I take in a deep lungful of ozone-rich Paragon fog while doing my best to usher from my mind the events that have transpired earlier this evening. It’s too painful, too incomprehensible to believe anything that has happened in the last few months, let alone the last few hours. I don’t want to think about the horrors of what my new reality brings.
Gage and his wicked transformation feel soluble in every sense. Who he’s become and what he’s done are nothing more than the esoteric rantings of a madman. His new reality is nothing but an echo of a demon’s voice without a tangible vessel to produce the sound. It is smoke and mirrors. It has to be.
This new version of Gage is nothing at all like the solid, fire over stone, palpable, warm-bodied, warm-hearted version he once was. This new rendition is nothing more than a puff of smoke ready to choke out the world. He already choked mine. This new adaptation, the one born of a wicked nobility, is nothing more than what Logan suspected Fems were from the beginning—a ball of hate-filled air. That is what Gage Oliver has reduced himself to, perhaps what he’s been all along—a ball of hate-filled air.
But I don’t want to think about Gage or anything he’s done. Give me the here and now, this moment with my legs dipped into the icy brine of the sea, the hard granite beneath me cold as a tomb. I want to feel the chill in the air, feel the sting of the fog as it burns my lungs like fire. I want to hold my little boys, my angels’ happy bodies, feel their heft and their girth. Feel the carpet of the Landon house under my feet. Taste Emily’s delicious pancakes while the boys indulge in their own. I want to run my fingers over the bark of the evergreens that line this island like guardians and feel the sand of Silent Cove between my toes. Grip my hands over the steering wheel of the Mustang. Run my finger over the Eye of Refuge around my neck that has proven to be no refuge at all. Give me something real I can touch and feel, probe with my finger and hold over my tongue like a communion wafer. Take from me this evil vapor that my husband has become. Make him go away. Make him disappear. Have the grave open up twice in one lifetime and swallow him whole like it should have done the first time.
He is not real. He is not the Gage Oliver I had known and loved. It is a cruel injustice for him to parade around in that familiar coat of flesh and those heated flames he calls eyes already pinned on another woman. His belly filled with the flesh of my people.
“Skyla!” Logan comes upon me quickly, panting out of breath, his skin illuminated from the trip down the cliff.
He offers a hand, but I hop to my feet without his assistance. Accepting a hand from others has been one of my greatest downfalls. I have learned the hard way that there are none that I can count on, no one I can fully trust. Not even Logan. Especially not Gage.
“I have to go.” My feet quickly move me from the rocky crags to the dirt lot with expedited speed and Logan promptly follows. I find his hand connected to mine, but every last inch of me is numb and frozen. He could have removed my hand and I wouldn’t have known the difference. I pull myself free from his grasp. “I have to get out of here. I need to crawl out of my head. I need to fix the mess that my life has become. I have to fix this for my people.” Every manic thought swirls through my head at once. Never have I felt so inspired and frustrated all at the same time. Never have I felt the need to both kill and heal simultaneously. There is so much destruction I am determined to achieve—so much rebuilding, redrafting, and resurrecting of my own that I will move supernatural mountains to make happen. And I will.
My people, Celestra, will stand tall once again as the victors. The Fems might be on the winning side of the celestial fence at the moment, but I will fight tooth and nail to make sure their moment of glory extinguishes like a flame at the bottom of the ocean. The struggle will not be mine; it will be theirs.
My supernatural abilities enliven within me, and soon I’m racing my way back to the highway with minimal effort.
“Skyla, wait!” Logan calls after me. But I don’t plan on waiting for anyone ever again. All that waiting, all that trusting landed my people in the hot seat—and all of Noster nearly extinct. My God, people are dead because of my negligence.
Soon enough, Logan is shoulder to shoulder with me, breathless, panting as he struggles to keep up. Logan belongs to Celestra as well. He was the one that fate, also known as my mother, had delineated for me to begin with. And had I followed dear old wicked Mom’s advice in love, I could have avoided having to deal with Faction war after Faction war.
My sons bounce through my mind once again and I cradle them there. Nathan and Barron just turned two. It’s their birthday, or it was Nathan’s and mine yesterday. Today it’s Barron’s and his father’s.
My heart lurches as I push Gage right back out of my mind. It’s the boys who are, in fact, the cornerstone of my existence at the moment. I couldn’t imagine a life without them. So no matter how much I want to decry Gage Oliver as my biggest mistake—and dear God up in heaven, he is exactly that—I can never wish we didn’t happen. And knowing how much blood is on my hands makes what happened between us feel all that much more wrong.
“Skyla? What’s going on?” Logan snatches up my hand and threads his fingers through mine before I can stop him. And judging by that death grip of his, he’s not letting go anytime soon. “Your nightgown is all wet. Let me take you home.”
It takes all of my strength to yank back my hand as I stop abruptly on the road and watch as Logan sails on without me from sheer momentum. He finally jogs to a stop about a block away before backtracking at a lightning clip.
