Link here to a general overview of the novel
Prologue, Chpt 1, Chpt 2, Chpt 3, Chpt 4, Chpt 5, Chpt 6, Chpt 7, Chpt 8, Chpt 9, Chpt 10, Chpt 11, Chpt 12, Chpt 13, Chpt 14, Chpt 15, Chpt 16, Chpt 17, Chpt 18, Chpt 19, Chpt 20, Chpt 21, Chpt 22, Chpt 23, Chpt 24, Chpt 25
Chapter Twenty-six
Daav
“Daav, he’s fine,” Nuée repeats, sounding more than exasperated with me.
She’ll have to cope.
“He’s just unconscious and healing, not in distress,” she continues. “Colleen said he’d be out at least an hour and it’s barely that. Only the fiftieth time I’ve repeated this.”
I force my attention away from the back seat where he’s slumped to gaze out the windshield of Pike’s car where I ride shotgun. I have to get better at keeping my eyes off my Angel if I’ll ever have a hope of staying away.
The dark outline of the rocky Clevrian hillside blurs past the car as we drive forward into the night. My Verse is a soft burr of humming background, nudging into me and swaying back as I push it away.
Since I saw Sebastian being carried through the chaos of headquarters by Isolde and Deidre, obviously injured, and then watched him slammed again into the walls with that second quake, I’m not sure I’m capable of giving him space enough to breathe let alone actually stay away from him.
When we ran for the vehicles in the garage under the unexpected cover of the disaster, I climbed into the front. It kept me from eviscerating Colleen as she insisted on riding next to Sebastian to heal his leg. Ironic that such a nasty piece of work as Colleen has a strong medic skill. Better than Frederick and Hanna’s, although not as strong as my Angel’s. No ones’ is.
Thank Verse he remained unconscious when Colleen had to force the bone back straight before the healing. But once she finished what she claimed was her best effort, I made us stop to switch passenger loads, not willing to tolerate her another moment. Pike sent me a look, but readily accommodated me. She left for Christopher’s car to ride with him, Deidre and Hanna, and Nuée traded to join ours. Frederick, Bethany, Esther and Ravel are in the last car. Not once has Colleen commented about Frederick’s new distance from her, or at least not to us. I don’t know what she said to him earlier when they left the suite together.
Our three vehicles have been able to follow one another, ready to separate if we see anyone tailing. Colleen had rented, borrowed, or stolen these vehicles after she left the suite earlier. I don’t care which, only the fact they belong to none of us and not recognizable from the Conclave garage’s typical line up, adding another layer of protection for us. So now it’s Isolde and Nuée in the back seat of our new car on each side of Sebastian.
Pike handed my sister her phone when the drive started. Esther had used the cover of their earlier meeting in Johan’s office to get Kevin’s help to smuggle out the device from where it had been secured. Rarely does anyone suspect Esther of subterfuge with her calm, logical demeanor. Logical does not mean innocent, and only fools assume so.
Isolde remains silent, mostly tapping the screen of her device. Damage control, she called it when I asked earlier. She’s been out of contact with Harkness, her friend Delat and her bodyguard which means her carefully orchestrated cover story may self-destruct.
“Looks like he’s stirring,” Nuée says after a low groan sounds from the back.
My head snaps around once again to watch my Angel grimace through his struggle back to consciousness.
“Sweet agony, but I’m developing a bad habit of waking up in strange cars after blacking out. What happened?” he says, words slurred between more groans.
“You managed to get yourself hurt. Again,” I bark.
“So sweet, Prince. I love opening my eyes to such tenderness. You know how to sweep a boy off his feet.”
“Daav has been worried about you,” Isolde says to him, patting him on the shoulder. “It’s made him irritable.”
“Oh, I know. Scowling is his love language.” He winces but gestures around him to the car. “We obviously got out of headquarters. Any more drama on the way out?”
“You mean aside from your idiocy joining Verse with Hanna?” I add. The fear of what might have happened poisons any hope of calm I try to cultivate.
“Daav,” Nuée articulates calmly. “If you don’t have anything nice to say, then shut the hell up. I didn’t share the information about that so you’d bite off Seb’s head.”
“How much damage did the bomb do? Is everyone else okay?” Sebastian asks, ignoring me, scratching the exposed skin of his calf where they’d torn away the pants to heal his leg.
Shame burrows deeper in my gut. Of course he’s concerned about our friends.
