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Prologue

Scott's eyes opened slowly, reluctantly. A glance toward the morning sun peeking through the slit in his bedroom curtains felt too bright. Scott wished it would fill him with the same hope it used to. Either that or just go away. There was no room for in-between.

Instead, he waited.

It took only seconds for awareness of his new reality to crush itself heavily into his chest and he sighed in resignation.

"It's still true," he muttered, letting his head fall back into his pillow and staring up at the ceiling.

Scott had repeated this same ritual morning after morning for the past 8 days. Once the Nogitsune was defeated and his best friend's freedom had been won, there had been little to think about other than their losses. Their losses, their guilt, their various maladies of grief that had shattered what all of them had come to think of as their pack. His friends, all suffering.

Two of them dead.

The services for their fallen friends - one a hunting warrior, the other bad boy turned good, both fighting for the same cause – should have signaled finality.

The final nails in the coffins, so to speak.

I'm getting morbid, Scott thought to himself with indifference when that analogy crossed his mind.

That finality was supposed to mean they were supposed to get on with their lives. Begin to leave the rest behind them as they moved on.

There was no moving on. Scott was stuck in his own private hell, a limbo of nightmares. He didn't care to move on. Not right now. He was pretty sure the rest of the pack, his friends, were in similar states. It wasn't that he didn't care, really; it was that anything but the guilt and the loss was felt at a distance, something he had to work at to reach, push through the painful things to consider that there was more going on outside of his heart that he should be aware of.

Every day, ever night, Scott went to bed eager for the oblivion of sleep, anxious for whatever numbness the quiet and the dark can bring when he slipped into the grayness of slumber. Sleep had become his sanctuary, awareness had become his hell. Every time he begged inwardly for sleep, Scott closed his eyes and prayed that the next day's morning light would reveal that it had all been a horrible nightmare.

It never did.

It was still true.