“Ca. Can’t. N-no.”
“Jesus Christ,” April hisses, snarls even, and when she grabs him by the back of the shirt and yanks it almost takes Fray off his feet. Almost. “Inside. Now.”
Fray can all but feel his throat closing up. “No,” he says again, or tries to say. His throat’s not working, his lips aren’t making the right shapes. It just comes out as a muffled grunt.
She’s dragging him, and the moment he realizes it he locks his knees and digs in his heels and scrabbles to grab anything he can catch. He gets a grip on one of the support beams. The wood threatens to splinter under the force of his hold, and his stomach lurches with the sight. It’s almost enough for April to yank him further forward. Almost. “Not,” he snarls back, “going.”
Her response is more animal than human. Her brown eyes flare into unnatural blue as she wheels on him. “You just going to live in my barn forever?” she barks. “Do you think you’re going to get all better if you run? Running doesn’t help. Running never helps.”
“Can’t!”
She’s got his wrist, now, and her nails dig in. With a feral sound he yanks back, twisting, long scratches running down his skin, but she doesn’t let go. In a fit of fury he grabs the arm that has him and squeezes with strength he should not have. He can feel the bone groan under his grip. It must hurt. It has to hurt, but she doesn’t let go. Instead, she fixes him with that blue stare. “Then what,” she says, calmer than before, a deadly calm, the calm before a storm. “Are you going to kill me, too? Is that going to fix your problems?”
The world drops out from under him as again Baj’s lifeless face flashes in front of him.
He’s crying, he realizes distantly. His face feels hot and puffy, tears rolls down his cheeks. Humiliation and anger swirl together in his chest to make a chlorine gas that threatens to choke the life out of him. Before it can, he becomes aware of a searing pain in his arm, he can smell burning hair. He looks, and, ah. Heat wavers the air where April’s got hold of him. She’s burning him.
It’s no less than he deserves.
“Can’t,” he tries again, but this time he can’t even get his jaw to move. His fingers loosen around the support beam, which was threatening to bow. Splinters riddle his fingers. (No less than he deserves.) As his shoulders shake, the heat dulls, though whether it’s because April is dialing it back or because he’s getting nerve damage is not clear to him.
When he works up the courage to look back up at her, her scarred face is a still, hard mask. “Here’s your options,” she says presently, eyes still ablaze. He can see that blue-white light through the thin cotton of her shirt and it makes him nauseous to see that pattern of ribs and sternum on someone else. “You can be a coward and keep on not dealing with it. Or,” and she lets go, finally, and he can see the hand-shaped burn shiny on his wrist, “you can face up to it, because that’s what you need to do.”
Fray hiccups. He can’t meet her eyes.
“It’s going to be awful either way,” she says with a deadly quiet. “It’s going to be the most terrifying thing you’ve ever done. But if you wait, it’s going to be worse. I promise you it will be so much worse.”
The gravity in her tone feels like someone’s opened a black hole in his gut. He’s dizzy with it, he’s in pain, he wants to throw up, he wants to go home, he wants his mother. He wants Kaiana. He wants to get as far away from Kaiana as he possibly can.
“Which is it?” says April. “Decide.”
Trembling, he takes a step toward the door. Then another.