“Everyone’s fine. You’re the only injury,” Nuée replies.
“Lucky me.”
“But I don’t think it was a bomb,” Isolde says.
“What other technology has your father got going?” he asks.
“I’m not sure it was my father.”
My gaze switches to my sister and my gut twists with foreboding. I don’t want to hear whatever’s coming next. “What do you mean?”
“I’ve been scrolling the news feeds on my phone for pictures from the media. The way sections of the building fell, it looks like tectonic activity and actual earthquakes, not a bomb. We were lucky that the building didn’t shake itself to the ground over us.”
Pike’s gravelly voice joins the conversation from where he’s been focused on the road. It’s dark and he’s taking side roads out of the city toward the seashore on the Southwest coast. The night is a mixed blessing. A good cover, but harder to tell if anyone else is following our caravan. And it’s forced distance between our cars.
“Johan hinted as much when Esther and I met with him,” he says. “They can’t find the patterns to the other destruction around and outside the capital. They keep reporting it’s Staltz sabotaging us, but Congress and the Chancellor are worried.”
Isolde’s brow furrows, and she turns her head to stare out at the night. I’m not sure what she looks for although she has little reason to speak freely in our car. She barely knows me and Sebastian, let alone Pike and Nuée, and she’s spent the night locked up by the mage community. I worry about her. She’s gone through so much, and now she’s thrown into our crisis.
“Hey, Iso, you okay?” Sebastian asks her.
Of course he sees this, too.
She turns back to him. “Sure.”
“You have that same funny scrunch to your face Daav gets when he’s thinking too hard and not happy about what’s in his head.”
Her lips curl into a soft smile which I prefer to the other expression, and I’m glad Sebastian sits next to her.
“Just putting together puzzle pieces. More’s happened with the magic from what I’ve gleaned from the frantic discussions since we fled the Conclave?”
Nuée happily fills her in with what happened in the suite with the Cohort’s joint experience of each Verse and the explosion, with a lurid smile for the part about finding us in bed after sex, at which Isolde raises an eyebrow but doesn’t blush. She hasn’t seemed affected by my Angel’s provocative comments either. Then Nuée continues on to Sebastian’s idiotic choices in the Conclave basement touching Hanna’s Verse before they freed Isolde. The time Nuée’s spent in Deidre and Hanna’s car before switching means she’s up to date on that part of the story.
“My details are right, Seb?”
“Pretty much, sweetie.”
My sister keeps looking over at me, and I try to force my face back into neutral from what I know is annoyance at Sebastian for courting disaster.
“What did Johan want with you?” Isolde asks me after Nuée winds down her description. “When he spoke to you before releasing you and Sebastian to the suite?”
“What he wants is me for a puppet. Told me he’d keep me on lockdown, and same for you and Sebastian. But at least the talk also confirmed the identity of the dead spy in your picture. Although Congressman Chelton, for whom the man worked, hit a wall with that lead.”
Pike concentrates on the road, but asks more about the spy.
I explain the circumstances around the death. “Pasqua sent a final message, but it made no sense to Chelton. It contained one word, ‘reflection,’ sent by Pasqua on Saint Jallop’s Day. He died after that last communication.”
“Saint Jallop’s Day?” Isolde interrupts. “That’s the fifth of Lunar Mars, correct?”
“Yes. But I know Staltz doesn’t celebrate holy days, so it would be meaningless there. Why do you know our holidays?”
“My father insisted I know as much as possible about the enemy. But we do have a worker’s festival that same day, secular but originating from a pivotal historical moment when the factory laborers won the right to limit their working hours seventy years ago. Celebrations are held throughout the capital. My father hosts a ball at his residence each year and makes nationally televised speeches.”
Could the message mean something after all if it was sent on the same day both our countries celebrate?
“Are we your enemy?” Nuée asks Isolde.
“Nuée, you’re fucking rude,” Sebastian chides.
Pike grunts. “We need to be able to speak freely, Seb. No more time for prevarication.”
Nuée shrugs. “Yeah. It’s natural for me to want to know. And you don’t think Isolde wonders what we’re thinking? Daav says she’s an ally, but until we know each other, it’s hard to trust. And none of us can afford to be stupid.”
“You speak your mind,” Isolde says to Nuée. “I admire that. And you’re right, I have to wonder if everyone believes me a spy like Pasqua was for you. It’d be hard to prove otherwise. I don’t know that I can, or that I can stop doubting everyone around me.”
