Dangerous Lovers

by Becca Vincenza

  Phoenix’s strong hand slid around my arm as I passed him and pulled me to him. Against my neck he whispered, “We end this, and you let go. You die in peace.” Even if I wanted to argue with him, his warm breath was easing down my neck and made it impossible for me to form a clear, coherent argument. For a second, I even forgot what I was trying to end.

  His thumb started to trace small circles against my skin, driving me to the point of distraction. “Why are you so intent on going for a night swim?”

  “There is a key. I think.”

  “You think,” he repeated.

  “Don’t toy with her,” Skylynn warned. “You know she’s in a fog.”

  “Exactly. That is why you should not be putting ideas into her head.”

  “I’m not in a fog,” I said, raising my hands to stop their bickering.

  “Is that a fact?” Phoenix said as he gazed down at me. “You see, Love, when you die…your mind panics, reaches back for memories as it tries to understand how it arrived at its end, but at first the memories are like a dream. Only places are clear; the words, the objects in those places change. Emotions come into play after some time, and those emotions shape the dream into a solid memory. You’re looking for a key, but for all you know it could be a book, a jewel, or nothing at all. Minutes ago, you were prepared to charge into the manor and freeze, then shatter Rasure—now you think you need a key. Tell me that’s not odd. Tell me you do not want to dive into this lake for nothing more than kicks and giggles. That you only want to kill that woman for the same reason.”

  My stare moved to the snow on the bank. I did feel like I was in a dream. Nothing made sense. I flashed back over my recent memories. I remembered developing that film clear as day. I remembered that key. It had my family name on it, along with an ‘M.’

  As I focused on that, I remembered the time at the shop entirely differently. I remembered spending the afternoon at Gavin and Mason’s side, going through old newspaper clippings we found online, ones that held images of Rasure. I remembered in each one that she had a clock somewhere near her. I remembered Mason making a joke about how it must be her soul, that or the soul of the poor bastard that had married her. That remark freaked out Cadence. She took the key and shoved it in her pocket. By then, the shop was filling up and we didn’t have the time to do any more research.

  I remembered something else: that key floating in the cab of Gavin’s truck, falling out of Cadence’s hand, all of them struggling to grab it as they escaped, but the lack of air didn’t give them a chance.

  “Odd or not, the fog is clearing. That key unlocks something, and it’s in the cab of Gavin’s truck. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still going to freeze Rasure to death, but I want that key now.”

  His gray eyes cascaded over my determined expression. A nod from him caused the water to begin to part, and within three beats the lakebed was exposed and the water was draped aside, dancing in place, waiting for permission to fall again.

  Wilder’s car was on the bottom, and Gavin’s truck was on its side just behind it. With more confidence than I should have had, I walked across the rocky lakebed to the truck, fumbling over the rocks as gracefully as I could.

  I looked everywhere, but I couldn’t find that stupid key. I focused on the memories of the time I was under water. I was sure that key didn’t make it out of this lake on anyone. It was still drifting downward when I left, when I had no choice but to fight for air.

  The memory of that caused fog to leak from my lips. I heard the cracking of the water that was being held back. A halfhearted glance to the ice the lake was becoming revealed my key: it was frozen in place in the water.

  I was screwed now. If Phoenix let this water go, it would flow to God knows where. I could try to catch it, but I had my doubts that I would be so lucky.

  I felt a hot breeze and glanced to my side to find Phoenix. He reached his long fingertips to the ice, melting a small hole in it instantly. He had my key in the next beat, all the while holding my stare. “Your key, Love.”

  With a trembling hand, I took it from him. He looped his arm around my waist, and in the next beat I was on the bank and the lake was falling into place.

  “How do you do that? Move that fast?” I whispered, trying to understand what he was, what he had become since he left the manor.

