A Touch of Truth by Bella Forrest
I didn’t want to be parted in these last few minutes we had before I left, so I went with him. Unfortunately, the dragons weren’t hard to find. They’d been hanging out in one of the lounge rooms on the ground floor, and we found ourselves heading back to the clearing where we’d left my father all too soon.
“I’ll give you a moment to say goodbye,” my father said to me, his tone softening a little as we returned. He cast another furtive glance at the werewolf before turning around and approaching Neros with Azaiah and Regan. So much had happened, and my parents had been away so much, I hadn’t even had a chance to properly talk to them about Bastien yet, to explain how I felt about him. No doubt now, I will have plenty of time for that, I thought grimly.
Bastien placed his hands on either side of my neck, his fingers reaching into my hair as he bestowed on me another kiss. A long, deep, mournful kiss.
Bastien’s assurance that “we’d be all right” felt too vague. Neither of us could say when we’d see each other again. I was grasping for something more concrete.
“One and a half weeks, you said,” I reminded him, “that’s when you should be finished on your tour?”
“I hope so,” he replied.
“Then I will try to return, then, even if it’s just for a few hours. And hopefully, in the coming weeks, some things will change,” I went on, though I struggled to understand how they would. “And I’ll be able to stay longer with you again. Then you could come to stay in The Shade with me, if you can get some time off.”
He smiled at me warmly, brushing his fingers against my cheek. Then his arms wound around me and he lifted me off my feet in an embrace. “I would love that,” he whispered.
“Okay,” I said, as he set me back down. I drew in a breath to steady myself. All I wanted was to lose myself in another one of his kisses, keep myself wrapped in his arms a moment longer… but it would only make it harder to pull away.
We took a step away from each other, our bodies parting. I did my best to put on a strong, optimistic face. And so did he.
“Goodbye, Victoria,” he said. “I love you.”
“Goodbye… I love you too.”
I unglued my gaze from him and turned around to make my way toward my father and the dragon. I didn’t look back at Bastien until I’d climbed aboard Neros, my father sitting behind me.
Bastien remained rooted to the spot, looking up at me. The breeze caught locks of his curly black hair, making them trail across his handsome face. Even from this distance, his eyes were striking.
I pulled another smile and blew him a kiss. And then, as the dragons took to the air, I watched him grow smaller and smaller on the ground, until a line of trees hid him from my view.
I swallowed.
Okay. This is okay. Bastien and I will just have a long-distance relationship for the time being. Many couples do that and pull through… I comforted myself that we would probably even grow stronger apart, and that the next time we met would be even more special.
“Okay, Vicky?” my father asked behind me, breaking through my thoughts.
“Yeah.”
I felt him kiss the back of my head.
We fell into silence as we gazed down at The Woodlands slipping away beneath us. When we reached the shore and launched out over the endless blue, my father cleared his throat and asked, “Do you love him?”
I suspected that he’d wanted to ask that the moment he had gotten me alone.
“Yes,” I replied, barely hesitating. I love that wolf…
I didn’t turn to see my father’s reaction, though I felt him tense slightly behind me.
There was another pause before he spoke again, echoing Bastien’s assurance: “Then you’ll be all right.”
My father couldn’t have known how much his words meant to me.
Bastien
“Goodbye, Victoria,” I found myself breathing as I watched her disappear into the sky. My new responsibilities would feel a lot heavier without her presence. My bed would feel a lot colder. I would no longer hear her laughter in the evenings, have her sweet kisses waking me in the mornings. Breathe in her scent as she followed me around during the day. I would be alone now… though, I reminded myself, I was not actually alone. I had Cecil, and a whole pack of wolves who were loyal to me and my family. It would be ungrateful to feel that I was alone. I couldn’t take what I had for granted when only a short while ago I had been without food or shelter, fleeing for not only my life, but my sanity.
Victoria had mentioned to me that her stay in my home had felt like a dream to her, and that was exactly the way it had felt to me too. A dream that had now faded. A dream that I couldn’t be sure would ever return.
I had been uncomfortable about Victoria coming to The Woodlands from the very start, as soon as she had proposed the idea. I had given in because… well, she had wanted it, and I had wanted it, too. I had been too selfish, too greedy for her, to hold my ground and insist that she stay in The Shade. Now her father had come to do what I should’ve done: lead her back to safety.
I tore my eyes away from the empty sky and turned around, heading slowly and heavily back to the castle.
As I reached the entrance, I reminded myself of the assurance I had given Victoria—that we would see each other again. We will, I told myself firmly. Sooner or later, we will. We had managed to reunite before against all odds. There was no reason why we couldn’t now, when the odds were far, far less…
We just had to be patient and wait. I felt a little more cheerful as I passed through the entrance hall. Victoria was certainly a woman I was willing to wait for.
I had tried to hide it, but those nights she had spent with me in my bed had been torture. More times than I would like to admit, I’d had to fight the urge to claim her as mine… completely. One of my weaknesses was my impulsiveness, the force of my emotions. It was truly a wonder to me that I had managed to control myself and allowed her to leave The Woodlands as she had come—with her virtue intact. In werewolf culture, it wasn’t tradition for men and women to share a bed until they had committed themselves to each other in marriage. But with Victoria being a human, her and my relationship had been anything but traditional until now.
