Mark of Betrayal (Dark Secrets #3)(81)
Author: A.M. Hudson

Mike and Emily watched as I bled my oath—the real me—or the imposter, I didn’t know, but I watched on too. She rose to her feet, and with her eyes closed, her lip stiff—trying in vain to hide her pain under the mask of deception—she walked toward Mike—toward the edge of the forest.

As she passed each subject, they read aloud the words that burned her skin—my skin—each sentence like spiky, acid spears of hot lava. Wasps, bees, bashing my knee on a step was nothing in comparison to this.

But she walked—her face perfect, her lips red with blood, her skin pale under the dark inks of her Markings. She was flawless and so beautiful, while I fought to breathe—a sticky, sweaty mess of my own tears and blood.

Mike reached for her as she passed him, and though it was a small movement, I saw her shake her head, keeping her eyes closed, as if she knew, as if she needn’t see him reach out but knew he would. I wanted so badly for her to fall into his arms, have him make everything okay—just know that somewhere out there, one of us was safe. But she wouldn’t. She had a path to walk—and she walked it blindly, not knowing the hell I’d been through—the hell we would go through all over again as soon as she set foot over that border.

Morgaine edged forward several times, hesitating before launching after Ara and wrapping a dark-purple cloak over her shoulders without disturbing even one step. I saw it wrap her, but felt the warmth on my own skin, and when I looked down, the silky velvet rested softly over my shoulders, hiding the silver dress. I touched my bloodied fingers to it, matting the velvet slightly.

“She looks so beautiful,” Morgaine said, covering her mouth.

Mike blinked a few times, practically biting his own fist. “I don’t like this, Morg.”

Her fingers floated slowly up through the air and came to rest on Mike’s arm; he looked at her. “She’ll be okay, Mike.”

“I’m not so sure anymore, I… We gotta stop her.” He darted forward and everything disappeared in a cloud of whitewash as Ara placed her foot to the doorstep of this ever-holding prison.

“No!” I screamed at her, grasping the air where Mike’s hand had been. “What have you done!”

Each step she took forward, deeper and deeper into the Walk of Faith, saw the burn of our promise mark my skin once more. I held my arm out and watched it snake its way along—the words becoming clear to me once more; you will never escape. Leave the forest by dawn or be trapped in there for eternity.

I closed my eyes and listened to the ghostly whispers of the warning.

“Never step foot in the Forest of Enchantment—never step foot in there at dawn.”

Dawn.

The word echoed all around me in the haunting silence of eternally consequential mistakes. My failure would repeat itself over and over again for me to watch, to relive.

I rested the back of my head against the bark of the tree, but stumbled back, falling through nothing, seeing the world go white around me…

…My eyes flashed open. I looked down, standing where Ara had been only a second ago.

We merged. I became her, but with the memory of a treacherous night too fresh in my mind to stop the tears. I just wanted to go home—be normal, be with David. Nothing more, nothing less.

I sunk to the ground—a pitiless soul in an empty world—and hugged my knees to my chest, weeping into my arms. I was alone. Forgotten. A memory they would mourn, for sure, but evermore only that.

Trudging endlessly down an entirely different path, I shivered at the thought of the darkness to come.

My legs hurt, aching as if hands of reverberating sharpness were rubbing up and down my thighs, and my stomach felt like I swallowed a big, empty bowl of space. Even the grumbling hurt.

I rubbed the tops of my legs, letting my skirt rise higher than I would if there were others around. All over my skin, the Markings made me look like a favourite old Barbie doll someone’s little brother had gotten hold of and scribbled on with a permanent pen.

“This sucks!” I flopped down on my back, blowing my tantrum out with a hard pant. Overhead, my only friend shone down on me, lighting the sky pink as it had done on the last dusk, and beside that, my enemy crept in like purple shadows, disguising itself as clouds.

Hope was lost. It was my job to find it out here, but I failed. Now, I couldn’t even seem to find the beauty of the forest, either. It wasn’t pleasant like a national park or the forest by the lake. This was wild and untamed and open and no one knew where to find me. I wished the trees weren’t so high, so that maybe I could feel sheltered. I just felt so out in the open—like anyone, anything could be watching. But nothing ever showed. That rude crow hadn’t even returned.

Though this world maintained it was dusk, I felt time passing again. I lay on the dirt, semi-conscious, singing to the sky, twirling the key around and around. Every now and then, I held it up to the light and moved it along so the pink sun made the silver sparkle. I wondered whose key it was—what it locked away, whether it was a good secret or maybe a bad one. And wondered if perhaps it was a secret of the heart, like the ones I held. Maybe whoever owned this key felt love for another man, even though she was married, or maybe, in truth, it opened the lock to her lies—perhaps lies she told herself because she didn’t want to know the secrets.

The longer I laid on the cold dirt, the clearer the sounds around me became; the lonely song of twilight hummed my heart to ease—the crickets, the buzzing of mosquitoes, the distant, sleepy ballad of a bird. I closed my eyes and let myself imagine home. Home. Mike. His smile, his smell, all powdery-smooth, and the warm, scratchy stubble on his chin that’d prickle my forehead when he’d kiss my brow.

Home is David. His eyes. Green. Greener after we’d make love and the electric blue surge of my uncontrolled passion had run free of them.

I shut my eyes tighter around the memory and held it all inside. Eventually these memories would fade, just like all the faces of my past. But right now, while I’d only been lost for a few days, they were as clear as a summer sky.

When I opened my eyes again, with the memory of summer so strong in my heart, midday actually filled out the forest around me. A sweet chocolaty scent ran through me with a deeper breath as I rolled onto my side, seeing a shape through the glare, like a beautiful man laying right in front of me, face to face. His green eyes stared into mine, but even though the day was so bright that sadness seemed misplaced here, his soul looked lost, broken. I reached up, slowly tracing my thumb over each grain of hair along his jaw, feeling every bump, every rise in his skin, stopping on a small scar at the base of his chin—one he got when his six-year-old brother kicked him for losing a paper boat he’d made.