West

"Taylor!"

What is he doing? His brother needed help! I bent over Fighting Badger to feel for a pulse.

There was none.

"Oh, god." I sank to my knees beside him, shivering in the cold rain. He'd come to help me and ended up dead.

His memories whispered to me, and I closed my eyes to hear them. He had died thinking of happier times, of his youth and hunting.

My phone buzzed again. I looked around, not understanding where Taylor had gone and why when his brother lay dead beside me.

"Taylor?" I shouted once more.

Another vibration rocked my pocket. Irked at Carter, I pulled it free.

Taylor doesn't exist. His grandfather is dead. He was never born.

I stared at the note. Taylor had mentioned something like that before Nell awoke. But it wasn't possible for someone who existed to suddenly … not.

History should be changed. Both twins are dead, Carter had messaged.

I sat rereading his notes, the sense of disconnect strong. Sagging against the well, I felt both nostrils ooze with blood this time, and the sharp headache accompanying them took my mind off my shock.

Taylor didn't exist. Nothing was making sense, and my emotions were at a stand still, too lost to know how to react.

"Then how can I remember him?" I typed back to Carter.

He responded, Because you and I exist outside time. Like how Doctor Who and his companions remember saving the world but the world doesn't remember it was in danger, because they stopped it before it happened? To the rest of the world, he never existed.

New tears choked me. I had thought spending my life here in the past disappointing, with Taylor providing the only potential ray of light. But alone? In a home where a father killed his daughter, a nanny killed three women only to die herself and … I just became the reason Taylor didn't exist?

Everyone was gone. John, Nell, Taylor, Running Bear … even Fighting Badger.

I sent you back to remove Taylor from history, Carter added. It was necessary to reset events I have an interest in changing.

"Oh, god." I hunched over, dry heaving, unable to fathom the idea I'd helped murder someone I cared about.

Taylor had claimed to have been working against Carter in multiple time periods. Carter had outsmarted him in the cruelest way possible.

I lay in the cold rain for what felt like hours, close enough to Fighting Badger to feel his body cool. The sense of disconnect crippled me, and there was no Taylor to pull me out of it. When I could finally move on my own, I pushed myself up into a sit. My nose streamed blood, my head pulsed, and I could barely see straight from the physical pain.