by May Dawson
On one of the couches, three witches lie tangled on the couch; a boy has his arm around the girl, and another boy lays with his head in the girl’s lap. Her long, tattooed fingers stroke through his hair, over and over.
“Welcome,” says the boy lying on the couch, although he doesn’t open his eyes.
The girl looks up at Ever and says, “Are you sure you want to call in that favor today?”
“I’m sure,” he says, and I glance at him, wondering if there was ever really a favor at all, or if he influenced her to believe there was with his magic.
She’s pretty, petite with a dark bob and swirling black tattoos running down her arms and along her fingers. If there was a favor, I wonder how they know each other.
“I’m Alyssa,” she says.
The guys don’t introduce themselves, just watch us with narrowed eyes.
She rises and moves toward us languidly. She’s graceful, but not like us; there’s something practiced about the way she moves. Chocolate eyes, under thick, heavy lashes, meet mine.
“You seek answers to your past,” she says as she gazes into my eyes, her voice heavy.
Ever runs his hand through his hair. “As I told you, Al. Can we?”
She pouts at him. “You always ruin my fun.”
When the two of them exchange a look, I really want to know how well they’ve known each other. Ever hasn’t been with anyone for the past two years; I believe him when he says that. But I wonder if she tried. I wonder if he tried, tried to leave me in the past. I must have been his ghost as much as he’s been mine, because she undresses him with her eyes with a glance, and something in my chest tightens.
Her gaze rises to his face, which is as cold and neutral and beautiful as ever, and she shrugs.
“All right, Eden,” she says, facing me. “Let’s see what’s missing in that mind of yours.”
I don’t feel enthused about her fingers in my mind right now. At least my small flare of jealousy is a distraction from the way my heart pounds in my chest. I can’t stop thinking about how I woke up in that hospital bed, shattered, in so much pain, and alone. So deeply alone.
“Let’s get on with it,” I say anyway, and there might be a lump in my throat, but my voice comes out fine.
She pats the sofa beside her, and her two men move away. They look like twins, one dark haired and one blond, and they stand at either end of the couch, almost as if they’re squaring off with my men. She flashes them a mischievous smile.
“Try to lower your defenses, Nephilim,” she tells me as she leans over to the coffee table and flicks a lighter. She touches the flame to a series of candles. The candles don’t cast any light in this sun-soaked room, but they release a sweet scent of citrus and vanilla, and then she touches the flame to a bowl of green herbs. “You angels all cage your minds. Relax.”
Her narrow fingers are cool when they press against my temples. I try to relax, but my posture feels straight as an arrow, my muscles tense.
She gives me a genuine smile. Softly, she says, “It’s going to be fine, Eden. There’s nothing in the past that’s worse when you face it than when you hide from it.”
“I had a concussion,” I say, because there’s a medical reason why I lost my memories. Someone split my skull open and it was only my Nephilim strength that kept me alive. A day’s memories are a small price to pay—I’m lucky to be alive. It has nothing to do with me running from the past.
Her smile turns sad. “Okay. Just relax. We’ll get through it together.”
When she closes her eyes, I stare at her face, at the harsh line of eyeliner she drew and fanned out into cat’s eyes, at her red lipstick bright against her pale skin.
Her voice whispers in my mind. “Come on, Eden.” She sounds patient.
I close my eyes too.
There’s darkness, and then a door in front of me, a bright red door like the one that led into my childhood home. Then she blinks into existence standing next to me.
“Through here?” she asks.
“I don’t know how this works,” I answer.
She glances at the doorknob. “I can help you find where you’re trying to go. But I can’t open any of the doors.”
Even though everything in me recoils at the idea of walking back through this cheerfully colored door, I wrap my hand around the knob and turn it.
I walk ahead of her into the living room of the house where I grew up.
My grandfather sits on the couch, watching television. There are tentative footsteps coming down the stairs, and my grandfather tenses slightly, then turns, throwing his arm over the back of the chair.
“Come down for supper finally, Eden?” he asks.
It’s my younger self, twelve or so, that steps down from the stairs. There are pink blotches still lingering on my tanned skin, as if I cried myself sick, and the sight makes me recoil. I don’t cry anymore, and I definitely don’t cry like that.
I don’t remember this day at all. My younger self comes quickly down the stairs, and runs into the kitchen. Then Elliot comes down the stairs, and my heart stops as I study his face. He’s frowning slightly under that mop of golden curls. There’s a little scar at the corner of his mouth where he went over the handlebars of his bike earlier that summer; I’d almost forgotten that scar.
My grandfather looks up at him and smiles. “You two are always together, aren’t you?”
There’s a bitter tang in his voice, and something predatory in that smile. Even now, though I’m grown and dangerous and he was just a mortal man, my hands shake before I fold them behind my back.
“This isn’t the right memory,” I tell Alyssa. “And I don’t understand, why do I see it like an outsider? Maybe I overheard what my grandfather and Elliot said...”
“It’s complicated magic,” she says. “Do you want to find another door? Another memory?”
“Yes. Please.”
The two of us step over the pink jelly sandals and the sneakers piled in the entryway. I throw open the front door, and the two of us walk through.
