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Tiv

Thursday 1st October, Year 828

I had to find Alayna.

Something was wrong. I didn’t know what. But it was wrong.

Amelia's tirades oscillated between self-pity and gratitude since she regained consciousness. It had taken her no time at all to regain her wits and go back to being a vicious bitch. I’d braced her arm and given her all the Venenum I had on me. She would live.

We had not moved far–crouched in an alley adjacent to the library trying to catch our breaths. The stench of burning debris still filled the air along with a thick suffocating smoke. Though we fared better than Ben Jameson, our options were limited, our bodies bruised and battered. My own arm throbbed, a numb weight hanging from my shoulder. Although I wished to retrieve Xander's body, I realised it would be lost amidst the rubble and flames now. He wasn’t an immortal familiar any longer…

My phone began to ring and, to my surprise, it was my Father. I knew there was one thing I could do. Only one thing. One that signed my prison sentence living under his rule, yet one that kept Harroworth safe.

“You must stop the reinforcements coming to Harroworth now,” was my answering response.

“Good. You’re alright. Marco isn’t answering. Give me your exact location. I can have someone there in an hour to-”

“Stop the reinforcements coming to Harroworth or you’ll never see me again.”

His cadence darkened to something I had never heard before. “Tell me where you are. Now.”

“I’m about to hang up so you can’t trace my location. I’ll give you five seconds to decide. You can leave Harroworth alone and I will return with Marco today, or you can do nothing and I will find the nearest television camera and tell the world I’ve defected to the Vakosian cause and you will never see me again.”

He sounded like he was choking.

I began counting down from five.

At two, he barked, “Come home. Harroworth will be spared.”

A part of me died at his words. Prison it was then.

“We are at what remains of Central Library on Main Street,” I hung up, breathing deep.

I needed to see Alayna. Once. Just once more.

I rose to my feet with effort, steadying myself against the wall.

"Wait here," I instructed.

Amelia's voice was sharp. "Where do you think you're going?"

"To find Alayna," I said plainly. “I only left with you because I thought you were imminently dying. Your screeching had proven that false. Marco and Jonas will come for you.”

“Her!” She spat the word like it were a curse. “That anorexic little bitch? What the fuck is wrong with you? What's clouding your judgement? Planning a cosy future with that whore in this wasteland?”

I bit back a sharp reply; arguing served no purpose. Alayna was heading for the hospital, not far from us. Ignoring Amelia's vitriol, I turned away, yet paused as a distant blood-curdling scream sliced through the air.

“Aly?”

Had I imagined her screams?

“As if she would stoop so low to coax you into leaving me again,” Amelia growled.

I couldn't ignore the visceral spike of fear that coursed through me. "You heard it too?"

I waited for no answer but propelled myself forward, driven by a surge of dread. How could I have been so reckless as to let her leave? My heart thrashed so hard I thought it was failing.

Racing around a corner, I collided with Marco unexpectedly. In the moment before I crashed into him, a wide malicious grin was spread across his face. Yet the moment he saw me, it immediately dropped. For a brief second, our eyes met–mine wild with panic–and his… filled with hatred.

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Acting on a primal urge, I snatched his gun. The shot rang out before reason could take hold; Marco stumbled to the floor, a cry escaping him as he clutched his foot.

“What did you do to her?” I roared.

Jonas, his face smeared with muck and blood, replied with urgency, “It wasn’t us! Those creatures, they chased us. I don’t care who she is to you! I wasn’t about to become their prey.”

Marco's gaze slid away from mine, not even bothering to scold me for shooting him; his silence spoke louder than he ever could… He had hurt her.

“Liar,” my voice broke on the whisper, eyes narrowed into slits as Marco's silence stretched between us.

“Tiv, for all that I despised that rat, it doesn't mean I wished for her end,” he protested, still not meeting my eye.

The word tore from my throat, sharper this time. “Liar!”

Why was I wasting time talking to him?

“She is dead!” Marco’s voice clawed at my back as I bolted away from him.

“Alayna!” The name cut through the smoky haze as I called out again and again. “Where are you Aly!”

After what seemed like an eternity I saw figures unmoving about ten metres away in the parking lot where some of our vehicles still remained. The thick smoke twisted around me as I dashed closer, and then the realisation hit–two bodies. One of them had no head. Yet even amidst the carnage, emotion did not surge. My mind refused to process the horror. Instead, a clinical detachment settled over me… For perhaps three seconds. Then the scene sunk in. The blood. The bodies.

