“I owe you every apology for doubting you all this time.” Dorran’s eyebrows had lowered again, and his lips were pressed tightly together as he stared at the fire. “All this while, I have been trying to tell you that what you saw and heard were figments of your imagination. When you described the figures you saw—women with holes in their sides—I couldn’t reconcile that with reality. I thought you were seeing waking nightmares. It took me seeing it with my own eyes to believe you, and for that, I am deeply sorry.”
Clare shrugged, heat spreading over her face. “You were trying to help me. If our positions had been reversed, I don’t know if I would have been able to believe you either.”
“Regardless, I made you doubt your own mind. And that is a cruel thing to do.” He shook his head. “You trusted me when I asked for it. And I want to give you that in return. I will not doubt you again.”
“What if I try to tell you something really crazy, like dragons made their nest in the attic?”
He smiled. “Not even then.”
“Thank you.” She chuckled as a painful kind of happiness filled her stomach. The best word she found to describe it was bittersweet. She didn’t know what was happening to the outside world or if there even was an outside world any longer. But she had Dorran. He was alive, and he didn’t hate her. And that counted for a lot.
Dorran inclined his head towards her, and when he spoke, his voice was soft. “I also wanted to apologise for what I said in the garden. I never wanted you to be afraid of me, and I never meant to grow angry. But I did. And I regretted it immediately. I should have followed you when you left, but I allowed myself to stay in the garden. To calm down, I told myself. When I finally went after you to apologise, you were gone.”
A log in the fireplace broke, sending a shower of sparks dancing into the chimney. Dorran faced the fire but glanced at her. Guilt and grief hung about his eyes.
“I didn’t realise you would leave the house. When I saw your snowshoes were missing and the door was open, I was terrified. If you had become lost in the forest or succumbed to the snow…” He drew a shallow breath. “I thought I had sent you to your death.”
“You can’t get rid of me that easily.” Clare leaned a little closer, nudging his shoulder with hers, trying to break him out of his melancholy.
He smiled. “Ah, Clare. Never leave again without at least giving me a chance to beg you to stay.”
Clare’s throat ached, but she smiled. “All right.”
Gale-force winds shook the windows. They both looked up at the noise, and Clare pulled her knees closer to her chest. Even though the fire was warm, she still felt cold.
“I think it is safe to believe we are not just waiting out the snow any longer,” Dorran said. “We must turn ourselves towards both short-term and long-term survival.”
Clare thought of the destroyed garden and tried to breathe around the rising dread. “How much food do we have left?”
He didn’t answer for a moment, and when he did, Clare thought he was trying to sound optimistic. “We have some. And the garden was not a complete loss. You managed to save some plants. And after you were gone, before I realised you had physically left the house, I did what I could to replant the remainder. Some will not survive. Growth will have been stunted in most of them. But it is significantly better than starting from scratch.”
Remembering a detail that had been lost in the scuffle in the forest, Clare took a sharp breath. “There’s food in my car. I was bringing it to my sister’s. There’s enough to last two people at least a couple of weeks.”
“Good! That will make a difference.” He chewed his lip. “The only issue that remains is retrieving it. I don’t know how many of those creatures are still in the forest, but there are at least several. They seemed reluctant to leave the trees. The eight that followed me to the pond were just the ones I could coax out.”
“They looked thin. They might starve if we leave them alone for long enough.” Clare felt uneasy just saying it.
“We will hope for it. But there is another, slightly more pressing matter.” Dorran looked towards the ceiling and the dozens of rooms hidden out of sight. “Some must have found a way inside the house—the ones you saw. I do not know how. The doors and windows stayed locked this whole time, but they are in here with us.”
“I’ve seen three. One with a hole in her side. One with a twisted back. And one with a spine that pokes out of her skin.”
“Heaven help us,” Dorran muttered under his breath. “I would rather face death than a fate like those creatures.”
She shared his sentiment. The thought of being twisted, losing her mind, and having her body broken was unbearable. Clare’s wrist was stinging. She glanced at it and saw a smear of dried blood where the skin had been broken. Her heart skipped a beat. “Do you think it’s—”
“It is not contagious.” Dorran took her chin and turned her head so that she looked him in the eyes. His voice and expression held conviction. “It is not. You will not turn into one of them.”
She nodded, but frightened tears stung her eyes.
Dorran’s hand moved from her chin to stroke the side of her face, and his voice softened. “You were badly scratched when I found you. At the time, I thought it had come from the crash, but I can guess now it was the creatures’ doing, correct?”
“Yeah.”
“If it was contagious, I think we would have known about it well before now. Do not let it frighten you. That matter aside, the bite looks painful. Wait a moment. I will take care of it.”
He rose, and Clare knew he was going to fetch the first aid kit. She grabbed at his dressing gown to keep him in the room. “No. If those creatures are in the house, we can’t split up.”
“Hm.” He rubbed at the back of his neck. “We cannot stay here forever either. Soon we will need water and food. Plus, the garden will need additional care if we are to save what we can.”
“I have a theory.” Clare rose so that she could stand at Dorran’s side. Together, they faced the closed dining room doors. “I don’t think they like light.”
“No?”
“Any time I’ve seen them has been in shadow. Either at night, when the lights are off, or when natural light was blocked out.”
“They were reluctant to leave the forest’s shelter,” Dorran said. “You may be right. And it might be why they came into the mansion in the first place. The building was darker.”
“When I saw one in the wine cellar, she reached for the candle. I think she wanted to snuff it out.”
“Which means light doesn’t hurt them, but they are repulsed by it. So having the lights on helped keep them away.” Dorran laughed. “Well, I did one thing right by you.”
She moved a little closer to him. “You did a lot of things right. Where do you want to go? The bedroom?”
“It might be the safest location. The bathroom will give us water, and it has only two doors to defend. The windows would be too high for them to reach, unlike the rooms on the ground floor.” Dorran nodded at the curtains he’d drawn over the dining room’s windows. “I tried to hide our presence, just in case. The creatures seem broken, but they are unnaturally strong.”
“They bent the door on my car.” Clare squirmed at the memory. Dorran was right—she didn’t think windows would present much of an obstacle if the monsters wanted to get through.
“The bedroom will be farther from the foyer’s door in case we need to run,” Dorran said. “But I don’t feel that is a huge disincentive. Where would we run to?”