Trying to balance an inverted pyramid on the tip of a sword, that was what it felt like. The equilibrium was fragile. The calm is an illusion concealing a frozen fury and a mind twisted by its own ruin. Both Katherine and Lucía knew it.
In that instant, an unspoken agreement formed between them, a shared glance, a slender waist held by a steady hand, shoulders braced and ready to leap. They had to make the most of Jonathan's fleeting clarity, but neither of them fooled herself into believing they were safe.
Katherine still felt drained. Something inside her that once burned like a bonfire had reduced itself to embers, barely grasping for a second wind. Even so, the redhead clung to every warm memory she had shared with the Blackthorn brothers and drew strength from them. The arm wrapped around her waist became both her anchor and her solace. She knew that if she burned through the last of her energy, she would collapse straight into Lucía's embrace.
What it took for Katherine to find her voice again was simply seeing Jonathan's ghostly face, still confused, still wounded, so... alone.
"I'm Jonathan, Katherine. Do you remember me?"
Faster than she had ever seen a ghost move, Jonathan stood before her. His face twisted in pain for a moment, then returned to a state of uneasy stillness.
"Kath, is it really you?"
Katherine felt Lucía's body tighten, muscles usually hidden beneath softness now registering in full. All the strength of her frame had been drawn taut, a bullet in the chamber, waiting for the trigger. And it was Katherine whose finger hovered over it.
It was strange, this feeling. Unfamiliar to Katherine, but somehow both comforting and empowering.
"Yes, Jonathan. It's me," she said, pushing unnecessary thoughts aside.
Unlike in life, Jonathan's expression actually softened the moment he realized it was Katherine who had answered. For a breath of time, the cold in the room retreated. The lights ceased flickering. The rattle of metal drawers fell silent.
"Thank God it's you. I'm so alone here. It's so cold and it hurts so much. Why does it hurt, Kath?"
Even with the eerie blankness of his features, the swirl of confusion, fleeting relief, and creeping doubt carved into him made it feel like someone had stabbed Katherine straight through the heart. This was always the part she hated most about meeting a new ghost, the one thing she would never be ready for.
Lucía responded as though she had heard Jonathan's voice. But the way her eyes drifted past his general direction made it clear to Katherine that her companion still couldn't truly see the threat before them. That didn't stop her words from bringing comfort.
"Keep going. You've got this, Little Red."
Katherine chose to ignore the nickname, one she didn't particularly love, just as she ignored the way Lucía's warm breath against her ear sparked a flutter in her chest. Feeling all kinds of things during stress was normal, or at least that's what she told herself in the moment.
"You're not alone anymore, Jonathan. I'm here now." Katherine finally said, after gathering her courage and carefully weighing her next words.
"I know you're in pain. I know you're scared."
She swallowed hard, knowing what came next might be difficult.
"Jonathan, you need to try to remember. Something happened to you. That's why it hurts. I need you to remember."
Her gaze locked onto Jonathan's, feeling the chill deepen across her skin. His presence flickered in and out, becoming more tangible, then dissolving again, like reality itself couldn't decide whether to hold him in place.
"I ran..."
Jonathan's voice was a distorted echo, torn by the void of his agony. It didn't come from his mouth but from everywhere at once, seeping through the air like the morgue itself was retelling the story. And somehow, that was exactly what it was doing. Both Katherine and Lucía caught a glimpse, a nighttime landscape, warped and fleeting.
"No. I didn't run."
He corrected himself, though he still didn't sound sure. Katherine felt her chest grow heavier, her heartbeat slowing, far too slow.
"They left. I took the shortcut."
The lights flickered again. For a brief second, Katherine and Lucía saw a blurred vision of Jonathan separating from his friends the night before. Frost cracked over his corpse, spreading across the metal table, reaching nearly to the circle of salt beneath their feet.
"I saw the trees… but something else saw them first."
