I traveled toward her, my feet seemingly going on their own. “I’m sorry, Krystal.” Teagan sighed. “I wish I could help.”
“That’s okay, Teagan. This was never your responsibility.”
I was here for… for what? I sighed. It was like I was supposed to know but I couldn’t grasp the memory. I couldn’t hold onto the knowledge.
Titus jumped down in front of me. He looked different, and I stepped back to protect myself from the sheer blinding light in him. His hair was long, it fell down by his shoulders. His eyes were light and he wore clothes I’d never seen before. His pants were blue, but also somehow gray, and they looked like they might be scratchy. He had on short sleeves with some kind of design on the front, a print I didn’t recognize. He shook his head.
“Don’t try to remember so hard. Not yet.” He hugged me and my earlier alarm fled. Who cared what he looked like? This was Titus. I breathed him in. His scent was there and his arms were strong. “When you remember it, that’ll be the end. I’m not ready for that.”
No, neither was I. “Okay, I won’t remember.”
“Not yet.” Zeke’s voice behind me had me turning. Like Titus, he just looked different. His hair was here there and everywhere. It poked up and he had a beard I’d never seen him with. Zeke had never seemed so sloppy. It was sort of adorable. He tugged me toward him, and I went. “We’re here, Krystal. And we’re not going anywhere. You’re still a Sister. You always were.”
Further down the path stood Paden, Jett, and Ryland. They were frozen like statues, staring out without moving. I gasped, and ran toward them. I grabbed onto Paden to shake him, but he was made of stone.
Why? What was happening?
Flames shot up from the ground, and I had to dart back from them to get away from the heat. Sweat broke out all over my body.
“Hey,” I yelled. I couldn’t leave my guards like that.
Daniella appeared in front of me. “Darkness to light. Darkness to light.”
What did that even mean? “Daniella? I don’t understand what’s happening here?”
In front of me a giant bird appeared, flapping its wings. It was multicolored and had a huge beak. Almost suspended in space, I could hear its voice in my mind. “Fix things, Krystal. Fix things. Don’t wait.”
Not yet…
I jolted up in bed. The room was cool, quiet, just the sounds of Titus and Zeke sleeping motionless let me know I wasn’t alone.
Someone came out of the bathroom and as he walked toward me I quickly realized it was Paden. I scampered off the bed and threw myself into his arms. He wasn’t stone. He was here. He breathed. He was… okay.
“Hey.” He wrapped me up against him. “Glad to see you, too. I’ve been filled in a little bit. These two aren’t going to be moving any time soon, so I came in to check, and you were all out cold. Did I wake you?”
It took me a moment before I could speak. “Weird, weird sleep. Bad dreams. I don’t know. Yes, fine.”
“Aww.” His voice was low. “I have nightmares. A lot of them. Almost every night, actually. So we share that in common. The sun is shining. Let’s go outside, it helps.”
Okay, I’d believe him. Maybe it was just a dream and not some sort of premonition. Not something I had to hang onto like some kind of warning.
I followed him out the door.
He was right. Outside, the sun was shining, but no one was smiling. The Sisters stood in a circle, the guards surrounding them. Mika looked up when I came out. “Oh good, Krystal is here. Maybe she’ll have an idea.”
An idea? I walked toward them, nerves making me a little slow about it. I didn’t feel like a Sister. I didn’t know if I really belonged with them or not. I was… different. And dead, apparently.
But if they wanted my input on whatever was happening I’d try to give it. I was here. I had to contribute as best I could until I couldn’t anymore.
“What’s going on?”
Mika sighed. “Bob has decided to interfere with the hot water. Again. He only does this when he’s aggravated about something. But he won’t tell us what.”
Bob? As in Beelzebub? The strongest demon ever recorded lived under our house and he messed with the hot water? “He won’t tell you why he does this.”