My back stiffens. “You’re not a spy. I trust you.”
“We trust you,” my Angel adds with emphasis.
The night deepens around us, and we drive up into the hills, the road narrowing as it climbs and begins to circle around Nantel peak. We’ve definitely lost sight of the other cars behind us. We pause our conversation, the dark creating a silence of its own. From time to time Pike starts to hum, not in pleasure, but almost unaware as if it’s part of his normal thinking process. I’m tired. Too much has happened in the last few days. Tendrils of fog begin to coalesce beyond the windows of the car and Pike’s hands grip the wheel tightly as he focuses on the road.
The topic’s sent everyone into their silent thoughts, the weight of the unknown draping us like the growing fog. The turns on the hills grow tighter and Pike quietly curses his choice of route. I search the murkiness ahead, as if keeping my eyes glued to the road helps Pike find his way forward. Finally, we’re driving down the other side of the hills onto the flat distance along the shore, or what I imagine is the shore with the fog still surrounding the vehicle. The flat shoreside road is a much safer place to be with the opaque soup surrounding us, surrounding the vehicle in which we’re enclosed together.
Close. We’re too close shut up inside this small space, feeling the seriousness of our mission, the consequences of failure. Too close to Sebastian. His body is just behind mine. I’m breathing his air, him breathing mine.
The whispers begin then. Seeeeeeeeeeeeeebbbbbbbbbbaaaaaasssssssss. Seeeeeeebbbbbbb. Mooooorrreeeeee. Seeee. Toooooooooouuuuuuuuccccccccch.
“Fuck, Daav,” Sebastian intones from the back. “The tangles.”
He feels it, too.
“This is not the place. Not now.” Although I’m not sure if I’m speaking to Sebastian or my Verse itself.
But it pulls, insists, and gold is sheening my vision. My hand grips the front dash of the car as I fight it.
“What’s happening?” Nuée asks. She sounds confused. “Shit, Seb, your eyes are gold.”
“Your magic?” Pike barks. “Dammit. Shut it down!”
Like I’m not trying? My shining tangles swim ahead of me, singing. And beyond them, the shadow of the dark, knotted ugly ones of Sebastian.
I suck in deep breaths, push my tangles away. Verse twist this, it can’t happen again.
“I’m pulling over,” Pike’s saying, although I can’t focus on anything other than trying to keep this contained.
“NO!” My voice is a yell in the enclosed walls of the car.
“Daav! Please!!!!” Sebastian begs.
The car veers toward the side of the road and jerks to a halt.
“Fight it!” I yell to Sebastian.
“I don’t think—”
“Fight it, Angel.”
“I’ll try.”
The fog’s encased the outside of our vehicle, but light is bouncing with persistent brilliance all around my vision. And it’s my will alone that puts hands on it and wrenches it down, the burn of beauty searing the palms of this parallel body of mine.
It’s like wrestling a mountain, impossible but I keep trying. The song warps around me, aching and wanting me to accept as it insists upon touching the putrid, serrated tangles just out of reach.
I growl, scream into the music. One last wrench and then…
Falling, falling, and slamming into myself. Cold sweat coats my body, my shirt wet and glued to my chest. I shiver.
The echo of my Verse wailing its loss is haunting my ears.
Behind me from the back seat come low wracking sobs. Sebastian.
Why is he crying? He hasn’t cried with our past struggles with the Verse.
“Hey, hey,” Nuée is saying to him. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”
Is he hurt? I need to get back there, check on him, but I can’t move yet, my entire body a bruised paralyzed ache.
“Dammit.” Pike is trying to start the car again, but the motor won’t turn over. “We need to get going if there’s a pause in this Verse mess because I don’t think the others behind us can see we’re stopped. They may ram us. This road’s pretty narrow, all sand on one side and the trees right up on the other side so I can’t pull over further. They were each keeping a distance away for security, but they’ll catch up soon.”
It’s then I hear it, just as I’ve gathered the energy to turn in my seat and check on Sebastian. Wind, a bright, blinding streak of lightning, followed quickly by thunder so nearby the auto vibrates with it.
Another flash and another peal of thunder. A whistling sound, the wind suddenly on top of us, snaking across the vehicle and rocking the body. Howling.
“What the fuck,” Nuée calls over the almost deafening noise of it.
