my world. But sunshine and daises had no place in my future. There was only apocalypse, doom, heartbreak, and more doom.

I turned up the iPod as loud as it would go, unable to think through music shaking my skull and causing my eyes to water. My hearing might suffer for the volume later, but the inability to think would be more than worth it.

Someone had raised the flag in the park to half-mast in honor of Dani. The gesture touched me. I crossed the baseball field to the trail on the other side, wiping tears from my eyes. The music drowned out every thought in my head, allowing me to focus on nothing more than the space around me. The more time I spent outside, the more I grew to love the town.

My desire to hate such a beautiful place seemed ridiculous. I no longer felt that way. The gentle wildness of the town humbled me. Finding such an adorable place growing up amongst wilderness, touching but not disturbing it, was rare. The subtle wildness made it look as if the townspeople took care to damage as little of the natural beauty as they possibly could.

Large tracts of woodsy land went undisturbed right through the heart of the small town. Entire neighborhoods butted up against thick woods, with houses peeking out from between the giant trees. Looking around, I wondered how anyone could keep from loving the place.