We step out into night.
“This still isn’t the right memory,” I say, beginning to feel exasperated. “We’re trying to get to one of the Lords’ safe houses.”
“This is your mind,” she says. “Your memories. You came back here for a reason.”
“Maybe I wanted to see Elliot,” I say, frowning, but I can’t make sense of any of this. “I don’t know how to make my mind do what I want. That’s why you’re here.”
She doesn’t bristle at my complaint.
“Where are we?” she asks. “You might not feel in control of your own mind, Eden, but you are. What is this place?”
“I don’t know,” I say, but as soon as the words have come out of my life, they’re a lie. Memory washes over me. I grab her hand. “Let’s find another door. We’ll try again.”
But we’re on a long, flat plain under the moonlight, and there’s no door.
Someone screams behind us.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
“Did you forget this?” Alyssa demands.
I turn slowly to see what she’s facing, my heart hammering in my chest. Funny that my memories make me scared, although the present, no matter how dark, doesn’t bother me much.
Behind me, a human male crawls out the window of the overturned security truck.
The Lords of Havoc move toward the truck. I try to find myself in the crowd, but we’re all masked, wearing black, and I give up on my search for my slight figure among them.
“No,” I say, my voice hollow.
But the dark figure with hulking shoulders who moves toward the human on the ground now—I know that body well. That’s Lincoln.
It’s Lincoln who draws his sword from its sheath as the man brings a gun up toward him. Lincoln’s sword flashes, and the man is no more.
Richmond moves to the back of the truck. “Children,” he calls.
Even though Julian is masked, I know he rolls his eyes. Richmond called us
children as a joke. It amused him to call his heist team, his five young thugs who were one smooth team, nothing but children. But now, looking back, I realize how right he was. We were so young; we were innocent when we came to the Lords, and were reborn as something dark and twisted.
Lincoln. Julian. Ever. Elliot. Me. The five of us join him at the back of the truck as the other Lords set up a defensive perimeter.
Richmond nods, and Ever and Julian throw open the door to the truck.
I close my eyes. I don’t have to look. I remember the bound angel, wide-eyed and terrified, brought down by humans.
It’s Lincoln who climbs into the truck and cuts loose his magic bonds, which sapped his power.
The angel staggers out of the back of the truck. He’s taller than any of us, seven feet tall and, even now, shining. His eyes are wild.
“What do you want with me?” he asks, his voice deep and resonant, a song that makes the earth shake under our feet.
“To free you, that’s all.”
He looks around at us all. There’s blue blood flowing down his back, dripping onto the cement.
The humans sawed off his wings when they brought him to earth, although as I watch, they begin to heal, they begin to grow.
“You are the Lords of Havoc,” he says.
“Any other day, yes,” Richmond says. “Today, we’re friends. No one should cage an angel.”
No one should cage an angel. Somehow I know those words will ripple through my dreams tonight.
He nods. “Thank you.”
He trails blood and feathers as he leaves us, walking away down the road toward the moonlight. Without the magic that bound him, his wings are already beginning to twist up from his shoulders again, growing out like vines.
He’s small in the distance, his wings shimmering under the moonlight, when he soars into the air.
“If you didn’t forget this, why do you think we came here?” Alyssa asks gently.
“It wasn’t all bad, all the time,” I say, remembering the good things we did as Lords, especially at the beginning.
“That’s what I forgot. I forgot that it wasn’t all bad, that we weren’t trying to do evil.” My lips twist. “The dark parts snuck up on us.”
“Isn’t that always the way it is,” she agrees.
I sigh. “But none of this helps. We need to find another door.”
We turn, and there’s a closed, unfamiliar door in a disembodied door frame, hanging in the air. There’s a Welcome mat. Of course there is. We’re in my brain, and my brain is a ridiculous place.
I head for the door without hesitation, even though my shoulders ache from tension. As if these memories carry more weight than I can bear.
“I always thought Nephilim were just unbearable snobs with an inflated sense of their own purpose,” Alyssa begins.
“We are,” I cut in.
“But I have to give you this. You are quite brave.”
Her kind words fall behind me as I step through the door.
I come to a stop so abruptly that she almost steps into me and she stops, stepping to one side to see.
“Don’t speak so soon,” I warn her.
This isn’t the dark memory I want, but it’s certainly a bad one.
There was a sixth young Lord, for a while. He was much older than me, nineteen to my thirteen when Elliot and I fled to the Lords. He was handsome, with sharp dark eyes and a way of smiling slowly, as if I had to earn his smiles. He was older than Everett, and where Ever was clumsy then, David was smooth.
I haven’t thought about his face in years, but now he’s in front of me again. He’s lying back on a blanket in the back of a pickup truck under a sky that looks like a sea of stars.
There’s a girl beside him in the truck, and I don’t want to look at her face.
“Eden?” Alyssa asks gently.
“How do we get this thing on the right channel?” I ask, pressing two fingers to my temple. “I didn’t mean to take you on a Greatest Hits tour of my bad memories. I just need one particular day.”
“Trust your gut,” Alyssa says. “There’s a reason we’re seeing all this.”
I shake my head. I can’t believe that there’s a reason.
