Mark of Betrayal (Dark Secrets #3)(79)
Author: A.M. Hudson

“Who’s there?” A hot breath moistened my ear.

I dropped the stick and ran, fast as I could but slow as a human—wishing my legs would work properly. Each step hit the ground under me with a crunch of dry leaves, and the stranger mimicked. I pushed harder, faster, closing my fist, tilting my head for fear of hitting a tree and gouging my eyes out on its razor claws. “Leave me alone,” I screeched, panicked sobs choking my breath.

The sound of the stranger’s footfalls thumped faster, doubling mine as we sped through the black, until my heel slipped, skidding out on a rock that sent me onto my side, dragging my leg, my ribs and my head along the sloped ground after it. I stopped on my tangled shins at the base of a tree and covered my face. “Please, don’t hurt me.”

But nothing grabbed me.

Nothing touched me or poked me or whispered in my ear.

Several beats of my heart passed, and the exhaustion forced a wave of calm through my limbs. Slowly, I slid my hands down from my face and blinked against a glare. Daylight!

A hysterical giggle jolted the pit of my empty stomach, though it refused to break through my lips. I looked up at the changing sky, looked at my hands, my dirty feet, my stained dress and all the gashes along my arms, legs and hands. It was a dream. The thing. Just a dream.

Feeling a little silly, I pushed up to stand, holding the trunk of a tree to keep my balance. The soles of my feet burned like walking on hot asphalt in the summer—they even felt sticky as if it had melted there, too. I curled my toes to keep them from touching the hard ground.

All around me crickets sounded the song of dawn, and the trees, with their tall, reaching branches, stretched out to the heavens, warming their leaves in the golden glow of the sun, while a fresh, moist breeze brought a dewy, sugared taste to each breath I took.

But the colour of dawn drained the blood from my face. I slid down the bark of the tree and covered my mouth, tears blurring the yellow beginning of day.

I failed them. I failed the Walk of Faith.

Morning had broken, and I hadn’t found the black dress, the border of the forest or hope.

My eyes traced the skin all the way along my wrists and down the backs of my hands; the tattoos were gone—faded away to a silvery memory under my skin. They were supposed to disappear as the crown touched my head, clearly not because it was a mystical crown, but because it took a night for my soul to absorb the promise—a promise I no longer had any right to wear.

I traced the absent Markings with a fingertip, scratching the skin as if I could make it come back. But I couldn’t.

They were right. All of them. I am just a baby. The all-powerful pure blood, and yet, I couldn’t even finish the Walk of Faith.

In my mind, I could see them all by the edge of the forest, waiting for me. They’d all be standing there right now, their eyes hopeful, their smiles starting to slip as each second of sunrise passed. Mike would lower his head, Emily would cover her mouth, and everyone would turn away slowly and go home. And that would be that. It was over before it even begun.

But I would be here. I would be lost in this forest for the rest of eternity, and still, that wasn’t what scared me. What scared me most was what would happen to those people without me. My bite turned Mike, my existence made others change their allegiance, and now, Drake would come back and kill them all for it. And it was, without any doubt in my heart, my fault.

I stood up and turned on my heel, indifferent to the beauty of the day, wandering aimlessly forward, with nowhere really left to be. A weary princess wearing a broken promise.

Throughout the hours that passed me, I thought about my dad a lot. I wondered if Mike would tell him the truth about why I disappeared for eternity. And a part of me smiled because, somewhere inside, I felt like Dad would come out here to find me. If anyone would, it’d be my dad. Of all the people I needed in my life, he was always the one who was there—through everything. He came to me when I lost my mum; he wrapped his arms around me and told me it would be all right. And he made it all right. He gave me a home and a bed and he hugged me every day. And maybe I was hurting inside, and it was a hurt he couldn’t heal, but I knew he wanted to. I knew he would give up everything and anything to make me safe.

But I never felt safe. Not really. And the worst part was, until now, I didn’t understand some of that feeling. It was never in the sense that I was afraid I’d be kidnapped or tortured, this was before all that; this was when I felt afraid of having nothing. I wondered how I would live if I didn’t have a bed or food or my mum and dad, and now I’ve come to understand a new truth altogether; you don’t need any of it. You don’t need a bed or food or love, because, at the end of the day, even without all that, you’re still alive. While you’re missing the smell of roast chicken or crying because you can’t hold those you love, you are surely and definitely still alive. It’s the cruelty of the world, I suppose—to take everything we need, everything we thought we needed to survive, and show us our hearts will keep on beating; we will keep on breathing without it.

And that’s when you have to hope. That’s what hope is.

Nothing is final until you’re dead.

I looked up at the clouds and closed my eyes as the warmth of the day made my skin feel yellow and bright all over.

Where there is life, there is hope. And I wasn’t a little girl anymore; I couldn’t lay in my bed, safe and warm with my dad down the hall—the one who always knew what to do; the one who always told me it would be okay. It was my job to be that now. And maybe I didn’t feel like it would all be okay; maybe I was scared all the time, but I at least had to be the one who said it would be okay. I had to be the leader.

But I learned that too late.

I opened my eyes again and let out a long breath, then poked at the seeping gash on my arm; it was swollen and red, probably infected, since, out here, I no longer seemed to be Lilithian. I was more human than I’d ever been before. And it hurt and it sucked and I hated every breath of it. But this was it for me now. This would be my new life, and all I could do was find some food or some water and wander every tiny inch of this forest until, maybe one day, I might find the border again. Who knows? It wasn’t much, but it was…a hope.

And at least if I eventually did make it out, I could say that I’d done it on my own—that I may have failed my people, but I did not fail myself.

* * *

As the day wore on, I trudged up an endless hill; I could see the top, but as the sun moved to the west, that distance hadn’t changed, and when I looked back behind me into the mouth of the valley, it looked as though I’d only taken forty steps.