“Skyla.” His head ticks back, and simply by his warm affect, albeit momentarily stunned, I can tell it’s my Sector, Marshall. “Extinction, Ms. Messenger, really? I certainly hope you don’t mean it. I’ve sacrificed—”
“Marshall!” I slap a kiss to his lips, quickly putting an end to his diatribe, and my entire body electrifies with his touch. “I’m light driving.” I pull him in and point to the dance floor where I spot myself dancing with—him? “Oh, wow, you are, too.” I pull back, and he gives the sad curve of a smile. My panting ratchets up, and I can’t catch my breath. “Then you know.” Desperation hitches in my throat. “Take me to Gage. That is an order from your spirit wife.” I pick up his hand and give it a firm tug as if to say go.
Marshall darts a glance around the dance floor, to the edge of the property, to the depths of the forest that lies black in the distance.
His chest expands as he gives a single nod. “He’s inside.”
Marshall and I head up the stairs just as the Sectors that usually flank my mother’s side float right past us as if leading the way.
“What are their names?” I give Marshall’s hand a squeeze, and the one to the left looks at me from over his shoulder, offering up a sultry grin.
“Never you mind their monikers,” Marshall growls at the steamy Sector until his glowing eminence is facing forward once again, the two of them lighting up the darkness as we enter the mouth of the overgrown house like twin beacons. “You wouldn’t understand them. Impossible to say. Too many consonants, not enough vowels.” He’s glowering at them as if it were possible I might actually fall for them. As if. I have one love and his name is Logan Oliver. I stop cold. Gage. I slap my hand to my mouth. My God, where is my mind? It’s GAGE Oliver. “Don’t worry. I love you, too.” I’m quick to put Marshall’s restless spirit at ease.
“I do realize this, Skyla.” Marshall’s illumination dims a notch. “Your words are kind but completely unnecessary. I’m no needy human. I can feel your love permeating my being.”
We pass the kitchen, and there’s not a soul in sight. The darkened hall is littered with ghostly Transfer transplants rutting and giggling like hyenas in every spare orifice the house has to offer.
“Why can’t I see in here?” I bark as I try to push those useless glowing beings out of the way. Instead of lighting up the darkness, they’re blinding me like a traveling sun in my line of vision, creating a dull blur around them. “Out of my way.” I muscle my way past them, dragging Marshall along with me. The house only seems to dim the deeper in we get. The air grows stale with a suspicious brand of silence layered beneath the din of voices filled with glee and muffled laughter. The orchestra left once Demetri demanded they clear the grand room, and now I know why. He needed the space for a blood sport.
The sound of feet pounding their way over speeds up from behind, and before I can turn around, a force so powerful bullets through me. It’s not until I look up do I see a familiar man running for his life.
“Laken!” he riots so loud the walls rattle, and it’s then I realize it’s Coop.
“My God, he ran right through me. Second time tonight.” I look to Marshall, quickening my steps through this midnight maze of Demetri’s. “What’s happened to Laken?”
“You’ll deal with that later.”
The glowing Sectors zoom ahead of us as if to say speed it up, and I pull Marshall along as we trail them to the stairwell. I look down the hall that leads to another twisted area of the house and spot the most beautiful face in the world running toward me, moving quick as a bullet. That determined look on his face lets me know he means business, and my chest swells with relief as my heart drums to unsafe levels. I hold open my arms, words eluding me as Gage crashes right through my body as he speeds toward the foyer.
“Laken!” he thunders twice as loud as Cooper, and it’s only then I realize that wasn’t Gage at all—it’s his demented brother, Wesley.
“Laken?” I drop Marshall’s hand and hike my skirt up with my fists. Marshall’s right. Whatever it is, I’ll have to deal with it later.
“Skyla!” Logan bolts my way and takes up my hand, pulling me behind him like a kite. We run right through the glowing Sector duo, and as I move through their bodies, a nuclear blast of elation, of orgasmic delight, shudders through me as we come out on the other side. Logan spills us into the grand room, empty save for its blue illumination that washes the room in an ethereal glow, strangling every other color right out of existence.
“There he is,” Logan says it with an ache in his voice as we make a mad dash over.
Gage Oliver stands with his back to us, looking to his right where a shadow lingers.
“Gage!” I scream his name as my body moves through time and space. The room only seems to elongate, disrupting the effort to save him. My voice shrills from me hypnotically loud as it spasms from every cell in my body.
A slash of silver glides through the air, and Gage falls to the ground. His body falling one way, his head the next.
“No.” I freeze a moment as my limbs contract with a newfound paralysis, my feet suddenly rooted to the floor. The glowing beings my mother sent stride forward. One of them steps into the shadow that’s still wielding its blade—a spirit sword no less. Gone is the shadow, the murderer enveloped in the Sector’s comely light. And there it is. My mother never meant to expose the killer. That is why she sent them, her dashing minions robed in stars, protectors of evil, the purveyors of my grief.
I stagger forward, dumbfounded, afraid, with Logan taking up my hand once again. I’m so numb, I can’t feel his fingers.
“We’re too late,” I whisper low as if it were a lullaby.
