Chapter 4

Freya POV

After what felt like an eternity but was probably only a few minutes, Edward stood and extended his hand toward me. "Come on, Miss Granger."

I looked at his hand, then at his face. The harsh light streaming through the small bathroom window caught the angles of his features, and for just a second, I saw something in his expression that wasn't cold professionalism or barely-concealed impatience. Something that looked almost like understanding.

Maybe he wasn't completely heartless after all.

I took his hand, and he pulled me to my feet with surprising gentleness. My legs wobbled, but held. Barely.

"We're leaving now," he said, and though the words were a statement, not a question, his tone had lost that sharp commanding edge.

I let him guide me out of the bathroom, down the hallway, toward the front door. My feet moved on autopilot while my brain remained stuck in that moment, in that horrible realization that I had just lost everything.

The moment we stepped outside, I stopped short.

The weather had changed completely. The gray clouds that had hung over Oakhaven for days were gone, replaced by a brilliant blue sky that hurt to look at directly.

The summer heat hit like a physical wall—thick and humid and suffocating in a way that made the thin fabric of my knee-length sundress stick to my skin almost immediately.

After days of rain and overcast skies, the sudden blazing sunshine felt wrong, disorienting, like the world itself had shifted while I wasn't paying attention.

I blinked against the brightness, my eyes watering from the glare off the wet pavement. Puddles from the morning's rain were already starting to steam in the heat.

Edward, I noticed, seemed completely unbothered by the sudden change in weather. If anything, he looked more comfortable than he had inside the house, like the warmth was natural to him.

We started walking, and after a few minutes of silence, something occurred to me that should have been obvious from the start. I glanced sideways at Edward—at his silver hair catching the sunlight, at the pointed tips of his ears, at everything about him that screamed not human—and felt a spike of anxiety cut through my numb fog.

"Aren't you worried about people seeing you?" The words came out hoarse from crying, but at least I could speak again. "You kind of... stand out."

Edward's lips quirked in something that might have been amusement. "No one can see us."

I stared at him. "What?"

"Remember what I told you about the Memory Erasure Protocol?" He kept walking, his pace unhurried. "You don't exist in this timeline, Miss Granger. As far as this world is concerned, you were never here. And since you're not part of their reality anymore, they can't perceive you. We're walking through their world, but we're not in it. Not really."

The words should have been comforting, I guess. No awkward questions from neighbors about why I was walking around with a guy who looked like he'd stepped out of a fantasy novel. But instead, it just made the ache in my chest worse. Not only had I been erased from their memories—I couldn't even exist in their sight anymore.

I was a ghost in my own hometown.

We walked through Oakhaven under that too-bright sun, past houses where families were probably having late lunches or watching TV or doing completely normal things that I would never be part of again. Past the corner store where I used to buy candy after school and the park where Ethan had broken his arm falling off the swings when he was six.

Except in this new timeline, I had never been to that park. Had never bought candy from that store. Had never existed in anyone's world at all.

The thought made my chest ache with a pain so sharp I had to focus on breathing just to keep moving.

Edward didn't try to make conversation beyond that brief explanation. He just walked beside me, his pace measured to match mine, occasionally glancing at me like he was checking to make sure I wasn't about to collapse.

Eventually, we turned down a narrow side street I'd never noticed before. The kind of street that looked like it existed in the gap between two other streets, like someone had accidentally left a slice of space unused and nature had filled it in with cracked pavement and overgrown weeds.

At the end of the street, barely visible in the shadows cast by the surrounding buildings, was what looked like an old subway entrance. The kind that had been closed for decades, with rusted metal gates and a faded "STATION CLOSED" sign that had probably been put up before I was born.

Edward walked straight toward it without hesitation.

"Wait." I had to jog to keep up with his longer strides, the hem of my dress swishing around my knees. "Why are you going there?"

"Just follow me." Edward reached the gate and placed his palm flat against the rusted metal. For a second, nothing happened. Then the rust seemed to... melt away, revealing intricate symbols carved into the surface underneath, glowing with a soft blue light.

The gate swung open with a groan of protesting metal.

Edward glanced back at me, one eyebrow raised. "This way please, Miss Granger."

I hesitated at the entrance, peering into the darkness beyond. My every instinct was screaming at me to turn around, to run, to go literally anywhere else.

But where would I run to? Back to a house where my family had never known me? Back to a life that had been erased?

I took a deep breath and stepped through the gate.

The temperature dropped immediately, the humid summer heat replaced by something cooler and drier. Stone steps led down into darkness, lit at irregular intervals by the same blue-glowing symbols I'd seen on the gate. Edward descended without hesitation, his footsteps echoing off unseen walls.

I followed, one hand trailing along the damp stone wall for balance, my sundress suddenly feeling too thin against the chill. The descent seemed to go on forever, each step taking me further from the world I knew and deeper into something completely unknown.

When the stairs finally ended, we emerged into what should have been an abandoned subway platform.

Except it wasn't abandoned at all.

The platform was massive—easily three times the size of any subway station I'd ever seen—with vaulted ceilings that disappeared into shadow and walls covered in more of those glowing symbols. But it was what filled the space that made my brain stutter to a halt.

People. Dozens—no, hundreds of them. Except they weren't people, not really.

A woman with ram horns curving back from her temples stood near a holographic display, scrolling through what looked like flight schedules. A man covered in green scales was buying coffee from a convenience store that somehow existed down here, chatting with the cashier—who had four arms and was using all of them to ring up purchases. Near the far wall, someone who looked mostly human except for the pointed ears and the fact that they were floating three inches off the ground was having an animated phone conversation in a language I'd never heard before, but somehow the meaning felt like it was hovering just at the edge of my understanding.

I stood frozen at the bottom of the stairs, unable to process what I was seeing. This couldn't be real. This was too much, too impossible, too—

Several heads turned in my direction.

I felt the weight of their stares like physical pressure. Whispers started rippling through the crowd, voices too low for me to make out the words but the tone was clear: curiosity. Confusion. And something that might have been concern.

"Is that a human?"

"What's a human doing here?"

"She looks completely ordinary. No magical aura at all."

"Poor thing probably can't even cast a basic light spell."

My face burned. I hunched my shoulders, trying to make myself smaller, and took a step closer to Edward's back.

He must have noticed the attention because his posture shifted—not threatening, exactly, but projecting an aura of authority that made people instinctively give us space. The few beings who'd been moving toward us stopped dead when they caught sight of him, their eyes widening slightly.

More specifically, when they caught sight of the back of his neck.

I couldn't see what they were looking at from my angle, but whatever it was made several people actually take a step backward. A couple of the cat-eared teenagers exchanged nervous glances and quickly found somewhere else to be.

Edward's hand closed around my wrist—not roughly, but firmly enough that I couldn't have pulled away even if I'd wanted to—and he started walking. I had no choice but to follow, stumbling slightly as I tried to keep up.

He led me across the platform, weaving through the crowd with the kind of purposeful stride that made people automatically move out of his way. We passed more shops and kiosks than I could count, each one more impossible than the last. A store that sold what looked like bottled lightning. A food cart offering "authentic phoenix egg rolls." A newsstand with magazines in at least twenty different languages and scripts, some of which hurt my eyes to look at directly.

We stopped at what appeared to be an information desk, where a bored-looking woman with blue skin and gills was filing her nails.

"Night-watch Captain," she said without looking up. "The usual platform?"

"Yes."

She made a note on her tablet—which was floating in mid-air and appeared to be made of water—and waved us toward a corridor branching off from the main platform. "Dragon Bay Seven. Your mount is already waiting."

Dragon Bay.

Wait. What? Dragon!