Enchanted Chaos (Enchanted Chaos 1)

“Skylin, can you hear me?” darkness purrs in my ears.

“Go away!” I scream. “Leave me alone!”

“Now, why would we do that?” darkness whispers. “Why would we ignore our queen?”

“I’m not your queen,” I whisper. “Just go away.”

“We’re never going away. We’ve waited a long time for you, and we’re not going to stop until you’re ours.”

The voice is deep and familiar, but I can’t place from where.

“Who are you?” I whisper.

“I think you should be asking: who are you …?”

“Sky, open your eyes.” Foster’s voice cuts through the darkness like a zap of lightning. “Come on; wake up.”

“This isn’t over yet,” darkness warns. “I’ll be back for you, our queen of darkness.”

I force my eyelids open, sucking in a sharp breath.

“Easy,” Foster whispers as he strokes his fingers up and down my back.

I blink profusely as I peer around, noting I’m in my bedroom, the lights are on, and I’m lying in bed, on my side. Foster is sitting beside me on the edge of the bed with his hand on my back, and he’s wearing a pair of plaid pajama bottoms and a black T-shirt.

“How long have I been out?” I sit up, rubbing my eyes.

“A couple of hours.” He watches me guardedly. “I came to check on you a couple of times, but you were pretty out of it.”

“Oh.” I’m touched he kept his word and tried to wake me up, but what happened while I was asleep has me distracted. “I dreamt of darkness again. It was really pushy, saying… I’m its queen.” I shudder a

t the memory of how delighted darkness sounded about it.

He considers something while cracking his knuckles against the sides of his legs. “When I was about ten, darkness started really trying to take over my dreams. I think because my powers were developing faster and I was having a hard time controlling them.”

“Did it ever call you its queen?” I ask then shake my head at myself. “Never mind. Please forget I asked that.”

He smiles then scoots closer to me, bringing his legs up onto my bed. “Remember what I said in the bushes? It’ll get easier with time, and the dreams will eventually go away when you learn to block the darkness out.”

“I’ll try to hold on to that, but I’m not going to lie, it makes me not want to go to sleep.”

“You should probably try, though.” He glances at the alarm clock on the nightstand. “We have to get up for school in only a couple hours.”

“Shit,” I murmur, flopping back on the pillow. I stare up at the ceiling, trying to process everything that’s happened and everything to come. “I’m nervous about school,” I admit. “I’ve never been good at making friends, and now I have to try to make them in a school full of people with powers.”

“You won’t be totally alone,” he promises. “East and I will be there.”

“Yeah, but I’m sure you guys have your own lives and your own friends.”

“We have a few, but not a ton. And we’ll take care of you.” He lies down beside me and turns his head toward me, a teasing smile playing at his lips. “If we don’t, then we’ll be stuck feeling your social awkwardness all day, and we definitely don’t want to have to deal with that.”

I playful scowl at him. “Like you guys are any better? I may have only felt what you were feeling for, like, two seconds, but there was some weird shit going on. Honestly, I may not have agreed to do the how merging thing if I knew I was going to feel everyone’s internal drama.”

“It won’t always be as intense as when we did the merging spell. It just took a lot of strain on our power, so we couldn’t control what we sent out to each other very well. But it’s not always like that.” He muses over something. “My bet, though, is that weird shit you felt came from Porter. I love him and everything, but he’s into some weird stuff.”

A smile quirks at my lips. “I think it totally was him.” I roll to my side, tucking my hands underneath my cheek. My gaze skims his profile, his full lips, his lightning-blue eyes that are lined with dark, thick eyelashes.

God, he’s so pretty. No wonder I had a crush on him without even seeing him close up.