“I don’t remember!” I yelled. “Is that what you want to hear? I remember nothing past that day!”
“What day?” This time Mason stepped forward, and repeated himself, “What day?”
My eyes searched Cassius’s for help. “I don’t know. I just remember begging for it to stop, and she said it would. She said she would make me whole, I was the last of the first, the last of the first,” I couldn’t stop saying it, “The last of the first.”
“Good,” Ethan said calmly. “Gibberish from a demon, I don’t think any of us signed up for this. Cassius, can’t you just mind read him?”
“I… could,” Cassius said slowly. “But what if I can’t get out, what if it’s beyond my power? What if this is something deeper, older, stronger?”
“Can’t you find out?” Alex.
Cassius stared us down and then reached for Mason’s hand. The apple dropped and rolled toward me and then turned brown and shriveled up to its core.
Power surged between them and hit me square in the chest as I fell backward, my last thought.
Sunshine.
KYRA
You know those dreams that feel so real that you’re upset you’ve woken up? That’s the exact sort of dream that haunted me the entire night, and even when I showed up to work, I couldn’t look away from his bright red eyes. They should be terrifying—instead, they just seemed powerful, all knowing. They also seemed… burdened, and I wanted to reach out and grab the face that the eyes belonged to, I wanted to hold it close. Every hard inch of him was godlike in beauty, so much so that I was impressed my imagination could even conjure it up.
I’d been wearing a crown. It was black with enormous rubies. And we danced in a magnificent, colossal ballroom surrounded by so many people, glowing people, people who looked like they belonged on that ridiculous Hercules movie from Disney.
Not that I was comparing myself to a Disney princess, because there was something dark and sinister—not bad—but also no longer good about the way people stared at us like they were expecting death to follow.
He was altered in a way that could not be fixed.
I only wished I was a writer so I could pen the story, because it was incredible, and when he pulled me into his arms to kiss me, it felt real.
“I gave my soul for you, sunshine, my everything to have you here with me, in this place. Tell me you don’t regret it,” he whispered against my mouth. He tasted like darkness, and I soaked in my fill.
“Worth it,” I’d promised. Even though I knew our match was cursed before it began, there were rules—we broke them. What was the reason for that? Love? Obsession?
“My beautiful wife—my queen, my sunshine.” He bowed before me, earning gasps amongst the crowd. I knew in my soul he never did that—he was the prince of the— prince of the—I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to remember his title.
“Whoa, there!” Tarek slammed into me, his grip on both of my arms. “Any reason you’re closing your eyes and attempting to walk at the same time?”
“Uhhh,” I gave him a weak smile, “Sorry I just had the craziest dream or vision, I don’t even know.”
He licked his lips, his glance darted toward the bar and back at me. “Oh?”
“Yeah, I mean it was so vivid, do you ever have those?”
His smile was sad. “I don’t really dream.”
“What?” I gave him a playful shove. “Everyone dreams. You probably just don’t remember them.”
He just shrugged and ran a hand through his mop of hair. Huh, he had it down today, it was long, down his back, silky, thick, how did he get away with that and not look ridiculous? “How is that possible?”
“Some of us are born…” He sighed. “Different. Besides, they say that dreams are eight percent reality.”
At that, I burst out laughing. “Riiiight, so I married royalty about a billion years ago and here I am, just waiting for my prince to come. Okay.”
He clenched his teeth. “You never know, maybe this is your second life. Maybe this is your first and you’ve just been roaming the world searching for your other half and every time you think you die you just wake up with a new life.”
I frowned. “That has to be the craziest and most depressing thing I’ve ever heard.”
He let out a snort. “You’re telling me.”