Page 36 of Venom & Vanity

When she opens them, the heavy thing that's been sitting in them all evening hasn't gone but it's made room. Shifted to the side to let something else stand beside it.

“Alright,” she breathes out.

“Alright?” Bash pushes.

“I believe you.” She looks back at the lighthouse on its cliff, dark and alone against the storming sky, the cliff dropping away beneath it into nothing. “Now let's get through the night and go find the woman with the violet eyes so we can get off this island and you can prove it.”

The fire settles.

The clouds move over the lighthouse and keep moving.

And then in the dark ahead, so brief it might be imagined, a light blinks from the high window of the eastern lighthouse.

Small. There. Gone.

Like a signal.

Like someone standing in the dark of that abandoned lamp room looking out across the island and telling us without words that she knows we're coming.

That she's always known.

That she's been waiting long enough and she's ready.

None of us speak.

We watch the dark where the light was and the dark gives nothing back.

“First light,” Doc announces

EPILOGUE

SNOW

I don't know what wakes me.

Not a sound. Not movement. Something else, the particular feeling of the air changing, like a presence that arrived quietly and has been standing still long enough to become part of the dark.

I open my eyes.

The fire has burned down to embers, throwing just enough light to see the shapes of the others sleeping around it. Doc on my left, close enough that I could reach him without stretching. Prince on my right with one arm behind his head and his mask still in place the way all of ours are, because this island doesn't offer the luxury of letting your guard down even in sleep. Bash is nowhere to be seen which tells me it’s his turn to be on watch.

Cinder and her three are shapes on the other side of the dying fire.

Everything is still.

And then at the very edge of the firelight, just where the dark begins in earnest, something shifts.

I see her before I understand what I'm seeing. Low to the ground, moving in that fluid four-point way that I've learned isn't feral so much as chosen, a way of moving that this island taught her because this island is all she knows. Her violet eyes catch the ember-light and throw it back and she's looking directly at me.

She knew I was awake before I did.

I sit up slowly. Check the others. Nobody stirs.

She tilts her head toward the dark beyond the camp and then she's moving, silent and low, away from the firelight and toward the cliff path.

I pull my mask into place and follow.

The night air hits cold and sharp the moment I'm clear of the fire's warmth. The path toward the eastern lighthouse is a grey suggestion in the dark, the clouds above slightly lighter than the rock below, and I follow the sound of her movements more than any sight of her.