“Bastien,” Cecil addressed me, spying me in the corridor. “Back so soon? Where is Victoria?”
“She is gone,” I said resolutely, “at least for now. Her father came to collect her.”
I attempted to turn my mind to other things now—specifically to the journey that lay ahead of me. We could leave sooner now that Victoria was gone.
Traveling would help me take my mind off of her… and hopefully make the days pass more quickly.
Grace
After Orlando had agreed to talk to his sister about escaping with me to The Shade, we left the roof and returned to the dry loft. Maura appeared to be sleeping by now; her chest heaved gently as she lay beneath her blankets on the mattress. Orlando and I took it in turns to use the bathroom in preparation for bed. He provided me with a pair of snowflake pajamas that were brand-new—still in their plastic packaging. I guessed that they had foraged for these in a store or something downtown. I changed into them and disposed of my old clothes in the trashcan.
There were only two mattresses in the loft, though they had an impressive stock of pillows and blankets in their cupboard. Orlando laid two blankets one on top of the other in a relatively empty corner of the loft. He gave me a third blanket to cover myself with, and a pillow.
I sank into the makeshift bed and turned on my side. I gazed at the tall, sickly Orlando on the opposite end of the room and experienced an uncanny wave of déjà vu as I thought of Lawrence.
Orlando stooped to his mattress and lay down. He turned his back on me, facing the ceiling. I watched through the dim lighting of the one gas lamp he had left on as his breathing grew slower and heavier.
Although my body was completely exhausted, and I needed as much rest as I could get, for the life of me, I couldn’t fall asleep. I stayed up, tos
I was woken up by a chilly breeze touching my face. I opened my eyes to a loft streaming with pale daylight. I heard the siblings’ voices, faint. They weren’t in the loft. They were up on the roof. As I rubbed my eyes, coming to consciousness, I caught onto more of their conversation. They had already started discussing the issue. My stomach clenched. It didn’t sound like it was going well so far.
Pushing aside my blanket, I crawled directly beneath the skylight and stood up, hoping to glean more of their conversation from this position. I didn’t want them to think that I had woken up yet.
“We’ve worked so hard to get what we have,” Maura was saying, her voice unsteady. “Why can’t we just be happy with what we’ve built?”
“Happy?” Orlando spat back. “We’re not happy, Maura. You’ve forgotten what happiness is.”
“Happiness is peace,” she replied pleadingly. “We have peace here. We’ve figured out how to get by. We have enough food to last us. We have a warm, dry shelter. We—”
“Like I said,” Orlando steamrolled over her, “you’ve forgotten what happiness is.”
There was a pause, as perhaps Maura was at a loss for words. I heard her blow out in exasperation. “Well, maybe I have, Orlando. Maybe I have!” At this point, it seemed that she had forgotten about me supposedly sleeping down here. Her voice rose to an almost desperate pitch. “But I’m not willing to risk what we have for something so… unreachable. You know what could happen if we got caught—”
“Yes, I know,” Orlando growled. “But I would rather die fighting for something better than spend our final days in here, in ‘peace’… rotting. We’ll have enough time in our graves for that.”
I was taken aback by the fire in his voice. When talking to him last night, he had appeared completely pessimistic, even right up until the end of our conversation. Maybe I had managed to spark something in him after all, more than I’d thought I had.
Maura didn’t respond for a couple of minutes. I heard the sound of footsteps above me, pacing up and down.
“And all this… because of her?” Her tone was disbelieving now. “How can you even trust her? She’s a total stranger. Even if we agreed to go along with her and help her find a phone, she could just be using us. She could abandon us the minute she manages to make contact with her family.”
“She wouldn’t do that,” Orlando retorted so quickly and firmly, even I was taken aback.
“How can you say something like that?” Maura spluttered.
“I just… I just know, okay?” he shot back. “I can see through people. I know when someone’s BSing me. I believe that she is from where she says she’s from, and I believe that she will take us in, if we help her…” He drew in a deep breath. “Maura. Please. Let’s at least try to live again.”
Another pause. When Maura finally spoke again, this time, her voice was lower, deeper. “If I said no, would you leave with her, without me?” As she asked the question, she sounded like a child again, the way she had last night, when she had seemed afraid of being left alone. Clearly, the girl had abandonment issues.
Orlando groaned in irritation. “No, Maura! What makes you even ask that? Of course not. Of course I would not abandon you. That’s why I’m busting my balls trying to convince you that we should do this. If we refuse, she might wander off by herself and then…”
His voice trailed off.
“And then what?” Maura asked.
“We’ll never know what could have been,” Orlando finished.
I waited with bated breath for Maura to respond.
“Okay,” she said, eventually, in a voice so soft I barely heard it. “If this is what you want… then okay.”
“I know we’d regret it if we didn’t,” Orlando said, sounding relieved.
“When would we leave?” Maura asked, tentative.
“I don’t know. We need to talk to her.”
