EIGHTEEN

**ARTEMIS**
Time bled, a gaping wound that seeped infectious seconds, minutes into hours into days.

Marus was by my side almost nonstop until it came time for him to leave.

He told my stories of long nights by the open fire. Stories of my parents and sister. I clung to them, listening desperately to his every word hoping it might trigger more memories, hoping it might make everything make sense. But still nothing did, why did she kill them?

I had barely seen Astoria in the days that had passed, only caught fleeting glimpses of her leaving and entering her room. She hadn't left since the night ball.

It was strange, even for her.

I balanced the tray loaded with a cooked breakfast and a glass of juice in one hand and knocked three times on her door with the other. "Go away." She growled. The same thing she had said to me every other day I had tried.

"You can't hide away forever!" I called through the door. "Please just let me in."

The door opened to reveal a ragged looking Astoria, her hair was a mess and her eyes were red rimmed and puffy. I was taken aback by her appearance, she had always been so austere and cold. Her Cerulean eyes held many secrets. The ice queen was melting, her cold demeanour finally coming undone, but what was the cause?

"Are you okay?" I asked tentatively.

"I'm fine." She snapped. "Are you coming in or not?"

Her room was dark, all the curtains were drawn and it smelled like salty tears and roses. A bouquet of the red flowers perched on her dark wood desk, I set the tray down beside the flowers. A red light enveloped the room like everything was drenched in blood. She sad in the centre of her unmade bed, the covers cocooned around her and motioned for me to join her. I sat carful not to disturb her nest of sorrow.

"What's wrong, you've been acting really strange the last few days?" I said, motioning to her cave of bloody hibernation. "It's not normal, even for you."

She ignored me. "What do you know about mates?" She asked incredulously.

That I don't have one. At least, not anymore.

I laughed to try to diffuse the weight of her seriousness and the heavy burden that it pressed upon my shoulders, I tried not to think about it. "I know just about as much as everybody else, why?"

"Do you know what happens if one mate dies?" Her eyes were glassy and her words too harsh. Every syllable she spoke hit her too close to home. It was like she was made of glass, cold yet fiery. Smooth yet sharp. Even in her darkest times I still couldn't help but he baffled by her beauty. Her eyes were so bright even though they were glassed by tears, face so flawless even despite the tinted half flush that died along her neck. Grief suited her in some sick way, like she was revisiting an old friend.

"Why are you asking me this?" I frowned. "What happened to you?"

A sickening feeling was beginning settle like a weight in the pit of my stomach, I didn't like where this was headed.

"Tell me Artemis! What happens if one mate dies!" She hissed. Her eyes were wide and haunted. Ghost eyes. Eyes of the dead. Eyes that had seen so much, too much. Eyes that could never unsee the horrors of her life.

I grimaced, I shouldn't have answered I was only further fuelling her dark decent into her own personal hell.
"The other goes insane or dies, only half a soul one cannot live without the other."

What happened to her?
Was that why she was always so cold, so heartless. She never let anyone close to her, not even me. The only person I had ever seen her warm too was the Alpha.

Astoria stared at the blank red tinted wall, rocking slightly. "Yes." She whispered, "They go insane." Maybe it was my mind playing tricks on me, or maybe I heard her mutter under her breath,
'But what if they're already insane?'

"Astoria, you're scaring me.." I shifted away from her. "Are you sure you're all right?"

She was staring straight at the bloody flowers, a small white tag attacked around the bunched green stalks. "Who are those from?"

"Theos." She began to rock slightly. "He's the only one that understand. He's the only one that knows what it's like..."

My heart clenched at his name. They were both broken, two halves of a whole. They were not mates, sometimes I doubted they even liked each other, but deep down they needed each other to survive.

Two broken halves of a whole.
Their pieces didn't fit together, but they stopped one another from crumbling when the drugs and the alcohol no longer flushed the nightmares out.

"Knows what what's like?" I said, I couldn't tear my eyes away from her ghostly pale face

I had never realised how hurt Astoria was. I should've realised.

Her next words shook me to my core.

"He's the only other one that knows what it's like..." She was silent for a long while, a single tear crawled down her flushed cheek. "To kill your own mate."

