by Chloe Jacobs
“If we know roughly when the portal will open, how will we determine where it will open?” Siona asked.
“I don’t think we actually have to find the location. We just have to find a place that gives us the best advantage and is out of the way of innocent bystanders so that nobody else can get hurt,” she said, swallowing the bitterness that lingered. “Because I kind of think the portal will find us when the time is right.”
“How can you be sure?” Ray piped up.
The swings rocked gently in the slight breeze, the chains clinking and creaking. “I don’t know exactly; I just am,” she said with a shrug, although that wasn’t exactly true. She had a pretty good idea where her certainty came from. It came from the time when Agramon was inside her, sharing his dark needs and desires, trying to make her accept them for her own. “When the celestial thing happens, I think wherever we are, the portal will be there, too…with Agramon eagerly waiting for us.”
And just how are we going to stop him when that happens? Would they have enough time and magick to hold out against him, to gather an army?
Greta also knew other things about the demon that she hadn’t told anyone. Impossible things that she didn’t want to know but couldn’t seem to get out of her head. Like how it felt to wear the faerie queen’s skin like a cheap Halloween costume, and the tight sexual satisfaction he felt when drawing upon Minetta’s magick to set Mylena ablaze. She threw up in her mouth just thinking about it.
“Isn’t this guy going to be a little busy decimating Mylena to bother with portals to Earth?”
“These kinds of events don’t happen every day, or else Agramon would not have spent centuries locked up in that fortress until he had enough kids to fuel his spell. He won’t pass up any opportunity to access this world,” she said, certain of it.
“Who says he even gives a shit about this world anymore? Now that he’s got free rein in Mylena and the power of a faerie queen, you don’t think he’ll enjoy his destruction for at least an eclipse or two before attempting to move on?”
Isaac growled in response to Ray’s attitude. Damn it, everyone was on edge tonight.
She didn’t know what Ray’s problem was, but she didn’t think it was really about Agramon. She made a mental note to talk to him again when Isaac wasn’t around to fuel the fire.
“Trust me,” she said. “I have absolutely no doubt that nothing in Mylena will ever be enough for him. There’s not enough destruction, not enough power, not enough…anything to keep that demon in check.”
“How could you possibly know something like that?”
Suddenly, that black, oily cloud was inside her again, filling her with certainty and greed and hunger. Choking her soul until she couldn’t breathe for the thick smoke, couldn’t see anything but fire, or feel anything but the scorching heat.
She gasped as Isaac’s palm covered hers, and she realized her nails were digging into his skin. The images faded, but the scent of charred flesh and smoke and blood stung her nostrils.
Wyatt walloped Ray across the back of the head. “You idiot,” he hissed. “She knows because she was stuck with his sick, demented mind inside her, trying to take over her body.”
Greta winced and stepped back from the group, leaning up against the railing that circled her parents’ back deck. She wrapped her arms around herself and took deep breaths. She’d mostly been able to suppress those feelings and memories these last few days, at least while she was awake. She wanted to believe that what she’d just seen now was only a memory of the fires she’d set in the forest while trying to get away from the blood wraiths, but that’s not what it felt like. These fires seemed bigger, hotter. Endless. Scorching the world.
Was it a vision of what was happening all across Mylena right now? She didn’t want to admit it, but all the horrible things she knew about Agramon had to come from somewhere. Part of her wondered if the demon was still inside her somehow, showing her that she was already too late.
Isaac leaned down over Ray with an expression that was pure intimidating goblin king and said, “Be glad that you are returning to your human family on the sunrise.”
Ray didn’t back down. If anything, he bristled and started to rise like he was itching for a fight.
“Listen, all of you,” she interrupted, shaking her head. Her voice sounded thin. She cleared her throat and forced some power back into it. “It doesn’t matter what Agramon’s plans are. We know it isn’t going to be good for anyone.” She looked from Ray to Wyatt. “But you guys won’t have to worry about it anymore. As of tomorrow, you can go back to your families and start a new life. You deserve a new life. Isaac, Siona, and I will make a plan to stop the demon. I promise that we won’t let him destroy Mylena or this world.”
That was pretty convincing. Too bad not one of them actually believed it.
That night it was even more difficult to leave Isaac in the basement and go upstairs with Siona to sleep alone. She felt like every minute they spent here was already putting stones in a wall between them.
Four weeks might be more than their relationship could handle.
She would give anything to have him in her dreams again. Maybe then they could talk in private… and she could get a break from the nightmares.
Once the lights were out and the house had quieted, she slipped out of bed and pulled on her clothes.
“What are you up to, danem?” Siona whispered from the opposite side of the bed.
“You’d better stop calling me that,” Greta reminded her softly, bending to retrieve the white Keds her mother had given her. It had been weird to discover that they wore the same size, although maybe more for her than Greta, who’d grown into her height gradually over the last four years instead of being confronted with it all at once.
“I will call you Greta if you tell me you aren’t going to sneak out to be with the goblin king.”