“Usually he speaks to one of us. Gives us a clue. But he keeps saying we’re not doing what we’re supposed to be doing. We have no idea what that is.” Anne ran a hand through her hair. “And it’s going to get uncomfortably cold here without hot water again with the cold season coming in.”
I put my hands on my hips. “How do you ask him?”
“One of us crawls under the house and gives it a go. We’ve all been under.”
Teagan threw her hands in the air. “I tried for ten minutes. I hate being under there. It reminds me of worse times.”
I didn’t know if I wanted to ask her what those times were. “Well, I can try. And then if he won’t speak to me, I’ll come back out and we can try to guess?”
Paden cleared his throat, and I turned. Jett and Ryland stood with him, the former waved at me. “We’re going under the house?”
“I guess so.” To speak to Beelzebub. And ask him why he was messing with the water.
I couldn’t say as I’d ever crawled through muck before. I hadn’t. In a lot of ways, I’d been entirely sheltered. But I was doing it, and so far I’d managed not to gag at the experience. I might prefer never to do this again.
“You know what?” Ryland was closest to me. “This isn’t so bad. I mean, I hid once under a house to get away from roving gangs of thieves. They wanted me to join them whether I wanted them to or not.”
“Don’t sugarcoat that,” Jett called from behind us. “If they’d caught you, they’d have done all kinds of awful things to you.”
I shuddered. Not from the awful imagery but because a coldness I’d never experienced before traveled over my body.
“Been waiting for you.”
It was an old language, the kind we’d learned in school. “Me, specifically?” I answered him in the old tongue as best I could.
“Yes. Since you arrived I’ve been waiting for you to do what you were supposed to be doing. Instead, you do nothing at all.”
“I don’t think that’s exactly true. I helped with the zombies. I fix people when they’re hurt. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be doing. No one has given me instructions.”
“Then let me instruct you in what should be embedded somewhere in your head.”
Like someone took a sledgehammer to my brain, pain assaulted my mind. Visions of things I’d never imagined—never dreamed—traveled past my eyes. The history of all things, the way the world worked according to Beelzebub and what was worst was what the universe expected of me.
I screamed like I was being murdered, because it felt like I had been. In my mind. In my heart. In any ridiculous hope I’d held onto through this whole ordeal.
Whatever agreements I’d made when I signed on to be a Sister, I knew it wasn’t this. Yet, I knew there was also no choice. There never had been.
Chapter 14
There had always been demons like there had always been evil. Conversely, there were also the opposite. And shades of gray, too. But that wasn’t what we had to deal with, and Beelzebub was uninterested in questions of right and wrong. He was only interested in what was his.
This place—our existence on this planet—it was his. It had always been that way. He was the biggest game in town, and if he wanted to take a few hundred years off to sleep, he didn’t want some newly created demon thinking it could come in and take what was his.
He expected us to handle this for him.
And if we wouldn’t, we would be discarded.
When he left the Sisterhood several years ago, he’d gone off to see just how bad things were. Take a few human souls, eat someone’s happiness, all of it was very dull, but he didn’t feel—at least not yet—at playing apocalypse. That time would come. It was so much better to end the world
when everyone was happy than when it had already gone to shit.
That was when he’d seen me. Locked in my room. I was going to die. It was written all over me.
And that was interesting.
But he wasn’t in the business of saving lives, not unless there was something in it for him, and much as he wanted the Darkness gone, he had no interest in that level of interference. But his noticing me alerted others to my existence.
As I sat in my room getting beaten night after night until it killed me—and I still didn’t have those memories—other beings that did have the business of interfering in human life made plans.
So in a strange, sort of unusual way, I had the demon Beelzebub to thank for the fact I was still walking around.
I sipped the water Jett shoved at me, and I waited for the panic I knew had to be coming. Only… nothing happened.
I’d been given a good dose of reality from his highness under the house. He expected me to get up and do what the powers that had gifted me extra time had brought me back to do. My hands buzzed. I wanted to use my gifts. I ached to be of service to the universe. I’d come down here to do this.
