“It’s real,” Logan groans so low it’s hardly audible above the roar of the water, the raging of our tears.
Death had swallowed up far more than Gage tonight. It swallowed my future, my will to live. It swallowed the sun, the air, the world from beneath my feet. It swallowed every good intention that has ever lived because everything about Gage Oliver was good. He was my lover, Logan’s brother—our everything in between. Logan and I had sacrificed each other just to have him near us. We gave up on a future of our own so that Gage could have what his heart wanted most, and ultimately that was me. We yielded to his every desire as if he were our king, an irony we know now to be true. We worshipped him first, but Gage Oliver had been destined to rule all along. He had already ruled my heart long before we were made aware of any dark truths lingering above him like a sickle.
Yes, our sacrifices to keep Gage in our lives were great and they were worth every effort. We laid our bodies down, our destinies before his feet, and prayed he would find us worthy. Gage and his happiness were all that mattered to the both of us. Logan and I had poured ourselves out like water, trying to keep him alive, in our midst, tangible, living and breathing for as long as human years would allow and we failed. A hurricane of darkness had danced around Gage since the time of his conception. It was Emma who was drawn to the darkness first. I know this now from the letter that Kate left before she was taken back to eternity. It unlocked the wicked intent of Emma’s black heart, something I was privy to long before I ever read a single word.
A gasp gets locked in my throat as I dip my fingers down between my breasts and come up with a limp envelope, the ink bleeding through, the parchment stained pink as if Gage himself was acknowledging the sins brought to light within it.
Logan pulls it from me, studies it for less than a second before slipping it through the crack in the glass door, easy as mailing a letter. I don’t need it. I’ve tattooed Emma’s sins over the landscape of my heart. Every last word is easily accessible to me to view with disdain over and over again. She is culpable in all of this. She has been from the beginning.
Was it important? he asks telepathically as the water beads us far too lightly to ever wash away Demetri’s crime from our clothes.
My hand cups his neck as I lay my head against his chest. Nothing is important anymore.
The boys, your life, the Factions, he counters.
All at a great loss without him. You and I both know that. A dull breath escapes me and I have no desire to take another. Breathing no longer seems necessary in this dark hole we’ve plunged into. Words are useless. And now so are we.
The pain hits its crescendo, and in doing so it becomes oddly sublime. Logan and I float over our grief as if it were the sky, the sea of grief below us is dangerously thirsty to suck us to the bottom. Its icy arms are hungry for us, and it is ever so patient.
Logan takes up my hand, threads our fingers shyly as if it were the first time, and in a way it’s exactly that. Death had stung like a scorpion and launched us back to the beginning, to a horrible place that neither of us wants any part of. The truth is, Logan and I were content in our shared misery, our shared denial of one another. Gage Oliver usurped our love. We became less so he could be made greater. Gage had become an idol, a god when we weren’t looking, and now we’re left without anyone to properly worship. It seems selfish, childish, improbable to imagine a life without his full presence permeating our every realm.
So many people, entities, beings, had played a part in Gage Oliver’s death. So many people, entities, and beings would ultimately have to pay. My celestial mother and Demetri rounded out the list. My mother and her stone of lies. She gifted us the number seven, and now I’m going to gift that very stone right down her throat and make her choke on it, but not before I coat it in his blood. If I should be forced to drink the sweet wine from his marrow, it’s only fair she should, too. And then there is Demetri. Of course, he had his wicked talons in this. I can see his cloven hoofprints stamped all over Gage Oliver’s demise. He wanted this. He lived for this. Emma was his charge. I won’t forget to gift her a healthy portion of my revenge. It will be my pleasure.
Logan shakes his head, pulling me from the moment, pulling me to my feet. He unzips the back of my dress and pulls off every last stitch of clothing that’s melted to my flesh. We’re standing under the duress of the deluge of God’s own tears as the water washes us clean. Gage disappears from our clothes, our skin, our hair, and swirls down the drain as if he never existed. Logan holds me as tears and pain wrack my body. We engage in a morbid dance, begging the water to heal us, but the tears won’t stop coming. The pain barrels through us like a gunshot over and over. Our agony never runs out of ammunition. Something tells me that it never will.
