His laugh.
His smile.
The way he could bring me out of myself and remind me I could be fun and funny. I wasn’t those things without him. He was everything in life and happiness bottled into one gorgeous body. I was the Debbie Downer to his Party-Boy lifestyle.
Except when I was with him.
He made me better. He made me whole.
The way his arms wrapped around me like he never wanted to let me go.
How we could stay in bed for hours, all day long, how we never wanted to leave.
His legs tangled in mine.
His fingers stroking sensual paths over my bare stomach.
His lips on my neck and in my hair and on my mouth.
And how we connected.
How we could talk through the pain of our pasts and heal each other. How we told each other everything. There were no secrets, no reasons for secrets.
Sometimes I wondered if he knew me at all during that time. I had been so careful to hide the unpleasant parts of me. I didn’t want him to see me at my worst, at my ugliest.
But as I lay there, watching the ceiling fan flap in lazy circles over my head, I realized I only made sure to tuck those embarrassing pieces away when we were with other people. I had always been honest with him. Our time together had always been open and raw.
My heart squeezed painfully in my chest and I felt sick to my stomach. The wine swirled through my blood and made the clear, rational thoughts fizzle out into more confusion.
He still chose the battle over me. And if I were honest, if I were truly real, I chose the easy, less vulnerable path over him.
I didn’t want to be hurt again and again as he chose mission after mission over me. I didn’t want to face the possibility of losing someone I loved so deeply. I didn’t want to have to face my intense feelings for him and give up myself and what I wanted, so that he could go after what he wanted.
I was the one that had been selfish.
But, despite all of my unworthiness, there was a stubborn emotion inside of me that would never go away.
Love.
I would always love him. Always.
And it seemed stupid that I would realize this now… a year later.
We were beyond salvaging at this point.
I might hurt for him for the rest of my life, but there was nothing I could do about it.
There was nothing I wanted to do about it.
My eyelids eventually fluttered closed and the hazy shroud of drunken sleep found me. I dreamed about crosses and women dressed as nuns. I dreamed about a square of white and a hand that held mine so tightly I couldn’t let go.
I didn’t want to let go.
Chapter Nine
Sebastian
The silence of the mountain echoed in the fuzzy gray of early morning. The absence of sound screamed through the night louder than I could imagine it would. My ears felt stuffed with cotton. The sheer pressure of quiet pressed down on my shoulders and head and I thought my brain would explode from it.
Something had changed on the mountain.
Something vile and terrible had seeped into the ground and destroyed the good, vibrant Magic that ran these hills.
I looked around for signs of life or peace, but only the ancient stone stared back.
Machu Picchu. City of Kings.
We hardly used this place, except it seemed, as a meeting ground. Silas’s people had lived nearby in a settlement that would never acclimate to the human world. They were Shifters and wild in their human forms. Which made them completely untamable in their animal.
They ran these mountains with uninhibited abandon. Silas had cultivated this in his people and I couldn’t help but be jealous. I wanted that. I wanted to run free, in the spiritual sense. I wanted to run free of myself.
I wondered where they were today though or if they were even still in these mountains. It was possible that after Silas’s death, they had moved elsewhere.
Or maybe Terletov had found them.
A renewed sense of responsibility coursed through me. I no longer associated myself with the Monarchy, but I felt tied to these people, to this Kingdom. Kiran and Eden could no longer fight on the frontline. Avalon and Amelia had to stay put and run the ruling.
This mission could go to no one else.
I was the answer.
I had to be.
My team scattered through the ruins. The tourist section didn’t officially open for a couple more hours. We had the run of things, but I didn’t know where to start.
“I don’t think there’s anything here,” Titus decided. He’d come up to stand next to me and looked out at the tumbling of stone steps and what remained of an ancient, proud civilization.
This moment felt symbolic for some reason.
Would this be us one day?
A legacy of bad Kings and a powerful people that wasted their gifts on greed and prejudice? We stood at the forefront of a new age for our Immortal Kingdom. We had the potential to be great. To make a difference in this world and in each other.
But we were immature in our newness, untried and untested. Would we survive this conflict? Could we defeat Terletov and become the people I knew we were supposed to be?
Or would Seraphina’s vision become our reality?
Would we destroy the world we should be protecting?
“Can you feel the change?”
“Like swallowing soap. It’s bitter and wrong.” Titus’s power rippled in the air around him. I couldn’t feel all the Magic, but he and I were especially close. It felt like his bear shivered his great length and shook the evil air off of him, like water after he’d emerged from a lake.
The Titans I’d dispatched scoured the grounds dutifully. They were efficient and smart, and they could sense the Magic that I couldn’t. I didn’t love being charged with the interim, but I did enjoy the skill and perspective they brought with them.
Jericho walked over to us. The Gypsy Queen had called him the general. And the Titans treated him in that way.
