Wilder’s steel blue eyes drank her in as he took the paper from her.

“Don’t look at me like that. You can do this.”

“I’ve got a block,” he said under his breath.

“Well, I’m not asking you to be creative. Copy it so I can connect the dots,” she demanded.

Wilder stretched out on the floor and used the screen to guide his hand.

“I don’t think they should be focusing on this…we need to help them move on,” I said to Skylynn.

She raised a single eyebrow. “I honestly assumed you would come out of that library with a different determination. Phoenix convinced you to move on?”

At the sound of his name, the guys looked at me and my skin turned beet red. Normally, by now the room would be a solid block of ice. They knew something was off about me, that someone had broken through my icy shields, that the idea of him was powerful enough to make me melt.

“I’m good with repeating my day. If they do, they will get more and more twisted. I don’t want them hurt.”

Skylynn’s blue eyes looked over me gently. She felt sorry for me, guilty for keeping Phoenix away from me, but I didn’t feel that way. If I knew who he was before, this would be harder. The old memories of him, along with last night, would keep me warm for years to come. If I’d known him longer, I wouldn’t be able to walk away, to boldly tell him to go on his way and leave me be.

“They are more involved in this than we first thought,” she said with a nod to Gavin and Mason. “They weren’t blind at their death. They knew what you were fighting before you did,” Skylynn said with sympathy.

“That’s not what you guys said before,” I argued.

“We are doing our best to piece together what happened before your death, and at first it looked to be an accident, but now it seems as though it was premeditated.”

“So they will not go off and fight their own losses?” I asked. I was ashamed of feeling grateful that I would not be alone in death.

Skylynn glanced at all of them. “Weeks before your death, where was your energy focused? Where did your thoughts wander when they had nothing else to think about?” She locked eyes with Mason. “Was it your brother?” She moved on to Gavin. “Your sister?” Then to Wilder. “Where?”

Their stares all seemed to scream, NO! at once.

“Where was it? Don’t lie to me. This is important,” I demanded.

“You,” they said one after the other.

“Don’t think we’re crazy,” Mason said, reaching for my shoulder. “We thought Rasure had you under some kind of demonic spell. That she was the reason for the ice and stuff. We’ve been really deep into this.”

“Cadence knows, too?” I asked in a ghost of a whisper.

“No,” Gavin said with derision.

I glanced back at Mason. “I told him about what she did, but he already knew.” He answered my unasked question, almost painfully.

“How?” I asked Gavin, reaching for his hand.

“Just did.”

“For how long?”

“Since before Halloween. We’ve been breaking up for a long time now. She blamed you for it. I wouldn’t tell her what Mason and me were working on and that drove us further apart. She thought it was about my sister, but it wasn’t. It was just easier to put up with her than to fight it out at the end.”

That didn’t make any sense to me. Gavin was one of those people that wanted all or nothing. If you didn’t want him, if he didn’t want you, or if there was any cheating going on, he was long gone. Cadence wasn’t the only girl he’d been with since me, so I knew his pattern. What didn’t make sense was why he put up with it for the better part of a month, why what I saw last night happened. That just wasn’t his style, to have friends with benefits.

I didn’t want to push him about it, so I just let it drop. By then, Wilder had finished the sketch of what was on the screen.

Without a doubt, it reminded me of what I saw this morning. There was even what I thought was The Fall centering the sphere.

Skylynn fell to her knees and crawled across the floor toward Wilder. She took the marker and connected the trees. The way she connected them created a pentagram, one that my entire home, with the exception of Rasure’s wing, sat on.

“How freaked out should I be right now?” I said with a gasp.

“This is why she could never hurt you here. This house was protected,” Skylynn said in utter astonishment.

“Not from evil—she lives here,” I argued.

“No, she lives in a wing outside of the pentagram. I bet that is why she wanted it built there. She was also hoping someone else would break this force around the home. Maybe she’s not the big fish I thought she was,” Skylynn said, almost to herself.

Her eyes rose to meet mine, and I saw an unexpected element of respect there. It was as if she were in awe of me. That didn’t make any sense, though. She was the angel, shadowed soul, whatever—not me.

“Were you born where I found you that night?” she asked me.

I shook my head no and swallowed. I’d never advertised exactly where I was born because I didn’t want it to make me out to be more of a freak. “I was born in the memorial garden.”

Every Falcon that had died over the last two hundred years was buried in that garden, most of them inside marble walls. Beautiful artwork was in there, and it was even temperature-controlled. A marble observatory with a constant burning fire was built just before the tomb. That was a sacred place for me, a place that I would go to and just stare at the stars, watch the reflections of the stained glass window dance around me.

My parents thought my birth mother was a runaway, hiding out in there for shelter or something. When they couldn’t find her family, they had her buried in our family tomb. It was their way of saying they would watch over her and the gift she gave them forevermore.

“This garden?” she asked, pointing to the one Rasure almost destroyed. It rested at the peak of where those rings of roots connected. I nodded once. It looked like the same spot.

Skylynn rolled up the paper in her hand.

“Where are you going?”

“To argue for your life. Something tells me he’s in a better mood than the last time I saw him.”

“You’re wrong there,” I said with a shaky voice, remembering how I’d left him hanging.

“We’ll see,” she said as she vanished.

“Who’s in a better mood?” Mason asked me with his familiar boyish smirk.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but you guys are the last people that I could tell what’s going on in my head.”

“Why is that? We could reopen the club, pass some tips on—make sure he sticks around.”

“Not a good idea on any account…”

Gavin reached for my hand. “I never felt your skin this warm before. I have never seen you look uncertain. That’s a good thing,” he said as his fingertip traced the falcon on my wrist.

“What else were you guys looking at on here? Anything? I have to figure out where this key goes,” I said as I turned it in my hand.

“Even if you do, you’re missing half of it,” Gavin said, glancing at it.

“What?”

“Yeah. I told you it almost looked like it,” Mason said, reaching for it. He ran his finger across the other side of it. “The key I found had two sides. You’re missing half.”

“How sure are you?” I asked, knowing I wasn’t at all sure. I still thought I developed the film I’d found in the camera.

“Very,” Gavin said to agree.

“Freaking A. Which clock did it fall out of?”

“The one on the mantel,” Mason answered.

“Of course it did,” I muttered, wishing I was still in the room with Phoenix. “At least I can shatter that clock if I wanted to. I assumed the other half of the key was still inside.”

“I don’t think it’s the same clock. I think it’s a replica,” Gavin said, changing the images on his screen. When he did, I saw the images that I thought I’d developed before only this time when Gavin zoomed in, the clocks I’d moved out of this house, at least one of them, were in every image. Even the one on the docks of the ship showed the small clock strapped down on some cargo in the background.

“I analyzed these left and right. They were made by different clock makers. I think the one in the library is meant to throw you off, that if you did put that key inside of it or whatever, something that should not happen will.”

“Why would she switch out the clocks?”

“I don’t know, but she did,” Gavin said, moving the screen to another image, one that had my parents standing in front of the one on the mantel. He zoomed in and out and pointed to various parts on the clock. They were close, but not identical.

“She put a hit out on us because we had that key, not because we took the clocks. In fact, because you took the key, she knew you were onto her.”

“I’m not onto her. I have no idea what this is about, why she just won’t leave my house.”

“She thinks you know, that’s what our problem is,” Gavin said with contempt.

“No. Our problem is that we’re dead. You guys need to stop focusing on this and let go.”

“Not a chance,” Gavin muttered as he changed the screen a few more times, looking for more images. “We need to go through your pictures, the ones you took in this house, figure out when she switched it, if it was before or after that wing was added. If we get a time frame, maybe we can track down the real ones. Your parents inventoried everything that came in and out of this house. It would take some time, but we could figure it out.”

“I’ll have to ask Cadence where most of those are.”

They all looked at me at once. “What? She was helping me with my portfolio. She knew it would be hard on me to go through the old images, so she was going to weed through them.”

“Interesting,” Mason said, nudging Gavin.

“You two stop it. We’re dead. Let your grudges go already. Yeah, so maybe she has commitment issues, too. She’s damaged. Always has been.”

“Tell me this,” Gavin said, letting his gaze meet mine. “Why is she so focused on bringing up our past? Why is she so interested in getting us to work through our ‘deep down’ emotions?”

“Um...gee...I don’t know, maybe because she is majoring in psychology?”

“She has asked more since we’ve been dead than she did when we were alive,” Gavin asserted.

“We’ve been dead for all of two days. Seriously? You’re mad. You should be. But if tomorrow never comes, would it matter, I mean really and truly matter?”

“You know she’s Rasure’s pet,” Mason chimed in.

“She wasn’t her pet. She dealt with her so I didn’t have to,” I argued back.

Truth be told, if it weren’t for me Rasure surely would have manipulated the hell out of Cadence. Cadence didn’t grieve for the loss of our family the way I did. She was sad, don’t get me wrong, but it was just another loss, another almost family for Cadence to add to her list. Rasure used to try and make me jealous by giving Cadence more attention, but I didn’t care. About a year after my family died, Cadence came to me and said that Rasure wanted to know how I was dealing with things…she then asked me what she should tell her. She became my voice. I couldn’t lie, so when Rasure asked me or put me on the spot, Cadence was my voice. She had to play the devil’s advocate to protect me.

“I’ll ask her if she knows anything about the clocks. You guys are obviously not going to rest in peace, but I’ll make sure she does. After the life she’s had, the last thing she needs is a tormented afterlife.”

Gavin closed his laptop. “We are due to drop off those clocks. I’ll see if I notice anything different this time around.”

“You guys are being shifted around, too?”

They all stood. “We’re trying to stop it, but my theory is if our minds keep taking us back to the same scenes, then there is something we are missing or need to understand,” Gavin said.

“Yeah, like we’re supposed to be dead,” I said under my breath.

Mason squeezed my shoulder as he followed Gavin out, leaving me alone with Wilder.

After a second or two of awkward silence, I spoke up. “Look, I’m sorry for that crazy ex-girlfriend thing I pulled. I’m sure it aided in killing us in the long run. This sucks. I know it does. Let’s just not hurt each other anymore.”

He grinned. “The only time you ever showed any emotion toward me was when you knew I was hooking up with someone else. Why is that, D?”

“Um, listen,” I said as we both rose to our feet.

He raised his hand. “I know. Friends. Arm’s length. But D, you need to stay grounded. Don’t let the others get you riled up. Ending Rasure has become a game and addiction for them and had been long before death. This is not a game. This is our reality, and I seriously doubt stepping on the playing field with Rasure before you know all the rules is a wise thing to do.”

My breath became fog, and the room was instantly covered in ice as I took in that warm, uncalled-for scent he always carried.

“I never expected…to feel this way about you,” Wilder said under his breath, as if it were a curse. He stepped forward and pulled me against him, leaning his forehead against mine, ignoring the shiver that my touch sent through his strong body. “Fate brought us together for a reason.” He raised his fingertips to trace my jawline. “It’s so we can protect each other. I’m not going to let Rasure hurt you, no matter how bad it gets…remember that.”

Fearing that he would freeze to death, I moved slightly away from him. “I’ve been promised that if I stay on this path, it will be wicked, that I’ll become vengeful. I don’t want that for you, for any of you.”

“Wicked is my gig,” he said just before kissing my forehead, causing the room to freeze even more. He walked away then.

In frustration, I fell back on my bed and reached for the key that Mason had left there. I studied every part of it, wondering if that missing piece was still in the lake, and if so, how I would ever find it. As my hate for Rasure consumed me, the ice began to thicken.

Just as I was about to go and inspect the clock that was here, Cadence walked in the room holding a warm cup of coffee.

“Looks like you need this more than I do,” she said to me.

I smirked, remembering this exact same conversation. She really didn’t know, and I wasn’t going to tell her, either. She would be just like the guys, vow to fight at my side.

“Your head looks better,” I said, noticing that the wound on her forehead wasn’t as red and swollen as it was before. I guess her body was healing, on the outside at least.

“Crazy. I woke up with this. Gavin is becoming violent in his sleep.”

“Yeah, you guys looked pretty aggressive when I came in.”

“He’s deflecting. Every time I try and get him to talk about his past, the next thing I know my clothes are across the room—not complaining, but geez, he needs to face this. Maybe you should talk to him, like start by talking about how you handle grief.”

“He doesn’t want to talk about it, and Cadence, that is not the issue between the two of you. He knows about you coming on to Mason.”

Her skin blushed, making her strawberry blonde hair seem redder. “Mason is making up crap to come in-between us, to make you mad.”

“I don’t care who you come on to,” I said boldly, locking eyes with her, letting her know I knew she came on to Wilder, too. “But you need to make peace with that, make peace with your own past.”

