I felt like a sleepwalker when Helen finally convinced me to leave. This has nothing to do with you, she repeated. It felt like a lie, even if she didn’t know it. I didn’t want to leave her there. She was shaking and couldn’t stop the tears in her eyes and she kept looking at the door like she wanted to break in and double-check on Jane or run away and never look back. I wanted to feel like I was doing something when it was clear there was nothing to do; I wanted to make her feel safe. Or something. But she finally told me if I didn’t leave she’d fail me, and I knew she was joking and I knew she was just trying to keep me protected from whatever godawful truth rested beyond that black door, but I forced myself to my feet and left, down the back stairs and out the back entrance. Before the cops or my mind could catch up to me.
Once outside, I squeezed my eyes shut and tilted my head back to face the coming snow. I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry. Most of all, I wanted to wake up. I wanted it to be a bad dream and when it was over I’d start the day again and everything would be okay. But I wasn’t waking up. There wasn’t anything to wake up from. I wasn’t stuck in a nightmare, I was living one, the one I’d been trying so hard to escape. Death will follow you.
I couldn’t tell if those words were Munin’s, or mine. It wasn’t until my feet began to go numb that I realized I needed to move. Escape. I just had nowhere to run. I’d already gone as far as I thought I could.
My feet led me to the woods, down one of the side paths that was covered in snow and only traversed by a handful of footprints. I didn’t register the cold as my feet sank into the snow, as the woods closed around me and wrapped me in silence. My head was still screaming. My thoughts burned. Jane had killed herself. Death was following, but I swore that this time, I had nothing to do with it.
This isn’t happening, I whispered on repeat, maybe inside my head, maybe out loud. I was too lost to actually know or care. Jane’s apparition was everywhere I turned, her words whispering through the branches. Jane, Jane, happy bubbly Jane. She wouldn’t have killed herself. She couldn’t have. It didn’t make sense.
It didn’t make sense. But in my head, it was trying to piece itself together, and I couldn’t live with how the image was shaping itself.
I stopped in a small clearing maybe ten feet wide, the snow deep and the trees circling me tall and black and bare. Everything out here was white and gray and black. Frozen. Static. Save for the flickers of Jane’s ghost at the corners of my imagination.
Save for the raven that squawked from his branch high above.
“Why are you doing this to me?” I yelled. “Jane was innocent! She had nothing to do with any of this!”
The raven just puffed its wings and looked at me with its onyx eye.
Death will follow you. Until you face what you’ve done.
“Kaira?” Footsteps from behind me. The bird cawed and flew away. I turned and nearly broke down on the spot. Chris. The brief flash from before, the seconds I thought he had killed himself, pierced through my mind and through my heart like a bullet.
“What are you doing here?” Chris asked.
I opened my mouth to answer. A sob came out instead. He was at my side in an instant.
“It’s okay,” he said, wrapping his arms around me. He held me close and let me sob onto his shoulder. I couldn’t speak. I could barely hold myself up. I wanted to be strong. I wanted not to show him this—the side of me he could never see, the weakness, the fear. I wanted more than anything else to sink into the earth and vanish. Chris’s arms prevented that. He was the anchor holding me to this world.
Finally, with a furious wrench of self-loathing, I stopped the tears and forced myself upright and took a step back.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. There was probably more rage in that statement than he deserved, but my anger needed to go somewhere, and my hatred for my own shortcomings was already at its peak.
He noticed. His eyebrows furrowed and he leaned back a tiny amount.
“I saw you run into the woods,” he said. “And I saw ambulances and police cars by the art building. I thought . . . I don’t know. I just knew I had to follow you.”
I took a deep breath. He’s not your enemy, Kaira. He’s trying to be your friend.
My frustration, though, wasn’t with him. It was with me. It was for just how relieved I was to see him standing there. Chris was still alive, and for some reason, that meant more than I could understand.
“What did you hear?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said. “I just got off the phone with my parents and was going to the studio when I saw you leaving. Here I am.”
My next words were lifeless, twin spent bullets dropping to the ground.
“Jane’s dead.”
He didn’t answer at first. He stared at me like maybe I was making some twisted joke, like maybe Jane was about to jump from the trees and yell gotcha! But nothing moved save for the snow drifting down through the branches. Everything was silent. Silent and stark and dead.
“What do you mean she’s dead?” he finally asked. “She was just at brunch. She said she was going to the studio to get started without me. She said we were going to race to finish our paintings and . . .”
“I mean she’s dead,” I replied, cutting him off. I didn’t want to hear about their plans—I didn’t want to start comprehending all the things she would never actually do. Anguish turned to anger in a heartbeat, a flare so hot it burned like venom. “What about that don’t you understand?”