A deluge of rain pours down, so suddenly it’s like a tap is wrenched to a fully open position. So heavy it blocks out all detail from the outside through the windows.
Then another roar as something hard starts to pour down onto the auto. Constant thwacking impact.
Pike is still cranking the engine. It catches, and despite the near blind conditions he pushes his foot down on the gas and lurches us forward, picking up speed too quickly for the conditions.
“What are you doing?” Nuée screeches.
“That’s hail the size of golf balls. A damn microburst,” he yells. “If it’s localized we should get out of the range.”
“Sweet agony,” Sebastian says.
“We can’t outrun it, and we’re blind,” Isolde barks. “Pull over again and turn away from the windows, get as low as you can.”
Pike brakes the car, throws it in park.
“I’ll strengthen the metal,” he barks. “Nuée, work on the glass. Temper it more.”
Nuée’s laughing a bit hysterically. “I can’t believe this is really happening to us. Microburst? Call Hanna, then Bethany. Check on them.”
I turn to see her slouching into the limited space of the footwell for protection, sucking in deep breaths of air, the sign she’s reaching for her own Verse. Her eyes go gold in the limited light of the interior. She’s grabbing onto the back of the seat to brace herself.
And as much as I want to help her, I can’t risk opening my Verse again when I just escaped its attempt to hijack Sebastian and me. It may make this disaster worse and blow us up in addition.
“My damn cell’s gone, probably smashed back at headquarters.” Beside her, Sebastian’s crouching but digging at Nuée’s jeans pocket for her phone.
Isolde speaks. “I think Colleen took it from your pocket before she tore up your pants to do the healing. Guess she forgot to return it before switching cars.”
“Yessss. Gotcha,” Sebastian says. He pulls out her phone and starts to tap the screen. “You better not have changed your password,” he mumbles, but Nuée is lost to her magic.
The pressure of it fills the car, but thankfully mine stays contained even with its nearness.
I’m digging for my cell as I go low, unclicking the seatbelt as I turn my chest to face the seat.
Pike’s drumming the steering wheel with the flat of his hand and his eyes spark gold like Nuée’s. Once the sheen overtakes him he grips onto the wheel, bracing himself.
Lightning and peals of thunder on top of us, the barrage of cracking ice balls slamming in a constant crash. The auto rocking under the whistling wind. This storm isn’t natural.
From the backseat. “Hanna, it’s Seb. Microburst. Are you in it? The hail’s motherfucking gigantic. One of you try to strengthen the metal of the exterior and the glass. Pull over, do it now!”
“Pull the energy from the storm and redirect it to quicken the tempering,” I call over the noise.
I’m dialing Bethany. I reach her, yell into the phone to give the same direction and end the call.
“We’re helpless here. Daav, you sure you can’t join them?” Isolde yells from where she’s crouching in the back.
I can barely hear her, the roar of the hail’s impact shaking the car along with the rocking from the barrage of wind.
She understands that my power far outshines the others’, but something about it makes everything unstable…I think.
I twist to look over the seat to meet Sebastian’s gaze. He’s wide eyed, but stares back at me, mouths the words, “love you.”
Then more of the endless waterfall of impact shakes the car, slams, rocks, pushes it. The wind keeps howling.
My body rocks with it. Tosses me against the sides into the door, against Pike.
Pain flares at each impact.
Then a new kind of darkness joins the chaos of the moment, blots out everything beyond the glass including the fog.
Glass crackles. The ceiling dents down and sound is everywhere. Inside my skull and blood. Booming and deafening. There’s nothing of normal existence in this crucible.
Timeless. Forever.
A larger jolt slams the vehicle, bouncing the car, and it’s darker than ever.
Until finally the roaring chaos slows.
The plink and shift of very occasional balls of ice bouncing against the body trickles through my ears, then slows down more. Stops. The noisy silence is a weight on my body.
A moan from behind me. The knock of a limb against mine.
“Fuck.” Sebastian’s voice.
Thank Verse!
“Is everyone okay?” I call, blind to that information in the dark of our supposed survival.
“Ow,” Nuée answers. “Okay, but this really sucks.”
“In one piece,” my sister chimes in. “And the roof seems to have held, although it’s pressing down too close for comfort.”
Pike coughs. “Glass is fractured but didn’t break. Though something else fell on us, and it looks like we’re half buried under piles of hailstone, high enough to reach just above the side windows. Getting out may be a problem.”
