Just to test her, I sent a wave of energy to the vanity, knocking down a vase. I knew she couldn’t see it fall from where she was.
She jumped, wrapping her arms around my neck. I had to smile. “Just testing you. You can still hear. I’m sure it’s the shower. You must have some water in your ears.”
I stood with her in my arms and carried us out of the shower. The vase had broken into several pieces across the floor, but it didn’t take more than a thought from me to pull it all back together and allow it to sit on the vanity as if it had never fallen.
I felt Willow tense in my arms. This was one of my new insights, something I learned in The Realm, something that my Phoenix past amplified. It was nothing more than moving energy, but that was harder to explain than it should be.
I sat her down. “Safe now.”
She never bothered to respond. With the towel still wrapped around her, she walked to the mirror and leaned in. I caught a glimpse of my reflection, the mark on my chest. It was amplified now, looking more permanent by the moment. Before she assumed I ran out and got a tattoo of a dagger on my chest, I moved my body to the closet to find dry clothes. Right as I pulled my shirt on, I felt terror belt through my soul. In that beat, I flashed back to the bathroom—Willow was in the corner, blocking her face with her arms. I yelled her name over and over. Nothing.
“Willow!” I thought.
Her arms fell, then her cagy stare met mine, then the mirror.
“Willow, talk to me. What is going on inside right now?” I said as tenderly as I could.
Right as I touched her arms, I saw it. In her mind, for a brief few seconds she was back at the palace, in the shower. The mirror had come to life, she saw Chara burning, we saw Libby screaming our names.
“I’m going mad,” she thought weakly.
Shit. Illusions. Neptune was wrapped within Saturn. Donalt was trying to break her down from the inside out. The day I destroyed that ghost could not come fast enough.
“Then we are going to go mad together,” I thought back as I guided her out of the bathroom and into our bedroom.
She wasn’t going to like this, but right now Willow Haywood was going to tell me every detail of the nightmare she’d just had.
Chapter Eight
~ Willow ~
I was so dizzy that I couldn’t keep my balance. I was at war with my mind—at war with reality. Everything that I had overcome, everything that I had found a way to deal with was fresh again—but this time it wasn’t the same. Instead of being fearless, furious, I was terrified. I couldn’t understand how I’d found the courage to walk the path I had then, but now I feared it as if it were going to happen again, if something worse were going to happen to me.
I couldn’t figure out how I’d gotten home, how I woke up in my nightgown and not dressed. The last thing I remembered was pulling that door open to that sour smelling booth. Just the thought of that, the idea that I’d been in Esterious without Landen, petrified me. Why would I do something so foolish!
It was like there were two people in my mind right now: one telling me to toughen up, that we had moved past all of this; and another begging me to see how fragile life was, how precious what I had with Landen was. I’d let that voice win and squashed the dominant one as I grasped Landen.
I tried to catch his intent. I could only vaguely feel one, and it, along with the piercing stare in his blue eyes, told me that right now he was not going to allow me to hide from the breakdown I was embarking on.
I lost it in the bathroom. My mind thrust me back to that bloody scene in the bathroom in Esterious. I felt the heat of the fire in the mirror, heard the screams coming from the glass. I saw Chara burning. I should have been strong enough to push that flashback away, but instead I heard Justus in my thoughts, telling me that the end of Chara was coming. That if I did not let my soul rise and ego fall, it would be a bitter end. Now that I think about it, he never really promised any kind of blissful end or gave me a call to action.
Justus had to have done something to me, given me something to cause me to dream so wickedly. How I got here was still a mystery.
Landen was on his knees in front of me, moving his hands across my legs. He was trying to calm me down—I could feel that in his energy caressing me—but all he was doing was causing that craving to be closer to him to erupt.
God, he was gorgeous. Those eyes, that strong profile, those dimples that seemed to appear less and less. I wanted to feel his skin against mine again. I wanted to feel him inside of my mind, body, and soul. That was all I wanted right now. It was like I knew he was the only one I trusted to usher these newfound fears away. He was the only one that got me, that let me go insane when I wanted, let me be who I wanted to be when I needed to be.
My eyes watered when I realized that telling him I loved him, telling others he was the only choice, had become a line, just words. I had spent every moment alone with him, speaking of what was to come next instead of cherishing the little things. Like how his lips felt as they moved across my skin, how he watched for any response I would make as if he were learning the silent language of my desires. I was always looking for the next reason I might lose him instead of appreciating that I had him.
I leaned into his lips, but his hand reached to cradle my face, holding my lips a breath away from his. He leaned his forehead to mine.
“Willow, I can’t bear this distance anymore. I don’t understand what’s going on with you. In the shower…in the shower you took my breath away.” The pad of his thumb traced the base of my eye. “I saw something looking back at me that I craved to see for so long.” He swallowed. “Tell me what’s wrong. What’s going on inside. What kind of dream caused you to wake up and pull a 180 on me?”
He furrowed his brow when I didn’t respond to him.
“Talk to me, Willow. What did you dream?”
“It wasn’t all a dream.”