I raised my gaze to meet Ryland’s, and I smiled. The only problem? I had no idea what would happen to me afterward. Beelzebub might be fine with me ceasing to exist, but I wasn’t. I could keep going as I was and nothing would change for me. I could live as I was forever. But I’d never age. And until I did what I’d apparently agreed to do when I was rebirthed, we wouldn’t make any progress either.
“Want to tell us yet?” Paden stroked my hair. He sat next to me. I could feel their millions of unasked questions pounding at me. What had happened to me under the house? Well, at the very least I’d gotten the hot water turned back on.
I leaned back in my chair. “I am here to fix the world, to bring fertility back. I knew it. Jett stopped me from doing it when he arrived, which was the right thing to do, I think. I…” I didn’t know how to put into words what it was to have had my brain invaded temporarily by a demon, but it had illuminated something for me. “Now I know I don’t really have a choice. I have to do this, and I have to do it soon.”
Jett kneeled down next to me. “Will it hurt you? To… fix things?”
“I don’t know. The demon wasn’t all that concerned with my welfare.” I rose. “But if it does, it will now hurt Titus and Zeke, too.” I found Ryland’s gaze. “It doesn’t have to hurt the three of you. We can keep this from being… hard on all of you. If you want.”
I didn’t know what to hope for. I could feel Titus and Zeke in my mind, like they were planted somewhere in there, a source I could touch. The closer they each came to waking, or at least that’s what I thought was happening, the more their presence became palpable to me. Yet, as they started to merge with me, in a way I wondered how I’d ever done without. There were still three gaping holes, and I wasn’t at all confused about who those holes were. Paden. Ryland. Jett.
Still, if I was going to do this huge thing I’d been brought back to do, I didn’t necessarily want them in there with me where they, too, could get hurt. In fact, I was going to have to figure out what to do about Titus and Zeke.
My journey didn’t necessarily have to be theirs even if we were together. There was such a thing as standing on my own two dead feet without dragging them down with me. I wouldn’t take co-dependence to a whole new level.
Ryland slammed his hand on the table before he rose. “Sorry for the display, but I’m so angry right now it was hit the table or walk away, and I need to talk to you. This very second. It can’t wait. Do you think we would choose anything but to be with you? We’ve all picked it, time and again. We had a choice. That was… I don’t know how long ago. I’m not at all convinced that’s how time works between here and there. I don’t know. I’ve always liked the here and now wherever I am and…”
“Ry.” Paden shook his head. “If you have a point, stay on it.”
“Right.” Ryland ran a hand through his hair. “We chose you. We’ll always choose you because you are… everything. Don’t lessen that by assuming that doesn’t include us when it’s all gone to shit.”
I took his hand in mine. “You think I don’t want to protect you? That it doesn’t go both ways? My head is jammed with inconsistencies. On one hand, we only just met. On the other, we’ve known each other forever. And I am interested in your happiness and in not causing you pain. You might say I’m consumed with it.”
Ryland sighed and the sound moved through me. I was suddenly in his thoughts. We sat together under a purple moon, surrounded by trees. There were stars in the sky and falling snow. We didn’t feel cold, we never would in this place.
“I don’t want you to go.” Ryland’s head was in my lap. I thought perhaps he’d been sleeping, but I’d been wrong.
I stared down at him. Who knew when I’d see it again? If I’d see it again. “Are you going to say something hostile next because you’re worried?”
He smirked. “And she knows me so well.” His eyes flew open. “Maybe.”
“Look, I don’t think anyone would choose to do this just for fun. But we have the ability to participate in the most important battle ever. My role will be small. I will be one of many Sisters. I can battle demons. I can heal. We won’t be… leading the charge like Aspen or Anne.”
He kissed my palm. “Do you think you won’t be important? I can’t imagine they’re not going to use you as much as they can. It’s going to be a matter of not letting them overuse you. That’s where we come in.”