“Well, then I guess you’re stuck calling me danem.” She pulled a face that no human would have seen in the darkness, but Siona would see it.
“Do you think it’s wise? Your mother and father may not—”
“My mother and father are asleep,” she interrupted bravely. “Besides, I’m sure they’ve figured out by now that I can take care of myself, and if I was going to do something with Isaac that they disapproved of…it would be done by now.”
Siona sat up in the bed and pulled her knees to her chest. “Are you saying it still hasn’t been done?” she said curiously.
“Oh, so it’s time for girl chat, is it?” Greta countered, sitting on the edge of the bed and clapping her hands together. “Well, then why don’t we start with what’s going on between you and Wyatt, huh?”
Siona gasped.
“I take it that means you’re not ready to have that particular discussion yet?”
There was no answer for a long while. “Thought so,” she said with a grunt.
But when she moved to get up from the bed again, Siona caught her hand. “How does one turn this feeling off?” she whispered so thinly that Greta barely heard. It was almost the exact same thing Wyatt had asked her earlier. “He’s leaving tomorrow for a life that I can never be part of. I’ll likely not see him again, and I would rather not go into battle for my king with this ache in my chest weighing me down.”
Greta slumped back down and shook her head. “I don’t know. If I knew, don’t you think I would have done it myself when I realized who I was starting to have feelings for?”
“But your feelings are at least returned.”
She frowned. “Why would you think Wyatt doesn’t think of you the same way?”
Again, no answer. When it dawned on her what Siona must think, heat flooded her cheeks yet again. “You think that he has a thing for me?”
“I am neither blind, nor stupid,” she said. “I see how he watches you.”
“Not anymore. You’re wrong,” she insisted with absolute certainty. “Wyatt and I are friends. And sure, he might have given it a thought or two because we’re both human
and were both stuck in Mylena. But I have no doubt that the moment has passed. Besides, he knows—everyone knows—that I…that I’m already…”
Siona’s hand fell on her arm. “That you belong to the goblin king,” she finished.
She would have turned up her nose at the word only a few weeks ago. Greta the bounty hunter belonged to no one. She was strong and independent all on her own. But the truth was, she wanted to belong in some way, somewhere, to someone. Not in a creepy kind of way, but the kind of belonging that embodied the acceptance she’d been searching for all this time. And with Isaac, it finally felt possible.
“Let’s just say that I’m still not holding my breath for a happy ending. A lot of things will have to work out just right for there to be a future for me and Isaac, and given the circumstances, the odds aren’t really in our favor.”
“If everything was easy, we’d never know for sure when we’ve achieved greatness.”
Greta snorted and got up from the bed. “There was a time when surviving to the next day was hard enough, let alone achieving anything resembling greatness.”
“And yet, here you are, having accomplished the impossible.”
Surprised, she paused in the middle of pulling on her shoes. “And what is that?”
“Do you honestly not know?” Siona sounded equally surprised by Greta’s ignorance. “Do you think that any of the children who went home with their loved ones this day could have done so without you? You did that for them.”
She shook her head. “That wasn’t even me. I couldn’t have opened a portal if my life depended on it. That was part Agramon, part your mother, and part you twisting their magick into something that wouldn’t kill us,” she reminded Siona.
“Only because you saved my life, and only because you saved theirs. Only because you saved his,” she stressed, obviously meaning Isaac. “You did what no one in Mylena has ever been able to do before. You brought back the Lost.”
Can it be done again? It had been on her mind a lot. Rescuing the Lost instead of hunting them down might be one way to gather more people to fight Agramon.
Siona was still watching her. Greta wasn’t used to accepting praise. Luke had never given it. The best she’d gotten from him after exceling at one of their training sessions had been a grunt and a promise that the next time would be harder. She supposed her parents had praised her as a child, but that time still felt too far away, more like a half-remembered dream.
“There’s no way I’m falling asleep in this kind of mood,” she said impatiently. “I’ve got to get out of here for a while.”
She slipped out before Siona could warn her to be careful. This world had no demons, no faeries, no ten-foot-tall bjers. What could happen?
At the bottom of the stairs, she instinctively moved toward the basement door, but she stopped when she caught movement from out of the corner of her eye through the kitchen window. Someone was in the backyard.
Without making a sound, she crept into the kitchen to get a better look. The shadowy figure leaned a shoulder up against the railing of the back deck.
Isaac.
He turned as she opened the sliding door to join him and smiled, but there was a strain in his face.
“What are you doing out here?” she asked.
He shrugged. “I suppose I’m not used to being indoors for so much of the day. I came out to explore the sky.”
She wasn’t used to it, either, not anymore. She could just imagine how he felt here. Even with the forbidding cold, all of Mylena was intimately connected to the Great Mother. It was strange to realize how much of humanity lived apart from the natural world which sustained them, and didn’t even feel the disconnect.
She glanced up. It was a beautiful, clear night. The moon was full, and the stars glittered like pinpricks of light coming through a black velvet sheet, making shapes and patterns that she knew should be familiar…but funny enough, everything about this world felt like it was the alien one to her now. The single sun, the single moon, the warm breezes, and the greenery that was everywhere. It was all part of a world that didn’t belong to her anymore, a world that seemed to mock her.