  He reached to trace the outline of my eye, sending a surge of warmth through me. “There is so much I could have shown you. Millions of places I wanted to take you…but that is lost to us now…”

  “That’s a shame,” I breathed before finding my focus once again. I went to run, but he held my wrist, and when he did I felt a blazing burn. It was so painful, I screamed out in agony and fell to my knees gasping. I tried to pull away, but he was too strong. He pulled me up with little effort, and in the next beat his lips were on my wrist. The agony faded instantly, and I sighed as I imagined his lips moving up my arm, across my body.

  Sanity came back to me as I pulled my wrist from him. There I saw a small bird, a falcon. It was only a centimeter or so wide and off to the side of my wrist, looking as if it were flying away. “What did you do to me?” I bellowed.

  “I’m not losing you in this veil. Go fight your war. I’ll find you when it’s over. I’ll know when you’re in danger—or anything else.”

  I’ve always considered myself a balanced person, someone who has control over her emotions and acts accordingly. Not at that instant. Rage ripped through me so fast that I didn’t have room for thoughts.

  “You’re out of your freaking mind! You marked me! Like I’m some kind of property! You’ve got a wakeup call coming, buddy. I do not belong to anyone or anything! Take your freaking tracking device off me—NOW!”

  My outburst didn’t faze him at all. In fact, I thought I saw a spark of recognition in his eyes as a sinful smile echoed on the corners of his lips.

  I was in his arms the next second. His lips were near my ear, and I felt his breath slide down my neck. “That is not my mark. Trust me, Love.” His hands moved down my side to my lower waist, sending an unbelievable sensation through my body. “I want nothing more than to mark your soul…” his hands squeezed my hip bones, “but time is our enemy.” His lips brushed against my neck before he slowly moved away. “I just have to know you are safe. Grant me that one request.”

  I didn’t say a word because the last thing I wanted to do was speak the truth, the truth that would beg him to stake that claim. He would surely think I was in some kind of ‘death fog’ then. What kind of person goes from rage to passion within a split second? Why was he driving me so crazy?

  I just stared as I tried to get hold of what was left of my reality.

  “You need to slow it down, Phoenix,” Skylynn warned. “She is intoxicated by death right now. And if I recall correctly, she was a rather violent drinker.”

  His stare broke from mine, only to glare at Skylynn. “Are you admitting to me that you not only fed her lovers but let her run wild?” Phoenix said with scorn in his tone.

  “Your imagination is too rich. She was never wild—or anything else. You’ve seen that for yourself now.”

  I was not going to stand there and listen to them argue about me like I was not even there. I pushed past Phoenix and broke into a sprint. Rasure was my next target. I’d freeze her, all but her head, then demand that she tell me what this key went to.

  A few steps into my sprint, everything around me changed.

  I was running through my bedroom door. The lights were out, but I wasn’t alone in there. Cadence and Gavin were in her bed, and they weren’t sleeping. They were very, very distracted with each other.

  The bookcase to my darkroom was ajar, and I saw Mason there, waving me in. In a stunned fog, I went to him.

  One thing I now knew for sure: death was like a dream, an all-too-real dream.

  Mason slammed the bookcase closed behind me, as if he wanted Gavin and Cadence to know we walked by them. I knew him well enough to know he was furious, but I couldn
’t understand why.

  “We gotta talk,” he said to me when I reached the bottom stair.

  “I’ll get our revenge on Rasure,” I said quietly. I was relieved. I didn’t want to tell him that we were dead…

  “We must not be talking about the same thing,” he muttered as his chocolate eyes met mine.

  “Whatever you want to tell me, I promise you, my news is more important.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Trust me, Mason,” I said, reaching for him, but he dodged my touch.

  “She came on to me, Indie.”

  “What? Who, Sophia? That doesn’t matter right now. Nothing matters because—”

  “Cadence. She came on to me, and it wasn’t the first time. I told her if she didn’t tell Gavin that I would. Obviously, she didn’t,” he said, pointing at the stairway.

