The hospital room walls blurred together after a while—white, beige, sterile. They felt like a box, and I couldn’t breathe in boxes. Tyler and Alaric were speaking low with the witch they’d managed to track down—the woman with the hollow eyes, the one whose little boy had been found lifeless in the park just days ago. Her grief carried in the way she stood, the way her hands trembled against the spine of the grimoire as if it were alive.
They trusted her to read it, to decipher what we couldn’t. Maybe she’d find answers. Maybe she’d find nothing. She kept shooting me some looks. Calm, easy, but hard looks. I don’t know what they mean.
But I didn’t stay to find out.
“I just… need some time alone,” I told them, my voice as thin as tissue paper.
Alaric gave me a long look but didn’t argu