***


Ozymandias' pale grey dreadlocks looked almost white in the blinding sun.

"How did he do it?" I asked, throwing a feeble punch. He blocked it with more ease then he let on.

The old man furrowed his brow as he dodge another pathetic throw. "What do you mean, Dulce."

"How did he kill my sister." I spat with such malice that I even frightened myself. I couldn't let my hate take over, I threw a punch, this time I caught the old man hard on the jaw, he stumbled back, blood crawling from his fat lip.

"You hit hard, Dulce." He said, sounding surprised, "On the rare occasion you actually manage to hit your target."

"Answer the question." I grunted, ducking from one of his hefty blows, he had managed to hit me several times throughout our training and each one felt as though I had been bowled over by a semi truck.

"Did you ever think that you might not want to know the answer?"

He was right. I didn't want to know, I knew that as soon as the worlds left my lips I would regret it. Every time I closed my eyes all I would see is her.

Or maybe it would calm my conscience. My demons would vacate and sleep would be a thing of peace rather than unguarded terror.

"I want to know."

"She was hanged." He deadpanned, apparently not interested in fighting anymore. He slumped to the earth, the field was boundless and bare. Nothing but green grass fed my hungry eyes, only disrupted by the blue blockade of the horizon.

Hours earlier Ozymandias had made me climb the hill, the hike alone was at least an hour but now that we were here it was strange how foreign this nothingness felt.
Only a monotonous green carpet stretched as far as I could see, before it seemed to drop off of the edge of the world and into the sky.

Maybe if I focused on my surrounding, then I wouldn't have to acknowledge my sisters death.

Ignorance was bliss, a gift I no longer possessed.

I slumped to the earth beside him, examining my bloody knuckles whilst he started out into the vast and empty nothingness before us.

"It's strange isn't it." I couldn't help the dry chuckle that left my lips. There was no humour but something about the situation was almost laughable.

"What is?" He said, his eyebrows biting in a frown as he turned to face me.

"How I was go for so long. I missed so much."

"I know you probably don't want to talk about it.." He said, I knew what was coming. "But what happened to you out there, Dulce? You were blinded."

I had nothing more to hide, the more I thought about it, the more I realised that the only way forward was to stop hiding.
Maybe if I told Ozymandias about my past then it would stop haunting me.

Maybe I wouldn't wake up almost nightly drenched in cold sweat.

"I was an experiment."
He didn't interrupt, he didn't ask. Even when I wasn't sure if I was going to continue. "I don't know when, I don't know why. I don't really know much of anything except the pain."

I picked at the grass, uprooting a daisy. "They would test things on me. Chemicals, drugs, and sometimes just torture us for fun. I try not to think about it much." I tore the daisy in two. It didn't bleed. It didn't cry. There was strength in its beauty. I had to be the daisy.

Except the daisy would die now. I wouldn't let that be my fate, I would grow from the past and this was the way forwards, I was sure of it.
"Sometimes the girls would just vanish. When they were considered too damaged to be used for further experimentation, whether they would dump them or they would just kill them I didn't know."

"The last time, they almost drowned me. I didn't know what it was but it wasn't water, it burned my eyes and when I woke up I was in the woods and I was blind."
My shoulders shuddered with the loss of a force that had weighed long and heavy upon my chest and heart.

Finally I was free from those mind forged manacles.

"Don't you remember anything from before you were taken?" He stroked his long grey beard, seemingly deep in thought.

"I never really stopped to think about it until recently, even now I only have slithers brought back from what other people have told me."

I tried not to think about it at all.

Ozymandias hummed in response. For a while, either of us said nothing, we just sat there letting the comfortable silence envelope us.

Blades grass danced in the slight breeze, a thousand shards of funky sliced emeralds sparkling in the sun.

"Is there anything else I should know?" I stared at the old man, he was long, lean, dusty and dreary yet somehow lovable. His grey dreadlocks fell almost to his waist, the pale grey contrasting against his dark skin.

"Well.. There is one thing." He hesitated, looking at me with a look that asked once more if I was sure I wanted to know.

"What?" I asked cautiously.

"Flick's pregnant."