  “She was trying to cheat on Gavin—with you?” I asked, completely mystified. That didn’t sound like the Cadence I knew.

  “You want me to really piss you off? She came on to Wilder last fall, while you were still hooked up. I don’t know what her deal is, but I’m sick of her messing with my boy’s head, playing all innocent, trying to get him to talk about his sister. He was over that. The second you helped him, he was over that, and what does she do? Dig around in his head and bring it up again, get him ticked off and sad when all the while she’s coming on to his best friends. Psychologist-wanna-be my ass. She’s a born actress, and right now Gavin is playing the part of the fool.”

  I didn’t know what to say to him. I could tell he had been holding this in for a while and that he couldn’t stand it any longer.

  He cursed under his breath. “I didn’t mean to throw that at you. But right now, as far as I’m concerned Cadence is a bigger threat than Rasure.”

  He sat down on my couch and leaned forward, raking his fingers through his hair.

  I took a breath and closed my eyes. If I were alive, I would defend Cadence, tell him she was empty, that she’d fought rejection and abandonment her entire life and this was her way of making sure she was wanted. Granted, it was a shallow way, and she needed to understand that random physical acts would not fill that emptiness inside her soul…but I was dead. So was she, and none of this mattered anymore.

  I sat down next him and let my hand rest on his back. He shivered once as my emotions produced the cold I was known for. “Have you ever heard that question if this was your last day, what would matter? What would you do?”

  “I knew you would defend her. You don’t understand. When she is not around you, she is a completely different person, not the Cadence you know. I think she envies you, that she has always been jealous. I’m not even sure it’s the money she’s jaded about.”

  He really was mad and letting his emotions cloud his judgment. Cadence knew she would never have to worry about money. She knew that I would take care of her. I mean, yeah, she was upset that the moment she became a part of a family it vanished, but who wouldn’t be? “I’m not defending her. I’m telling you it doesn’t matter because…because our life is over.”

  Sharply, he looked at me. “Indie, what the hell is going on with you?”

  “With us, you mean. Mason, we’re dead. Living in a cycle of our last day until our minds figure out we’re gone.”

  “Is Rasure messing with you? Did she drug you or something?”

  “We were in a car crash. We ran off the road, then sank in the lake. My emotions turned it to ice. I had to fight to get you out, we all fought to save each other.”

  As I spoke, his face turned white as a ghost. He knew exactly what I was talking about. I’d just turned a light on in his head.

  “A car ran us off the road, you and Wilder, then us …”

  “Right,” I said in a shaky voice.

  He stood up immediately and began to pace back and forth, cracking his knuckles, the act he always goes through before he gets on stage or does something that takes a dose of adrenaline to get through.

  “Why are we still here?” he asked after a beat or two.

  “I don’t know. But I’m not walking into some peaceful light. I think our bodies are on life support or something. Rasure will pull the plug on me. I’m not sure how long your family will hold out.”

  “Not long, not if they listen to me,” he said through a locked jaw. When his brother nearly drowned, hit his head on the rocks in the river years ago, his parents kept him alive for months. Mason finally convinced them to let him go and made them swear they would never do that to him.

  He sat down next to me, looking exhausted all at once. “I’m not going peacefully either.” He reached his arm around me, and I let myself lean into him, knowing it could be the very last time.

  “Listen, Rasure is some kind of evil. I’m going to end her. I’m mad enough to end her—to become some kind of vengeful spirit, but I don’t think you are. I think you need to let go.” Grief slammed into my soul. I’d never seen my life without Mason. He truly was one of my best friends, someone I knew I could trust.

  He leaned back on the couch, having a hard time holding his eyes open. Tears dared to spill from my eyes.

  “I’m mad enough,” he promised. “She killed us…I need to get that damn key,” he muttered.

  “You remember the key?” I asked, glancing to the room. The film I thought I’d developed was nowhere in sight. The camera was still sitting where it always was. There was too much dust on it for me to think that it had been moved.

