“Open your eyes, Luce.”
Small, white flames flickered playfully across my hand, and I didn’t feel a single piercing needle.
“We did it,” I said in awe, smiling at each of them.
“No, Hellion.Youdid.”
Chapter
Thirty-Four
LUCILLE
Firewings swarmed the ancient, vined arches, their otherworldly orange glow muddied by the purple ring around my vision. I turned, cringing from the sharp, dry grass digging into my feet. With a single thought, I imagined boots and crunched my way through the moonlit clearing.
I frowned, finding Aspen’s spot beneath the oak empty.
“Aspen?” I called out.
No answer.
I searched the area, and something dark flickered in my peripheral vision, right behind the trunk’s shadow. But when I looked directly at the tree, nothing was there. I twisted my head again with the same result.
Creeping toward it, the hair on my arms stood on end.
“Aspen, where are you?” My nerves danced as my voice carried over the quiet. “We need to talk.”
I needed to ask him about Lilith and what he presumed her plans were with me. There was a missing puzzle piece in Lucifer’s theories. I just couldn’t get past why she’d want me in the Immolation Circle after everything Aspen went through to get me to her.
What if Lucifer was wrong? What if Lilith wasn’t behind the demon infection or trying to kill me?
But if not her—then who?
The oak taunted me with its ominous darkness, only showing me what it hid in its shadows when I turned my head. I shouldn’t even be able to see it at all, not with the oak’s large branches halting the light of the moon. But my dream-walking haze distinguished the difference between the shadows and the pulsating mass.
Something invisible brushed against me at the same time I smelled it. The cloying sweet scent overwhelmed the air, shoving down my airways and making it difficult to breathe. I wheezed and stopped in my tracks, then took a few steps back until fresh air filled my lungs, landing at the halfway point between the arches and the oak.
What was that?
Frozen with apprehension, I waited to gather the courage to investigate further.
Something latched onto my hips, and I screamed, the ring around my vision eclipsing my eyes and drowning my surroundings in purple.
“Gotcha,” Aspen whispered in my ear, arms encircling my waist.
I would’ve whipped around to hit him, or chastise him for making my heart murder my sternum, but the purple-hued blob was no longer a blob. It looked almost like a figure.
“Is someone else here?”
He tightened his hold, placing a kiss on my neck. “Not that I know of.”
“You don’t see that figure behind the tree?”
He attempted to twist me, but I wouldn’t let him. I wasn’t about to turn my back on the figure-like dark void that suffocated me the closer I got.
Aspen sighed. “No, sweetheart. I don’t see it. Is that even possible? This is my dream.”
“Yes, it’s possible.”