That elongated dimple of his goes off as the moon makes his eyes glow a deep shade of citrine. Logan Oliver has always been a dirty blond god, emphasis on thedirty. It’s not his fault he’s handsome to a fault. We tried to make it work in high school by way of using Gage as a cover so that the Fems wouldn’t kill me. But it was the Fems’ plan all along to have me with Gage, bear his children, and hand over my people on a silver celestial platter. However, Logan and I were married briefly after the first Faction war. And when I say briefly, I mean for all of three days. But it was heaven and perhaps the purest moment of my life outside of any time I spend with my children.
“This isn’t a nightgown.” My chest bucks as I look down at the illuminated fabric clinging to my skin. “It’s a wedding dress.” That’s an outright lie, but my mouth chose those words over the truth. In reality, it’s nothing more than a Halloween costume. A flimsy toga that I chose not to wear on that fateful Halloween night Gage swiped the celestial rug out from underneath my people. Instead, I dressed like a superhero and ended up being anything but.
“Wedding dress?” Logan takes a half step back. “You did it? You married Gage,” he says it mostly to himself, stunned. His chest expands as wide as a football field with his next breath. Logan is clearly floored that I’d side so intimately once again with the man who just finished eviscerating my people. “Okay then.” He winces as he inspects me in this dim light. “Why don’t you go be with him? Take a honeymoon. I’ll help watch the boys. You deserve it,” he says it so soft it’s hardly a whisper as if he were actually happy for me, but the fact he’s inadvertently glaring my way suggests anything but.
I lunge forward and grip him by the shirt. “I’ll be watching the boys while Gage goes on his honeymoon—withChloe.”
My feet pick up their frenetic motion once again as I head down the dark, damp highway, but Logan quickly catches up and stops me. The two of us stand there a moment, our chests heaving as we take in vats of crystalline Paragon fog.
“What did you just say?” He touches the back of his hand to my cheek as if checking for a fever. “Did you hit your head on those rocks?” His voice hikes up an octave and I can tell he’s reaching his boiling point. I’m not sure he knows exactly why.
“Ask your nephew the same question,” I roar as I turn back toward the road ahead, the mist swirling around us like a band of curious poltergeists.
“Skyla,” Logan says my name sharp like a reprimand. “Are you fucking with me?”
My chest bucks in lieu of a laugh. A horrible sound claws from my throat, something between a scream and a howl and Logan collapses his arms around me in one aggressive move.
“Oh God, Skyla.”
“No, don’t.” I push him away. “I can’t do this. I can’t think straight, Logan. I went all the way to that demonic plane his father gifted him and he didn’t choose me!” I riot into the night. “He chose Chloe Fucking Bishop!” I hop backward, my entire body in full submission to my rage. “He could have had me! My mother was gifting him the keys to the kingdom, Logan!” My voice lances through the pristine silence only the early hours of the morning can afford and a peacock screams in the distance. “I was there.” A cold sweat breaks out over my body all at once. “The throne room was glistening like a jewel—roses everywhere.” I shake my head in disbelief and I begin to settle down, my gaze lost in the woods across the way. “I went there to marry him. Our sweet baby girl Sage was there, Demetri and Wesley, too. Gage stepped toward the altar looking dapper.” I beat my fist to my chest in hopes to stop my heart. “So alarmingly handsome.” I take a simple breath as I recall that last moment in which I thought we could be real. “Marshall came with me and so did Chloe. She wore the dress they buried her in and I marveled at the irony. It was going to be like a second funeral for her to witness the holy union, a binding covenant between Gage and me. It should have been the final one we’d ever need.” It all comes back to me, so painfully clear—not just the serene, surreal surroundings, but the way I felt, so much hope, so much love for the soul I was willing to walk away from my people for. I look back to Logan with heavy eyes. “He said his vows and then he took Chloe’s hand. The rest is history.”
“Skyla.” Logan pulls me in, shaking me slightly as if to wake me. “It’s not true. Gage would never do that.”
My mouth opens as the fog filters in, flirting with my tongue, ready to choke the life out of me if I let it. I look past Logan toward Devil’s Peak, my gaze penetrating right through this night and back to that wicked realm Demetri gifted his wicked son.
“It’s true, Logan. Gage’s own words were that he chose Chloe. Demetri finished out the ceremony and Gage took Chloe into a glass enclosure that had nothing but a bed strewn with roses. They consummated their union as walls of fire ignited around them. I stood in their midst, my heart burning right along with those walls. He did it, Logan.” A single tear scorches my cheek as it rolls its way down. “Gage Oliver took my people and my heart and burned them both to cinder. Gage and I will never be again. He belongs to her now.” I fall into a thick, catatonic state, gazing out into the nothingness of the fog, my thoughts pleasantly vacant and my heart comfortably numb.
