Sally didn’t even wait for all of it to fall. She just ran through it, straight for Zara. Sally knelt beside her still form and pressed her hands on either side of her face. “Zara, come back to us,” Sally whispered.
She felt Zara’s spirit trying to slip away from her, so Sally pictured a rope and tethered her own spirit to Zara’s.
“Sally, no!”Costin’s firm voice filled her mind.
“It’s going to be fine, Costin. Trust me.”
Then Sally pictured herself pulling on the rope, pulling Zara’s spirit back into the land of the living, so to speak. “I don’t know if you know this about me, Zara, but out of Jen and Jacque, I am actually the most stubborn. You would think it would be Jen, but nope. You see, I am the most stubborn because I honestly believe everyone has a purpose in life. Everyone has a certain number of days they are supposed to be on this round, spinning ball of water and land. And they can’t leave until they’ve completed their work. You have not completed yours. You are not done. You have so much left to do, so many people who need to be impacted by you. So, you see, I can’t let you go. Don’t make us mourn you before your time.”
Sally hadn’t noticed Rachel kneeling on the other side of Zara. She, too, had her hands on the girl, but hers were on Zara’s arm and hand. Both pushed their light into the mental form of the girl that was just a memory. They weren’t going to stop until she was back, until she believed them.
Zara wanted to die.Didn’t she?For some reason, the girl was suddenly confused about what she wanted. One minute, she was sure her miserable existence just wasn’t worth enduring any longer, and the next she was considering fighting, trying to get free or at least holding on and praying for someone to rescue her.
“Fight, Zara, you have to fight.”
She didn’t recognize the voice that suddenly filled the air around her. It was feminine and beautiful, almost musical in its quality.Fight. The voice wanted her to fight.
“Why?” Zara asked the voice.
“Because this is no longer your life. You aren’t trapped with that monster any longer. You’re free. You have a family again. You have sisters and brothers and a man who loves you. Try to remember."
Zara desperately wanted the voice to be real. She didn’t think she could hold onto this life much longer. She honestly didn’t know how much fight she had left. She forced herself to focus and search her memories. Zara imagined her mind as a file cabinet, her memories lined up in manila folders. She began flipping through them, noticing the pictures filling the folders. One after another, she flipped. They began as happy memories, pictures of her family and friends. But soon they turned dark. The pictures became dark and blood soaked. Some were blank, containing memories she’d completely blocked out because of the trauma. She forced herself to continue looking. Somewhere toward the end of the file, she paused. Inside of this file was the picture of a handsome man. It was bright, crisp, and clear and so completely out of place among the rest of the dark folders, she thought some cosmic bookkeeper must have misfiled it somehow. But then Zara felt something stirring in her stomach, and her heart began to pound out a rhythm in her chest that was nearly painful.
She knew this man.How do I know this man?His eyes were gold and full of kindness and mirth. His lips turned up in a smile that looked content on his face, as though he wore a smile more than any other expression. He was handsome. Zara found herself reaching out and running her fingertips across his forehead and down his cheeks.Have I ever touched him like this before?
She doubted it. It had been so long since she’d been around humans.Hadn’t it?She flipped through the rest of the filing cabinet and found more folders containing pictures of people who clearly weren’t vampires. Zara felt like she should know these people, but she couldn’t place them.
There was a beautiful brunette with eyes as kind as the first male she’d seen. There was a blonde woman who had a mischievous look on her face that made Zara think perhaps she enjoyed causing a lot of trouble. Then there was a redhead who had a look of exasperation on her freckled face. She appeared levelheaded more than anything. The other pictures were of males, nearly as handsome as the first picture she’d seen, though they didn’t draw her in as he had.
Who are these people?The memories had to be hers. She didn’t think she was sorting through someone else’s memories. The vampire pictures she had no trouble whatsoever recalling. So, Zara had to know these people, too, but how? She’d been a captive of the vampires since she was eleven. These people weren’t in her life before her capture.
“Remember, Zara. Remember Wadim, Jacque, Jen, Sally, Alina,”the voice said and continued to list more names.
Zara repeated the names over and over, but it wasn’t until she heard a different voice that her brain began to feel as though it were going to shatter.
“Beautiful.”A deep, masculine voice replaced the feminine one and sent shivers down her spine.“I need you to remember me. I need you to remember the first time you bumped into me and nearly brought me to my knees. You were the loveliest thing I’d ever seen. I knew instantly you were my true mate.”
True mate?Zara was puzzled.What on earth is a true mate? Is it like a soul mate? And do those even exist?
“It is exactly like a soul mate, and yes they exist,”the deep voce said.
“Who are you?” Zara asked.
“I’m Wadim. I’m the picture at the start of that file in your mind.”
Zara flipped back to the beginning of the memory file and stared, once again, at the handsome face. Her heartbeat started to speed up as she gazed into those golden eyes.Wadim. That named sounded so familiar and precious to her. She wanted to remember.
“He is nothing to you.” Ander’s voice suddenly broke through the bubble that had enveloped her.
Zara’s head snapped up to see the … thing. She called him a thing because he wasn’t a man. He was thethingshe despised most in the world, and he was staring down at her with a determined fire in his eyes.
“You are mine.”
She shook her head. “No. You can keep saying that, but I will never be yours. Not any part of me.”
“Your soul says otherwise,” Ander said, and a sinister smile spread across his evil face.
“My soul—” Zara began but stopped when another voice—Wadim’s voice—reverberated throughout the room. Somewhere, deep down, she was beginning to believe this wasn’t a room at all but actually a place in her mind. Yet it seemed so real to her.