“Yeah, fine, so what are we doing? School is cancelled, I guess. No one was there. You want to go to the coffee bar early, work on your portfolio—what?” she asked as she set her coffee down on the edge of the bookshelf and started to layer on another jacket that she had tied around her waist.

All at once, the room became warm, really warm, and I felt a flaming sensation of energy course through my body—two quick beats.

“Maybe I don’t need this, you’re getting control,” she said, glancing back at me. “Make that hot...hello, and where did you come from?” she said with a mischievous grin.

Nervously, I glanced over my shoulder to see Phoenix standing right behind my bed. I looked back at Cadence. “Um, the darkroom. Can we have a second? I want to work with the portfolio before we go to the bar. I want to look at all the boxes. Will you get them ready for me?”

“You sure that’s a good idea? I mean, it’s kinda cold outside,” she said, glancing from me to Phoenix, clearly not knowing if he was aware of my curse and not wanting to let my secret out if I wasn’t prepared to share it.

“I’m sure. I’ll meet you in the playroom.”

“Ok, then,” she said, blushing slightly, nervously letting her hair fall over her face before she turned to leave.

I waited for her to close the door before standing and turning to face him. Slowly, holding my gaze he walked around my bed. When he reached my side, he raised his long fingertips to my forehead and outlined the place where Wilder had kissed me goodbye. I saw the fiery jealousy in his eyes. “It was innocent. We had to close a door,” I whispered as my chest rose and fell rapidly. His touch was so seductive that it was taking away my ability to breathe.

“He had to kiss you to close that door?” he murmured as his fingertips traced the outline of my cheek, then my lips, one by one. I gasped and swallowed nervously. I had to find control.

“You know what? Whatever,” I said, looking away from him. “I don’t like repeating myself. I already told you who my beats were.”

With far too much caress, he pulled my chin up so I would have to look at him. Within that beat, his warm, inviting lips were on mine. Rapture. That was the only word I could fathom to describe how insanely awesome it felt to feel his flesh move against mine. Slowly he pulled away, but not before gently biting my bottom lip. “I’m not mad,” he whispered.

“Then get that look out of your eyes,” I said, daring to meet his sultry gaze.

That made him smile. “Never the bashful one.”

“Life is too short for that nonsense.”

“That it is, Love,” he said as his grin grew.

“You’re in a good mood all of a sudden. Did Skylynn show you what Wilder drew?”

“Why would I care what Wilder drew?” he asked as he reached his hands for my hips and slowly pulled me closer.

Guardedly, I asked, “What is it, then?”

“You know,” he said quietly as one arm held me against him and his other hand began to trace my side with his fingertips, sending warm chills through my body, “living a long life has granted me at least one lesson.”

“Hmm,” I said, tilting my head and slightly squinting my eyes. “One that mine was surely not long enough to learn, I suppose.”

“Hopefully, it will be,” he said with a ghostly grin. “You see, Love, you’ve always pushed me, known exactly how to drive me to the edge and leave me there—giving me one of two choices: to either fall for your plea, or stop and think.”

“I never begged you for my life…you have your reasons for not saving me, or whatever.”

“You can’t become what I am,” he stated with absolute certainty, a heated warning in his gaze.

“If I understood what you were, then I would be able to tell you if I agree or not. Either way, I’m not going to let go.”

“Let’s hope that was the truth,” he whispered.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

He smiled tenderly. “It means that one way or another, this choice before us will soon cease to exist.”

“Do tell,” I said as I tensed. For all I knew, he’d found a way to make me let go.

“Well…either I win the battle I’m in now and simultaneously make Rasure weak enough for you to kill her, then you move on…or I lose and I won’t have to worry about you facing death’s door alone.”

“Such grim outlooks. Call me crazy, but I kinda hope you lose.”

“No, you don’t. At least you wouldn’t if you knew what was at stake.”

I knew exactly what was at stake. I knew that people like Rasure were breeding evil, and that evil was threatening to take over every ray of light in both realities. I knew that the universe was out of balance, that only a few were even aware of this war, that this war had stolen everything from me. I was only teasing when I told him I wanted him to lose. I wanted him to win. I wanted this all to be over with. I wanted the life I started with him so long ago back.

“Maybe so. Option three: you fight your war, and I fight mine.”

“Option four: you’re healed, and we have more time to figure this out.”

I had to wonder what ‘this’ was. Was it us, or this war he seemed prepared to die in—could he even die?

“What are you?” I whispered.

“My name…an eternal soul who lives life on the edge of every wrong line to cross. When it’s too much, when the guilt, grief, and anger become too much—I destroy myself, only to be reborn, all the wiser, all the more determined…but I can choose death…at any time.”

“Your name is Sebastian,” I said with a quiver in my voice, knowing he wasn’t always what he is now, wondering which boy had actually caused my beats, the one in the past or this one before me.

“At one time, Love. You are one of two aware today that know me by that name.”

“What’s her name?” I bit out as instant jealousy consumed me.

“Guardian,” I heard a new voice say. It startled me so much that I threw myself in Phoenix’s arms. He held my head against his chest as he laughed under his breath. “I see we still share the common demon of jealousy.”

Finding my calm, I turned to see another boy. He was as tall as Phoenix, built like him. His hair was dark and wavy, and he had the bluest eyes I’d ever seen.

“Guardian,” I gasped as the memories I had of him flooded my mind, quickly leading to the end, to the point where I was supposed to watch over this manor and his lover. “I’m so sorry.”

Guardian’s eyes questioned me as Phoenix’s body tensed next to mine.

“For...?” Guardian asked as a shy smile dared to show, revealing the sweetest dimples. I vividly remembered that smile. He was the sun where Phoenix was the moon, and for every negative Phoenix ever said, Guardian had a positive. He was just as fierce as Phoenix, but he was fierce because he had no sense of self-preservation…as if he thought he could live forever, like the sun.

“I don’t know where she is. I didn’t keep her safe.”

Guardian’s eyes flipped to Phoenix, giving him a knowing glance before calmly looking back at me. “I found her, Genevieve. Long ago.” His eyes were troubled, enough to make me wonder if that girl he loved was in the same kind of trouble I was in. Guardian had changed, too. He now carried the fire that Phoenix had. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what either of them had been up to since the day I last saw them.

“How clear are the memories you have of me?” Guardian asked.

I glanced up at Phoenix to see agony in his stoic stare. “Crystal. You’re Sebastian’s younger brother. You are precognitive, at least, you dream vividly. You had passed through The Fall. You knew there was hope on that side. You didn’t want our world to seal that passage, for you knew it would rock the balance of our universe. Sebastian agreed. You left with him and promised that if you had one dream, one bad feeling, that you’d return to us.” I squinted my eyes closed. “The very end is a bit hazy.”

Guardian reached his hand for my shoulder. “We were just too far...we were too late...” He was giving his condolences to me.

“What’s going on, Mate? Shouldn’t you be doing your thing?”

Guardian sorrowfully locked eyes with Phoenix and moved his head slightly to the side as if to say no as he let his hand fall from my shoulder.

Phoenix’s hold on me tightened. “There is nothing you can do?”

“I can heal, but I can’t bring anyone back, not when they’re this far…I’m sorry. We have to find another way. I don’t like your option two very much.”

He could heal? Was he serious? I was starting to fear the supernatural path these two had walked in my absence.

“The same for all of them?” Phoenix asked, ignoring that last part Guardian had said.

Guardian slanted his head, asking Phoenix for a private word. After a warm rush of air, my eyes found them both across the room. As Guardian spoke in a whisper to Phoenix, every part of Phoenix tensed in what could only be rage.

I felt like I was waiting for the judge to decide my method of execution. I was starting to think that Phoenix was not sending me to death so he could fight a war, but because he thought what he had become was too dark and dangerous for me to become. I couldn’t figure out how that could be any worse than a vengeful spirit.

I started to take a step back, make my escape, but then all at once my lawyer arrived. Skylynn appeared next to them with the drawing she had in hand. I would never be able to repay Skylynn for always being my voice.

Both Guardian and Phoenix seemed shocked, confused, and maybe even angry at what Skylynn was showing them.

Fearing that my lawyer was losing her plea, I began to edge back to the door. One beat later, I was in Phoenix’s arms and had no idea how I’d gotten there. “Going somewhere, Love?” he asked, lacing his fingers through mine.

“I have half a key and a clock to find, and a date with a half-frozen lake.”

The nonchalant way I’d mentioned the impending repeat of my death seemed to anger him.

“Genevieve,” Guardian said gently to me. “Do you happen to remember anything about this house, how it was moved?”

My growing turmoil was this sensation of standing between a past and the present. My life as Indie told me this house was two hundred years old, had always been in this one place. My memories, however, along with my gut feeling, were telling me that that was a lie, that it was built in a different reality. I kept hearing Wilder’s voice in my head, telling me I needed to hold on to the life I had—what was real in that life.

“I was told it was built here two hundred years ago.” I glanced at Phoenix. “I don’t know how or why it is not where you left it.”

Guardian pointed to the points where the trees were on the paper. “Do you remember planting these trees, anything you could have said over these trees?”

My befuddled look told him I didn’t. “Why are you guys bothered by my trees?”

“They are very similar to something that is the center point of the war Phoenix and I are fighting. We just don’t understand why or how…you and this house are here.”

“Twin realities,” I said, crossing my arms, agitated that they were acting as if I were on the edge of sanity. Maybe I was, but I was not an idiot. “The Fall. The star that centers it. One side is dark, the other is light. We are from the light and stuck on the dark side now. I’m not an idiot. I’m not slipping away. More than half of me is here. In fact, more of me is showing up every second. I don’t know what you two have been up to since I last saw you, but it’s clear to me that both of you are more than human at this point. I would love to debate how a home built for a family I never had mimics the universal war we have been at for longer than any of my memories can stretch, but listen to me: Rasure is trying to seize this home, and I will not let her have it. All of you should be backing me up on this point, especially considering that at one time you called it home.”

Guardian raised his brow as a grin spread across his addictive visage. I could see Skylynn grinning out of the corner of my eye.

“I swore to you that I would handle her,” Phoenix said with a sigh.

I was making this hard on him. I knew far more than he thought I did.

“Listen,” I said, looking back at Guardian. “I’m not exactly the normal girl you boys left behind, either. I have odd traits that cause the space around me to freeze when my emotions get off point, and when I touch things I see memories of the past. Sometimes just standing in a room will make memories come to life. To help you understand why those trees are there, I will touch everything but them.” They all seemed to question me at once. “I try not to touch living things. I don’t want to hurt them. I’m sure in one of the libraries I can find the original plans that are said to belong to this house, but I’m not looking for that now. Not until I find what I’m on the hunt for.”

“It’s all right. We’ll figure it out,” Guardian promised. He glanced at Phoenix. “What do you need me to do?”

“You have your own thing.”

“This is in my path,” Guardian stated dominantly.

“How is it in your path—because it’s Skylynn’s fault?” Phoenix snapped.

“It’s in my path because it’s you. Nothing will be undone without you.”

“You’d fare well without me for a while, Mate.”

“You know that is a lie. For the record, I’m not a fan of option one either.” That was the plan where I kill Rasure then move on.

“Why is that?” Phoenix asked.

“You know why.”

“I need it all,” Phoenix said under his breath.

Frustrated, Guardian looked at Skylynn. “You’ve known her for awhile, is she brighter or darker?”

“Getting brighter every second. She’s more real now than ever before.”

“Um, hello,” I said, raising my hand. “Standing right here. Can you drop the third person?”

Guardian bit his lip to try and stop his smile. He knew it was only infuriating Phoenix. He tipped his head toward me. “You...um...you’re angrier. That could be a sign that you are slipping, with or without how aware you are of your past lives.” Guardian tilted his head as he furrowed his brow. “But as far as I can tell, the anger is justifiable.”

“Thanks for the insight, Mate. Don’t you have someone who is waiting on you?” Phoenix asked Guardian with a frustrated snap.

“I do,” Guardian said, letting out a sigh. “I understand if you can’t be there tonight.”

“I’ll be there.”

Guardian locked eyes with me and gave me a subtle smile, then a brisk shot of warm air took him away.

“Need a minute,” Phoenix said to Skylynn. She looked down, then vanished.

Shyly, I looked up at him. “Sounds like you are having a hard time getting votes for your options.”

“I don’t need votes. This is my life.”

“I thought my life was the only one in question?”

Seriousness took over his expression. “Listen…there is a wolf hiding within the sheep.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you can’t trust anyone.”

“Is this your jealousy surfacing again?”

“This is me trying to protect you,” he said as he reached to trace my jaw with his fingertips. “Genevieve…it terrifies me to think how close you have lived to evil. At this point, living or not, I don’t know that you would be able to tell friend from foe.”

“I think you have forgotten how to trust me.”

“I trust you. I don’t trust this war.”

