Uncomfortable, I turned to see what my brothers thought and discovered all attention on me.
“What?”I barked, hating that I’d shown any weakness.In all the myths surrounding the Knowing Crystals, I’d never heard of anyone suffering ill effects from their presence.
Had Arim cast some spell on me?I wouldn’t put anything past him.
“Darius will wear it first.”Arim placed the necklace around my throat.Before I could protest, the crystal turned a blood red, then burned itself through my shirt and painlessly into my chest in the shape of a diamond.
“How does it come off?”I lifted my shirt and traced the new tattoo, a strange feeling of urgency filling me as my fingers lingered over the crystal now embedded in my skin.
“It will remove itself after a true joining has occurred, then pass to the next in need.”
“You mean after Darius bonds with his affai, one of us will be chosen to find our supposed mate,” Marcus said matter-of-factly.He frowned at me.“Hell, we’ll die in this realm.”
“Very funny.”I glanced up to see a flash of satisfaction pass over Arim’s face.Distrust rose swiftly, followed by a certain realization.“That was more than the Knowing Crystal.What exactly did you do to me?”
“Nothing you haven’t already done to yourself.”
“What the hell does that mean?”Anger festered.But the crystal muddied my mind, turning my anger into a burning need to find…someone.A woman to fill the aching void growing within me.
“It means you’ve already met your mate,” Aerolus answered, worry shadowing his pale, gray eyes.“Now you have to find her, join with her, and convince her to give up everything she knows to live with you—in a place she won’t believe exists—forever.”
Silence filled the room.Arim vanished as if he’d never been there at all.
We stared at one another before Cadmus broke the silence.“We’re doomed.”
Chapter11
Samantha
Igave a soft cry, terror shaking my sweating body in the icy hotel room.Turning my head from side to side, I tried to shake free from the nightmare.Hellish images bombarded me, and with eyes wide open and unseeing, I stared into the maw of an uncertain existence…
Like a blurred image that had yet to be sharpened into reality, the cloaked figure shimmered as it moved over once blazing fields of tall, white grass.Whatever the figure touched, it destroyed.Grasses withered into decayed mounds of putrid pulp over reddish-gray soil—no longer black and rich with nutrients.Now the soil encouraged nothing but decay.
Leaving a blatant trail of decomposition in its wake, the hazy figure floated from the flames of a dimensional gateway into an unseen realm.
Like an omniscient navigator, I watched everything unfold with burning eyes, unable to look away from the evil abundant in my dream.
The indistinct features of the cloaked creature sharpened into a grotesque mask as it lowered its hood.No longer obscured in a world not its own, the creature thrived in its homeworld, in the dark shadows between the light.
My gaze followed the sickly, yellow claws protruding from frayed sleeves that still clung to its robe.Bony hands made the being look like a living skeleton, appropriate for the dark coffin of a room it had entered.I followed the hands, soon unable to look away from the horrible sight of the creature’s face.
A misshapen head devoid of hair sat like a lump of melted wax on a papery-thin neck.The creature had two ears, each pointed at the tip and overly long, sitting high on either side of its head.
And its head…
I shivered.Its head was a mottled accumulation of black and sallow bruises with two huge, round, white eyes sitting over a gaping mouth filled with rows of needle-sharp, black teeth.
It had no nose to smell, yet a lingering stench of death pervaded the room, and I had to wonder if the odor came from the creature or the dark place itself.
The thing finally let go of its hood and shuffled forward, clumsily stepping toward a figure bent over a marble table.
With those blank, white eyes it looked at a man so beautiful he could have been an angel.Shaggy, white-blond hair framed a perfectly-proportioned face, his cheekbones high, his jaw square.Full, blood-red lips stood out from alabaster skin that appeared silky smooth and as fine as a baby’s.
The man glanced up at the creature, and sadness lurked in the startling indigo-blue depths of his gaze.“Ah, Mirego, you brought a visitor.I had hoped you would be more careful.”
He stared at Mirego, and I’d swear he felt grief.A neon-blue film covered his eyes before twin beams of blue fire streaked from the orbs, lighting his minion into flames.
Mirego shrieked, an awful sound that made my head feel as if it might split in two.Then the creature burst into ash, its form smoldering near the man’s feet.
