Chapter Thirty-two

**GABRIEL**

I sat still at the table and watched Oliver as he stared at the paper in front of him absentmindedly, my dreams from the previous night still vivid in my mind. The same recurring nightmares of bloodshed, chaos, and death. Dead bodies strewn across barren land, baptized in blood and screams of dying mothers and screaming children carried in the wind. As I continued to stare at Oliver, the urge to protect him overcame me. From what? I couldn’t say for certain, but I could feel the clouds getting heavy, the sharks were gathering as though it was almost time for a feast. There was a dark presence hovering, a dark power…something was brewing. He turned the page on the paper and sighed loudly, his voice bribing me out of my depressive thoughts.
“How long do you plan to sit there and stare at me?” He asked, his voice coming out in a cold, hatch tone.
My brows furrowed in confusion as I stared at him. This has been his behavior lately; aloof, uninterested, a shadow of himself…not himself.
I sat up in my seat and placed my hands on the table.
“Not really. I was just trying to figure some things out.”
Oliver looked at me, his eyes filled with an annoyance that wasn’t there before, that I wasn’t familiar with. “And you want to figure that out by staring daggers into my skull?”
“What is wrong, Oliver?” I blurted out, swearing under my breath as the question escaped my lips but having no regrets.
Oliver cocked his brow at me, and fingers idly ran the morning paper that was now damn near forgotten. “What do you mean?” He asked.
I sighed and thought to myself if I wanted to go down this route. “You don’t feel like something has been going on lately…”
“If you want to say something, Gabriel, just go ahead and spit it out,” he snapped at me. “I don’t have the patience for this.”
“Exactly,” I stated. “You don’t have the patience for me. You haven’t felt anything but disdain for me the past few weeks. It’s almost as if something else is taking over you.”
Oliver’s eyes hollowed and he lowered his head slowly onto the table until it rested on the edge. He held that position for a while until I began to wonder if he had fallen asleep.
I scoffed and rose to my feet. “Sometimes, I wonder if you want to be here…”
“Gabriel, please…”
“Or maybe you’re just tired of me…”
“Gabriel…”
“Maybe you don’t love me anymore?”
I stood still, holding my breath in anticipation. Waiting for him to say something, to say anything. Waiting for him to say how much he loved me, that I embodied the very essentials of life needed to keep him waking the surface of the earth. Waiting for him to tell me how much he hated me, and how meeting me was the worst thing that could have happened to him. That if he hadn’t met me, his life would have been all sunshine and roses.
But no…
Oliver just sat there, his head resting on the table in utter silence. Silence. And somehow, that was worse. My heart fell into my stomach and I turned to walk away, increasingly aware of my wolf’s agony in the back of my mind.
“She’s everywhere…” he said finally, his voice barely audible.
I turned to him, a spark of hope igniting. “What?”
“She…she’s…” he sighed and raised his head from the table, his eyes sunken and radiating pain. “She’s getting more powerful.”
I walked back to the table, confusion and pain clouding my soul. “The goddess?”
Oliver nodded slowly and subbed his tired eyes until they were red. “She’s getting stronger…”
“But isn’t that good?” I asked, somewhat confused.
Oliver shrugged. “For her…”
I waited for him to continue, but he didn’t. Instead, his eyes hollowed and he seemed to dissociate.
“And for you?” I asked.
“I feel like I’m losing myself, Gabriel. I’m beginning to hate the things I used to like…and people I used to love…”
He didn’t need to finish the sentence, I understood. “Like me…”
Oliver’s eyes looked up at me pleadingly. “Gabriel, please…”
“No,” I said and shook my head. “I understand.”
I smiled when he sighed in relief. I pulled a chair so close to Oliver’s that our knees touched and took his hand in mine.
“I love you, Gabriel. I always will. Nothing will change that.”
“I know…”
“Sometimes, I hear her calling me from the water. Her call is very strong. She keeps taking me underwater…” he paused, and his brows furrowed. “The more I stay under, the stronger she gets. The more of me she becomes.”
“And you can’t stop her?” I asked.
“That’s the thing,” he answered. “I’m not sure I want to stop her.”
My brows furrowed in confusion. “What?”
“It feels like she’s preparing me to be strong for something. Something’s looming, something dark.”
Chills went down my spine, and my mind immediately strayed back to the recurrent dreams that I’d had. Could it be that they weren’t mere dreams, coincidences? Should I prepare? But for what? War?
“And that girl…” he continued.
“What girl?”
“The one we rescued at the border.”
“Ah, that one. What about her?”
Oliver opens his mouth as though to speak and then closes it. “She’s related to all these somehow.”
Oliver sighed tiredly and leaned his head on my shoulder. I ran my hands through his hair and back, smiling to myself as I felt the tense muscles in his neck and back begin to relax. And then his body tensed up again, and he sat up straight.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
He shook his head and he began to look out the window, his gaze fixated on something that only he could see. My senses heightened, and I stood to my feet, my wolf on full alert. I walked over to the window and looked out and around, there was nothing there. I turned back to Oliver, his eyes were still fixated on the window, and a cold sweat had broken out on his brow. It was then I decided that the river goddess might need to go.