I could see the anger in his eyes, but I couldn’t feel it. I wanted to feel it. I was craving anger as if it were air. I would give up every emotion but love and anger if I had any control over my jacked up soul, but for some reason right now I only felt love and fear, two emotions that made little sense together, not after everything Landen and I had shared together.
“Did you leave here?” he asked in a disbelieving tone.
I glanced away. “Justus was saying crazy things. Calling me a sovereign. Telling me my ego was in charge, that my dad didn’t even want to have me because he knew how dangerous my life was going to be. That I would end time in Chara. I…I followed him to Esterious.”
Landen was as hard as a rock. Every muscle in his body was rigid. His eyes were fierce. I could swear I could see flames rippling in them. That insane maternal feeling over Justus came forth instantly. I didn’t want Landen to hurt him.
Landen must have felt that. He let in a breath as confusion overtook his stoic image.
“What happened?”
I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t let him know that in no way, no form, in five years or a hundred could I ever give him a family. That Donalt had robbed him of ever having a legacy with me.
A dizzy sensation slammed into me. It felt like the floor fell fifty feet and rose again. The only thing that was stable was Landen. I threw my arms around his shoulders and hid my face in his neck, fighting the wave of nausea off. I was going mad.
“Show me,” he thought as his strong hands eased across my bare back. I didn’t want to show him anything. I wanted to pull him against me and feel every part of him against me. I didn’t want him to leave my side for battle, like we both seemed trained to do recently.
Hearing the unspoken words of my body, his lips started to move down my neck. I sighed as I felt his hands, which were as warm as fire, begin to explore me.
I wanted to stay focused on what I had invited to happen, but right as his hand moved down my stomach, my thoughts flashed back to what happened with Donalt, where he touched me, and what happened just before that, Adonia, wha
t she said, the other side of the story Justus had told me about our fathers.
Landen’s seductive caress halted, and his lips closed against my skin as he raised that angelic stare up to meet mine.
My watering eyes told him that he had read everything right. Donalt was going to destroy me one way or another.
I saw pain in his eyes and felt so guilty for putting it there.
“He cannot take anything away from you or me. That path is not in our future,” he thought as his eyes raced across mine and he seemed to realize something for the first time.
I felt myself gasp. I wasn’t sure if that meant he never wanted a family anyway or he knew we would never survive long enough to consider the idea.
“You think I have days like Justus said.”
He reached for the center of his chest, and his eyes moved away from me. I had hurt him again.
“We. Willow. We may only have days. We may only have moments. But that doesn’t matter—”
“I’m not done,” I blurted out, fearing for the first time ever the end of my all-too-young life.
Right as I thought those words, his eyes met mine. There was an uncanny hope in his stare. You would have thought I had told him that I loved him for the first time ever.
“I have a lot to tell you. A lot to show you. I want you to get dressed. Pack a bag. When I get back, we’re leaving.”
I felt a sharp pain absorb me. Everything—both arguing voices in my head—screamed at me not to go to Esterious. I also knew I didn’t want to go back to my home dimension, to deal with Saige, Skylynn, or anyone else for that matter. I didn’t want to go to Pelhan’s world and hear some slow advice that wouldn’t make sense to me until the long run. I didn’t want to run anywhere. I didn’t want to be anywhere but with Landen. In his world. In his life.
“I’m not leaving Chara,” I thought reverently.
“No. We’re not.”
I thought maybe he meant he was going to take me to the beach house again, but I was almost positive Charlie had moved into there. I had no idea what he was thinking, but I had a horrible feeling that he was not looking forward to it.
As I focused on him, searching for his intent, I managed to catch a glimpse of the one intent that terrified me: he was going after Justus.
“You can’t hurt him. Swear you won’t hurt him.”
There was a mix of confusion and jealousy in his stare. “I just want to understand what he was doing in Esterious. I want to know what that has to do with you.”
“Everything bad in Esterious has to do with me.”
“Willow…this trial, it will take place here.”
“What? Who do we have to move? What is happening?”
“Shhh,” he thought as his lips met mine. “Just trust me right now. I’m sure Drake will have something to deal with, just as Phoenix and Draven will…they will happen at the same time, but you and I will be here.”
“Hiding?”
“No.”
“Not crossing lines?”
“The lines had to do with the spells. This, what is before us, has to do with us. It is something I should have told you about long ago. I should have told you a lot of things.”
That definitely didn’t sound good. Landen and I shared everything. I admit he had been a little off the last few weeks, but the look in his eyes was not a promising one. I felt my gut plummet.
“You aren’t going to tell me about another Skylynn, are you?” I could not keep the pain out of my tone. I didn’t know where that was coming from. Before, I just disliked his past but thought fair was fair. The pain I was feeling now was unspeakable.
He looked away. I could have sworn I read a silent curse as it left his lips, but his eyes met mine right after that. Though there was the same regret he always had when Skylynn was mentioned, that devotion he poured into me was there, too. “No, I’m going to take you away, explain everything.” His hands squeezed my thighs. “I won’t be gone more than an hour,” he thought as he leaned in and kissed my forehead, only to vanish from my sight a second later.