Kiran had given me this position, but I knew what it meant. I was the Royal mouthpiece, the blood relation that they were supposed to look to. Jericho was the talent.
“There’s nothing here,” he declared. “This can’t be the well. I think the Magic would be stronger and not just… off.”
“So where to, then? We’ve narrowed the well down to this country, but that can’t be it. We have to find this quickly. Terletov has it. Obviously. We have to do something.”
Seraphina and Olivia approached us with their eyes searching and appalled. We all felt the change. It grated against our skin and sickened our insides. It was easy to see that this Magic could destroy everything. Its very definition was destruction.
“Sera, have anything?”
She looked at me, seeming surprised that I’d spoken to her. She brushed her blonde hair out of her eyes and leveled me with a confused look.
“I had a dream last night,” she said. But then she stopped talking and shot Liv a “help me” look.
“What?” Liv laughed. “I don’t know what you dreamed about!”
“I can’t remember!” Seraphina cried. She looked horrified for only a second before she put her hands over her face and started laughing.
She laughed so hard that her shoulders shook and she doubled over. Olivia started laughing too and clutched at her stomach as if it hurt her to laugh so hard.
Jericho, Titus and I just watched them, so completely confused. How was it funny that she couldn’t remember her dream? And since when had Seraphina decided to become friends with the former-humans. That didn’t seem like her style at all.
“So it wasn’t a vision?” I asked when the girls tried to settle down.
“It was the wine!” Seraphina laughed.
“What wine?”
“All the wine!” Liv giggled.
“They’ve gone mad,” I groaned. “The girls have gone mad.”
“Do you think it’s the bad Magic?”
Titus asked seriously.
Roxie and Ophelia joined us with Xander and Xavier. The brothers gave the giggling girls a once over before they looked to us for explanation.
“What’s so funny?” Roxie asked while trying to suppress her own laughter.
I didn’t understand. Was giggling contagious? We were on a mission! Did no one remember this?
“Something about wine,” Jericho explained. “And a vision?”
Ophelia’s surprised laugh popped in the silent moment. She tipped her head back and became as wild and out of control as the other two.
Even Roxie wiped away tears of hilarity.
“We had wine last night,” she explained. “Lots of wine.”
“Is that why you can’t remember your vision?” I scowled at Seraphina. How could she be so reckless? Careless? Didn’t she realize what was at stake?
We had to be sharp. Always.
Abruptly, Seraphina’s head snapped upright and her vision cleared. “Gabriel,” she whispered. “The church.”
“Let’s go.” I didn’t hesitate. I didn’t question her. I called in the Titans and we left.
It made sense. It made perfect sense.
Bloody hell, why hadn’t I thought of it?
Why had Gabriel exiled himself from the Kingdom to run a small church that had zero congregation? The church itself was a poor excuse for a house of worship and the nuns that ran the grounds did nothing to improve the situation. Yet, they stayed relentlessly devoted to the building.
The church itself had been attacked before by Terletov’s men.
And Gabriel had always returned here.
He had refused to stay on with Avalon.
He left the Kingdom in supposed hiding; yet everyone knew where to find him.
The church.
I was an idiot.
We piled into the various rentals we’d caravanned out here in and sped our way to the small little village where Gabriel had lived the majority of his life.
We were silent as we went. It took a couple hours to arrive, but we were wired with anticipation and relief.
There would be battle ahead of us; our nerves wound tight and ready as we counted the seconds until that looming moment. But we had a direction. We knew where to go.
And even more than that, I had been right to involve Seraphina in this mission.
We arrived at the church and flooded the small sanctuary. I could have given instructions, but nobody needed them. These were vetted soldiers. The mission could only go one way.
We had to win.
We had to win every battle from now on.
The Magic felt thicker than ever inside the small, disheveled space. I had been here before but never had I felt the pulsing energy beat in the air.
I felt it now and wished I couldn’t.
It scraped against my skin and screamed inside my head.
The Titans spread out in protective formations and we made our way over the crushed pews and shattered glass. The room was shrouded in darkness, not even the light from the early morning could penetrate the oppressive gloom.
The cross at the front of the room had been pulled down and broken over the pulpit. Candles in red glass looked to have been thrown on the ground and shattered on purpose. The only thing not broken in this room was the dingy stained-glass windows that remained untouched.
We moved beyond the sanctuary and through the door to the left of where the cross used to hang. Down narrow hallways and beyond nun’s dormitories that were as torn apart and destroyed as the front of the building.
The Magic grew stronger and my sense of it as well.
The Titans started tearing apart rooms, looking for anything that would give us a clue as where to go next. I led the rest of our group deeper into the maze of living quarters.
I had never been back here before and was a little shocked by the primitiveness in which Gabriel and his nuns lived. Even the kitchen was sparsely furnished, not even containing a refrigerator. The building itself had no electricity and all of the lamps and candles had been destroyed.