As I heard them begin to make their way back to the skylight, I left the ladder and hurried back into bed. It would’ve been awkward if they’d thought I had just listened to the whole conversation. I quickly pulled the blanket over me and turned my back on them just before they climbed down the ladder and returned to the loft.
I sensed their gazes fall on me and slowly, I stretched out, allowing them to see me awake. Orlando was the first to catch my eye. Based on his expression, he seemed to already suspect that I had overheard everything.
Maura turned away and headed into the bathroom, leaving her brother and me alone.
“She agreed,” he said, “in case you didn’t hear.” What I had sensed in Orlando’s voice just now when he’d been talking to his sister up on the roof—life, a spark of passion—I now saw in his eyes as he continued: “If we’re going to attempt this, then we should do it sooner rather than later. We ought to leave as soon as possible, right?”
“Right,” I said. I nodded firmly, even as a chill ran down my spine.
Grace
We began preparing to leave. Not knowing where everything was in their loft, I felt rather useless as I sat in one corner, watching while the two siblings went about pulling items from shelves and rummaging through their possessions. They gathered together three generously sized backpacks and started filling them up with food and water, followed by some clothes. They packed only one set of clothes for each of us, along with some waterproof overalls. I put on the warmest items from my outfit now, anticipating stepping outside. Next came the weapons: knives, guns and ammunition. These took up most of the backpacks’ space.
“Oh, and matches,” I said, “We need matches, or lighters—or both. Bring as many of those as you have.”
Orlando grunted an agreement before heading to the chest of drawers and emptying it of about ten lighters and six boxes of matches. I only needed a single spark to brew up a fire, so what he had should be more than enough.
“Make sure you put the matches in a waterproof container,” Maura said. She moved to the other side of the room and brought back three sturdy plastic boxes. “Put anything else that’s water-sensitive in there too,” she advised her brother. “Chances are we’ll get soaked at some point.”
Once the bags had been filled up, Orlando handed one to me. The siblings strapped their belts around their waists.
“We don’t have a spare one of these,” Orlando explained, gesturing to his belt, “so you’ll just have to borrow mine. Like we did before.”
I nodded, feeling queasy at the thought of having to zipline again.
“Now, we’re almost done,” Orlando muttered. “We need a map.” He reached into a drawer and pulled out a map of Chicago. He planted it down on the table and spread it out. Maura and I peered over his shoulder. His finger traced from our current location to Lake Michigan. “The fence is supposed to run all the way along here,” he said, continuing to glide his finger. “And there are posts, manned by IBSI members.”
“Who are armed,” Maura added, as if that would not have been obvious to me.
I sucked in a breath. Okay… Each of us stared at the map a few moments longer before Orlando folded it up and stuffed it into one of the waterproof boxes, where it would stay safe and dry. Then he picked up the blade-wheel and its remote.
“That’s like… recharged and everything?” I asked, eyeing it nervously.
Orlando smirked darkly. “Yes.”
I didn’t know how that thing ran, whether on batteries or something else. “Where did you get that thing from?” I asked.
“I built it,” Orlando replied.
“Seriously?”
He nodded, making his way with his sister toward the trap door. “Our father was an engineer, once upon a time. I learned some stuff from him and managed to scrounge the components for it from a mixture of places—derelict stores and s
He bent down to lift open the trap door and extended the ladder to the ground. He climbed down first, followed by Maura and then me.
“Oh, wait,” Maura said, as Orlando’s feet touched the floor. “We’re idiots.”
“What?” I asked, anxious.
“Oh, yeah,” Orlando said, apparently reading his sister’s thoughts. “We forgot the helmets.”
“Helmets?”
“Those gas mask things we were wearing,” Orlando explained. “We have four of them, actually—we keep them in the largest cabinet, on top of the pile of clothes. Can you grab them?” he requested of me, since I was closest to the loft.
“Yeah.” I climbed back up and found them quickly. “So what do we need these for, exactly?” I asked, climbing down the ladder and arriving next to the siblings.
“We use them like helmets,” Orlando said. I handed one to each of them. They placed them over their heads, concealing their faces, while I pulled on mine. “They extend low enough to protect our necks… I’m sure I don’t have to explain why that’s useful.”
Still keenly aware of the fang wounds in my leg, I nodded, gulping.
Grace
We headed up the old stairwell toward the dreaded main roof of the building. I was already securing my heavy backpack around my shoulders, anticipating the glide. A spiteful wind whipped us as we strode out into the open. It was raining again—more heavily than when I had been outside with Orlando last night.
We did things in the same order as the day before. Maura was first to withdraw her hook, climb onto the ledge of the roof, and attach herself to the metal cable. She kicked off and swung gracefully, like the pro she was, to the neighboring skyscraper. Orlando followed her, threw me his belt once he reached the other side, and then it was my turn again.
I had done this enough times by now to know that it was better not to procrastinate. Before taking the leap this time, however, I focused my eyes on Orlando standing on the roof of the opposite building. I willed myself to remain fixed on him and not allow myself to glance down even for a moment as I launched myself off and went hurtling to the other side. I was still staring at Orlando’s face with fierce determination when he reached down for me and helped me climb up onto the roof.