“I used to wonder how Mylena’s sky could be so different from the one I knew. Not just the constellations, but all of it. I mean, shouldn’t the sky be universal? It’s not like you just get to the end and there’s a concrete wall. It must keep going, eventually connecting all the worlds to each other, right?”
“No matter how the stars hang in the sky, I believe all our worlds and all the creatures in them are connected,” he murmured.
“That’s not what the rest of Mylena believes,” she reminded him.
With a sigh, he dipped his head to kiss her. “No matter how much I wanted it to be so, I realize that Mylena may never have accepted you the way you needed to be accepted,” he said. His touch remained light, but when she swayed closer to him she sensed every muscle in his body tensing. “Even if we are able to find a way back, I would understand if you decided to stay here…”
She shook her head. “I’m going back. Wherever we are, if I have you, then I have all the acceptance I need.”
He touched his forehead to hers with a sigh that sounded like regret. “You can’t say such things. We were sheltered the last few days, almost between realities. But when we arrived here, we entered the truth of your world,” he said. “You can’t know how your feelings will change now that you have reunited with your family and will return to school. You have the opportunity to lead a life of acceptance and possibility, one that doesn’t hold constant danger or threaten to corrupt your soul with spilled blood. How could you give that up without at least considering—”
“It’s no big deal,” she said firmly.
He kissed her again, but she could feel his hesitation. She stood on her toes, wrapped her arms around his neck, and gave herself up to him completely.
His arms tightened around her. Every kiss was like an amplifier, making it harder and harder to stop. She clutched the fabric of his shirt in both fists at his waist and breathed deep to settle her racing heart. She felt the same urgency in him, too, in the tensing of his muscles as he crushed her to him, the hesitation before he set her aside, and the way he always came back for just one more taste of her lips.
There was a strange look in his eyes when he lifted his head again. Surprise, and something else.
“What is it?” she asked, reaching out to tap his cheek, her insides still going nuts.
“It’s gone,” he said. Her heart lurched, but he didn’t look concerned. He looked as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. “The beast is gone.”
That primal part of him that took over when he went Lost, the one that came out with the eclipse. “How do you know?”
He hesitated, as if he didn’t want to tell her.
“Isaac,” she warned.
“The night you said my name and let me into your dreams was the night the beast raised its head for the first time. Since that moment, I have had to fight for control with every breath…and it’s always so much harder when you’re close like this.”
She gasped. She’d known that his struggle had been more difficult since the eclipse and that she’d pushed him over the edge into Lost territory when Agramon’s dark portal magick bled into their bond, but to hear that it had all started because of her?
How was she supposed to process that? How was she supposed to live with that?
She shoved him back, but he trapped her face between his hands so she couldn’t avoid him. “For you, I would fight that battle every day of my life.” There was such fierce intensity in his voice, it flowed through him right into her.
She shook her head. “You shouldn’t have to. I would fight my whole life to save you from it.”
Even if that means letting him go?
She caught the stubborn look in his eyes, and his mouth thinned as he gazed back at her. “It doesn’t matter now,” he said. “At least in this world, I am in no danger of ever
going Lost.”
But what happens when we go back to Mylena? Would it be so bad if we just stayed here?
Without asking out loud, she only had to look at him to know the answer. He might like the idea of not having to fight the moons, but he wasn’t meant for this world. He was meant to be the goblin king.
Just like you were meant to be a normal girl?
“You’ve had a difficult day,” he murmured, delicately changing the subject.
She pursed her lips. “And you stayed out of it. I barely saw you.”
“You needed to be with your family and say good-bye to your friends on your own,” he said. “I would have only been in the way, a reminder of the nightmare they were forced to endure.”
“The boys don’t see you that way anymore,” she insisted.
He didn’t answer, but both of them knew that wasn’t the whole truth. Wyatt still had his reservations about Isaac, but since he’d started spending so much time with Siona, that had faded even more. Sloane seemed not to care one way or the other, but Ray was another story. His condemnation was the strongest, and it had only gotten darker and more bitter since they’d come to Greta’s parents’ house and he awaited the arrival of his family.
“Do you want to go for a walk?” she asked, taking Isaac’s hand.
“Will you show me your favorite place in this world?”
Did she even have a favorite place? She remembered home and school, but beyond that, what had there been for a thirteen-year-old girl living an average, middle-class life?
An idea came to her, and she grinned. “Come on. It’s not my favorite place or anything, but I’ll take you somewhere, and I guarantee nobody from Mylena has ever experienced anything like it before.”
The back gate squealed as she pushed it open. They both froze, waiting. Greta glanced up at the window of her parents’ bedroom, but when none of the lights came on, she let out a breath, and they slipped through.
The streetlamps cast soft cones of light on the sidewalks all the way through the neighborhood. Greta pointed things out as she remembered them. “That’s where my friend Danielle used to live. I guess she probably still lives there.”
