Lux (The Nocte Trilogy 3)

“I’m so tired of what is necessary,” my mother snaps, and her voice is so venomous that it takes me aback. “I have free will. We all do. That’s why we’re here.”

“Free will is an illusion,” my father answers and his words his words his words are so dark.

“I hate to say that I’m starting to think you’re right,” mom replies. “My mother always gets what she wants. She and Sabine…”

Sabine?

I’m clouded by confusion, and I’m paying so much attention to them that I don’t pay attention to what I’m doing, and my hand slips from the window, and my head thumps the sill.

My dad’s head snaps up, quicker than lightning, and for a minute for just a minute for just a minute, his eyes flash black in the moonlight.

I gasp, and I shirk away, because my dad is supposed to have blue eyes, blue like Finn’s.

But for a long second right now, they gleam and glimmer black, like a pool, like onyx, like the demons that I’ve been seeing for my whole life.

They’re as black as sin.

I scream and I faint, and when I come to, I’m back in my bed, and the hooded boy is next to me. He holds my hand and his fingers are pale.

“There’s a ring,” he tells me. “And if you give it to me, your brother will always be safe.”

“What do you mean?” I ask, and I’m paralyzed with fear, at the mere thought that Finn might someday be in danger.

“You aren’t crazy,” the boy says. “What you dream is real. What you see is real. There is more to your family then you know.”

But the moonlight, the moonlight, it shines into my room and it illuminates his eyes and they’re black black black as night, and I scream so loud my room shakes and my parents come running.

When they burst through the door, the boy is gone.

“There was a demon here,” I cry, but there isn’t anything here now, and they can see that. “His eyes were black,” I insist, and I swear I swear I swear my father looks away, almost like he feels guilty.

I swallow hard, I swallow my fear and it tastes almost like poison.

“I saw you outside,” I tell them. “I heard what you said. Why does grandmother always get her way? And Sabine?”

But my mother looks at me blankly and my father kisses my forehead.

“Honey, that didn’t happen,” she says, and my father nods in agreement.

“You must’ve been dreaming,” my father adds, and while that should comfort me, it doesn’t.

Because the hooded boy, the boy with the black eyes, told me that my dreams are real, and if they are, if that is true, then my parents are lying and the world is a scary scary place.

Chapter Ten

The conifers, the ferns, the never-ending moss…all of it is wet, all of it is suffocating. I run down the path toward the cliffs, and I feel like I can’t breathe, like my chest is constricted, like there’s a rock on my ribs, crushing my bones.

“That’s what Dare feels like,” a voice calls from behind me. I turn, and it’s the boy, and he’s whispering, but in my ears it echoes like a scream. “His heart hurts, Calla, and it’s your fault.”

I spin around and face him, and my hair whips in the wind, my pink Converses slip slip slipping in the rain.

“What do you mean?” I ask, and I’m panicked, because when he speaks to me, it always feels true. “What’s wrong with Dare?”

“His heart is weak,” the boy says and his eyes penetrate me, seeing into my soul, reaching in and twisting it, twisting it, twisting it. “You gave him your heart condition. It was supposed to be yours, but you gave it to him. Iniquum, Calla.”

Unfair.

I’m confused because that’s not right. I would never. I would never. I would never hurt Dare.