“I cannot help you debate this war if I do not know every detail. You asked me if I trusted you. I trust the boy I knew so long ago. I have no idea what time and circumstance has done to you, but I know that time has left me bitter, empty, and full of grief. We had to fight apart for this long, what is the difference now? Why can’t you just leave me be?”

I heard his sharp intake of breath and regretted saying those last few words. I said them trying to sound stronger than I was, but clearly he took them as if I saw him as some old fling that had resurfaced in my life.

“If you think I can walk away, act like I didn’t discover that you have been here, blind to me, all this time…then you have no idea how I feel about you—and you have proved me right the one time I wanted you to prove me wrong.”

I couldn’t figure out what he meant by that. I couldn’t figure out how to tell him that the memories of him that were becoming more real by the moment were life to me, an awakening, that unknowingly I’d been waiting for him and that I didn’t want him to leave. That I didn’t regret finding him now because even if I turned into a dark, vengeful spirit I would have this memory, these emotions, that they would be my anchor to my humanity.

When I didn’t say anything, he looked to his side. “I have to go. Skylynn is going to stay with you. She’ll have to leave for a bit, but it will be after the frozen lake repeat…listen to her. She’ll keep you safe.”

 

 

Chapter Eleven

 

 

The second he vanished, the room iced over and I felt my heart break in two. Maybe he was wiser than me, knew that the less time we spent around each other, the better. Maybe that’s why he was leaving Skylynn to babysit me—someone he clearly didn’t care for. One thing was for sure: my guys never would have left me like that. I was getting a bitter taste of my own medicine, watching someone walk away right after they basically said that time and reason would not allow us to be together.

I swallowed my pride, clutched the key, and began to make my way to the playroom. Just before I reached the door, Skylynn appeared.

I couldn’t look her in the eye. “Listen, I know you have better things to do than watch over me. Go help them fight or whatever.”

“You’re the only friend I have, the only best friend I’ve ever had in my existence…where else would I need to be?”

“Flattered. I don’t know, with them, I guess. Looks like you guys have your own private club or war to deal with.”

“It’s not private, and you, apparently, are very much a part of it.”

“He doesn’t want me there. He pushed me off on you, someone he clearly disagrees with.”

“Do you want to know what Phoenix’s issue is?”

“Not really. I don’t need any more Karma.”

“He thinks you’re an echo, a shell, that the real you is gone, left the night of your death. The fact that Guardian could not bring you back tells him that he is right, that you are too far gone.”

I still could not get over how much Sebastian and Guardian had changed. I felt the grief I always carried in my soul intensify. I knew that the past that was ricocheting in my mind was gone forevermore. We had all escalated to some odd supernatural level. I was grieving for lost innocence, for a past I could never get back.

Bravely, I locked stares with her. “If that boy needs any more proof that I am me—dead or not—then there is no hope for him, and I don’t have time to deal with it.”

She grinned. “You’re messing with his head. Keep doing that. I know that nothing has changed. You may be a little confused, but you are holding on. As soon as he figures that out, he’ll get past his own dark thoughts.”

“Why does he despise what he is? Why does he not want me to be that?”

“He likes being a phoenix, all too well, and therein lies the problem.”

Those words made my stomach cave in. I guess I was reading him the wrong way.

“He likes it because it’s a perfect place for his dark energy to gain strength. I haven’t figured out why he is holding back yet, but I think he doesn’t want it for you because he thinks it will stifle the light you are, that your light has already dwindled down to nothing.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Opposites attract. Soul mates come from light and dark; he was the dark, you were the light. Now you’re both bordering on the dark side. Basically, in some supernatural way you are very ill.”

“I’m dead,” I said with an odd grin on my face. “Ill? Really?”

“Only the vessel,” she said with a sigh.

“So he thinks because I lived my life in anger and grief that I’m no longer bright or whatever?”

“Somewhat. But I disagree. I think unconsciously you have hidden yourself in this life, that behind that ice wall is the boldest, brightest energy that has ever existed, that no change—whether it be death or into a phoenix—can harness it.”

“I don’t know enough to agree or disagree…he was a stranger to the life I’m clinging to.”

“He was not a stranger. You’ve screamed his name out in your sleep since the day I met you.”

“You watched me sleep?” I asked, mystified, wondering exactly which name I screamed out.

“At times, when you were scared.”

“Good to know,” I murmured.

“I’m really sorry I wasn’t there when you needed me the most. I still don’t understand why I didn’t feel that you were in pain or scared.”

“How would you have felt that anyway?”

“I spelled you to me. I have no idea what blocked me from you that night. The only thing I can think of is that you were not in pain, and you were not scared. You fought hard.”

“Still fighting. I need to figure out this key, clock, Rasure thing.”

She held her hand out, telling me to lead the way. “You can search for anything on these grounds, within the house, but you can’t go out.”

“I went out yesterday.”

“Yeah, and yesterday I didn’t know the house was protected.”

“I’m going to have to go back to that lake. I think the other half of that key is in there. This time, we will all focus on it—know where to look.”

“The second you zap out of here, I’m bringing you right back. Phoenix was not kidding. There is a wolf among you.”

I wasn’t going to argue with her about what I would or would not do. I knew she had something to do with Phoenix and Guardian later, that if I really wanted to, I would go then.

Before I went to the playroom, I wanted to go downstairs, look at that old clock, maybe see if I could find Ben or my other brothers and sisters down there. I needed to know for sure how much time I had left, and I could figure that out by listening to them. I hoped Ben had gotten his way, that a machine was giving my body life right now.

Right as I went to go down the stairs, I felt a bolt of energy stab me. It felt like razor blades were on the inside of my body, turning in place. I screamed in agony just as Skylynn pulled me back.

“What the hell!” I shrieked. As soon as I was away from the stairs, the pain stopped.

Skylynn stepped down one step. Along the creases where the next step began, she picked up a handful of white powder. “Salt.”

“That much salt hurt me?”

“No. It’s lined all the way across. Someone didn’t want you mingling with the others downstairs.”

“Salt? How worried should I be about pepper?” I asked dryly.

“Very funny. Salt and iron keep away. I don’t like the fact that you’re being corralled,” Skylynn said with disgust laced in her tone as she glared down the stairs. She must have decided that staying with me was more important than figuring out why I was being forced to stay up here. The ‘who’ was not a question. It was Rasure, no doubt about it.

“You don’t like the fact that someone else is corralling me?” I said with a snap.

She ignored me, instead scooping up what was on the floor, breaking the line of it, and causing it to vanish into thin air. “Let’s save those floors for later, when the living are sleeping.”

“Give in to Rasure, who obviously put that there? Is that what you mean?” Going down there after my brothers and sisters had left defeated the purpose.

“When someone strikes you, they expect you to strike back. You can’t be predictable right now because she’s counting on that to undermine and ultimately defeat you.”

“Fine. Then I’m going to go and figure out when she moved those clocks. You can’t come. Cadence will know something is off if my imaginary friend comes to life. I want her to pass on.”

“She won’t see me. That is why I’m here instead of Phoenix. I can hide myself. Side effect of having a shadowed soul.”

I could see the pain in her eyes. Any fool could see that she hated how invisible she was to most. If I made it out of the mess I was in, I was going to make it a personal goal to set her free from whatever this was that she was fighting. “I’m sure whatever time and reason your soul needs to come back is close.”

“We’ll see,” she said with a fake smile.

I looked down as I made my way to the playroom on this floor. It was the room that all of my sisters and I would hang out in. It had a massive flat screen TV that took up nearly an entire wall, oversized couches and chairs, tables for us to do our homework, and every gadget or electronic device known to exist. The décor in the room held relics from across time like street signs and old radios. It reminded me of a really trendy restaurant, and that could have been because of the bar stretching the length of the back wall. It never once held alcohol, but it did hold its fair share of ice cream and late night snacks in the refrigerators under it.

I didn’t spend nearly as much time in there as Cadence did. I only really went in when the guys wanted to play video games or I needed the space to lay out my work for school.

When I got there, Cadence had five white boxes beside the bar and was laying out the shots I’d taken—that wasn’t even half of the images I’d captured.

She glanced up at me when I walked in. Even though Skylynn was right next to me, she acted like she didn’t see her, which wasn’t odd. Skylynn had been by me most of my life, but a ghost to the others.

“Where are the rest?” I said, noticing these were from the last six months.

“This is everything you took for your project,” she said, straightening the piles out. Cadence was a bit neurotic about organization, everything having its place.

“I’m not working on my project. I’m trying to take an inventory of the things in the house so I know what’s mine.”

“Indie, do your project. Worry about that when your case is settled. Aggravating Rasure is not going to do anything but give her more leverage over you.”

“That woman has nothing to hold over me, she never has,” I said as I went into the enormous closet that was in the back corner of the room. I found the box from my sixteenth year, the year that the addition was finished. I had the foresight then to photograph this entire manor. I wanted proof if anything was missing after she ‘moved in’ to her own wing.

When I started to lay out the images, I quickly discovered they were the wrong ones. These were from when my family was alive: Christmas, birthdays, every special and ordinary event in our lives.

“What the hell? Where are my images?”

“I—I don’t know...maybe Rasure switched them out,” Cadence said as she focused on my painful expression. “You want to talk about this? How do those images make you feel?”

“They make me feel like someone is trying to screw with me. And they’re cold-hearted.”

“Because they are digging up these emotions?” she pressed.

“No, because all of these were cataloged into a story, books I was going to give our family—it took me years to build them—and someone just ripped them apart and stuck them in a box. For what? To hide that Rasure has taken heirlooms from this house, heirlooms that are priceless to her because the energy in them doesn’t belong to her.”

My response seemed to leave her baffled. I figured she would be angry, too. I guess it was a good thing she wasn’t.

“Is that all, Indie? You’re not upset about looking into those moments?” she asked, once more glancing to the image in my hand. It was of me when I was five, sitting on my father’s lap as my mother stood behind him.

“Why would I be upset? I feel bliss when I look at these shots. That is the glory of film. It captures the emotion,” I said with a weak smile as I remembered every moment of that day and felt warm bliss ease through my soul.

“And the glory of theater is becoming someone else. You’re on stage right now, Indie, and playing the part rather poorly. You’re upset. I know you are. You were robbed. Life was cruel to you long before they left. You were cursed with nearly killing everything you touched. For God’s sake, you were born in a graveyard—no one even bothered to claim your mother’s body. You need to face this.”

“On stage? Really? Call me crazy, but being adopted by the Falcons is hardly a bad break, and neither is having a birth mother with the foresight to deliver me into their arms. And the cold…I don’t think that was a curse anymore.”

A look of disgust came over her innocent image. “It’s isolated you.”

“No,” I said, nonchalantly glancing to where Skylynn was standing. “It shielded me, and it pointed to the one person that would give me warmth.”

“Is this about Wilder? Has he reignited an old flame in you? If so, you need to know that that is an illusion and it will fade just like it did last time. He’s been less than faithful to the memory of the two of you.”

“It’s not Wilder,” I said under my breath as flashes of Phoenix—new and old—exploded in my mind.

“You’ve been seeing someone else? That guy that was in the darkroom? Why would you not tell me?” There was an accusing pain in her tone.

“I’m not the only one keeping secrets around here,” I said as I glanced over Cadence, trying to see this different person Mason had said she was when she wasn’t around me.

“So now you’re deflecting, too. You need to face this,” Cadence said again as she crossed her arms.

“I have faced it! What is your problem? Why are you trying to get all of us to go back to our darkest days?”

“Because it’s healthy.”

“OK then, where are your pictures? Where are the images of the underfed, terrified girl my parents brought home? Where are the files that outline the abuse you went through before then?”

“Don’t go there,” she said with a glare.

“Doesn’t feel good, does it? If you can’t take it, don’t dish it out.”

“You’re mad about Mason and Wilder, and you’re taking it out on me.”

“If I was mad about that, then you would be the only person who deserved to have that anger directed at. Why would you do that to Gavin? You know how he feels about ‘all or none.’ And why would you set Wilder up with some girl and not tell me about it?”

“So you’re not over him.”

“I was never into him, not in that way,” I said, slamming the images down onto the bar. The room began to freeze over, simply because I was beyond frustrated with her. I was ready to tell her she was dead and that she needed to get over it and move on.

“You could have fooled me.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you play that ‘I’m-broken-and-can’t-be-adored’ card to a T—quick to tell your darling interests that you’re cursed just so they will fight harder for the girl they can’t have.”

“‘Quick’ my ass. They figured it out.”

“Yeah? How’d they do that again?”

I was so furious that I violently shoved the box with my family’s images causing the pictures to fly across the room and rain down around us.

“Three boys in six years...that hardly makes me out to be what you are insinuating. How many boys have dared to get close to you? Double my number and that is just the ones I know about. I was glad when you started dating Gavin because I knew he would calm you down, allow you to see that love is not a physical act.”

