Hidden Moon

C H A P T E R 22

THE FATE OF THE MATE AND THE LOVER

CORA

I had been awake for what seemed like hours but I couldn't feel my body. My heavy limbs could've been severed for all I care but there was not a ghost of pain nor sensation. All I could do was stare at an unfamiliar ceiling as tears welled in my eyes. I blink them away but the well won't dry.

The cries I couldn't let out as I bit the inside of my cheeks fell heavily at the back of my throat. A ball of air was to be lodged within, obstructing my breathing. Slowly growing and pushing against my windpipe, it was painful.

"You're making yourself sick." A finger brushed against my cheek, wiping the stream that flowed down my eye. "Let it out."

The voice was Haliyah's but the face I saw wasn't.

By my bedside and watching over me with concern etched on her face, was Dylan.

Hope started to bud in me but I was fooled only for a short moment.

Memories of scales breaking through skin and those silver eyes forced to close and never to open again assailed me. I couldn't hold on to Dylan as Haliyah pulled me away and out of the water. Her arm tightly pressed around my stomach, she stopped me from going back.

Dylan's final act of kindness was to spare me from seeing her go; she fell backward, sunk, and drowned in the spring.

From the water's surface, cold light of white pulsing fireflies flew off but died out before reaching the sky. They were the last I saw of her.

Dylan's gone?

Haliyah helped me up to save me from drowning in sorrow as I laid flat and breathing erratically.

Alternating from rubbing and patting my back, she hugged me.

"Please just... It's okay to cry, Cora."

And I cry, I did.

* * *

It was nightfall when I regained consciousness. Contrary to the numbness I felt that morning, I was aching. My stomach rumbled, empty. The soreness from my throat resonated with the tenderness from my jaw to the back of my ears and my eyes were puffy, raw from crying.

Moonlight filled the room through the tall windows but barely lit it, just enough to help me find the door to leave. I open the door an inch and winced. Blinking so my vision could adjust at the change, I leaned against the door as my hand anchored at the doorknob.

The hallway only led to one direction where I could hear a murmuring of people in the heat of discussion. Judging from the fact I couldn't make a decent word out of the shouting, I reckoned I was too far from them.

As I first deduced, I wasn't in Hannah's house or on the island. The huge place was unfamiliar.

Afraid to reveal me and startle them, I inched from the wall, looked over the railings and down to people gathered in the spacious living room.

Haliyah was among them as well as the other two women who arrived that night to help us. With them were three other people, two men who could be uncle Carl's age and a woman who...

"Dylan-" I whispered lest loudly calling her name out would make her disappear.

A hand to my shoulder stopped me from running to where she was.

"That's not her," a relatively shorter woman, who could also be Nadia's sister or relative, said. "You're looking at a changeling. It will take her place and go home to the Mitchell's."