"HARRY!" SHE SCREAMS THROUGH her sobs and runny nose, "Let me go! LET ME GO!"
Her legs kick out wildly from where they dangle underneath her, and she never stops flailing and struggling against Niall and Mitch dragging her away from the portal that is now camouflaged back into the forest with no one near to it. Their hands squeeze her so hard, she knows she'll bruise, but she doesn't care. She doesn't care about anything except the person she just watched disappear through those two trees into another world.
Salty tears flow down her cheeks until she tastes them on her tongue whenever she yells out for them to let go of her, or let her follow him through the gateway. Neither of them listens, though. They only continue drawing her further away from it, knowing that she'll do anything she can to follow him if they let her go, and hold tighter on her forearms.
Her heels now drag through the moss and dirt, creating tracks in the ground just in case she manages to break free, so she'll have a path to follow back to the two trees that mark the entryway between worlds.
They finally let her stand upright when they're far enough from the gate that she can no longer see the two matching sigils in the bark, and when their grips loosen, she immediately moves to run back to them. Two sets of hands stop her once more, but this time, Niall takes her by the shoulders and roughly spins her around to face him.
"Let me go! What the fuck are you doing? We have to follow him!" She cries, "I have to follow him, he needs us!
"You can't! We're trying to help you!"
He shakes her as if he is literally trying to force her to snap out of her hysterical meltdown. And though her mind came up with a million possibilities involving Niall and Mitch betraying them, selling Harry out to Sacrosanct and ensuring that she cannot go after him, she should've known better.
His eyes are filled with concern and...pity.
For the first time since the day she sat down in his townhouse to talk with him and Harry, he is looking down at her with pity lining his features. The sight of his pity is the only thing that makes her stop for the briefest moment and stare at him with wide eyes, asking a question she knows she does not want the answer to but needs it.
"Spit it out. Tell me why you're looking at me like that."
'Like that', like she's a wounded animal ready to lash out at the next person who dares to approach or take the wrong tone with her. If it is how he sees her at this moment, he isn't necessarily far off from reality. If the people who took Harry were still standing here, she would be throwing herself at them with all of the ferocity of a wounded animal whether they're vampires or not.
As soon as she saw Devin taunting him in the garage over a month ago, she knew she would do anything in defense of him, even if it meant cutting a man's dick off or chasing uselessly after people that can run ten times faster than her, it doesn't matter.
That mixture of pity, concern, and guilt all bubbles over to the surface in one look he gives her, and she can tell before the words leave his mouth that whatever he's going to say won't bode well for her.
"I'm not stopping you from following him, you really can't go through there."
The hands bracing her shoulders squeeze once in a silent apology as he looks over her head at Mitch one more time for approval before looking back at her.
He says it carefully, "If you go back through, you'll die."
At first, her instinct is to laugh. Though there are tears blurring her vision, she laughs like it's a stupid joke. She knows he'd never mess with her at a time like this too, but she can't help it. For the entire time she has stayed here, there was always a promise of going back home to visit her family after they kill the people involved in her attack, so to hear that she can't go back is unfathomable.
"You're lying," she says, nose stuffy from her sobs.
Niall's eyes are watery too, she notices, and his guilt has yet to disappear.
"You know me, I'm not lying to you. When I saved you from the attack and brought you here, they hit you in the head enough times to murder you. If I left you there, you would've died from your injuries, so the only thing I could think to do was bring you here..."
This is not real.
The only logical explanation she can find, despite the vampires and magic and secret portals between worlds, is that none of this is real. She must have gone into a coma when they bashed her head on the cobblestone wall of the bridge and this is the fantasy her mind has conjured up while unconscious. It was her original hypothesis when she woke up and fled from Harry in the guest room, so why should she rule it out now? Forget the fact that this all feels too real, there is no way this is happening.
"Harry told me I was an idiot, and he was right, but I couldn't just let you die. I couldn't take you to the hospital because they would open a case about the assault and you needed help," he explains. "I'm sorry I did this to you, but being here is the only thing that is stopping you from dying completely. When humans are brought over here, they don't age or die, they're essentially frozen in time until they go back, but the only way you can go back without instantly dying from your brain injury is if one of us turns you. I barely got you here in time."
Turn. The word echoes in the recesses of her mind.
The only way she can go back to see her family or save Harry's life is if she is turned into a vampire...and they have all knowingly hid this from her for the entire time they've known each other.
Her head shakes, starting slow and then speeding up into a neurotic movement as she tries to step away from him, but backs up right into Mitch's chest. The tears fall too fast for her to realize she is crying harder.
As if it weren't enough, he says, confirming her worst nightmares, "You've been dead for three months, Jo."
The next few moments blur together, melting like glue and hardening into one unintelligible moment of grief, anger, and sadness to defiantly challenge the happiness she felt before Harry was taken. Niall continues talking, trying his best to explain to her calmly and comfortingly, but she is as good as gone.
The last memory she has of that night before her vision spotted and faded into gentle darkness was an image of a scarf lying in the snow beside a few stray drops of fresh blood that trickled down the cobblestones. Her view of the world was flipped upside down, head bopping up and down with every step Niall took with her cradled in his arms until she allowed herself to be carried away by the urge to fall asleep. Except, now that she knows what was withheld from her, it was the urge to die.
It was peaceful. There was no bright light to guide her away, perhaps because she wasn't actually passing yet, just dangerously close, and it felt just like falling asleep after days of remaining awake. She tried to remain awake for as long as she could to crawl away from her attackers and up the stairs toward the hospital down the street, but as soon as she felt a man picking her up, she let herself go.
Her head lolled back onto the arm supporting her neck, and she watched, blinking weakly as they walked away from the place she would have curled up and gone to sleep forever if he hadn't saved her.
A scarf, three drops of blood, and black spots dotting her vision, the last sight of her life would have been bleak and hopeless. Until she was rushed through the gateway nearby to freeze her in time and preserve her life before it fell from her weakening clutch on it.
The steadiness of Mitch's chest holding her upright with his hands hovering near her waist just in case she cannot keep herself up on her own is the only thing grounding her to this earth. Faintly, she picks up on the name "Harry" falling from Niall's mouth and whips her head up from where it was facing the distant gateway between the trees.
In the chaos of what he told her, she almost forgot about why she was told about it.
She steps forward, still sniffling and aching in pain from the fall she took, and says, "I think I know a way to find him. It's the only idea I have, and I don't know if it'll even work, but you have to turn me after. If I can find out where he is, I need to hunt them down myself."
Both of them shift in place, Mitch turning to look her in the eye and see her seriousness. They look unsure, like they don't want to deny her wishes in a moment of fragility, but also have their own views on the topic of finding Harry before anything detrimental happens.
Finally, Mitch breaks his long-held silence.
"You should think about that very carefully first, don't rush into it because you want to save him. I promise we will get him back—"
"It wasn't a request," she says, stepping into his space, "I'm telling you, one of you will have to turn me soon. If not, I'll go through the gate and drop dead trying to find him. It's your choice."
There's a dip of silence.
"Then what's your idea?"