“How would you know if it was, Miss ‘you-can’t-touch-me-or-I’ll-freeze-you-to-death’?”

That was the coldest blow she had ever thrown at me. At first, all I could do was stare at her as if she were nothing more than a stranger. “I’m not fighting with you anymore. Life is too short. We have different ways of seeing the world around us, and that’s fine. You were by my side through my darkest years. You were the sister God spared me. I’m grateful for that. Grateful for you. I love you.”

“Why does it feel like you are telling me goodbye? Stop trying to weasel your way out of this argument. Let’s get it all out now.”

“I told you life is short. We all have to go our own ways at certain points.”

“I see. So Rasure was right, you’re going to kick me out, too. The money and power have gone to your head, and because I’m not the sister you want me to be, because I made a few mistakes, hurt one of your ‘almosts,’ I’m not worthy enough to live in your kingdom.”

“What the hell are you talking about? I’m not kicking you out, and if you believe anything Rasure says, then you need a reality check.”

Guilt washed over her face. “Sorry.”

I looked away, fighting tears, then nodded once to tell her I wasn’t mad. She walked over to me and hugged me as tight as she could. “Let’s just go to the coffee bar. This is too hard on you right now. You’re freezing.”

“Go ahead, I’m right behind you. I want to clean up this mess first.”

“I’ll help.”

“No, I got it. I really just need a second to breathe. We’ll clean it up later,” I assured her.

She nodded once and looked down before walking away. I reached to grab her arm. As I stared forward, I said, “I really do love you. I’m grateful to have always had you.”

“The feeling is mutual. I’ll get my purse and meet you downstairs.”

I smirked, knowing she could never say the word ‘love.’ She told me once that she feared if she did, the world would have an excuse to take that person away from her. What she didn’t realize was that she had already lost us all, and I just wanted to hear that word once from her lips. If my own sister could not tell me how she felt about me, how could I expect or believe anyone else who did?

Cadence was eager to leave this room. I knew the mess was making her insane.

Just as she went to cross the threshold, she stopped. “What is this?” she said, waving her jacket over the white line that was now there. “Snow?”

I didn’t even bother to answer. She was out of danger. The wind from the waving of her jacket had broken the line. I knew she wouldn’t be shocked the way I was when I tried going down the stairs.

Within the next beat of my heart, the room was put back together and Skylynn was standing in front of me, holding a stack of photos.

“Who tried to trap us in here? Who took my pictures? Is Rasure walking by me and I can’t see her? Is that what is happening?”

“I put the salt there.”

“Why?”

“Call me cautious,” Skylynn said, raising one eyebrow.

“You think I’m going to run away from you. That I could if I wanted to.”

“Nope, not at all. You were looking for these,” she said, handing me the images.

“Did you switch out the images?”

“I have better things to do with my time, but they were easy to find.”

“How were they easy to find?”

“When you want something, your energy reaches out for it, calls it to you. I saw the path, found them in the back of the closet in a box labeled ‘scuba diving.’”

“Really,” I said under my breath as I took the images from her. “Does that energy thing work with everything, for everyone?” I asked timidly, wondering how revealing I was being.

“Yes…though it is more clearly defined when it reaches for love, the one that completes us. Oddly, though, those in love rarely see that connection.”

“Little early for the ‘L word,’” I muttered, knowing we were having a coded conversation. She was telling me that my energy was reaching for Phoenix, but he could not see it.

“If you call an eternity too early, I would hate to see what you call a substantial amount of time.”

I wasn’t listening to her. I was looking through the pictures. I was almost halfway through the boring inventory of photographs when one image stopped me in my tracks. The image showed me on my tiptoes, reaching for the clock on the mantel. I was no more than six or seven at the time. I was trying to get my Barbie doll up there, pretending that was the peak of her castle.

It didn’t make any sense that this image was stored with these, but it did clear up one thing: those clocks had been switched out. When this image was taken, that clock was mine. When I was little, my mother used to tell me that I had the most vivid imagination she’d ever seen. It wasn’t an imagination, though, it was memories. I would act out stories around the seemingly boring furniture in our home, thinking nothing of it.

“She switched them,” I said, slamming the images down on the bar and turning to leave. I was going to go with Cadence to the coffee bar if I had to fight my way there. I needed Gavin. I knew he could hack into our security files and tell me when anything left this house.

When I reached the hall, I saw Cadence walking down the stairs. I cringed, but just as I was about to tell her no, she had passed the third one and not given any reason for me to think she was in pain. I let out a gasp, grateful that Skylynn had broken that salt line moments ago. I went to follow her, but right as I stepped forward I heard the sweetest sound.

Nervously, I glanced over my shoulder. There, I saw two of my sisters, Lucy and Melody. My mom was with them. She was braiding Melody’s long blonde hair as Lucy waited her turn. They were talking about absolutely nothing that really mattered, such as what grades they got in school or what charities they were working with.

I simply couldn’t stop myself. I turned to walk toward them, but as I moved forward the blissful scene changed. Now all of them, all seven of my devils, were there, screaming in agony, but the sounds of their voices were silenced by what could only be water. Only, the water looked like flames...light blue flames.

My mother’s eyes met mine, and I saw a warning there, one that I used to see when I was about to fall or stumble when I was little. She was telling me to watch my step, to stop, but I had to get them out. I had to save them. I started to run forward, but Skylynn stopped me. I pulled my arm away from her. “They need my help!”

Right as I said that, the horrific images vanished and the innocent scene with my sisters and mom returned.

“That they do, but not this way,” Skylynn said with a sting of anger in her tone as she glared down the long hallway.

“You don’t understand,” I said as my heart broke and the hall turned to ice.

“I do. I understand that death is calling you, showing you everything you want to see, everything you don’t want to see, that it is inviting you in, but I’m not letting you go without a fight.”

“If I see them, I’ll have even more of a reason to fight,” I said as I stared at the gentle lines that indented around my mother’s eyes when she smiled.

“You were corralled on this hall because your memories are the strongest here. Rasure wants you to see this. To yearn for it. To want this more than fighting her.”

“Well, I’ll be damned. The woman was finally right about something,” I said as I went to move forward. Before I took another step, Skylynn had me pinned against the wall.

“You’re angry about your sisters, about your parents. I get that. I do. But you need to be angry about so much more than this. You’ve lost more than this family, more than I could explain to you. You give in right now, and you will not gain anything and Rasure and all those like her will not only continue to do what they are doing, but the souls they have will remain theirs.”

I locked stares with her. “What are you saying? How many souls does she have that I know?” I couldn’t bear to ask if she had my family’s souls, if that was what that image I just saw meant, if they had been in that kind of agony this whole time—it would be more than I could stomach. The grief and regret would very likely end me.

“More than you want to know about.”

I felt like I was going to puke. I leaned forward and tried to breathe, but the fog leaking from my mouth was near blinding. “Clocks, keys, souls…you’re going to have to help me understand, Skylynn.”

Before she could say a word, everything around me changed.

 

 

Chapter Twelve

 

 

I was standing at the beginning of my death, seconds before Gavin’s uncle was set to come in the door and tell me my grandmother was dying. Before I could find the guys and tell them that we needed not only to find the key but the right clocks, everything moved again and now I was sitting on the beam running across my room with Skylynn at my side.

“Tell me you fast-forwarded time, that you didn’t bring me here only for all of them to crash into the lake on their own.”

“I can’t move time, but yes, I did stop you from repeating that.”

“Why would you do that?” I fumed as the beam I was on turned to ice, nearly causing me to slip off. Skylynn gripped me by the arm before I could.

“Because if you keep reliving that moment, you will fall into it, you will give up.”

“I’m not a quitter!”

“Agreed, but you are standing at the edge of the veil, the one place every soul is tested the most.”

“I’m not with them, and now they’re going to drown.”

“If you were not with them, what reason would they have to speed down the road trying to reach your house?”

My insides caved in. “It is my fault, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s not.”

“Yes, it is. If I let those guys go, seemed stronger, found a way to lie or something, they would be long gone and not my friends, not racing toward their death at this moment.”

“Not being able to lie is a virtue to your soul. It rewards you with fewer demons to fight. And they would have stayed with you no matter what.”

“Why, because they like to be around girls who are freaks of nature and have commitment issues?”

That made her laugh. “No, because they are supposed to be with you, whether you or Phoenix like it or not.”

“And how do you know that?”

“I told you before, our soul reaches out for what it wants, what it needs, and it pulls those things to us, one way or another.”

“I don’t love them in that way.”

“No, but you need them.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because I saw your soul reach out for them. They weren’t even in the same state as you and had no reason to be. At first I thought your soul was calling them because they were in pain like you, because that was your purpose: to heal those who’d been down your path. So, I altered circumstance and brought them into your life one-by-one.”

“Are you trying to tell me you did some kind of supernatural hook-up that failed miserably?”

“No. I never intended for anything on the romantic side of things to happen. I already knew where your heart belonged. I knew they were eternal friends of yours, guardians that you had chosen for one reason or another.”

“And when it became romantic, you didn’t think to tell me that? You didn’t think to stop me from hurting them?”

“You never hurt them, and it was never romantic. You were just following the path of life. You thought that loving them was logical, but love is never logical. The way you feel about them is mutual. They love you, want to be in your life, but not in the way that will complete you.”

“Well, they have a funny way of showing that—at least Wilder does.”

She sighed. “Wilder was all you. I had nothing to do with his arrival, so I’m sure it may be different with him.”

“Are you saying that you have no doubt that Mason and Gavin are supposed to be with me in death? That I pulled Wilder into this by mistake?”

“I do now.”

“Why now?”

“Because if they weren’t, they would be chasing their own demons, either mad or moved on by this point. But they’re awake and plotting. It takes strong souls to do that.”

“What do you mean ‘plotting’?”

“I mean that they know when they are going to be moved and do what they can to alter it, even change the path. They are committing to death, committing to you.”

“An army of vengeful spirits...how lucky can one girl get?”

“We have to figure a way around that.”

“Not letting go.”

“I meant what I told Phoenix—either he turns you, or I find someone else to do just that,” she assured me.

“You mean to tell me that there are souls that will cross him?” I asked, meeting her stare.

“No, at least not many. But who says they have to know the whole story?” she said, raising one brow.

Skylynn was the one person in my life that knew me to my core, that had seen my darkest hour, my bravest battles—the one person that I already owed way too much to. I could not let her risk herself for me. “Listen, it sounds like you two have enough issues between you. I’ll figure this out.”

“I know you will. We will. But I have somewhere I have to be just now. When it’s over, we’ll hunt your clocks down, or whatever else.”

“You wouldn’t happen to know how to raise the water the way Phoenix did, do you? I see a long night of diving for the missing part of my key in the future.”

“I have a few things up my sleeve, and demanding that Phoenix give me one good reason why he won’t change you is one of them,” she said with a wink just before she vanished.

I slid across the beam to where it met the wall and there was a bigger ledge. This was one of my hiding spots, a place I went to think. It almost made sense that I kept climbing up here in that night terror. I liked finding a bird’s-eye view in various rooms of my home. I never thought of it as spying when I did it in the other rooms. I saw it as a way of being everywhere and nowhere at once, a way of finding a cozy spot in this enormous home that at times felt more like a museum.

I’d stopped climbing up here years back when the beams seemed to get tinier, when my hiding place became too small.

As I pushed myself into the corner, I glanced up. When I did, I saw a bird carved out in the beam. I remembered doing that. It took me days, but what was so odd was that it looked just like the one on my wrist now: a falcon in flight.

I reached to trace the grain in the wood. Oddly, it looked like flames swirling around the bird and that it was escaping just in time. The images I’d just seen of my family flashed before my eyes as a sick feeling consumed me.

When I carved that image, I’d noticed the flames the wood grain mocked, but then I imagined a much sweeter image; warmth, fire, setting this Falcon free.

Just as I was about to climb down, my bedroom door opened. Panic consumed me and I held my breath, not wanting to feel or let the ice show itself. As I moved back into the shadows of the beams, I gripped my wrist, the bird, and felt a flame ripple through me.

I sighed when I saw Mason. His eyes moved to the corner I was in, as if he could feel me there. I went to climb down, but he held his hand up, telling me to stay.

Like the skilled rock climber he was, he made his way up the bookcases until he was able to reach the beam and pull himself up. He slid down the beam to the shadowed corner I was in.

“You know, if we’re ghosts or whatever shouldn’t we be able to zap around or something?” he said in his familiar spirited tone.

As always, he made me smile. “I’m sure all of that is a state of mind. Shouldn’t you be in a lake right now?”

“Shouldn’t you?” he asked as he perched himself beside me and stared out at the beams of the room like he was looking for something.

“House arrest.”

He grinned as he threw a quick glance at me. “Someone told you to do something, and you listened.”