“Believe in yourself,” Alyssa urges, and for some reason it thinks of Lincoln, so desperate to teach me to fly that he dropped me from three hundred feet up.
But I knew what was best for myself, even if he didn’t agree. Anger rises in my chest at the memory of how he made me feel helpless.
I don’t ever want to be helpless again. I’m strong enough to face whatever comes—I always have been.
I sigh under my breath and look at the girl in the truck bed. When I remember being thirteen, I remember feeling grown in so many ways. But the round-cheeked girl sitting in the truck doesn’t look grown at all. She’s plaiting her long hair into a braid, slowly even though usually, she can braid all that long, shimmering golden hair in less than a minute. She’s nervous. She doesn’t know what she’ll do with her hands.
“What happened out here?” Alyssa asks.
David wraps his arm around her, and she rests her head on his shoulder. He points out stars, constellations. She’s impressed. It’s all very romantic.
Alyssa looks up to the sky, frowning, then scoffs. “He’s getting it all wrong.”
“Oh, is he ever,” I say, my lips twisting ruefully. “What happened out here? We kissed for a while, and that was nice, and then he kept pushing me for more, and pushing me, and then.” Apparently, that was a full sentence, because I end it with a full stop. I draw a ragged breath.
I should have died that day. It wasn’t like killing my grandfather, where I’d always had the greater power, but lacked the will until that night, when I was terrified and his hands were on me and I screamed. When I screamed, my power unleashed. I’d only wanted to get away, but suddenly my ears had been ringing and his blood had been splattered across the wall.
“Eden, you’re still here,” Alyssa says, resting her hand on my shoulder. “You’re fine.”
“Am I?” I ask. “Anyway, we fought. I killed him.”
Such short, simple words for some of the longest minutes I remember living.
David had been as powerful as I was, but fully grown, fully trained. It was pure luck that I’d gotten my hands on his knife, abandoned in the bed of the pickup truck. He’d smiled, and for a second as we faced each other, I’d wanted to believe it could end there—despite the blood trickling cold down my forehead where he’d bashed me into the side of the truck. Then I’d seen fury still blazing in his eyes, the mockery in his smile.
And when he lunged for me, I buried the blade in his throat.
“The Lords… they came and took care of the body.”
In the scene playing out before us, he sits next to that young Eden, pointing to something. She laughs. A shooting star. I remember what it was like, seeing a shooting star for the first time in my life. That evening had felt magical, until it didn’t.
There’s something about his face that’s familiar. I frown, heading toward him. Alyssa is so surprised she misses a beat, and then she hurries after me.
I reach the gate hanging open from the back of the pickup truck and feel my eyebrows twist together as I study his face.
“Does he look like anyone to you?”
She tilts her head, studying him. “I don’t want to say. You angels all look the same to me.”
“We’re not angels,” I correct automatically. But I can’t stop seeing the resemblance now in that nose, that sharp jaw, those strikingly beautiful eyes. Maybe Alyssa is right; maybe I’m making too much of it.
Or maybe my subconscious mind has put together more than my conscious mind can bear.
“To me,” I say, “that angel looks a whole lot like a teenage version of Michael Kinley.”
“I didn’t want to say it,” she says, but she still hesitates. “Like a brother, or a cousin.”
I nod. I’m trying to focus on what matters
, but my gaze keeps going to the girl beside him, with her laughing face and her shining eyes. I was a different person then.
What was the moment when I shattered? Or was it just a series of small changes, because I can’t even recognize that girl.
Alyssa goes stiff, and she reaches out and grabs my arm. “We’ve been in here too long,” she says. Her voice is so eerily calm, although her fingers are hard against my skin, that I know we’re in trouble. “Open the door, Eden, but this time, imagine bringing us out. Imagine that front room in the witches’ house.”
I nod. I turn, looking for a door, but there’s nothing.
“You don’t want to leave yet,” Alyssa says. “Until you have your answers. You’re fighting me. But we have to. You have to bring us out.”
“The truck,” I say. I don’t know what’s going on, but I won’t put everyone in danger, and I won’t trap her in my mind. I’m already running for it.
I throw open the driver’s side door of the truck. There’s a little pine tree air freshener hanging from the dash, and it shakes with the truck’s movement as we crawl across the seats. Her hand catches my heel by accident; she’s frantic. I throw the door open, and stumble back into my own mind.
When I open my eyes, we’re in the midst of chaos.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
When my eyes snap open, I’m still sitting intimately close to Alyssa. Her face is a blur as she turns away from me, her eyes widening. All I can see is her face, I feel disoriented, the world a blur. My head aches like it did when I woke from my concussion, and my stomach is tight, my body hot.
“I’m calling your head of house,” a voice snaps. “All of you are going to the detention center if I don’t get answers right now.”
I’m going to throw up.
As I hit my knees on the hardwood floor, my stomach clenching with dreadful finality as my throat opens, the people around me scatter.
Only Ever dives toward me, although he’s careful to hurtle the arm of the chair and move behind me. His cool fingers press against the nape of my neck as he pulls my hair back.
I made the right decision when I fell in love with him, even though I’ve doubted it many times since.