His spectral form wavered, wrapped in a vast shadow that resembled what had stalked them in the woods. Katherine watched the edges of his figure break apart, his wounds pulsing as if determined to finish what had started the moment he was killed.
"Amber eyes. So close. So close. I couldn't see anything else."
Jonathan kept speaking in a daze, completely unaware of the effects his memories were having on the room, or on himself.
Lucía tensed. Katherine felt her at her side, her grip firm around her waist, her breathing controlled yet alert. She couldn't see Jonathan, but she could hear him. And each word seemed to confirm something she had already feared, a pair of amber eyes glinting behind Jonathan's ghostly form.
"Howls... were they before, or after? The moon was high when I felt the claws..."
A shiver ran down Katherine's spine. Her own vision from the night before echoed in her mind like a haunting refrain.
"The creature... massive... beastly. Amber eyes..."
Jonathan continued, lost in a trance from which he couldn't escape, as the shadow behind him sank spectral claws into the wounds on his body, the missing piece of a gruesome, blood-soaked puzzle.
"It didn't kill me."
Jonathan sounded bitter when he said that.
"It left me there."
The fury in his voice surged.
"It left me to bleed out in the cold."
That final sentence carried the weight of someone who had suffered an injustice and refused to forget.
Katherine felt her heartbeat falter. Lucía's grip on her waist tightened even further. Jonathan had begun to remember, but remembering also meant facing the pain that had ended him.
"I called for help."
Those words came when the rage finally faded from Jonathan's voice.
With every sentence, the cold in the morgue crept in deeper. This time, Jonathan didn't scream. He didn't curse or demand answers. He simply told his story, a story no one should ever have had to live. His voice now cracked, emptied.
"But no one came."
The lights flickered faintly. His voice echoed against the metal, seeping through the edges of the morgue as if his suffering still clung to the air.
"At first, I could move. Just a little. Not enough."
"The blood... kept flowing."
Another chill coursed through Katherine. Her skin reacted as though she were right there with him, as though she could feel the cold earth beneath her body while life slipped away.
"It felt warm at first. Then it didn't."
The lights began to dim, just as Jonathan's life had dimmed that night.
"I was fading. But I could still speak."
Witnessing that pain, the raw sorrow and despair in his face was its own kind of torture. Katherine and Lucía had to endure it because this was the price of the truth.
"I called for Mom... I called for Samantha..."
"I was cold."
Katherine swallowed hard. The tragedy had become too tangible. For all the times he had intimidated, annoyed, and provoked her, she knew he had never been a bad person. And seeing that, in the end, he'd been just a scared boy tore at the redhead's heart.
"Mom... Samantha, my love... I'm so cold... Where are you?"
The question hung in the air, unanswered, as if it still waited for someone to hear it. The loneliness Jonathan had felt in his last moments flooded the room, and for an instant, even through the salt circle, Katherine could feel it squeezing her heart.
She felt the weight of silence press in around her. And precisely because of that, she noticed Lucía's subtle movement. No words, no dramatic gesture, just a quiet shift in posture. Katherine felt the change in her grip, the way her legs bent ever so slightly, her breath growing slower and more precise. It wasn't that she wasn't affected. Her focus was simply wired toward protecting them both rather than giving in to emotion in that moment. Still, her experience led her swiftly to a conclusion when Jonathan's story came to an end.
"He's trapped," Lucía said at last, her amber eyes fixed on where she assumed Jonathan's ghost would be.
Katherine blinked, still caught in the visions, trying not to associate Lucía's eyes with those of the beast that had brutalized Jonathan and abandoned him to die alone. The eyes were similar, yes, but the care and protection those eyes offered her made it impossible for Katherine to see them as the same.
Lucía's voice remained quiet, steady.
"It's because of how he died. That's why he keeps saying it 'I'm alone, I'm cold.'"
A new kind of shiver crawled along Katherine's skin. Jonathan wasn't just trapped in death. He was trapped in his final thought, in the last sensation he had felt before life left him.