“Picking my battles. Where is everyone else?”

“Not sure. We all had a plan for how we were going to leave the bar the next time. I was supposed to come to you. I appeared at your door.”

“The others?”

“Dealing with their girls.” He glanced at me. Noticing my confused expression, he stopped searching for whatever he was looking for.

“What’s up, Indie?”

I moved my head from side to side, holding his gaze and fighting the tears I felt clouding my vision.

“Talk to me,” he pleaded in a deep whisper.

“My head is spinning. I mean, I always knew I was odd with the ice, the weird way I would dream or see images when I touched stuff but this is insane.”

“Death?”

“What death allowed me to remember, or rather embrace.” I briefly closed my eyes, seeing Phoenix’s image lingering there. “Mason, I can remember a past life in detail, and it’s not a normal one. It wasn’t even in this world, or reality rather. Wilder got to me before, when he said my mind was fabricating what I wanted. I don’t want to lose what I’ve found, but I keep pulling and forcing myself to focus on who I was in life, on Indie. I want those lives to mesh, but one is close to normal and the other is straight out of a paranormal movie.

His shoulders fell a little as he held my stare. “Indie, you are not losing your mind, and you are not fabricating anything.”

“Are you saying that because you have seen Skylynn and Phoenix?”

“No,” he breathed out. “Look, I—we’ve kept something from you.”

My eyes grew wide.

“It’s not bad,” he said, raising his hand. “It just makes sense now.”

“What makes sense?”

“This manor. You. The first time I came here, I felt like I was walking into my house. I felt like I had come home. Yeah, maybe it could have been because you made sure everyone here felt like that, but still I would have dreams of this place, wild dreams that were, like you said, far from normal. In those dreams, I knew I was missing something, that this house, you, maybe even us were off, like, hidden or out of place.”

“Why didn’t you tell me any of that?”

He shrugged. “I didn’t want you to see it as a claim on you. Remember way back when we first started hooking up and Gavin showed up and it was odd at first?”

All too clearly. They didn’t know each other before then. Gavin and I had reached the ‘we can only be friends’ conclusion months before that. It felt odd introducing him to someone that was so vastly different than him.

“Well, you crashed that night in the middle of the movie, and Gavin and I talked for hours. At that point, I’d already had dreams of this place. They were like a heavy fog I was trying to uncover. He saw the way I was looking around and trying to match the room we were in with my dream, and he told me he had the same dreams, felt the same pull. We became fast friends that night.”

“Because of a few dreams? This manor?”

“It was more than that. They were lucid dreams. The fact that you could do what you could do with the ice and stuff made those unreal dreams seem more like repressed memories. We have been researching this for years, trying to figure out the connection, and death has just made those dreams turn to memories. We are getting close to figuring it out.”

“Mason, you have a family that has already lost one son. Fight for your life right now, not some connection to this house.”

“I feel it too, Indie. I know what you mean when you said you felt like you were stuck between the past and the present. Our theory is if we figure out the present, the past will make sense. At that point, we can have a future.”

“Why are you more sane about this than I am?”

He grinned. “Because I’m not struggling to grasp the one my soul has always called me to while we face this crossroad in life.”

I turned crimson. “You haven’t even officially met him yet. Those are big words.”

“We’ve met, though. I don’t think he recognizes me. Honestly, I don’t think he can see past you,” he said with a wink.

I raised my brow to question him.

“The dreams.”

I heard the echo of footsteps from the hallway, that irritating, authoritarian click that could only belong to Rasure.

Mason pushed me into the dark corner and pulled me to my feet so he could shield me behind him. You would have to be looking for us to see us up here, and even then it would be hard with the shadows.

When the door opened it wasn’t Rasure, it was Cadence. She was dressed in a black formal dress. My first thought was that she had moved on, that this was her glancing back one last time in the death shrouds her body was surely wearing now, but that thought made no sense when Rasure followed her into the room. The click of her heels amplified the anger I could see on her stone cold expression.

She reached for Cadence’s arm and spun her around. “Why did you walk away from me?”

“I walked away from Ben,” Cadence said, pulling her arm away. “He has always made me uncomfortable.”

That shocked me. I knew she and Ben were not close, but uncomfortable? That made no sense. And obviously, Ben could not see her in the first place.

“Niece. We have no choice. Either we play this role, or we are out on the streets.”

“Your master plan has failed. I’m not a fool. You have lost control. Indie has outsmarted you.”

I smirked when I heard that. Maybe death had finally afforded Cadence the tenacity she needed to stand up to Rasure. She’d always left that up to me in the past, saying it was my war and that she was just along for the ride.

Rasure’s cold expression vanished as she reached to caress Cadence’s long strawberry blonde hair. “I promised you that I would vindicate you. I never break a promise. One way or another, Benjamin will halt his fight.”

“He is a true Falcon. They never quit.”

“And you are a Cambridge. We never die.”

I felt like the wind was sucked out of my soul. The Cambridge family was very prestigious, close friends of Rasure’s. Why would she tell Cadence she belonged to that family? That she did?

“Everyone dies.”

“Do they?” Rasure said ruefully.

Cadence looked down in shame or fear, I couldn’t figure out which. “When their purpose is fulfilled.”

“Well, then,” Rasure said, smoothing out her dress, a tell of hers that said she was furious and beyond frustrated. “If that is the case, then I am sure you and I have a very long life before us, for we have barely begun.” She extended her arm, suggesting that Cadence lead the way back downstairs.

Cadence’s chest swelled with pride as she smiled slightly and then walked out of the room. Rasure’s glance surveyed the room once, then looked up, but not in our direction. She let out a sigh as a stern look of determination came across her emotionless face just before she briskly turned to leave the room, all but slamming the door behind her.

“What the hell?” I said as my chest rose and fell rapidly. I was pushing into my wrist so hard that it should have caused me to bleed. I guess dead people can’t do that.

Mason didn’t bother to answer me. Instead, he held the ceiling with his long arms as he walked across the beam to the direction that Rasure had glanced. He moved with ease and skill. I’d seen him do far more dangerous maneuvers on our epic hiking adventures.

When he reached a cross point in the beams, he reached down to the beam he was standing on and felt around. A second later, he pulled out what looked like a small black ink pen. The top of it looked like wood, something that easily blended in.

He broke the pen into several pieces, letting it fall to my bed below before he moved on to another point in the room.

I started to climb down, wanting to see what it was. By the time I reached my bed, he had thrown down four more, all broken. A second later, he fell onto my bed, causing it to move violently to the side.

“What are these?” I asked, seeing that there were wires at the core of each one.

“Cameras.”

“She was filming me! How did you know?”

“Gavin hacked into the manor’s security, found a coded file. In that file was this room, the playroom, every room you hang out in except the North Wing, darkroom, and library.”

“I’m going to kill her! Why would she do that?”

“Besides trying to see your plots against her, not sure,” he said sarcastically as he stated the obvious.

“Taking them down now is not doing us much good,” I muttered as I crossed my arms, finally figuring out how Rasure seemed to know my every move.

“Actually,” he said, raising his eyebrows and letting his warning of a smile echo on the corners of his lips surface, “you can see us, well, not all of us. It looks like a ripple across the screen. There is no sound or anything, but she can tell what room we are in, and how many of us.”

“You’re joking.”

“Nope, and guess what? When you look at older ones, you can see Skylynn. She looks like a halo of light around you, always there when you were pushed against a wall.”

“She’s always been at my side.”

He nodded once. “Gavin thinks Rasure is looking for more than that key. Those bodyguards—we saw them going into the darkroom. They were down there forever, and when they came out Rasure was waiting on them. They told her they didn’t find anything. After slapping one of them and calling them every name in the book, she sent them back down. Hours later, and still nothing.” He bit his bottom lip as his eyes moved over me. “You must have one hell of a hiding spot. Are you sure the rest of the key is not down there?”

The only thing I had hidden down there was a stack of old journals, ones I found in the floor of the sunroom by pure accident. I’d moved a rug that was not mine and saw an outline in the wood that looked like a trap door or something. The journals were in there. I flipped through all the pages, trying to understand the drawings and words. There was no key in there. I was sure of it. I was also sure that I had hidden those books days before I died, days before I even thought to move the clocks. I even left that rug in place to cover my tracks.

“Positive. Why would she not go down there? Surely, she is not scared of the dark,” I said in a faint tone, thinking she would not come into the library before either.

“Let’s just be glad that she has the boundaries she does have.”

“What game is she playing with Cadence? Did you see her messing with her head on any of that footage? She’s obviously trying to convince Cadence that I’m going to cut her off and that crossing me is the only way for her to know that she would be safe.”

I could tell he’d seen more than he wanted to tell me. “We didn’t really have time to analyze it or anything. We were in a hurry looking for the clocks.”

I turned to go to the door, but he stopped me. “Whoa, what is the plan?”

“I’m going to tell Cadence she is dead and that she needs to move on. Then we need to go for a late night swim.”

That look of his, the one that said, ‘You don’t want to know what I know,’ gave me no choice but to listen to him. “I dodged that lake for a reason. We can’t keep going back there. It makes us too mad, reminds us that we are gone.”

He wanted to say more, I could tell, but he didn’t.

“I need that key.”

“Then we need to find the clothes Cadence had on.”

“Why?”

“Look, I’m not sure what was going on in your car that night, but it was war in ours. We were bound to crash one way or another.”

“What do you mean?” I asked as a sick feeling rose in my throat.

He sighed as his dark eyes filled with a mix of sympathy and anger. “Cadence and Gavin had been fighting for days before that, so Gavin thought that her blocking him on every site he went to, every file he opened at the bar, was her way of begging for his attention. In the truck, he told her to give him the key that she took right when his uncle came in. She started yelling, telling him he needed to stop deflecting or some bullshit, and he told her she needed to stop acting like a spoiled brat, that you were in danger. She threw all kinds of crap at him, like you never cared about us, you were playing us—which we knew was B.S.—and that made her mad because we were still focused on you. Gavin jerked the wheel to the side, trying to get it out of her pocket. I yelled at him, told him to watch the road. I finally got the key, but it wasn’t all of it. I couldn’t find the other part of it. As we struggled, finally I saw her shove it in her pants, then she screamed, ‘Come and get it, you know you want it!’ as she stood in her seat and tried to climb over the back seat to get away from me. As we went down, Gavin tried to get the other half of the key off her as I fumbled for the one part we had gotten. Then I felt Sophia thrashing behind me. I turned to give her air so I could get her out. You showed up right about then. I think you found the part that was loose. The other part is in her clothes.”

“How sure are you about this?”

“Pretty damn sure. We ended up at the bar tonight, like we should have. The two of you didn’t show, so Gavin was trying to figure out why we were there again. That was when we remembered the truck, the fight.”

“Where is Sophia?” I asked in a ghost of a whisper, wishing she had not followed Mason that night. That poor, innocent girl.

“She’s gone.”

“You’re sure?”

“She didn’t show up tonight. That speaks volumes.”

I winced in an attempt to block the guilt I felt wash over me. I swallowed nervously, then said, “So we need Cadence’s clothes.”

“Yeah. So, they are either at the hospital, returned here—”

“Or in evidence. Evidence my brother would be collecting to build a case to show suffering.”

“That is what I was thinking.”

“I can figure that out if I can get to his tablet. He’s downstairs. We can get that info and give Cadence a reality check all at once.”

“You really think Rasure is playing her in death?” he said with an apprehensive echo in his voice.

It was the tone of his question that caught me off guard. It was the tone he used to tell me he didn’t think I was right but was not going to tell me that.

“I don’t know what to think. Cadence has always been broken, she could have been easily manipulated in both life and death. I don’t get why Rasure called her a Cambridge or what other crap she has obviously been feeding her.”

“Gavin is already trying to figure that out. He was going to make her face her past, so to speak…didn’t work out the way he wanted it to, though.”

“Why?” I asked as the room froze over with my dread.

Mason sighed. “He broke into the files about her adoption. There’s no issue there. The issue was that Cadence isn’t Cadence—at least, she is not the girl that was born into that abused family.”

“What?” I asked with a gasp.

“Right. He figured out that that girl died a year before your parents adopted the Cadence we know. Ironically enough, it was a car crash. Your parents were given a very real girl and a fake file.”

“How sure are you?”

“Does Cadence look Hispanic to you?”

“Um...no.”

“Right. Your parents knew something was off, too. Apparently, they investigated all the children’s families that came into their home. Gavin even dug up documents where you parents stated they would adopt her under that name but had insisted that her real family be found. It looked like they assumed it was a clerical error. They stated she was a broken child they would take in but wanted to be assured that at a later date she would not be thrust back into the system if her family came looking for her.”

“That is why she wasn’t added to the will. They were waiting until they knew she would not be taken away,” I said with wide eyes.