“I think one of the pine trees was blown down over the car,” I say, trying to make sense of the dim shapes beyond the windows aside from the ice. It’s pretty dark, but the fog seems to have lifted so some night light filters in through what must be leaves and branches.
“On the bright side,” Sebastian adds, “it can’t have been a humongous grandmother of a tree or we’d be completely flattened.”
“Mr. Optimism,” Nuée laughs.
He’s alive. He’s alive. He’s alive.
Another cough from Pike. He pushes against the handle of his door. “Door’s blocked.”
I try mine, and both Isolde and Nuée do the same at theirs. None open.
“Daav, can you please use your tangles to melt the ice? I’m too drained and I’d guess Nuée is, too. Maybe with those gone the tree won’t be a barrier to at least one of the doors.”
I force myself to respond, to move beyond the chant in my head that’s the only thing keeping me sane. “I won’t risk it. It’s just as likely my Verse will turn wild, cause more damage, explode us or cause another storm.”
“Then I’ll do it,” Sebastian answers from the backseat.
“No, you won’t.”
“Excuse me? Not your decision, Prince. And you prefer to stay trapped forever in here? Which one of us is the masochist, remind me?”
“You specialize in body work, not general energy manipulation.”
“Then you do it,” he challenges me.
“No.” He’s alive and I’m keeping it that way.
Pike coughs more, this time it takes him longer to quiet it and speak to me. “Your alternative plan?”
“We wait long enough for you to regain strength and access your Verse, or find out if the others are in better shape. Does anyone still have access to their phone?”
Sebastian snorts. “Can’t find shit in this dark. I lost my grip on Nuée’s.”
Nuée sighs. “Not sure I can manage to even search. I’ve got as much strength as a wet noodle.”
“I’m about the same,” Pike adds, with a wheeze. “On both counts.”
Such a strange conversation in the shadows draped between us, our voices floating out into the tight, contained shell. It’s like we’re suspended in another existence altogether, an in between space not tethered to reality. The occasional crackle of glass punctuates the eerie atmosphere.
Isolde’s voice joins the conversation, with more energy than the rest. “My device works with speech activation. It got lost in the car somewhere in the shaking of the storm, but if it’s intact, I can make a remote call without finding it.”
“I think I remember Hanna’s number, but not the others’.” Nuée calls out a series of digits.
“I’ll trigger it, then tell you when to repeat the numbers. Nova, engage contact.” The last of Isolde’s words trigger the response she predicts.
“Nova readied,” a flat metallic female response echoes out from somewhere low in the car.
“Hold,” Isolde says. “Now repeat the numbers after I tell it to cease the hold.”
“Wow, cool, okay.”
“Cease hold,” Isolde says. Nuée repeats Hanna’s number.
At the end of the string Isolde adds, “Call.”
After a series of beeps, an answer. “Hello?” a shaky voice speaks. “Hello? Seb?”
“It’s Nuée. Hanna, you okay?”
Then we hear sobs. “No. It’s Deidre, Deidre’s hurt. There’s too much blood, it’s coming from her side, and she won’t wake up. Colleen and Christopher are unconscious, too.”
“They’re hurt?” Nuée sounds panicked.
“I don’t know. I can only reach Deidre, but I can’t heal her. I used up my energy dealing with the, the storm. We hit a tree before we could stop, plus something was loose in the cab and hit her.” Her sobs break up her words, but she gets them out, like she knows she can’t completely let go. “What if it’s too late? I spent too much time in the Verse for the hail. I can’t lose her. Not…after, not…Trina.” She gasps a moan of her name. “Not Deidre, too. Please, help.”
Trina. When she was alive, Trina loved Hanna. Hanna’s pain is like a beam of light exposing the ache of loss I try to keep hidden in the dark. Trina.
“Hey, Hanna, it’s okay. You’re going to be okay. We’ll get you help.” Sebastian jumps into the conversation when Nuée doesn’t respond immediately, like the news about Christopher unconscious hits her so hard it steals her voice. “Can you put pressure on Deidre’s wound?” Sebastian asks.
“Yeah, I’m trying.” Her voice shakes, but there’s a kernel of strength under the fear.
“Keep it up, we’ll get to you. Do you know how far behind us you were?”
She pauses, like she’s not sure. “Maybe ten minus a quarter bell.”
“Are you buried in ice?”
“I think, I think partly.”
“Have you heard from Freddie? Bethany?”