People will pay for this. Whoever played a part in the destruction of my love will pay a hefty, hefty price.
And when I wake up in the morning—I will only see red.
The entire universe is red with revenge.
All night I toss and turn, moaning, crying out in pain, in ripe agony as Logan struggles to comfort me. The moon slices through the curtain to my left, shining over my tear-stained face as if to highlight it. The warmth of its light singes me. My entire body is on fire as the darkness comes and sucks me down into the murky arms of sleep.
Hours bleed by like minutes. My eyes spring open wide, and the room takes on a purple hue. Nothing has changed, and sleep cannot find me. Logan takes my hand, leads me wordlessly downstairs where the walls, the floors, every room in Whitehorse gleams resplendent, shining, gloriously rich and alive with color as if the house itself were looking forward to this season in my life with breathless anticipation.
Here I am, in my early twenties and twice a widow. I’m the poisoned spider that kills everything she loves simply by encircling my heart around it.
Logan speeds us through the living room, pausing under the doorway before stepping outside and landing a simple kiss to my lips. This is the house that Logan built on the foundation of our love. He’s inscribed his heart over the arch of the entry to our future home with words that read I love you more than the heavens love the sun and the moon. Logan reads the words along with me, and a dull smile curves to my lips.
Loving me is a curse, and we both know it. He leads us down the porch where the signature Paragon fog has mysteriously rolled away, exposing a night full of stars like diamonds tossed haphazardly against a deep violet backdrop.
Whitehorse is built just steps from the water. Logan turned himself inside out financially to build on the last remaining beachfront property that Paragon had to offer. The cool sand hits our feet as we run down toward Silent Cove and sit at the base of the waterline. The waves lap over the damp sand with their incessant clap, the whitewash snowy and glowing ethereal under the strict duress of the stars. The moonlight dances in a broad line across the water, creating a river of silver over the navy Pacific.
“I am a killer,” I whisper into the night as if the world needed to be apprised of this. The words tumble out like a midnight confession, and I can’t help but laugh in the wake of the truth.
“Skyla,” Logan whispers directly into my ear. His hot breath races down my neck, and I shiver trying to maintain my focus on the majesty of the water. And then I see it, a speck of dust growing in size at the foot of the horizon, making its way toward us, tall and stately with the frame of a man, his dark hair shining white in the light.
“Oh my God.” I run. I run past the waterline, over the metallic floor of the sea straight toward the love of my life, the light of my heart, my beautiful, beautiful husband.
Gage Oliver glows resplendent as bright as any heavenly body. His countenance radiates a beauty that makes my heart instantly splatter all over this twisted universe, and he laughs as he joins me in our race toward one another.
“Skyla,” he shouts for me, his voice decidedly sounding like Logan’s, and it makes me wonder. But not even that warning pecking away in the pit of my stomach can
quench the desire, the extreme drive in me to reach him. We run for miles, for hours, for days, for weeks until he’s upon me, those familiar features so very stunningly beautiful my body demands to collapse in adoration.
“Skyla”—he catches me in his arms, and I wrap my limbs around him tight, my face buried in the rock-hard girth of his chest—“I love you. You know that. I love you, and I’ll never stop. It’s impossible for me to stop loving you. No matter what I say or do, you must always know this truth. Do you understand me?”
I nod through tears, my face still embedded against him. My lungs beg for mercy, and I come up for air, my face poised to the angel before me, and a scream gets locked in my throat. Gone is the boy I once knew. I’m met with yellow eyes, scales for skin in shades of moss green and toxic purple—black as pitch. Gone are the features I know and love, replaced with a snout so fierce, cheeks set high, a forehead broad and wide as flint. My body goes rigid. Fear of this monster before me has my every limb in stark paralysis. Can’t move. Can’t breathe. Not a single sound emits from my throat.
The beast catapults us into the sky, embeds us between the stars that highlight how hideous he really is. The great maw of his mouth opens wide, and I slip through his arms as they transform into enormous webbed wings. I fall fast toward the earth, my hands gripping onto his barbed tail, slicing down my arms in suicide tracks as I catch on the thorns. A line of blazing flames shoots from his mouth a mile into the distance, so fierce and horrific, and yet I can’t deny the morbid beauty. Buried beneath the demonic roar I hear his laughter, sharper and far more sinister than ever before. And I feel him here. Gage’s very presence resides in this monster. It has encapsulated him so completely. This is who he has become. An unholy beast.