“They never got their answer. One week after Cadence was added to the documents that stated Gran would be her guardian if something happened to them, they died.”

“You think she was planted here. That whoever did that assumed when that was filed that she was on the will. Are you telling me that shell of a girl who could not even smile or stop trembling was a ploy?”

“We have no idea what role Cadence had in this. Your parents had psych evaluations along with physical ones done. She was abused, that was clearly stated. We just don’t know where she came from.”

“So either Cadence has always known this or Rasure has used this information to toy with her, to make her feel unwanted or unloved.”

“We’ll never know. Gavin figured that out before we died. Actually, the day we died he got an email from one of the investigators he uses. He never had a chance to get anything out of her. We were too focused on figuring out Rasure.”

“Where is Gavin?”

“He was supposed to be with her. He was hoping that he could catch her off guard.”

“Well, now we are.”

I turned to charge out of the room. When we reached the stairs and started to climb down, the shocking pain of razor blades cutting our souls in two thrust us back.

“What the f—!” Mason bellowed.

I caught my breath and crawled to the steps; the salt line was back and thicker than before.

“Rasure is keeping us up here,” I said as I rushed back to my room and started to tear through my drawers. I knew I had a mini-fan in there that I had used for white noise when I could not sleep. Thankfully, there were still batteries in it that worked.

Mason was trying to blow the salt, but not nearly enough of it would move to break the line.

“Move,” I said as I angled the fan at the line. All that did was make the fine salt fill the air. This was not the only step it was on, the fan had picked up salt on the next three. I knew it had to be on every step, and walking through this cloud would be agonizing.

“All right then...she wants to play, we’ll play,” Mason said as he reached to pull me up and back to my room.

He opened the glass doors that were basically huge windows that led to a ledge that was a few feet wide.

“Um...iron,” I said, looking at the bars that outlined the brick ledge.

“Don’t tell me that is worse than salt.”

“I haven’t tried it yet,” I said, a little apprehensively.

He looked back into the room, out past the balcony, then up. “Come on,” he said as he started to climb the bricks that were set out from the others.

“We need to go down, not up.”

“Right. We’re going to jump over this.”

“Are you crazy? We are, like, four floors up!”

He let out a laugh as he climbed to the side, giving me room to climb up. “What are you afraid of, Indie? Dying?”

That caught me off guard for a second. That was not the first time he’d said that to me. Every time he pushed me to climb higher, jump into a shallower pool of water or canoe down insane rapids, that was his battle cry. He said it was because I’d told him not long after we met that we were all born to die.

He laughed under his breath. “Born to die,” he said, edging to the side. “You had that part right.”

Accepting the challenge, I started to climb up after him, just like I always did before.

When I reached his side and looked down, my anxiety took over and everything turned to ice.

“We could use a soft landing here. Why don’t you think about who made you blush before?” he taunted in his familiar lighthearted tone.

Right when I went to slap him, he grabbed my hand and pulled me forward with his jump. For a second, we were flying. I saw flashes of when we had done this before, how he held my hands as we fell through the air. He used to cover my eyes so I would not know how far the fall was. His theory was that if I didn’t know how dangerous something was that I would be able to jump freely, that if I jumped freely I would learn that it was okay to feel the adrenaline—a rush. He always told me that that was fire, and I needed fire. When it came to cliff diving, he was right. I never turned the water we were diving for into ice, and I was usually so stoked that I just did something that insane that it would not turn frigid until the adrenaline wore off.

Seconds later, we landed on the snow.

“You are the most unpredictable predictable girl I have ever met.”

“You do realize that statement makes no sense,” I said as I stood and dusted the snow off me.

“Perfect sense—most of the time, I never know what you are going to do.”

“Exactly when am I predictable, then?” I asked, dusting him off.

He reached for my chin so I would have to look up at him. I felt my heart hammer wildly in my chest. I may be acting like I know what I’m doing, that death cannot stop me, that I’m clear and cool-headed, but when I looked into Mason’s eyes or the others, I felt grief. I didn’t want to say goodbye to them, and every second with them very well could be my last. Rasure would have officially crippled me for eternity if she managed to divide us.

“When you’re back against a wall, when there is no way out—that is when you’re predictable.”

“In the war of life, that is a weakness.”

“No,” he said, letting his hand fall and his boyish smile come alive. “You’re predicable because there is no doubt that you will win—you will find a way around what is in front of you, one loophole, and that loophole is only obvious to those who know you best, who have dared to get inside your head.”

“Are you telling me that you can see my next move all over my face?” I said with a blushing grin.

“I’m telling you that I’ve got your back, that we will get through this. I have watched every move you’ve made out on our little summer adventures. On instinct, I know what way you’re going before you do most of the time.”

“I don’t think you’re alone in that.”

“No. Gavin, too,” he assured me. We both knew that I never let Wilder in the way I let them in because Wilder and I never saw eye-to-eye. He had told Mason once that their way of getting to me didn’t work, so he was going to try his own way.

I needed to move away from this topic. “Let’s crash this mourning party,” I said with a smirk as I started to walk around the house to where I was sure everyone was gathering.

Every light in the manor was on downstairs, and through the open windows I could see people in almost every room. The issue was that when we had jumped, we had landed feet past the iron gate that outlined the garden and trees against the house, so when we reached the window outside the great room we couldn’t get close enough to see Ben, Cadence, or anyone else for that matter.

“We could always go in through the front door,” I said with a sigh, seeing my element of surprise vanishing.

Mason reached out for the iron gate, but on reflex I grabbed his arm.

“It can’t be worse than the salt, and that only lasted a second. We need to see where everyone is—how they are interacting,” he argued.

Mason always had a theory about pain, too, that it was instant and over too quickly to matter. He believed in adrenaline, that it would always come to the body’s defense.

“You don’t know that. For all we know, it could be lethal to us now,” I argued back.

“Well then, your guardian angel will show up and help us,” he said as he scaled up the gate in two huge strides. I heard him groan, swallowing the pain. He took in a few deep breaths and then turned to look at me with his unmistakable grin. “I have dealt with worse pain than that.”

“That is not saying much. How many bones have you broken?” I asked sarcastically.

“A few. I promise, it’s not bad. It burns.”

“Burns?” I questioned, knowing I was by no means afraid of warmth.

He nodded once as he gathered some snow from the bushes and rubbed it across his hands.

I held my breath, closed my eyes, and squeezed through the wrought iron bars. I felt the burn, even heard the singe of flesh as I passed through, but he was right. I felt the salt on the inside, but this was exterior pain, one I could deal with if I had to, but most definitely not for a long period of time.

“That’s my girl,” he said, reaching for my hand.

We pushed through on the bushes making our way to the window. He was taller than me, so he could see into the windows that were over my head. Not breaking his stare, he let go of my hand and held his hand out flat, a silent gesture I was used to seeing him give me. It was his subtle way of telling me to climb.

I put my foot on his hand and used his shoulder to pull myself up, then I leaned forward to grab the ledge. He didn’t even flinch under my weight. I’d used him as a ladder a thousand times before so he was used to the feel of me. When rock climbing, he would always push me up first, then take the more challenging path to get to the next level.

A beat later, he had climbed up next to me.

I felt sorry for my family as I gazed at them through the window. Every one of them looked so sad as they moved through the crowd with their little hors d'oeuvre plates and glasses of wine. As the crowd shifted, I saw Rasure against the back wall. I dove behind the brick barriers as Mason did the same on the other side.

He nodded, telling me I could look safely. He could see more from where he was.

My uncle Jamison was on one side of Rasure, and Cadence was on the other. Friends were walking by them, offering standard words of condolences and sympathy. Cadence never looked up at any of them. She looked so scared, so alone next to Rasure. I couldn’t figure out how she was standing in that room and had not heard them speak her name, mention that she was in the same boat we were all in. But then I saw Ben. I saw him staring at her from a few feet away. At first I thought it was just the angle, that he surely could not see her if he could not see me, but a second later he took a glass of wine from a tray that was passing him by and walked it over to Cadence. She looked up, and that was when she took the wine from him. Right then, a burning rage I’d never felt before consumed me, and left me feeling utter betrayal for the first time in my life.

Of course, Rasure took the glass from Cadence and said something harsh to him, something that made Ben turn bright crimson with anger.

Rasure put her arm around Cadence and led her out of the room. After quickly finishing the drink in his hand, Ben pulled out his phone and made a call as he went to leave the room through the other door, the one that led to the front foyer. I was sure he was going outside.

“Why do I get the feeling that Cadence made it out of that lake with nothing more than a bump on her head?” I seethed.

Mason didn’t seem nearly as shocked, but he was definitely just as mad. “Had my suspicions,” he said as he jumped down and held out his arms for me to jump.

“You thought this was going on and didn’t tell me?”

“I didn’t know anything for sure, but I have a pretty good memory and I know that the first go around on this loop we are in that she got her lines wrong.”

“Lines?”

“The first go around, we all did exactly what we did the first time, but she didn’t. At least once she answered a question before Gavin asked it, then took the key seconds before she had the time before. That made us think, that gave us the feeling that something was off. That’s why I didn’t flip out when you told me we were dead. That whole time your friend Skylynn and mystery man were in there, we were watching her, trying to figure out how she would play into it all. You never moved out of the spot you were in or the pattern you followed until that boy touched you. Just before he did, you should have moved to the left to pour a drink for a customer. That was where you were standing when Gavin’s uncle came in. They pulled you out of the loop, and when they did they pulled the rest of us out, too. We were able to move freely in the illusion, but Cadence kept her role, her words, and stance the same as we moved through the last part of that illusion. Even when Gavin and I were trying to ask each other if we were both seeing this the same way, she kept acting out her lines—it was ridiculous, really, watching her argue and struggle with herself.”

“A wolf among sheep,” I said under my breath. Phoenix had warned me about this. I would bet that Guardian tried to heal us, and when he did he figured out he was missing one—he was missing Cadence. That is what he was telling Phoenix. Why would he not just tell me that?

“One that has been in place for a hot minute. Here is some food for thought: how can a girl who is obviously alive and well sleep with a ghost— see ghosts?” Mason asked with a sinful grin.

“She did sleep with Gavin, didn’t she?” I said with wide eyes.

Mason nodded once. “Right on cue...well, I heard it was not right on cue, but anyway, yeah.”

I charged around the house, ready to go in and face Cadence and Rasure, let them look like idiots in front of everyone as they talked to us. Cadence had just ticked off the wrong girl.

 

 

Chapter Thirteen

 

 

Just as we rounded the corner that led to the front of the manor, we slammed right into Gavin.

“Oh my God, man—I almost knocked you the hell out!” Mason said in a harsh whisper.

“Feeling is mutual,” Gavin said, urging us around the side of the house. “Ben is walking this way,” he said in a murmur as he crouched down.

He wasn’t dodging Ben, he was dodging the phony security guards that were standing on every corner of the porch, ones that could obviously not only see the dead but talk to us.

There were police officers standing next to the guards and a few other men in suits who I would guess were detectives.

“What is going on?” I whispered as I nudged Gavin.

“Ben issued a search warrant.”

“Based on what? Looking for what?”

“The key, I hope. A witness told him that there was an obvious struggle in my truck before we ever went off the road. I think he’s trying to figure out what we were fighting over. He knows he’s missing something, and he found just cause to search for it.”

“Thinking it’s the key is a long shot, though.”

Gavin glanced back at me. “Sophia was alive when emergency workers showed up. When they asked what happened, she told them what we were fighting over.”

“She was more aware than all of us put together, and yet she’s the one that is gone?” I asked in disbelief.

Gavin let out a sigh as sorrow filled his eyes. “The accident didn’t kill her, Mason saved her life. She died because at the hospital she was given a drug she was allergic to.”

“You’re freaking kidding me. How do you know that?”

“Ben. He was talking to that detective over there, who told Ben her parents wanted an investigation opened right as he handed Sophia’s statement to him.”

“Ben will figure this out—he’s smart,” I whispered as I tried to overhear what he was saying into his phone. All I could hear was the echo of the other side, and it sounded like a radio. I kept hearing people say, “Clear,” “Over,” and then finally I heard, “I have something.”

A few seconds later, Rasure charged out the front door of the manor, walked over to Ben, and slapped him across the face. I lunged forward, but Mason and Gavin held me back.

“You cold-hearted bastard! How dare you come into my home and search for anything? Do you have no sympathy? Your sister is in agony, broken into pieces, and you have the audacity to question her involvement? Indie and her friends were wild. I have witnesses that will clearly state that they were taking shots of liquor before they ever got into that truck. If she was struggling with them, it was to take control—to save her life. You are banned from the property. I’m taking a restraining order out on you this instant.”

“It is not your property. If you wish not to see me, then you need to leave,” Ben said smoothly, with an all-too-polite grin that the Falcon children were known to have.