  “Yeah, I was the one that found it. It fell out of those clocks you had us take to charity. We kept it, showed you at the bar, but by then you’d already told her who you gave them to. From the bar, we watched a truck come and load everything we dropped off across the street. That same truck ran us off the road a few hours later. She killed us over a freaking key.”

  I felt my skin boil. “I have it,” I said, showing him the skeleton key I was clenching with my hand.

  Sleepily, he glanced at it. “That kinda looks like it.”

  “It is it. I pulled it from the lake.”

  He didn’t argue. His eyes closed, and I shook him, but he didn’t move. “Mason...oh God, Mason!” I said through tears as my hands outlined his boyish face, the innocence that hid the daredevil in his soul. I screamed his name again but he refused to budge.

  “He’s not gone,” I heard Skylynn say and turned to see her standing in front of me.

  “Yes, he is!”

  “No, he’s asleep, reliving his last day. He thinks he’s holding you right after you told him about your night terror.”

  “Who sleeps in death? I told him we were dead! Why did he still fall asleep?”

  “It took you a while to understand it, that is, if you even do. You are only as aware as you are because of Phoenix.”

  I glanced down at the mark on my wrist, the falcon in flight. “Why did he chain me like some animal? What was that test thing he did on me?”

  “He didn’t chain you, he just wanted to be able to find you again if he needs to. You’ve been lost to him for a while. I told you that your energy should be as bright as the sun, but it’s not. It’s almost as dark as his.”

  “Is that what that fog test was about? He was trying to see my energy?”

  She smirked. “I’m sure that was half the reason. Indie, you two have been apart for a long time, a very long time. And when he found you, your scent was saturated by Mason’s. He thought he lost you, that you had fallen in love with another, that you died with that person, and that it was his job to help you cross over. Beyond that, he was trying to see how much of your soul is still here, how much could have moved on.”

  “What?”

  “You are all here, Indie. Don’t worry about it. And anyone could see that you, at least your soul, has never forgotten him.”

  I stood and faced her eye-to-eye. I held no emotion in my stare. “My soul? How about this life? How about the fact that he is a living fantasy that appeared in my real world? I don’t know what the hel
l he’s gotten himself wrapped up in, but I know that it’s changed him. I know he was happy, that he had dreams and now he doesn’t. We are not the same people, and I will be damned if I have to beg him or anyone else for my own life. Test or no test, right or wrong, he’s not going to control my future.”

  A proud smile came to her expression. “Keep that resolve. We will fight this together.” She pulled her shoulders back. “Truth be told, you know him better than each of your friends…even me. That is going to help us convince him to let you live.”

  “And why exactly does he get the final say?”

  “His power can save you. I could find people with power close to his, but because he loves you his energy will grant that you rise from this veil.”

  “Obviously, he doesn’t agree with you.”

  “And I plan to figure out why. I thought it was jealousy, but he clearly showed both of us on the bank of the river that he was not fighting that emotion, but rather grief. He’s never been a quitter. I think he is just going through a lot of changes right now.”

  “Changes that are more nerve-wracking than death?” I mocked, not caring to hear about some supernatural melodrama.

  “In a way. People that were lost to him, you and his brother, have surfaced within days of each other—just in time to see how wickedly doomed we all are in this war of darkness.”

  I swallowed nervously. The relief I had felt before, that at the very least Guardian and Sebastian had been side by side this entire time, vanished. No wonder he was not the same man anymore. Everyone that brought him laughter and happiness was taken away.

  “Guardian. He hasn’t been with him.” My voice trembled.

  Skylynn’s eyes grew wide for an instant, shocked that I was pulling memories and random bits of her and Phoenix’s argument together.

  “They parted ways for a while, but they found their way back.”

  I clenched my stomach as a sick feeling came to me. “Guardian left Phoenix to look for his girl, didn’t he?”

  She nodded absently, pulling her brow together.