A Midwinter Fantasy - Leanna Renee Hieber [31]
So satisfyingly low, the words felt good the moment they dripped from her lips. But their effect was anything but. As they escaped, Rebecca’s guilt only magnified. Sorrow crested in her blood, and the darkness around her intensified, pressing in, urging her to simply wallow in a deep well of never-ending self-pity. She could drink from this bubbling font of misery, as she had every night for twenty years, from now unto eternity. The better air she had begun to breathe again went rancorous, the shadows around them lengthened.
“Rebecca,” her friend warned. “This is a deadly place to go melancholy. Do not ingest such a drug—”
“But I’ve so much pain—”
“Well, mitigate it before it’s too late!” Jane exclaimed. The Liminal stage of possibility went black. Shadow pressed in upon Rebecca’s heart, and she recognized the sensation. While The Guard had briefly halted Darkness, its ruler, the Whisper-world was its own entity and lived on, attuned to misery and fear, an ethereal, subtle and dangerous predator. That predator was hungry for a restless soul. Her misery was just the sort of food the Whisper-world craved.
Suddenly, in the distance, far outside the now-black picture frame through which she gazed, in the thick shadows becoming recognizable as Athens, there came a bright white gleam, like a star, widening. It was a beautiful light, a familiar light, and there was a petite figure within and drawing inexorably closer.
“What’s that?” Rebecca breathed.
Jane offered a partial smile. “A guardian angel, watching out for us beyond the Liminal edge. But we mustn’t test her. This realm wants her for its own more than any of us, and if she has to come in for you”—Jane shuddered—“who knows what it might do to her again. Look what surrounds you in the Whisper-world. Do you want to join them?” She gestured to the shadows, to figures Rebecca saw there that moved listlessly, shapeless, aimless.
Jane continued. “These souls are here because of second-guessing themselves, because of mortal frailty or selfishness. You’re hardly the first to come. What keeps them here is their inability to let go—which is their greatest crime. To err is mortal. To not forgive is the stuff of the Whisper-world. Who knows why events needed to unfold as they did, to press, madden or even kill”—she gave Rebecca a meaningful glance—“some of us as they did? Who are we to question? We must forgive.”
Rebecca could not meet her gaze. She gave a sob and the air thickened further.
Her friend sighed. “You’re a powerful woman, Rebecca, but stop thinking you’ve power over everything. You can’t make someone love you who doesn’t, and you can’t change what fate has already wrought. You cannot live well if you’re unable to discard regrets! In the end, this isn’t about me, or Alexi, or Percy. It’s about you—and the man who’s always loved you. The man who was meant for you, though you never let yourself believe it. You hid from the reality of his love in the dream of Alexi’s. Try, for once, to be unselfish. Be grateful.”
Rebecca bit her lip, helpless. “Show me the scene,” she gasped, turning to the Liminal stage. “Help me see what I must . . .”
The Liminal agreed, and the bright guardian star remained visible, a soft glow in the corner of the stage frame as the past began to play its chosen scene:
The Guard were all assembled on the dark third-floor foyer of Athens Academy, where Jane played the fiddle for the waltzing Percy and Alexi. Elijah and Josephine were arm in arm, and Michael was . . . staring at Rebecca. She had been too focused on the waltzing couple to notice before, always too preoccupied.
She wasn’t much to look at here, having already given over to an identity built around efficient administration. And yet, there Michael was, staring at her with the same desire he’d worn on his face when she’d done herself up for the ball years prior. Here she was drawn and shadowed, her face a grimace, so sure she could never be loved—some