Before she could say another word, two police officers along with a detective walked over to Ben. On a white cloth, they were holding the cameras Mason had destroyed moments before.

“Where were these found?” Ben questioned.

“The girls’ room,” the officer answered. “We are sweeping the home for others.”

Ben looked sharply at Rasure as he spoke to the detective. “Find the feed these went to and have someone trace the purchase and work orders attached to these cameras. I want to know who was spying on my sisters.”

“In the process as we speak, sir,” the detective said, matching Ben’s stare, which was still firmly held on Rasure.

She turned briskly and called out my uncle’s name as she entered the manor again.

“We didn’t find any odd key or part of it, but it could take days for us to find something that small in a home this size,” one of the detectives said to Ben.

“Bring Cadence in for questioning. Make sure she knows we are moving forward with charges on money laundering, and…manslaughter,” Ben ordered.

“How many counts?”

“One so far,” Ben said as he nodded goodbye to the detective and went to speak to our brothers and sisters that were coming out to see why Rasure was having a meltdown.

“I guess you are not going to get anything out of her tonight,” Mason said to Gavin.

“I think it’s still on her,” Gavin said in an angry whisper.

“Would you have not figured that out, you know, the other night?” Mason asked with an audacious grin.

Gavin looked down as he thought over last night. He stood up. “I didn’t look everywhere for it,” he said, then boldly walked around the side of the house.

They were walking Cadence out. On the front steps, they stopped and began to read her rights to her. Gavin bravely walked past the guards we knew could see us and went right up behind Cadence. He whispered something in her ear as his long arms reached down and pulled up the hem of her black dress, revealing black thigh-high stockings. He moved his hands around the band as Cadence started to struggle. The officers holding her restrained her, and because of the commotion they never noticed her dress moving up.

Either Gavin found what he needed or nothing at all. He moved his hands up her dress, squeezed her hips, and then walked away shamelessly. The guards started to move after him, but Gavin was smart. He put himself right beside Ben and all but dared them to make a move for him.

“That is why that S.O.B. is my best friend,” Mason said in a proud tone.

Gavin never looked in our direction or gave the guards any reason to believe that he was not alone in this act.

Gavin stayed shoulder-to-shoulder with Ben as he watched Cadence being loaded into the cruiser. Once they were gone, Ben made another call as he walked to the side of the yard, toward the woods in front of the lake we perished in. Once Gavin was close enough to the woods, he took off in a sprint.

“What do we do now? Wait to be zapped back in that house?” I asked Mason.

“No, we go to the memorial garden. That was the plan.”

“Whose?”

“Mine and Gavin’s. He was supposed to corner Cadence, figure out what he could. I was supposed to get you and get there.”

“Where is Wilder? Why there?”

“We told him to figure out his girl, see what she knew about all of this and that we would see him when we were all zapped back to your house. The key had ‘Falcon M’ on it—you were born there, so something connects to that place without a doubt.”

Seeing he had a point about the connection, I only had one argument. “Wilder is going to have a hard time doing that. I killed that girl, and Phoenix burned what was left of her.”

“Did you?” Mason asked with a disbelieving stare. “He doesn’t know that.”

“Right. So we need to find him and tell him that,” I stressed.

“Listen, if he would stop being Mr. ‘I-know-everything,’ then maybe we could have figured that out before. But no, his plan is to charge Rasure. He needs to figure out how to be a part of a team.”

“We don’t have time to fault him for that,” I said in Wilder’s defense.

“Then ignorance will keep him safe. We were not about to let him put us in danger. He already managed to put you at the bottom of a lake.”

“He was run off the road.”

“Yep, and Gavin will swear to you that after we crashed he was more concerned about getting Cadence out than the rest of us.”

“Because he’s a gentleman. Of course he would have tried to save her.”

“I’m not arguing with you. I wasn’t paying attention. I was trying to save Sophia, and obviously I had greater forces working against me,” he said with evident disgust and guilt. Sophia followed him into the truck that night, and he was bearing the weight of that.

“Don’t we all,” I muttered as I started to follow him through the shadows. It seemed like it took us forever to reach the path that led to the gates of the massive tomb and observatory just before it. I was grateful that the iron gates were open and that we would not have to push through that pain again.

A few steps later, I was wishing for that pain. All at once, it felt like a million razor blades were coursing through my veins. I couldn’t figure out why, and every step I took made it worse. If we moved to the side or forward, the wicked pain grew exponentially. In my frantic state, I realized we were not walking on snow, but salt—a ton of it.

It was sucking the life out of me if that was even possible. We were both so disoriented that we couldn’t figure out which way was back, where the snow ended and the salt began.

As if it were the flap of an angel’s wings, I heard a swoosh of wind and then found myself inside the gates of the memorial garden, side by side with Mason. We both leaned forward on our knees, trying to catch our breath. A second later, Gavin appeared at my other side and Skylynn was in front of us with crossed arms. Behind her, leaning casually into the frame of the doorway leading into the observatory, was Phoenix.

In the center of that marble room behind him was a forevermore burning fire. The warm, reassuring glow of it made Phoenix look all the more inviting to me. I no longer felt the cold of the snow, but I most definitely felt the cold stare of disapproval.

“I told you to stay put, not move,” Skylynn said to me.

“I don’t think those were your exact words. I’m on the grounds of the manor.”

“You wouldn’t have been for much longer. Everything is salted around here. That evil wench obviously has no mercy on Mother Nature either,” Skylynn said with a degree of disdain.

“Cadence didn’t die,” I said, holding her stare, letting her know I was not some blind fool.

“Does she know that you know that?” she asked with wide eyes.

“No. But I know that the two of you knew that,” I said, nodding to where Phoenix was, “and neither of you bothered to tell me that.”

“We had our reasons.”

“Which are?”

“Which are too numerous to name—the obvious one is that you are in the veil. Your soul is inside out, and you would have acted before thinking anything through.”

“I’m not an idiot. Instead of telling her I loved her and pushing her to let go, I would have been able to get more information out of her. Now she’s gone, and so are her secrets.”

“I doubt they can hold her very long. Your brother is trying to scare her into doing something foolish. Very wise of him,” Skylynn said with contempt.

“And what would she foolishly do?”

“Attempt to save her own skin.”

“Sounds like self-preservation to me. Maybe she is a victim.” As soon as I said that, both Gavin and Mason threw a wicked glance at me.

Then Gavin handed me the part of the key we had been searching for. “She is not a victim. I don’t think you know the real her.”

With a shaky hand, I took the gold piece from his hand and connected it to the key in mine. With the new piece, it was now in the shape of star. A bolt of energy came from the metal as it found its counterpart.

“OK, then,” I said as my heart broke a little. I loved my sister, and I trusted her. Feeling a betrayal this deep was painful, and it made itself known all around me as ice began to cover the snow. “What now?”

“Now we find what it goes to,” Mason said as he reached to grab my arm to lead me to wherever they thought this key went to.

Before he could take one step or Gavin could think to follow, an unseen force held them both in place. I thought it was Phoenix and threw a glare in his direction, but as I did I saw Skylynn slowly begin to circle the three of us with nothing less than a predatory look in her eye.

“You will not be permitted to be alone with her until I deem you worthy.”

“And who are you to do that?” Gavin said with more audacity than I have ever known him to have.

“I led you to her. I did so because her energy called you, but it is clear that her soul can be fooled, at least temporarily. I need to know if I have put her in danger and if I have, I will redeem myself.”

“You’re not doing anything to them,” I seethed. “I admit that I trusted Cadence as a sister, but I did so because I am a Falcon. We love the broken, we heal the broken, and we set them free to do the same for others. I’m not shocked that she has been led astray by Rasure. I’m not shocked because I am not my parents. I was weak and wallowed in my own grief and left her alone. All the signs were there, but I ignored them because I could not bear to lose another sister. These boys have done nothing but love and support me, accept me for who I am, and allow me to live through them when my life became too cold for me to handle. They followed me to my death, and I will be damned if they must now stand in your judgment.”

Skylynn nodded her head once, and with that both Gavin and Mason moved forward a few feet. When they did, the energy that was in control of them shifted to holding me in place.

I locked eyes with Phoenix, asking him for help, but the flames staring back at me offered no sympathy.

“Shirts off,” Skylynn said to them.

She was insane. Dead or not, it was freezing out here. They listened, though, and both of them pulled their shirts over their heads, every muscle in their long, lean bodies tensing with the chill of the night air.

A ball of fire appeared in Skylynn’s hand. She shaped it carefully, whispering something over it, dividing it in two just before throwing the fire at the two of them.

I screamed and struggled to move forward, but the power around me was too strong.

The fire surrounded them for an instant. They never made a sound. In fact, it seemed to be a welcome relief to them, which stopped my screams, but not my struggle.

Along their sides, fire started to wind through them, just beneath their skin. A beat later, what looked like wings made of fire were on each of their sides.

Skylynn began to circle them as they both held their heads high. “To redeem your soul, you must pass through the line of the moons—the flaming sons of the east and the west to reach the seventh sister, whose touch will destroy the flames of evil that bind you,” she said under her breath, as if she were reciting a sacred oath.

“I bow to you,” she said as she did just that.

The flames absorbed into their bodies at the same moment the hold around me released.

Unable to handle the cold, both Mason and Gavin pulled their shirts back on.

“What did you just do to them?” I yelled as I charged forward.

“Nothing,” she said with a degree of sadness in her voice as she glanced behind her at Phoenix, who did nothing but look down before turning and walking into the observatory.

“Something just happened,” I said as I felt an ache in my soul.

Both Gavin and Mason reached for me simultaneously. It was as if they could feel my heart breaking.

“The words I just said…those are sacred...they are the words that every supernatural being knows. They are ingrained in our minds so that if or when we are taken by the forces that we fight, we will know how to redeem ourselves, escape our demise.”

“And what do they have to do with them? Why did you put fire wings on them? Did you just change them—without asking?”

“They’ve always been there,” Skylynn said with a sense of remorse. “They were intended to be your guardians, to shield you from unworthy souls that asked for your redemption.”

“Past tense,” Gavin said under his breath.

“Very much so,” Skylynn said, letting her eyes rise to meet his. “You would have to be alive to fulfill that fate.”

“But, but we are working on that, right?” I said with a tremble as I tried to understand why she seemed so upset.

“I don’t know anymore,” she said with a hopeless sigh. “I always knew you were one of the seven, that you had a remarkable power to stand within the bitter cold of the evil, but I didn’t realize that though you were born to rule the veil, your power came with life. That once life was taken, your rule was taken.” She looked down. “The veil grieves tonight.”

“I’m—we’re not going anywhere until vengeance is ours,” I swore as I struggled to grasp what she thought I was, what I was supposed to be.

“That is a very fine line you are walking there, Indie. I will find your vengeance, along with so many more at my side. Rasure had to have known that she would answer for your demise, and yet she committed this ungodly act without hesitation. She sacrificed herself for your death. Know that.”

“Well, call me crazy, but I don’t give a damn why she did it. I’m going to find some freaking clocks, set my family free, and become more of a vengeance than that red-headed demon has ever dared to fear.”

“Not tonight,” Skylynn said in a whisper. “I’ll find your clocks…” She glanced over her shoulder. “You need to say your goodbyes.”

As soon as she said the word ‘goodbye,’ I felt everything in my soul break apart. My will to breathe, to live, to fight—vanished. I sucked in a deep breath and scolded myself for acting like a fool. What was one goodbye? I’d lost him before. I’ll find him again.

What I could not figure out was why Skylynn had changed her play, why she was no longer willing to cross him—to have someone else turn us all so we could live our lives and move this world. I couldn’t figure out why she was giving up on me.

“Come on, boys.” Skylynn said. After a whisk of wind, the three of them vanished, leaving me to gape at an open doorway that led to Phoenix.

I stared at that threshold for countless moments, trying to find the courage to move forward, to understand what I could have done to lose the defense of Skylynn. I kept telling myself that it could not have been something as foolish as trusting my sister. It had to have been him. Phoenix must have convinced her that the war they are fighting was too dangerous, that I was too weak to stand at their side.

I’d never been a quitter. The two of them would have to force me to let go, and I doubted either of them knew how difficult a task that would be.

I walked forward boldly, prepared to argue this out, prepared to tell him that I didn’t care that he was leaving me again, that the universe itself had divided us for its own selfish reasons. I wasn’t giving in.

He was leaning against the pool of fire in the center of the room. His strong arms and long legs were crossed, and every muscle in his body was flexed in what could only be anger.

Around this oval room, there were stained glass windows that reflected angels at play. The ceiling was glass and amplified the stars above.

I walked over to the ledge next to the stained glass window that imitated the sun and the moon and pulled myself up, slid back, and stared at him. He held my stare for what seemed like forever.