Alayna.

The scream escaped me before I was aware, a desperate plea for her to move. She didn’t.

Before reaching her, a trio of Umbrith materialised from the smoke. Their elongated limbs distorted in the light of flickering flame as they advanced with unnatural grace. Their empty red eyes seemed to devour any remaining hope within me before one gnarled hand slammed into my shoulders. The force of its impact sent me flying into a nearby car door, leaving me breathless and disoriented from the collision. Driven by panic and focus sharp as broken glass, I rebounded to my feet–an instinct beyond conscious thought. The Umbrith closed in once more; monstrous silhouettes against a backdrop of devastation.

“We aren’t lying! Now let’s go before you die,” Jonas hissed, seizing my good arm firmly to draw me away from Alayna.

Her still frame was drenched in red. Too pale. Too motionless. Horror rocked through me making the adrenaline course harder through my veins, almost stopping the tears that streamed down my face.

This was not happening.

I struggled from Jonas’ grasp, screaming incoherently as if my shouts could breathe life back into her. Rushing forward, the second assault by the Umbrith slammed into me; vision blurred and sounds merged into an indistinct noise as I landed hard on an already injured arm. Agony flared from elbow to shoulder, snapping me back to reality, as I righted myself once more.

"Tiv! Come on! She's gone!" Marco's voice pierced through the chaos, though his form remained concealed in the shroud of smoke and flame.

For once he hadn’t lied.

“I’m not leaving her lying there!” I shouted.

With desperate precision, I fired at one of the Umbrith. Bullets burrowed into its face, but it merely recoiled, shaking its grotesque head with a resilience that mocked my efforts. It swivelled towards me as I charged towards Alayna. My finger pressed futilely against the trigger until the gun clicked empty. Marco's shouts rang out, commanding the creatures not to kill me like he had any bloody say in the matter. Its rebuttal was a physical, violent heave that threw me high into the air. I landed atop a car, my body crashing against a roof before gravity and momentum flung me down to the burning asphalt.

Breath left me. Each attempt to draw air felt like inhaling fire as the world spun around. Pain lanced through my leg where Alayna's bullet hole had reopened.

Then something vanished within me. The sensation was an abrupt absence. An indefinable connection that had hummed beneath my skin since I'd met Alayna—since the moment our hands touched—was gone. Confusion, thick as fog, engulfed me, blurring all logical thought. It was more than simply fear or dread; it was a deep-seated certainty that seeped into the marrow of my bones. No one had spoken it out loud and no one had confirmed my fears, yet I knew without a doubt that the feeling was Alayna. Or the lack of Alayna.

That absence was the moment she died.

I fought against the knowledge that clawed at my insides. It was absurd—how could I know such a thing? Yet the hollow silence in my soul screamed that Alayna's heart no longer beat with mine. The air felt colder now as if the warmth of her had been stolen away.

"No," I whispered, laden with denial and incomprehension. "No." My voice broke on the repetition, reality slicing through hope with merciless precision.

I stumbled towards where she lay still and so very distant from me now. Ignoring the agony that shot through every nerve ending and fibre of my being, I focused on reaching her side because nothing else mattered. Not the Umbrith, not the fire's heat licking at my skin, not even survival—only Alayna. Only the girl who tied herself to me in ways I never comprehended until now—the moment the invisible string connecting us was cut.

I felt the second your lot took him from me. I felt his heart stop. That’s what Louise had said. And I felt it. I felt every world-shattering inch of it.

I didn’t make it even close to Alayna before Marco’s knees crumpled, he fell forward in front of me, eyes shockingly wide. His arm shuddered beneath my weight as he and Jonas grappled with my limp form, attempting to drag me away from the only thing that mattered.

As they pulled me backward, I cast a final gaze at Alayna's still figure—her hair now matted crimson; her once rose-nipped skin now frozen in an ivory stillness, untouched by breath or motion. There was an eerie peace about her, a twisted mockery of sleep. But I knew there was no heartbeat. Felt it.

Two mortals had never been Fated before. Yet somehow we had managed it.

And it didn’t matter now.

I love you, Alayna. Forgive me.