I pulled the massive towel around me as I stared blankly forward, trying to remember what happened to me today, how I got here. I tried to tell myself it was all a dream, that nothing I thought happened had really occurred.
I knew I was lying to myself. Something had to have happened; there was no way I could have gone so drastically from indifferent to this humble and scared person I was now.
I couldn’t sit there any longer, lost in myself. I flew through my room, getting dressed and packing my travel bag with fresh clothes. More than once, I felt that wicked, dizzy sensation, the one that caused the floor to fall, only to rise again. My ears were still full of water, at least the sound of it.
Calling my father to ask what was wrong was out of the question because I wouldn’t be able to hear him. I left the travel bags on the porch and confiscated Landen’s Jeep.
I wasn’t entirely sure which roads to take to reach my parents’ home. I’d always walked over the hills to get there. I cringed as I decided to take the Jeep off-roading. Even though winter was approaching, the fields were still full of flowers. Oddly, most of them in this late season were green and blue. I felt a stab of grief hit my soul as I remembered having to search for those to put on my friends’ dying bodies. What was rare then was in abundance now.
Right as I went to top the second hill, I had to slam on the brakes. Right in front of me was a girl in a black cloak.
My hands shook as I opened the Jeep door to help her, or at least figure out what she was doing out here. Right as my feet landed in the field, the day turned to night. Nervously, I looked forward, knowing that was not a girl that had stopped me, but an image. My eyes grew wide as I saw Evelyn, the girl’s body that I had resided in, the girl’s body that was nothing less than agony. Why was she here?
I edged closer, seeing her image outlined in the headlights of the Jeep that I had not turned on. It was the same scene that I had lived before, the one I saw with Landen.
My heart thundered in my chest. Evelyn looked right at me, saying something I could not understand or hear.
I moved backward, knowing this could not be real. This was just like what happened in the bathroom. My mind was stuck on rewind, or something wicked like that.
All at once, the field was full of souls, all wearing dark cloaks, all ashen. The flowers in the field wilted before my eyes, and the bright starlit sky became overcast. Each of the beings started to move closer to me, each with a pleading gaze in their eyes, each reflecting nothing less than terror in their eyes. What didn’t make any sense at all was that even though I was afraid, I wanted to take that emotion from them, I wanted them to be at peace. That internal battle was the only thing stopping me from figuring out how to do that. Part of me was still grasping for anger, like it was a mighty shield—the other was trying to understand, solve this.
I could almost hear them, saying my name. With my jacked up hearing, it sounded like they were speaking to me under water or through walls. I could make it out if I really wanted to, but I didn’t want to. I hated myself for wishing that my images would come back to me, for wishing that I still had a means of helping souls that I would never know. I couldn’t help these people, and if they were the same as Evelyn, then they were not real images, but ghosts. Souls I wanted nothing to do with.
They started closing in around me, saying my name. It became hard to breathe instantly. One reached for me and clasped my arms. That was when I lost it, that was when I screamed.
Then all at once, I heard my name clearly, unshielded by any filter of water. My scream stopped, and daringly I opened my eyes, which were squinted closed.
It was daylight, and the field was empty with the exception of Justus, who was standing before me, holding my arms and letting his cool gray stare meld into mine. He looked like a guardian angel.
“How you doing, Sovereign?” he asked with a crooked smile.
I reached for his face. His eyes glin
ted with recognition; he saw something inside of me that I could not begin to understand. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“You did nothing wrong. You’ve stayed hidden, but you have to come out now. You have to trust my king to love you.”
I furrowed my brow. He called Landen a king. A king of what?
“What did you do to me?” I asked with a tremble in my voice.
“It wasn’t me.” He tilted his head. “Are you embracing fear right now? Feeling it for the first time?”
“Terror. I’m going mad. I had a wicked dream that played out everything I had been through—but it wasn’t the same. This time, it was terrifying. Now I keep getting flashbacks. I couldn’t hear before now.”
He gave me one nod of understanding.
“What did you do to me? Undo it!”
“I have no such power over your emotions.”
“How did I get home? Who changed my clothes?”
“You vanished,” he said with an odd gaze in his eye. “I can track you anywhere, but you were not on this plane. The second I felt you back, I found you in your bed. Someone must have called you home.”
“This is home. What are you saying? I died? I was zapped around by God himself? Some kind of guardian angel?”
“I don’t know. Do sovereigns have such things?” he asked with a slight grin.
“I don’t know why you are so confused, think I’m some kind of queen, but I assure you I’m not,” I said, glancing away.
“If you are having flashbacks, feeling and seeing things as if they were new, then you are letting your soul rise. Your soul is feeling those experiences for the first time…this is good.”
“My soul was there the first time. I dealt with it then. Why should I have to deal with it again?” Could karma really be this cruel?
He shrugged. “I would think to rule fear, you have to understand how it felt.”
“I know fear.”
“You recognize it, but you have suppressed it. You have kept your focus forward and never absorbed your path.”