“Well played,” I finally said.

He tilted his head, as if to question me.

“You have managed to make the cold ice I live within as warm as fire…you have managed to make me feel the agony of rejection once again. I don’t know what you said to her, how you convinced her that I should move on, but I’m not listening. I’m on the verge of uncovering something that never should have been hidden.” I looked down. “So if the lingering question in your eyes is if I will now finally let go, the answer is no. Not now. Not ever. I have seen…and felt too much to say any goodbyes.”

Like a predator, he slowly moved forward. When he was inches from me, he leisurely leaned toward me, causing me to fall against the window. He reached his fingertips for my brow, and when his skin touched mine I could swear that I felt fire course through my soul. Slowly, as if he knew how agonizingly blissful his touch was, he let his fingertips trace down my cheek, neck, shoulder, chest, waist, all the way down to my thighs just before he whispered, “The question is…if eternity with me is what you really want.” He squeezed my thigh as his smoldering eyes invaded my very being. “Or is this our next goodbye.”

He leaned into my ear, letting his warm breath slide down my neck. “I already know the answer.”

It took every ounce of willpower that has ever existed in the universe, but I pushed him back and stepped down from the marble wall. My first instinct was to run, and I made it a few steps before rapid-fire memories started to flood my mind. Some were of my childhood, words my mother used to say to comfort me when my curse was too much to bear. Others, most of them, were of him, in another life, in another time. The wounds were fresh again. The emotions were raw, and the one emotion I refused to let myself feel immersed me.

“You’re playing the devil’s advocate,” I said before turning to glare at him. “You—you know I am the one person on this planet that cannot stand commitment. You know it took the better part of a year for me to even let you speak to me, that the more you promised me, the more I refused you. It was only when you let me be, when you made it seem like it was my idea that I ran into your arms and confessed that I loved you from my first breath, that when I laid eyes on you for the first time I found purpose, life.”

He was speechless, which gave me confidence that what I was saying was not only true, but also to him—as well as me—it felt like that happened just yesterday.

I went on. “Half of you wants to believe I’m real.” His eyes grew wide with surprise. “Don’t look at me like that. I know. I know you think I’m some kind of echo of the girl that you once knew, that this is my image, my words, but that my soul, the one that has belonged to you since the beginning of time, has moved on.” I swallowed nervously. “And by the way, the next time you decide to throw me on the floor and have your way with me, you better be damn sure that this is all me. I have never—and I mean never—given that much of myself to anyone. Ever. To think that you were not all there, that you were holding back because you thought I was not the real thing, is by far the coldest thing you have ever done.”

That hurt him. I could see the agony all over his flawless image.

“But I forgive you for that…” My eyes absorbed every inch of him. “I forgive you because I would have done the same thing because in this short, pointless life I’ve lived, that is what I did every second of every day. I held back.”

I balled my fist in front of my stomach. “There is a rock right here, covered in layers and layers of ice. I pushed everything deep down inside of me. Too scared to feel. To love. To be held. Because everything I touched, I destroyed. I refused to live because I feared who I was. What I was. I found people. Good people, who were not afraid to live life, to take a passion and make something beautiful out of it…and wanting to be closer to that, to feel it firsthand, I began relationships that were doomed from day one. I would reach the edge of the cliff and refuse to jump. I refused because it was the wrong cliff. The bold, fearless girl they thought they knew didn’t exist. I refused because it wasn’t worth the dare.”

“Dare?” he questioned with a crack in his voice.

“When I would cry, break apart because of this curse, tell my mother that I could never have a real life…she would tell me that all of life is a dare, that every second of every day, life dares us to live, to make a difference, to become who we were designed to be: a perfectly flawed soul who has the choice to be as miserable or happy as we want to be.” My voice trembled. “She told me, she promised me that one day there would be a dare, a person that made me realize that who I was, curse and all, was beautiful, powerful. They would be worth every dare, every ounce of pain and I would not think twice before I let my guard down and bared my soul to them.”

I stepped forward. “I didn’t let my guard down, let you in hours after I knew you because of some fog of death. I let you in because the second I laid eyes on you, my heart gave me two beats. The second you touched my hand, I understood that I wasn’t some cursed, abandoned girl set on revenge. I was someone who once had warmth, who once felt complete, whole.” I couldn’t hold his stare any longer, so I glanced to the floor. “You can play whatever mind games you want with me, tell me I really don’t want you to save me, that I have feelings for others, that the fog of death has shadowed my true intentions. You can even tell me to let go…but I won’t. I won’t because the few moments I have spent with you have set my soul on fire, enough fire to keep the vengeful side of me at bay for an eternity.”

Within a beat, he was at my side, gently pulling my chin up so I would be forced to look him in the eye. “I didn’t hold back,” he whispered, and the pain in his eyes told me that that was nothing less than the truth. “Every second of every day, I have thought of you, searched for you, fought and bargained my way to finding you. And when I did…when I figured out I was too late again…it tore me in two.” He pulled me closer. “You looked so scared, so confused. I could see the pain in your eyes. I wanted to rip whoever had hurt you into a million pieces, scatter their remains across the universe—give them no hope of ever returning to life. I didn’t want you to feel that rage. I didn’t want you to know everything. I wanted you to think that Rasure was the darkest thing in this world and that I would end it for you, so that you could rest in peace.” His strong hands squeezed my waist. “I knew if you let me do that, that you were gone, that this life had suffocated the woman I’ve loved across time…and when you refused you gave me hope, but that is a selfish hope that I am ashamed to feel.”

“I know the world is cruel. I don’t need to be protected from reality,” I said quietly as I tried to understand why he would be ashamed to be with me…love me.

“So says the girl whose soul is guarded by the sons of the east and the west.”

I stepped back from him. “Jealousy. That was a beautiful speech you just spoke…but you could have summed it up. You could have said that it’s not the danger of the war you are fighting or the awareness of the darkness I will see that is stopping you from saving me; it’s jealousy, plain and simple. You are condemning me for relationships that existed in your absence.”

“I wish that were true,” he said with an ache in his silky voice as his gray eyes took in every part of me.

“If that is not true, then you are going to have to come up with another speech, one that I can believe. Understand.”

“To redeem your soul, you must pass through the line of the moons—the flaming sons of the east and the west—to reach the seventh sister, whose touch will destroy the flames of evil that bind you’…I am in love with a goddess.”

“I am not a goddess.”

“To the dead you are. To the supernatural death you are. Those boys are not almost lovers, they are your guards. They shield you from all that are unworthy. They never hide anything from you. They feel your soul, and when they know that you trust someone, adore them, they will let them close, even if they know they are dangerous, not because they are weak, but because they know that soon, very soon, the truth will be revealed and that they will shield and avenge you before any of your power is seized.”

“I am the last person to say something cruel about those boys, but you need a reality check. They didn’t shield me from death. Life is power.”

“I cannot tell you how or why that happened. It could have simply been because you were unaware of your power, giving them no reason to protect it. Nevertheless, you did fall, and…if you do not let go,” his jaw tightened just before he said, “…so many more will, too.”

There was nothing less than grief in his voice. He believed every word he was saying.

“I don’t understand, Sebastian,” I said in a whisper.

Saying his real name, the name I’d known him to have before, did nothing but bring more anguish to his deep gray eyes, which were laced with fire.

He was against me within the next beat of my heart, leaning his forehead to mine as his hands clenched my waist. “It means that if you choose this vengeful path that every soul who fights in the war I’m in, everyone that falls, will have no way out. Over time, enough of us will fall, and when we do, when we can no longer set ourselves free, darkness will overcome, bringing self-destruction to our universe.” He reached his hands for my face and stole one gentle kiss before he said, “I’m selfish enough to never let you go, to burn you to ashes and let you rise with me, but you’re not. You will not let innocents suffer only for the sake of loving me. You will not let this war end without balance.”

I moved my head from side to side in disbelief as I stepped back. “You can’t just show up here and tell me that not only am I a freak of nature, I am supposed to set some souls free. You have the wrong girl. I would have remembered that by now in my life. What kind of goddess of whatever can even die?”

He reached for me, and in the next beat I was standing just before the pool of flames. He extended my hand, then against my neck he whispered, “Freeze the flame.”

The feeling of his body against my back, the warmth of his breath, brought nothing but warmth to my soul. “I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. Quit holding back.”

“I’m not. I’m warm.”

He hesitated, but then in a low, deep, silky voice he said, “Genevieve, focus on those flames. Imagine they took me from you, they took your family, they took your life, they took your soul—that they are the destruction of the world you love so much.”

Within that beat, the flames froze, making one of the most extravagant ice sculptures I’d ever seen.

“Now will it to crumble.”

I had no idea what he meant by that.

“Bloody hell, will it this instant.”

I was so sick of ice, of the cold, of dealing with this day in and day out, of not understanding it. I wanted the ice to go away, and with that thought it exploded across the room. Phoenix had shielded me from the blow. When I dared to look up from his chest, I found myself against the window again, him leaning into me again, my legs wrapped around his body.

“You have the power to freeze the fire that holds lost beings. You have the power to destroy what is meant to destroy you with a thought. Now tell me I have the wrong girl. Tell me that you and I make absolutely any sense at all—we are literally fire and ice.”

“I didn’t just become this person. Tell me how this happened. If that is true, how was I the girl that held you so long ago? Tell me that.”

He looked away. “You always loved the cold, the snow. You always seemed connected with a world I could not perceive. You were this girl then, but you shielded me from it and I’ll be damned if Guardian did not lead me into becoming something that would forevermore separate us.”

“No one has ever led you anywhere. You follow your own path. You were on fire long before you became a phoenix,” I said as I remembered saying such things to him long ago. “Fire was your birthright.”

“I’d give up every ounce of power and fire to hold you forevermore...but we would both pay the price for that one day.”

“I don’t understand what you need me to do. What you are telling me. So I died, so I had some powers I never used, but what is letting go going to do to resolve this? I’m not a quitter.”

“That is why you need to let go. When you let go, you will be born again, and when you are reborn you will be protected, and when the time is right you will be told of your supremacies. You will set your course to release all who have fallen in the war to restore balance. If you don’t let go…or if I turn you…once a soul has fallen, it will have no hope. It may take thousands, maybe even a million years for that end of all of us to come, but it will come and there will be nothing that can be done to prevent it.”

“Are you offering me a thousand years with you, or a death that will lead me to life, a life you will not seek me out in?”

He looked down. “I never said that.”

“Yes, you did. Just now.”

His eyes rose to meet mine. “We have broken each other’s heart twice…a third is more than either of us could withstand.”

This couldn’t be right. There had to be another way, a loophole, something. The universe could not be this cruel. Every part of my soul, every fiber of my being was telling me that, but arguing about it without any proof was getting me nowhere. Instead, I said, “I’m not making this decision tonight, or even tomorrow. Once I have my vengeance, once I’m sure my family is safe, I’ll decide.”

“That will be tomorrow, Love. Rasure will fall tomorrow, and what choice you make in that moment will be one that you will have to live with.”

“Why are you so sure about tomorrow?”

“Guardian and I have a battle before us. The wake of it, whether we lose or win, will weaken your Rasure. It will weaken all Escorts. As soon as Guardian and his own are secured, I will be here. I will stand by you as you deliver the last blow…end the demon that stole you from me.”

“Promise me I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said as I reached for his flawless image, as I dared to say, “Promise me you’ll see me in every tomorrow.”

His gray eyes filled with a hungry desire.

 

 

Chapter Fourteen

 

 

In that beat, his lips were on mine and a warm rush of air surrounded us. The next thing I knew, I was lying on the rug in the library in front of a raging fire. The power and passion behind every movement of his lips made my toes curl and a warm anticipation boil in my core. We rolled across the floor, fighting to get skin-to-skin, soul-to-soul. The idea that it was more than likely the last time that we would ever hold each other ignited our passion and desire to a euphoric level, one that seemed to pull my soul from the body I thought I still had and raise it to another plane of existence, to a plane where no flesh was needed, to where my soul could merge with his to become truly one, something that time or reason could never divide.

Hours went by. When we became tired, we were gentle with each other, but before long we would find our second, third, fourth, and fifth wind and battle to get as close, as fast as we could…but it never seemed to be close enough. We ached for more.

Side by side, wrapped in a blanket next to a fire that was reborn with a glance from Phoenix, we stared into each other’s eyes, both questioning why the universe seemed hell bent on dividing us.

As I reached to brush a lock of dark auburn hair out of his eyes, I asked, “Why do you think Guardian led you to become someone that could never hold me? Do you think I will destroy the fire in you? Freeze it?”

“No…” he whispered as his gray eyes slowly danced over my solemn expression. “Even if you did destroy me, I could instantly recreate myself. It meant that I would destroy you, that if fire gives birth to you, the ice that gives you power will be destroyed.”