“No, nothing. I tried calling Nuée, but there’s no answer. But I needed to keep the pressure. She can’t die. Please.”
“Okay, we’re coming. I’m going to hang up now so we can get to you.”
He’s lying to her. No, I know him, he’s not lying. But I can’t do what he wants. Verse twist this. Trina. Trina loved Hanna. Hanna who lost what I’m trying to keep. Hanna who may lose more.
“Daav,” Sebastian says, my name a question, a request, a demand. Even in the dark when I can’t see him, I know exactly the shape his face is making. The depth to his gray eyes as they look toward me, with hope, with infinite belief in my sorry soul.
How does he own me like this? All the time he tried to give me control, give me power, but he’s had it all along.
“Fuck!” My hand slams the dashboard, the shock of it rattling my already bruised flesh.
“I know you’re worried, but it’s the right thing to do.”
Nuée, Isolde and Pike remain silent, giving my Angel the space to work his magic on me, his ability more profound here than with any of his Versework.
They want to live, they want Deidre and Christopher and Colleen to live. Even Colleen. I know this, because I want it, too.
And Hanna. I owe her. I owe Trina who loved her.
“Okay.” I relent.
Sebastian’s breath whooshes out in our dark reality. “Thank you. I love you.”
That’s always your bottom line, Angel. Love. You give it freely. You’re beautiful with it. Verse twist it, but I want to hold him.
Instead I say, “I’ll try to melt the ice, hopefully without blowing us up.”
And with a silent prayer, a silent threat to the very Verse I’ve resisted, I let myself call for its touch, sink into my focus, and open.
It’s song and light and beauty, and eager, eager loveliness. I don’t have to cajole, barely have to try as the tangles leap to my touch. The power is a looming well of potential, a behemoth surrounding me, the force enough to shred and burn everything I love. It turns in the dark to the space beyond me, behind me, like a scent hound straining at the leash toward my Angel. Please, not now. My pleading is lined with an amorphous promise of what my Verse desires, that I will let it free. In response, the strain decreases, the song purring around me, fractured rainbow streaming through my body, and we move outside this metal and plastic tomb, looking down at the tree and hail burying our car.
I urge the tangles to move with me, settling over the piles of ice and into the frozen water. Their wellspring of energy moves between the bonds, weakening the forces of attraction and moving the molecules away from another. The tangles let me have control as their force melts the hail into liquid soaking into the already saturated ground.
They’re obedient to my leash although I know it for an illusion.
It’s easy, too easy. But the branches draping the car are larger than I hoped, making it necessary to erode the wood, letting me split and wear down the wood cells for us to push open the doors with success.
Water already saturates the tree limbs and trunk and if I suck out the water, resaturate it, and repeat the process again and again the surface of wood can be degraded. And so I herd tangles toward the carbon, hydrogen and oxygen molecules of the cellulose, speeding up the atoms. And then slowing them and urging the water again into their surface. The tangles flick to my call and skip wildly through the process, speeding faster, almost too fast for the goal. Enough, it’s enough and the now brittle wood will splinter when we push against it.
I’m calling the tangles to cease, urging them to quiet. The Verse pulls away from my call, dancing among the molecules of cellulose and water.
Quiet, enough.
They ignore me again, their song gleeful as the energy continues to spin, this time speeding the atoms so fast the wood catches fire. Twist it!
No!
And then he’s there, the serrated brambles of his Verse and the tumbleweed cackle calling to the gleeful light of my crystal tangles. Calling to them, so that their attention pauses.
Are mesmerized by the Verse filled with Sebastian’s presence.
I want to scream a denial, but my Angel’s inside that car, the car surrounded by smoldering, sparking wood.
The atoms slow, the energy of the crystals floating away to leave the particles to settle into normal. The fires die out.
I brace for the rampage of my Verse’s charge toward Sebastian’s wicked brambles. But strangely, it hesitates.
My heartbeat races in this floating, amorphous version of my chest. And it’s almost as if Sebastian’s dark ugly magic smiles back, breathes out, and simply watches my bright tangles. Then folds itself away, disappears just as my Verse wakes from its hesitant daze and rushes forward to touch my Angel’s dark.
But it’s already gone.
A howl of perfect song from my Verse sounds out, full of loss, longing, and ripping through my heart with such absolute sadness. It hurts in its tortured beauty.
I squeeze my fists together and let myself feel the bruised aching of my true body. And wake inside the now unbarricaded car.