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Finley Blair spent most of his nights haunted by the ghost of Briony Thorburn.
On nights when all he could do was sleep to avoid the harshness of his reality, she crept into his dreams and spoke so sweetly and so gently to him that he thought he might never wake up, if only to stay with her for just one more minute.
He would give anything for just one more minute.
But somehow, she managed to crawl out of his dreams and follow him throughout his day. He would catch a glimpse of chestnut brown hair and turn swiftly toward it, only to find a stranger staring back at him with something he likened to pity. He saw her in her little sister Innes, same hair, same eyes, same nose, and sometimes he couldn’t even bear to be around the girl because she was a cruel reminder of everything they had lost.
Sometimes he found himself thinking that he wished Briony would have let Innes into the tournament instead, because then at least she would be alive. But he had to shake that away; it was a horrible thought that reminded him of just how monstrous they had all proven themselves to be.
Sometimes he would catch a smell that almost smelled like the perfume she wore or the shampoo she used, and he would half expect her to be standing there next to him with some witty remark and a bright grin on her face. But he always found that it was just a smell, and he was still entirely alone.
Briony haunted him from the day she died until the day he left Ilvernath for good. He thought that if he disappeared, if he never came back, if he didn’t have to stand in the same town where her body lay six feet underground as a glaring reminder of what she did for him and for all of those strangers those monsters, then he could escape her.
And he did, for a long while. Life moved on. He went to university, got a flat with some friends, found a job, met a girl. Met another girl. Met another girl. And then met the one he decided he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. Briony lay silent, just a casual shadow in the back of his mind that crossed through like a whisper, a dream, something that had happened so long ago and so far away that it couldn’t possibly find a way into his life now. She was a dormant memory, a quiet ache that was so close to being healed that he didn’t even notice the pain of it anymore.
But then came his wedding day, and Finley Blair realized that he had finally succumbed to the demons that plagued him and let them drag him down into their world of complete instability and insanity.
Because right there, in the middle of his hotel room he had gotten for the night before, was Briony Thorburn.
It wasn’t the same Briony Thorburn that he had last seen, the lean, athletic girl with the twinkling blue eyes and the freckles that dotted her skin from so many hours in the sun. This Briony Thorburn was older, somehow more confident and mature than his Briony had been. Her hair was shorter, her skin slightly paler. She had lost some of her muscle mass, but she still had the build of an athlete, someone who ran several kilometers a day and never grew tired. There were spell rings glittering on both of her hands, spells shimmering in the earrings and the necklace she wore. She was confident, but she was clearly on edge about something, as if there was some invisible threat in the room that was getting ready to pounce.
Finley reminded himself very quickly that Briony was dead, that he had attended the funeral, that he had watched them lay her body to rest.
But this Briony looked like his Briony, if only she’d gotten a chance to live.
He swallowed hard, gazing up into blue eyes he used to let himself drown in. She tilted her head, smiled, and he found himself wanting to reach for her, to touch her soft, sunkissed skin just one more time. But he was more logical than that. “You’re not real,” he said.
Dreams of Briony came and went all the time for several years, and then she disappeared completely. He had never seen her standing before him like this, so elegant, so bright, so totally real. Of all his years of suffering, he had never hallucinated her, not even when he was at his lowest points. Why, then, did she have to come back now, so solid and firm and close enough to touch?
“I heard you were getting married today,” she said, taking a step closer to him. He couldn’t summon the strength to move away. “I thought I would drop by to offer my congratulations and wish you luck.”
His eyes trailed her body. She was wearing a nice yellow sundress that fell to her mid-thigh, an outfit she would have told him was perfect for attending a spring wedding. It would have been a dress Isobel picked out for her, if things hadn’t happened the way they had.
“You’re not real,” he said again.
“How do you know that?” she asked.
“Because I watched them bury you! I sat beside the people we fought against and watched them put you in the ground! You’re dead, Briony. I saw it. You can’t possibly be here.” He realized he was shaking now but still unable to move from where he stood, still struck with cold, blinding fear of what would happen if she came any closer.
She stood just as still, eyes wide, as if she couldn’t comprehend the words that were coming out of his mouth. This wasn’t his Briony. It couldn’t be. He knew what he had seen, what he’d lived through. This was a trick of the mind, some sort of cruel curse placed on him so he would lose the years and years of progress he had made. He had almost completely let her go, and now here she was, haunting him yet again, tormenting him, and he had no defensive spells to fight against a ghost.
“What’s her name?” Briony asked.
He stared in bewilderment, not understanding how she could possibly still want to have a conversation with him now, why she hadn’t just gone away. After years and years of studying the deepest parts of all the common magick that was left, he couldn’t fathom how this could even be happening. He wasn’t even sure that the long-dead high magick they had destroyed would be enough to raise someone from the dead.
If he thought for a second that it would, he might have gone to the ends of the earth to find some remnant, some echo of high magick just to try, even if it cost him his soul.
So if it wasn’t magick, it had to be a ghost. He had always thought Alistair and his family were completely full of shit with all their creepy stories and their made-up monsters, but maybe there was some truth to them. Maybe ghosts were real.
Or maybe sometimes they were so loud and so close that people willed them into existence. Maybe, in some sort of strange way, Finley had brought Briony back from the dead.
“You’re not going to make me feel bad for moving on,” he told her, his voice harsher than he meant for it to be. “It’s been ten years, Bri. I have a right to be happy.”
She frowned, adjusting the skirt of her dress as she took a seat at the end of the bed. She didn’t look up at him as she said, “Do you think it could have been us?”