Towards the back of the house, the Magic grew immensely stronger. I felt the physical pressure of it against my skin, as though it pushed back at me, trying to keep me from finding the Source.
My gut churned with indecision. I needed to get to the bottom of this, but I didn’t want to put my friends’ lives at stake.
I knew they signed up for this. And I knew they were aware of exactly what they risked when they’d answered my phone call. But still. I could not… would not be responsible for their deaths or worse.
“You have to go through that door,” Jericho encouraged.
We stood in front of a door that would presumably lead outside. We’d been through all of the rooms and there didn’t seem to be an upstairs or a downstairs. The only place left was out, but every instinct inside of me flared to life with warning.
“Tell the girls to stay put,” I told him over my shoulder.
And then I pushed against the building force of Magic and walked through the door.
Nothing happened right away and I allowed myself a small breath of relief. I didn’t know what I expected, but something along the lines of total and complete annihilation had run through my head a few thousand times.
The door opened to a courtyard with stucco buildings all around. The ground was cobbled stone and spread out in a rough octagon. Not one of the other buildings had a backdoor, nor was there another way to leave the courtyard except by scaling the tall windowless buildings or through the door I’d just walked through.
In the center of the courtyard was an old-fashioned well. It had a thatched roof over weathered wood supports; a rusted pale hanging on a hook and the stone that made the actual well portion had been worn and rounded. Grooves in the ledge pulled me forward.
A rusted ladder lay against the inside wall of the well.
“Well, that’s not ominous,” Titus sighed next to me.
“No kidding.” I ran my fingers over the distorted metal rungs. The tainted Magic in the air pressed against me forcefully, nearly stealing the air from my lungs. “It doesn’t want us down there.”
Titus leaned forward. “To be fair, I don’t really want to go down there either.”
We turned and shared a meaningful look. What choice did we have? In fact, this was exactly the lead we were looking for.
I dropped the pack I’d been carrying and swung my leg over the cold stone. I started to descend the ladder into the utter darkness of the well.
“Bastian!”
I heard the voice and instinctively raised my head. Seraphina stood in the doorway watching me go. Her blonde hair whipped around her face from a wind that came out of nowhere. The morning had suddenly grown grim and cloudy, but she stood in the doorway burning brighter than any gloomy darkness.
Her pretty face was pinched in concern and her hand stretched out to me as if she wanted me to stop.
I glanced down into the obscure abyss beneath me and then back at her. I let this memory of her sear into my memory, promising myself I would keep it with me forever.
She was beautiful. Staggeringly so. She was the air in my lungs and the blood in my veins.
I didn’t want to admit that. Bloody hell, I didn’t even want it to be true. But there it was. She was the loveliest thing that existed for me. And I’d pissed away her trust and loyalty without understanding the consequences of my actions.
“Am I going to die, Sera?” I asked her confidently.
She gave a quick shake and tried to suppress her smile. “I don’t think so.”
I winked at her. “Don’t follow me.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“This is why I fell in love with you.”
She actually tripped after I said that. She wasn’t even walking or moving in any way. But my words seemed to startle her so completely she nearly tipped over.
I hurried down the ladder, enjoying this game I had started to play with her.
Well, it was
n’t so much a game, more like a gamble. A gamble with my life, my future, my legacy.
I just didn’t know which way I was betting yet.
I eventually found solid earth again. The air was compressed and cold. It sunk in me with all the weighted destiny of death.
At the bottom of the well, a tunnel opened up to my left. I turned toward it and used my own Magic to see through the curtain of darkness.
More footsteps landed behind me. Titus and Jericho had followed. I didn’t want to acknowledge the comfort I felt with their presence. I could pretend to be as courageous as I wanted, but this shit scared the hell out of me.
I was glad not to be alone.
“What was that?” Titus asked in a whispered tone.
“What was what?”
“That exchange with Seraphina?”
I glanced at him over my shoulder. “I think I made a colossal mistake with her.”
“Breaking up with her or realizing you’re still in love with her.”
“Both,” I admitted.
He flashed a toothy grin at me in the dark. “Another one bites the dust. Another one bites the dust. Another one gone and another one gone, another one bites the dust!”
“Oh, god. Stop singing.”
And now he’d added dancing. We were likely on our way to meet our doom and the Shifter, who could turn into a grizzly bear, was moonwalking behind me whilst singing Queen.
“Hey, I’m gonna get to you, too! Another one bites the dust!”
“Jericho?” I spun around and stared at the General as he finished off the chorus. “You’re all mad. All of you.”
The two idiots that were supposed to have my back smiled at each other and gave a discreet fist bump. I tried to force my mind back to the task at hand, but the atmosphere had been sufficiently calmed.
I turned back around and continued to lead the way down the dark tunnel. “Funny they kept this such a secret from us.”
“You would think something like this would have come up in the last three years,” Titus agreed.
“Not even Kiran knows about this?” Jericho asked in a serious voice. Glad to know he had given up the song and dance routine.