I shrugged. “I’m not at all upset at not having to be on point. I’m just glad to help however I can.”
“They don’t have your sweet heart. I worry it’ll get trampled on.”
I leaned over to kiss him. “My heart will be fine. How about yours? For the few years it seems we’ll be apart. Will you manage not to fall into cynicism?”
“I’ve already fallen into cynicism. It’s my natural state. Only with you am I capable of believing in happily ever after. Otherwise, I think the world has gone to shit, and its natural state is to stay like that.”
I shook my head. He couldn’t hold on like that. It would eat him alive. “Ryland, then why fight?”
“Because you are. Besides, I wouldn’t mind being proven wrong.” And there was the hope. The sliver of it. The little piece I looked for. Out of all of them, I would protect Ryland from himself if I could. “Come on.” He rolled off me. “Let’s go fly.”
I scowled at him but not with any real heat. “I can’t fly. Only you guys can fly.”
“You know how you can fly.” He held out his hand, and I took it, rising to press up against him.
“In your arms.”
He nodded. “That’s right, my love. In my arms. Always. Hold onto me. We’ll go as high as you want and as fast as you want.”
That was the thing. I loved flying more than anything else. He knew that. There was no too high or too fast.
I gasped, jolting back into my body so fast I had to take two steps back to catch myself. Ryland’s arm reached out, grabbing me as I practically fell into Jett.
“Damn.” Ryland tugged me to him. His eyes were white. “This is it. Yes, thank Divinity. I needed this so damned much. I love you. I missed you. I… I want to fly again with you.”
I thought about the ravens circling above us. How many of them went home after their shifts here to their waiting Sisters? The ones who had yet to be sent down. “Do you think we get to go back? Ever? I know they collect our souls, but I don’t remember there ever being Sisters who were done walking around or their guards. Is there eternity together or is this it?”
How many goodbyes did I need to say, just to be careful?
He touched my cheek. “Hey now, no sadness. Do you always carry this much or it a new thing since everything went sideways?”
“Ryland, I… I don’t know what I’d do without you. Without any of you.” I turned to look at Paden and Jett. “I feel like I’m dooming al
l of you to suffer whatever comes next with me.”
“Where else do you think we’d be?” Jett kissed my cheek and Ryland let me go. He was right where he belonged inside of my soul, next to Titus and Zeke. He wasn’t as strongly formed yet. He was going to have to knock out to do that, I guessed. But he was there. I was warmer than I’d known I could be.
Jett’s lips were soft, his breath sweet. “Don’t be afraid, Krystal. You’ll never be alone. We’ve all spent too much time apart. Without you we’re not complete. So don’t be afraid. I promise. I will not lose you. Where you go, we all go. I want to be in there, where Ryland is. I want you to know I love you like that, too.”
I knew he did, and unlike the first three times it happened to me, I didn’t jolt into Jett’s head. Instead, it was a smooth transition. As though he welcomed me in.
But that was Jett. He made things… easy.
We were walking together through the woods. I blinked. They were the same woods I’d been in with the elves. When had this happened? He squeezed my fingers tightly. “Tomorrow, when the sun rises, is the day. Are you ready?”
I stopped. “I think so. I mean, it’s complicated, right? They introduce us only to separate us. Not very long ago, I’d have had no problem leaving. I’d have run for it. But now? With the five of you? I don’t want to be without you. I want to do my duty. I want to uphold my role, but I’m not anxious for the years until we find each other again.”
Some of the other Sisters, my friend Mika for example, she was never going to be separated from her guards. But I had to live a few years alone with my family before we’d find each other again. It was meant to help my natural healing abilities. Things had to be hard on healers for a while. My parents were going to demand a lot of me. And then a few years later, my guys would come. We’d be too young for romance but it would be natural to have them and develop into what we all needed to help save the world.
Around that time, I’d be brought into a Sisterhood and all would progress naturally.