He gives my hand a rattle, both our eyes still fixed on the blood pooling by our feet. “We weren’t going to change this.”
A flash of light so brilliant detonates at the nexus of Gage Oliver’s body. It rises in the shape of a man, in the shape of my beloved.
The earthen sphere recedes as a magnificent wall of light rains down from the ceiling.
“Pardon me.” Marshall strides past us, his body growing lucent as he steps into the tornado of light and looks to Gage with love in his eyes that I have never seen him exude for that man before—for anyone but the boys and me.
Gage rises. An entire array of glowing beings appear and he embraces them one by one, and slowly, ever so lethargically, the heavenlies evaporate like a dream.
“Gage, no! Please!” I run forward, my feet slipping in a puddle of blood, and Logan reels me into him. “Gage.” I bury my face in Logan’s chest, his heart walloping against mine, and I’m morbidly surprised by this. Logan is dead, locked in some super Treble that my mother landed him in. It’s Logan she favors. He is what her heart desires for me. I look up through tear-filled eyes and meet with his somber gaze. “My mother is speaking to us,” I whisper. And I’m afraid I know exactly what she’s saying.
Logan’s jaw clenches as if he were holding back an entire river of words. His eyes flit to the floor before he spins, craning his neck in every direction. “It’s gone. His head is gone.”
“What?” I tap-dance through the sanguine river beneath me just as I spot Logan—the one from that horrible night at the door, the other version of me hot on his heels. “We need to get out of here.” I pull Logan past this screaming version of the two of us without blinking and head to the foyer as my screams begin lighting up the night from the grand room. “Where did they go?” The glowing Sectors, the shadowed figure wielding that spirit sword have all disappeared.
Logan leads us outside, and it’s quiet as a cemetery save for the elevated screams coming from behind. My voice rises to the navy sky and pierces the membrane that separates the here and now from eternity.
There’s not a soul on the expansive porch. Logan and I split up and run to the ends of the enormous frame of the house and nothing. We meet up at the door, both with the destitute look of panic.
“Forget it, Skyla.” He leads me back inside as a
crowd begins to surge through the hall. “I’m getting the feeling that’s not the point of this little side trip back in time.”
“It’s not?” I run past him into the grand room as I spot myself splashing in crimson, Logan furtively trying to stop the blood flow from Gage’s neck, pounding on his chest as if trying to revive him. “Then what the hell is the point?” I stop cold as together we watch Logan himself rifle through Gage’s pockets as if he were a thief. The room floods with bodies, Emma, Dr. Oliver—and Logan—the older version of him picks me up, my face, my arms, my dress soaked in Gage’s blood and speeds us out the door.
“Come on.” Logan takes my hand, and we follow along the former versions of ourselves to the exit. So much blood dripping along with us, black splats—nothing but the remnants of Gage Oliver’s existence dotting the pale stone floors like a warning written in blood. My eyes follow the older versions of us out the door, and once we’re gone, my gaze falls right back to those claret prints my husband left behind. His DNA seeping into the floor, the limestone drinking him in without my permission. I’m sure Demetri will call Cerberus himself in to lap up the blood work Gage left behind. Death is messy, and Demetri can stand a lot of things, but a mess is not one of them.
Logan says something about heading upstairs, and I grab ahold of his arm as my gaze follows those blood drops to the right as far as the eye can see.
“Oh my God.” I shake Logan until he’s looking to the floor right alongside me. “They went this way.”
Logan and I speed down the dark hall, following drops of Gage’s blood like breadcrumbs. Those glowing, see-through Transfer transplants burst into the hall from out of the walls, laughing, swirling, twirling as if the celebration had just hit its zenith. I plow through them, ignoring their drunken fervor, their laughter only seems to get louder by the moment as if it were me they were laughing at all along. I’ll hear those thunderous cackles long into my life as my memory encases this moment in stone. Logan and I all but touch the floor to see where those sooted black dots might lead us. We speed deeper down the hall, past dozens of closed doors, so many nooks and crannies in this house to hide a killer, to hide a disembodied head. We hit the end of the hall and nothing.
“Oh my God.” I can’t catch my breath. “Right or left?”
Logan runs to the left about ten feet and waves me over. “This way.” We follow the blood, although scant at this point, to a doorway that leads to an all too familiar setting.
“The basement,” I grunt as we fly down the stairs. “I’ve been here with Chloe.” I remember this demented place, the strange diorama that Demetri has laid out—a miniaturized version of Paragon itself with all of the houses, schools, even the shopping mall set in its place. My shoulder slams against the door as I attempt to open it, and Logan pulls me back.
“The floor,” he says as he wraps his arms around my waist a moment, and I look down to find a large circle of blood the size of my hand as if someone set Gage’s head down for a moment then snatched it right back up again.
Logan kicks in the door, splintering the wood to pieces. I push past him with the fullness of my oversized skirt squeezing through the skinny frame, dashing down the stairs two at a time.
“The island.” I stop cold at the sight of the miniature playhouses overturned, a nasty swath of blood running down the center of the display, and a breath catches in my throat. It’s evident what’s happened. Someone or something dragged my husband’s head through this mess, obliterating it in the process. “Who did this?” My legs seize as I force them to move, edging carefully to the partition at the end of the room.