His eyes flicker to mine as if he heard me gift him the deformed moniker. His tail thrashes from side to side until I’m dislodged completely, free-falling back to a planet that will exist long after Gage Oliver has left me. My eyes remain locked on his as he rises ever so high into the stratosphere, his laughter incessant. His fire lights up the night like noonday.
“You are not evil.” It comes out less than a whisper, unconvincingly as a rush of icy air struggles to cushion my fall. The fog has returned and embraces me. It licks my ears with the remembrance of who I am, who Gage and I were together. This island and its companion of permanent precipitation have borne witness to who Gage and I have been. It reminds me of who we are in the most critical sense.
“You belong to me,” I shout as he grows faint in the distance while gravity does its best to claim me. “You belong to me!” A ripe anger enlivens deep inside of me. My entire body arches to reach him as I let out a mighty roar. Wings rip from my flesh, painfully bursting to life with a span that stretches as far as the east is from the west. And I rise. I rise to the sky at harrowing speeds, my rife anger the fuel I need to propel me to that dragon in the sky. “You belong to me,” my voice echoes with a thunderous power all its own, causing the stars to tremble in its wake. “You are mine, Gage Oliver.” I rise up to meet him, his yellow eyes focused so intently on my own. The beast stills, the flames recede from his wicked mouth as he swoops in close, his darkness only seems to make my light shine brighter. “You are mine forever, and evil will never win. You belong to me.”
The beast bucks softly. His eyes expand as his cavernous beak opens wide and out comes the blast of a furnace—wildly hot, sublimely excruciating, a bite of agony so rich you could rewrite the history of pain in this one spectacular blinding moment. Gage is incinerating my heart, my soul, my flesh, and I am instantly consumed by the flames.
I wake with a start, sitting straight up, panting, drenched in sweat, only to realize it was all a dream. Relief as deep and wide as a river fills me, rushing into my desperate heart as I struggle to catch my breath. My eyes blink rapidly, trying to make sense of the room forming around me. It’s my bedroom in my mother’s house. The Landon house. My hand bats the space next to me, hoping to find the promise of a body, and someone sits up beside me. A girl. I gasp as I swallow down a scream.
“Chloe?” I pant as I struggle to confirm it’s her. Perhaps we had rewound time. Or perhaps the most blessed thought of all—everything that had happened in the last year entirely was just a bad dream.
“It’s me, Laken.” She bounces toward me, pulling both my hands into hers. “Skyla, you had a nightmare.”
“What day is it? Is Gage dead?”
The moon bleeds through the vellum curtain and washes her features blue. Laken is a Count by nature, and yet somehow everything about her warms me at the moment, right down to the icy hue of her skin. I’m so relieved to wake from that nightmare. The last time Laken was in my bed was just after I witnessed Gage at the bottom of Devil’s Peak when Demetri had whisked him away. I thought he was gone forever and Laken was here to comfort me. If that’s the point in time we’re at, then the last two years must have been a dream. Thank God Almighty. I touch my hand to my belly. I must be pregnant with the boys. My God, Sage! I’ll plead with my mother to let her live, and life will be infinitely better than any reality has ever offered me.
“Skyla?” Laken glides her cool palm over my forehead as if checking for a fever. “It’s the night of the boys’ birthday party. I just saw you at Demetri’s. You do realize what’s happened, don’t you?”
Her words sting like a knife in the gut as I crash against my headboard. “Yes.” The word comes out lower than a whisper. “Gage—he’s gone, Laken. Who did this? What animal do I have to kill so I can sleep at night?”
“What are you talking about? Where did Gage go?” Her voice trembles out those last words, but her attention drifts momentarily as she glances over at the wall as if she were afraid someone was about to walk right through it.
I open my mouth to utter the words, and an agonizing cry sails from my lips instead. My spirit groans inwardly as I await my husband, my other half to rouse from the dead. Please, God, let it be so. I cannot fathom the alternative.