“I…” He was caught off guard by the question, rendered completely speechless as his brain lagged and then tried to catch up with what was happening. He’d be lying to himself if he said he hadn’t thought about it in the late hours of the night the weeks after her death, how if they both would have made it out then they would have graduated and gone to uni together, and they would have had a happily ever after.
Briony was supposed to be his happily ever after. But fairytales didn’t always come true.
“I don’t know,” he settled on saying.
“What’s her name?” she asked again.
He sighed as he ran a hand through his hair. “Katherine,” he answered.
The corner of her mouth twitched. There was something in her eyes that he couldn’t read. “Does she treat you well?”
“Yes.”
She gazed at him for a long moment before she let out a breath and nodded. “Good.”
Finley watched her, sitting there with so much poise and composure, so unaware of how badly she had shaken up his world. He couldn’t bear to look at her eyes, couldn’t bear remembering he never got a proper goodbye. He stared at her legs instead, stretched out in front of her and ending in white heels. He could see pink painted toes peeking out and imagined she and Isobel had done each other’s nails the night before. He imagined they would have been friends again, after everything, that they would have somehow found some sort of peace.
“I’m sorry,” he said, unsure of what he was actually apologizing for. She looked up at him with a question written all over her face, her brown curls falling in front of her eyes. He swallowed, fought the urge to go to her.
She shrugged, stretching her arms above her head and leaning back on the bed, looking far more comfortable than she should have been. “For what? I knew what I was doing, Fin. I’m sorry for what it did to you. But you’re alive, and that’s all I care about.”
He pursed his lips together, then took the chance and sat next to her on the bed, still keeping a healthy distance. He was too afraid to touch her, too afraid that he would actually be able to feel her. He could certainly smell her, the soft scent of lavender flooding the room and flooding his senses until he felt nearly dizzy. “What are you doing here, Bri?” he asked.
She hesitated, looking up at him underneath thick, dark eyelashes, and let out a slow breath. Her delicate pink lips curled up into a warm smile, and carefully, she reached out and let her fingers brush over Finley’s arm. He could feel them just as perfectly as he had ten years ago, and they lit a fire against his skin, his body reacting to her touch against his will. He moved toward her, closing the space between them just so he could run his hands over her bare shoulders, down her arms, his fingers lingering on top of hers as his breath caught in his throat and he remembered with a horrible ache how it had felt to kiss her when both their lives were on the line. How it had felt to kiss her in the dark, quiet hours of the night when no one else was awake, when there was nothing to stop them.
She was here, she was real, and –
“I’m here to tell you it’s okay,” she said as tears pooled in the corners of her deep blue eyes.
“Okay?” He frowned, pushing a strand of her hair out of her eyes. He let his hand linger on her cheek, and she reached to take his hand in her own. “What do you mean?”
Tears fell from her eyes, spilling onto his skin. Her smile wavered. “It’s okay…to let go.”
His brows furrowed, his heartbeat raced. Her fingers curled around his, gripping him tightly. “I did let you go, Bri. A long time ago. I didn’t have a choice.”
She shook her head, pulling his hand away from her face. “No, you didn’t. You just let it rest. There was still some sort of hope…” She wiped her eyes. Her chest rose and fell with shallow breaths. “I’m gone, Fin.”
“I know that! I –”
“And I’m not coming back. You can let go. I swear it’s okay.”
He was prepared to argue, then realized that she was right. Even though he had left Ilvernath, even though he had found a life outside of all the trauma and horrors they had experienced, he still let her reside within him, even if she was so quiet he barely noticed her. Even though he was getting married to a woman he loved, Briony lingered in the shadows of his mind, always making him question what he could have done differently, if there was anything he could have tried to have her here with him. The truth, of course, was that he was terrified of forgetting, terrified of losing the exact pattern of freckles on her face, the dimple that formed in her left cheek when she smiled, the crinkles beside her eyes as she laughed.
But that had been fading for a long time. Some days, he struggled to remember what she looked like after she got out of volleyball practice, the way her skin gleamed with sweat, the look of pure satisfaction on her face, the way her hair clung to her skin. And then he started forgetting other things too. His memories became skewed. Sometimes he wasn’t even sure if that was the Briony he had loved.
Was this Briony the one he had loved? The one he still loved?
“I don’t want to lose you,” he said, finally saying the words he had kept inside for so long. “I can’t…Bri, I can’t –”
“It’s okay,” she said, taking both his hands in her own and squeezing them tightly. She offered him a small, sad smile and nodded. “I don’t regret it. I would have sacrificed myself over and over again if it meant that high magick was destroyed. If it meant all of you could be free. The curse was broken, Finley. I lived and died exactly as I was supposed to. So it’s okay. Please don’t ever stop living because of me.”
Finley’s chest ached. The wound he thought had healed was starting to open again, to let Briony back in. Tears stung his eyes as he clung to her, afraid that if he moved, if he blinked, she would disappear. Her thumb rubbed soothing circles over his skin as she waited for his response. She wouldn’t go away. Not yet.
He swiped his wet eyes and chuckled. “Kath was keeping up with the tournament, you know. She told me she was always on your side. She thought you were so brave.” Briony smiled, and he moved closer to her, their thighs brushing as he whispered, “You were, Bri. You were so brave. You were the most incredible person I’ve ever known.”
“I loved you, Finley,” she said.
“I loved you too.”
She nodded and leaned forward, her lips brushing over his hot cheek as she whispered, “So let me go.”
He squeezed his eyes shut, letting the tears slip down his skin as he clung to her, memorizing the feel of her skin, the heat of her touch. And slowly, he nodded and forced out a breath.
And he let go.