Page 26 of Bond & Protect

I think it might be time to go and just speak to Amos. Not about what’s going on right now in this moment, but just normally. Before this happened, Amos and I had a really good friendship. I wouldn’t mind going back to that at all.

But as I pad down the stairs, I notice something weird. There’s too much silence filling the cabin now. Amos is never still. He doesn’t know how to be still. So for there to be silence is very strange. I pick up the pace and head down the stairs faster, trying to locate Amos before I freak out. I can feel the panic already starting to rise in my chest…

“Amos?” He isn’t here. I can tell he isn’t here and this is a mess. “Amos, where are you?”

Fuck, now my heart is absolutely hammering. I feel sick to my stomach. I head outside to see if his wolf is lurking around because something might have caught him off guard––he might have gone out to explore without telling me––but again I find myself faced with silence.

“Amos, are you out here? Where the hell are you?”

Is he doing this to scare me? I know Amos is a bit of a joker, but I can’t imagine even him playing a trick right now. This is such a serious time. I know that I’m on the outside looking in at the moment, but even I know that everything is a mess. I know this is a time when we should all be as careful as we can, keeping out of sight wherever possible. It seems like my only job is to keep hidden away in this cabin, and now I’m doing that without Amos.

I fold my arms across my chest, trying to protect myself as much as I can from this chilling fear. I’m a strong, independent woman, usually. But with this monster on the loose and the things I know it can do to me, I can’t help being fearful. I don’t think I’ve ever been so afraid.

“Amos, are you seriously not here?” I cry out one last time. “That’s fucked up.”

I head back inside, but everything in the cabin looks different now. Colder, lonelier, scarier. I can almost feel the icy cold chill of the wind running through this building, catching me in the breeze. I sit down on one of the chairs in the kitchen with my knees up by my chest. I hug onto those knees, trying to make myself as small as I possibly can while I wait.

A tear leaks down my cheek, splashing on my skin. I don’t want to cry, but I don’t know what the hell is going on. Being left out here with nothing to go on is horrible. The guys could be anywhere right now. They could be hurt. They might even have left me here.

Is it possible that the guys have realized they don’t want anything to do with me anymore? That maybe, our one special night together didn’t mean as much to them as it did for me. They seemed to enjoy themselves as much as me, but I might be wrong.

I might have been seeing things that weren’t there just because I wanted them to feel the same as me. Now I’m worrying if I have misread absolutely everything along the way… the sizzling between me and Elias, the chemistry I’ve shared with Sydney, the electricity that burns through me every time I get close to Liam, and the joy that fizzes through me as I lock eyes with Amos. None of that might have been real. It might have all been in my head.

“Fuck,” I whisper to myself as I brush the tears away––not that it really matters because there are plenty more tears cascading down my face. “Fucking hell, this is just… fuck…”

I kick the table hard, so hard it almost tumbles over. It shoots off the book, which I almost forgot was there. Now, I bend down and pick it up because I need something to distract me. I wonder what it is, and why it’s been deemed nothing more than a wedge under a table leg.

It’s handwritten. Almost like a diary. I first scan through the pages, not settling in on anything in particular, until a few words catch me off guard. I can see things written endlessly about monsters and The Rift. What is this?

I start reading, taking it all in as much as I can, just to see if this is useful.

I don’t know if the guys have seen this, but if not, then I might have something useful for them. It seems like wolves have fought this same beast in the past, and perhaps they’d won. I don’t know, but I’m about to find out. It gives me something to do other than wait and cry.

Some of the pages have folds in the corner. At first, I just thought that was because the book hasn’t been well looked after and stuffed under a table leg, but now I’m starting to think that someone has read this because this seems to be useful information.

I skip to the back, assuming that any guide for how to win this fight will be there. Plus, there seems to be a lot of folded pages back there I want to check in on.

“Shit, this is good,” I murmur to myself as I run my fingers lightly over the pages. Sure, the drawing of the monster is crude, and the guide to how it moves and acts could be a little more descriptive, but it’s definitely proof that someone has tackled this beast and survived. That makes me feel a whole lot better because it means the guys might defeat the beast now too.

“But what did you do, writer of this book?” I ask, hoping that somehow, the magic will just come to me and show me the answer. “How did you put an end to it? Did you put it back in The Rift? Is there a way to seal that shit up completely? Or to just kill it?”

I skip back and forth, going over all the pages with a greater depth now to try and see if there’s anything I’ve missed. Anything that could help…

Monstrum depascitur affectibus. Those words, those silly Latin words. I’ve heard them before. My mother used to say them when I was young, telling me her parents said the same thing. The monster feeds on emotions. I used to think that was a comment on how we feed our own emotions, especially negative ones, getting us trapped in a vicious cycle.

But now I’m starting to think that there might be a more literal translation to that. Because the monster does feed on emotions, doesn’t it? It sucked me dry of mine… and it did so more successfully when I was on my own. When the wolves were with me, the monster couldn’t claim me quite as easily as it once did. So being alone is obviously half the issue…

Alone just like I am right now. Fuck. Surely the monster isn’t going to come for me here? I dart my eyes around wildly, trying my hardest to spot anyone who might be coming my way, but I’m pretty sure all those shadows are in my imagination now.

We used to think the monster fed on flesh, the writer of the book continues after those words. But we were wrong. So wrong. The kill is just part of the fun for this monster.

Where are the wolves? Why the fuck have they left me? It’s starting to increasingly feel like something more is happening here. Like, maybe the monster has picked them off, one by one, and taken them away from me. If they don’t have any emotions left, then they aren’t going to be worried about me, are they? They are going to be shells of who they once were.

I can’t have that. I can’t believe that. Just as my life was about to get good, it’s been taken away from me. The wolves have been taken away from me. There was me naively believing that I’m about to have my very own happy ever after, just as it’s being taken away.

“No, no, no.” I shake my head hard. “No, this can’t be happening.”

I flick to the end of the book once more, trying desperately to see what we can do. I have a bit more information now, so I should be able to do something about it, right?

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