Rumpled in a rat’s nest of newspapers lies a very naked, very bloodied Bishop. I walk carefully around the chaos surrounding her and find her closed eyes, that dark hair of hers splayed around her like a demonic halo, a raven-soaked spider web that’s caught her head in the nexus. And then I gasp when I see it.
A low-lying growl works its way from Logan’s chest as we boil in anger.
Nestled tight in Chloe’s arms lies Gage Oliver’s head, bloodied, hair matted to the side, and those sad cobalt eyes looking straight at me as if pleading for mercy.
I don’t let another second go by before snatching him from her, and the girth and weight of him stabs me with shock as I shove him in Logan’s arms as if I were passing a bowling ball—my fingers knotted in his blood-soaked hair—his skin washed in crimson.
“Get him out of here.”
“Hey?” Chloe groans while sloppily brushing the hair out of her face.
I bear hard into Logan’s glossy eyes. “Go.” The word shreds from my throat. “Get out. This is not a request. It’s an order.”
I turn back to the witch before me, still struggling to free herself from her tresses. The blood smeared and dried to her body trails down her torso, right down to that dark triangle, leaving a bloody impression over her inner thighs. A wild pang of nausea rides through me, and something just this side of a roar yelps from my lungs as I piece together Chloe’s perversion.
“I didn’t do it!” Chloe gesticulates as if she were drunk. Her eyes light up a marbled hue of coffee and algae. She staggers to her feet. “I didn’t kill him!” Her voice shrieks to the ceiling as if she were afraid for her life, and she should be.
“Bullshit! What you did was equally egregious.” I lunge at her, digging my fingers into her neck so hard my fingernails cut right through her skin as if it were dough. I thrash her against the wall, and her naked limbs dance, punch, and kick as she struggles to push me off her. But I am focused, determined in accomplishing the task of killing Chloe Bishop. “If Gage gets to die, then so do you!” My voice cuts through my throat like a fire alarm as I pound her head against the wall over and over. My anger surges at the grotesque visual of what she made Gage do—my Gage—my husband. The Celestra strength in me kicks in ten times more lively than before, and I crush Chloe’s head right through the drywall as a plume of powder explodes around her.
Chloe’s eyes invert as her fingernails claw at my arms, eliciting long, bloody streaks in my flesh clear down to my elbows.
Her knee comes up and kicks me in the gut, and I double over, enabling her to wrestle me across the room in a stumbling dance before kicking out my feet and slamming me to the ground. The enormous dress my mother saw fit to stuff me in cushions my fall, but my head bounces over the hard stone floor like a melon.
“You fucking bitch.” Chloe straddles her legs over my chest and lands a violent slap across my face. “I didn’t kill him!” she shrills the words out as blood shoots from her nose to the side of her cheek. “He was gifted to me.” She shakes me as she screams it. “Dropped off like a log by who the fuck knows,” Chloe riots as a cool blue light takes over the room.
I glance back to see Logan gone, in his place my mother, Candace Messenger, glowing with approval as she smiles peaceably down on the two of us. “Rise, children. Have we not moved past the barbarity?”
Chloe leans back, and I steal the moment to pin her to the ground, her naked body encrusted with the memory of my husband’s blood. Chloe and I wrestle like lions, screaming like cats on fire, pulling hair, biting flesh, nails clawing at whatever we can grasp. In one swift move, I roll her over and crash her skull to the ground. Her lids fly wide open, and her eyes roll back as if she were seeing stars.
“I hate you, Chloe. I hate you,” I hiss over her lips, my eyes hardened over those black demonic orbs she sees the world through. “I have hated you since the moment you met me in my dreams, and you have proven to be nothing but a nightmare ever since!” I howl out the last few words as I drill her head into the ground with a morbid satisfaction.
“Skyla!” My mother’s voice reverberates through my bones as she calls for me. “Enough! Rise, the two of you. I have words for you both.”
Try as I might I can’t seem to pull my gaze from Chloe’s bloodied face, her own blood mingling with that of Gage’s. “I don’t give a damn about a thing you have to say.” My fist flies hard
and fast over Chloe’s face. Her hands grab my wrists in an effort to pull me away, and I claw at her face, taking one last swipe as my nails carve into her cheek three perfect lines that drip from her left eye.
Chloe lands me on my back and returns the favor, scratching my face with her nails, leaving the sting to linger.
“I said enough!” my mother bellows, and both Chloe and I fly backward with a gust of torrential wind, slamming into the wall and adhering to it, suspended several feet from the floor. “I won’t have this.” Her clear eyes cut to mine. “You will mind me, Skyla. I am your mother. And you”—she glowers over at Chloe with her naked body struggling to crawl to the floor—“you will mind me because you owe me everything.”
“Why does she owe you anything?” No sooner do the words leave my lips than Chloe and I slip to the floor as we’re freed from our bondage. I stumble over to my mother with a scrutinizing stare, wondering what in the hell she’s up to this time.
“She allowed me to live,” Chloe sputters, her hand massaging her neck, and I can see the lines I gifted her cheek swelling nicely.