“My God.” Laken dive-bombs over me, rocking me steady, with her quiet voice whispering the words it’s okay over and over in my ear. “Tell me telepathically, Skyla.” Laken cups my cheek with her hand, and it feels so loving, maternal even. Laken will make a wonderful mother one day. “What horrible thing happened to you tonight, once I left?”
I don’t bother with words. Instead, I show Laken a play-by-play of the macabre events I was privy to this evening. Once I get to the final scene—my limbs thrashing in my husband’s cold blood, she pulls her hand away and turns her head as if she were about to be sick.
“Skyla, no.” Laken squeezes her eyes shut tight, convulsing with a silent sob. “I’m so very sorry. I didn’t realize. I can’t ask you to help me. I had no idea what hell you were going through. My God, I wish I could be there for you.”
“Laken?” A stillness fills the air, and suddenly it becomes apparent something is very wrong outside of the obvious. “What kind of trouble are you in?”
She sucks in a quick breath, her head tipped back into the moonlight as if she were making an offering to it. Her face shines with tears like a mirror, and I can’t help but admire her beauty even in this gut-wrenching reality. “I’m sorry, Skyla. Coop will be here soon enough. I don’t doubt that.” She glides in close until her knees are over mine, her hands digging into my shoulders.
“Skyla, I need you to really pay attention to me.” She offers me a slight shake until my eyes focus in on hers. “I may not be able to be there for you for a while. Listen, and listen to me good. I may only have one chance to tell you this.” She swallows hard as if it pained her to speak the truth. And on a night built on horrible truths, everything should hurt everybody just a little. It’s only fair. I can’t shoulder all this agony the universe has doled out to me on my own. It’s cold-hearted and twisted to want to make the entire world bleed when the wound is your own, but at the moment it offers a modicum of satisfaction. “I know you will grieve Gage, and I want you to.” She takes up my
hand. “But I don’t want you to repeat history and lie in bed for months. I may not be able to help you heal, but I will say this. Be there for your boys. Be there for them, for Gage. He would want you to.” Her eyes darken as she glances to the window a moment. “And don’t you ever forget how it felt to have his blood dripping from your flesh. Somebody did this.” Her speech grows fierce and pressured. “Somebody dared to end his life. It’s up to you, Skyla, to bring him justice. Do it for you, and do it for the boys.”
Her eyes burn with fire, and for a moment I think I see Wesley, Gage’s lookalike brother, flickering in her eyes as if it were him she wanted me to slaughter. Wesley isn’t exactly Laken’s favorite person, and in a sad way I’d venture to guess he’s still pretty high on her shit list. But a love like theirs doesn’t just up and disappear because someone’s heart turns to stone. Wesley’s love is strong as iron, hot as hell, and for the life of her, she can’t escape it. I’m not sure she really wants to.
Laken gasps as she lets go of my hand like plucking it out of a fire—as if she heard my very thoughts. And then it hits me. I just played out the events that unfolded last night like a movie and judging by her reaction she claims to have seen them. She asked me to relay them to her telepathically. That’s strictly a Celestra gift. Laken is a Count. For some reason, unknown to me, Laken is able to listen into my thoughts. The entire world is upside down and a part of me accepts this.
“I’m sorry.” I pull her back, and her flesh feels strange as if my hands were numb. I can’t truly feel her. “You’re right. I have grieved Gage before. I’ve barricaded myself in my bedroom for far too long, and right now I don’t have that luxury. The boys need me, and I need them. But they need Gage, too.” A ripe anger rips through me like a gas line exploding. “I’m going to do everything I can to get him back. Demetri can’t have him. He’s mine.”
“He’s yours.” Laken offers a slow smile, all teeth as her body slowly disappears, and I marvel at Laken as the Cheshire Cat. “Go after him, Skyla. Think of the Factions, Skyla.” Her voice is a distant echo. “Just one more thing. It’s Angel and Tobie they want. They want to mark them and promised they’d let me go. But I won’t give Tobie up.” She gives a tired blink, her eyes disappearing right along with her face. “I don’t know how, but I will survive this. Cooper will make sure of it.” Laken said Cooper, but I heard Wesley simultaneously as if she had the power to say both at once.