Page 6 of The Midnight Death Match

Four

The forest is on fire,but it doesn’t burn. Teal and gold flames climb up the sides of trees cracked and jagged with age. Their trunks glow like lanterns, and leaves fall in slow spirals of light. The fire doesn’t give off any heat or smoke. Just the sound of crackling bark and a pulse of life.

I step forward. The moss underfoot is soft and oddly warm. Water runs somewhere in the distance, sounding beyond the crackling fire.

Then she appears before me.

My mother stands at the center of it all, her cloak fluttering in a wind I can’t feel, and her eyes shine with that same impossible fire—teal rimmed with gold. Her face is exactly how I remember it. Not softened by memory or faded by grief. But real.

I try to speak, but no sound comes. Try to reach for her.

She raises a hand to steady me. Then she says a single word, quiet and clear. “Loophole.”

Her voice echoes like a ripple through snow, and everything trembles. The trees lean toward her. The fire folds inward. She takes a step back, fading, dissolving into light.

“No!” I reach for her.

Then I wake. I bolt upright, heart thundering like I’ve run for hours.

Disappointment rushes through me like a harsh winter storm. It was all just a dream… yet somehow she seemed as real as my own hands in front of me now. Like she was back from the dead.

But no. It wasn’t real. Just wishful thinking. Me missing her, wanting her back.

The room is dark but alive with silver moonlight. The fire’s gone out, but I can still hear the crackle from the dream in my ears, though there isn’t any flame here. Just stone and silence and the ache in my chest that never seems to go away.

I miss her so much. The ache comes sudden and sharp, like it always does when I stop guarding against it. I miss everything about her, but most of all, the way she used to sit beside me, no words passing between us but somehow making it feel like she said everything I needed to hear.

Before the grief becomes too much to bear, I slide out of bed, wrap a thin blanket around my shoulders, then cross the room barefoot.

The shield leans in the corner where I left it, propped beneath the window where the light hits just right at night. I crouch beside it, tracing the edge of the carved wolf with the tips of my fingers.

My mother held this. She carried it. Bled on it. Fought for it.

Now it’s mine.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I whisper, my voice cracking. “But I’m trying. I want to follow our path, to learn everything I need to. There has to be a reason you didn’t tell me anything when you were alive. Is each Secret Keeper supposed to figure everything out on her own?”

Silence is my only answer, not that I actually expected anything more. That doesn’t stop the gnawing disappointmentwhich continues to pull at me in these quiet moments in the night. I can keep myself busy all day and push aside my pain, but it will wake me in these wee hours and force me to face my thoughts.

Some things refuse to be ignored, and clearly grief is one of them.

I set my hand on the center of the metal, let it warm beneath my skin. Not glowing or humming. Just solid.

Something catches my attention. Teal, like the fire in my dream.

Petals.

Fragile, scattered across the floor like someone placed them where they are. But no one’s been here. Or have they? These have to be the ones from the chest. This color is so rare.

My stomach drops, my breath hitches. Swallowing, I scoot closer for a better look.

Its pattern steals my breath. The petals’ arrangement is purposeful, intentional. They form a single word.

Loophole.

I stare, my voice caught in my throat.

They weren’t there before.

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