Everything hurt. I couldn't hear. I couldn't see. When blurred images finally began to form, all I saw was fire. Fire and Grayson, standing a hundred feet away from me. I waited for him to come running. I waited. I waited. He didn't. And then, there was nothing. The world around me was dark, and then there was a voice.
"Let's play a game." I couldn't tell if I was standing up or lying down. I couldn't feel my body. "I have a secret."
If I had eyes, I opened them. Or maybe they were already open? Either way, I did something, and the world was flooded with light. "I'm tired of playing," I told my mom.
"I know, baby."
"I'm so tired," I said.
"I know. But I have a secret, Avery, and you have to play—just one more time, just for me. Okay, baby? You can't let go." I heard a long and distant beep. Lightning tore through my body.
"Clear!" a voice yelled.
"Come on, Avery," my mom whispered. "I have a secret...."
Another round of lightning tore through me. "Clear!" I wanted to stop breathing. I wanted to go where the lightning and the fire and the pain couldn't touch me.
"You have to fight," my mom said. "You have to hang on."
"You're not real," I whispered. "You're dead. So either this is a dream, and you're not even here, or I'm..." Dead, too.
I dreamed that I was running through the halls of Hawthorne House. I hit a staircase, and at the bottom, I saw a dead girl. At first, I thought it was Emily Laughlin, but then I got closer—and I realized it was me.
"You son of a bitch." The words cut through the darkness in a way that nothing else had since I'd been here. The voice was Jameson's again, but louder this time, sharper, like the edge of a knife. "She was dying, and you just stood there! And don't tell me it was shock."
"Jameson stop, there's no point in arguing" I tried to open my eyes. I tried—but I couldn't.
"You would know, Jamie, about standing there and watching someone die."
"Gray stop."
"Emily. It always comes back to Emily with you." I wanted to tell them that I could hear them, but I couldn't move my mouth. Everything was dark. Everything hurt. "You can't let go. You couldn't when Emily was alive, no matter what she did, and you can't now."
"Are you done?" Grayson was yelling now.
"Avery was dying, and you couldn't run toward her."
"What do you want from me, Jamie?"
"Look at her, Gray. Look at her, damn it! Est unus ex nobis. Nosdefendat eius." She is one of us. We protect her. Whatever was said in response was lost to the sound of a crashing wave.
I sat at a chessboard. Across from me was a man I hadn't seen since I was six years old. Tobias Hawthorne picked up his queen, and then set it back down. Instead, he laid three new pieces on the board. A corkscrew. A funnel. A chain. I stared at them.
"I don't know what to do with these." Silently, he laid a fourth object on the board: a metal disk. "I don't know what to do with that, either."
"Don't look at me, young lady," Tobias Hawthorne replied. "This is your subconscious. All of this—it's a game of your making, not mine."
"What if I don't want to play anymore?" I asked.
He leaned back, picking up his queen once more. "Then stop."