Now he turned to me. “I love her.”
I stopped, rooted to the spot. “What? How?”
“I may have seen her in a way you didn’t and believed she was like me. But I watched her. Her gentleness, the sweetness of her touch … things that her features couldn’t mask. I might desire the darkness within her, but I fell in love with the light that I heard in her laughter.”
Completely stunned, words escaped me. Although I hadn’t known in the beginning, Lailah was made for me. One light split into two, bound together forever.
Despite the deceptions that had been crafted and the things they had done, we had found each other again. And here was a Vampire, a stranger she’d happened to discover by chance. He’d managed to see past what was staring straight back at him. I’d only been able to see one half of what she was. Jonah, on the other hand, had been able to see all of her; and yet, in her last minutes, still she fought for me.
I bowed my head, ashamed of myself.
Returning speedily to the barn, I raced into what had been her bedroom.
I hadn’t been in here since I’d held her, and I could taste her citrus scent lingering in the bedsheets where she’d slept. I picked up a pillow and nuzzled my face into its center, breathing her in. She was my home, my everything, the most precious thing I had ever touched, and I had let her down.
I sat heavily at the foot of the bed and considered the life she must have led while I had searched for her. This world, a world she was never meant to have existed in, scarred by the people in it, whom I had failed to protect her from. And now she lay lifeless.
And just as I allowed myself to consider that she might never return, her chess set on the wooden table caught my eye. The rising sun had drifted through the glass window, and the shiny crown of the ivory king reflected the light against the wall. The day was waking, the first morning of the new year.
Standing up cautiously, I drifted over to it.
Lailah’s king was out of check.
I scanned the board for any other irregularity; the last time I had been down here I had moved my piece, placing her king in danger. When could she have positioned her piece? Was it before she had fled to the mountains? Had she moved it when she had listened in on my conversation with Azrael? But no, she couldn’t have; she was being deadly quiet, perched on the steps. I would have heard if she had walked across the room to the board.
As the day began to dawn, so too did her message, hidden in our game. She was telling me that she was out of danger. She was asking me not to give up on her.
Though it was a fifty-mile distance, I returned to the clearing in the blink of an eye. I found Jonah thrown back, away from the thick stone upon which I had laid her. The air swirled and gathered like a typhoon surrounding her. A black storm, flashing with whites and golds, illuminated the space. The frost that had covered the stone had vanished, as though hiding from the spectacle. A low rumble sounded, and cracks started to form along the ground as the Earth split.
Yanking Jonah back as it began to open up, I shouted, “Lailah!”
The earthquake pulsated beneath my feet, unbalancing everything that surrounded her. As the sun rose, strobes of energizing light cascaded through the storm. Somehow, I could faintly hear the sound of the song Lailah and I had once shared, reverberating and bouncing off the trees that were being blown every which way, holding desperately onto their roots in a bid not to topple over.
I grappled past the tempestuous tornado that was skimming my body, but it flung me back despite my strength, acting as a force field and enveloping the most important being ever to exist.
The dark storm twisted, encouraging a pattern of white mist that sparkled in waves, merging as it crowded over where she lay.
The Earth stood still with it, watching silently, waiting.
And then, in an instant, it was over.
I don’t know who was faster, Jonah or I, but as we both arrived at her side I ground to a halt. Her face was unchanged, but her long cascading curls were now a mixture of coal-black with stripes of white-blond searing through. Her lips were no longer an innocent pink but a sharp red, heating her still-white skin. The blanket I had wrapped around her body had swept away and the deep V-neck of the dress Brooke had sacrificed displayed the skin around her heart. No longer was it broken; there simply remained a scar where the blade had pushed through her chest.
She sparkled in the sun’s presence, as did the crystal gem that still hung from her neck.
I could hear her. Very gently, I felt her tickle my consciousness. She was returning.
Neither Jonah nor I could take our eyes off her, and, breath held, I opened my mind up as far as I could imagine, begging her to reach out.
Her body remained still, and as I waited, I found myself grinding my nails into my palms.
Her eyelashes fluttered before flipping open in one swift movement, and I immediately locked my eyes onto hers. They were still a sapphire blue, matching my own, but now they were muddied, flecked with tiny dark spots. The black voids of her massive pupils sucked everything in with them, including me.
If I hadn’t known any better, I would have thought that every clock, in every world, had stopped ticking as she turned her head gently, bowing her face to the side. She stared straight back at me.
I heard her voice then, gathering the Earth as it moved at an impossible speed toward me.
Gabriel …