Nyxeris’ voice is calm, soothing, and she slides her hand across my bare torso to rest it on top of my fist, still at my sternum.
“What’s wrong?”
She doesn’t sound at all addled with sleep, like my waking has put her on high alert. But Erich and Zephyr are still fast asleepon the other side of her, cascaded in the pale yellow light from a small lamp on the other side of the bed.
I peer into Nyxeris’ dark eyes, a sudden sense of helplessness overtaking me. Sorrow I don’t understand.
Until her brow furrows, and then I see it. My dream. Nyxeris, wounded and being taken away from us.
I reach out to her now, pull her into my chest and back down with me to the bed. Fingers tangling in her blood red hair, I give a half-truth.
“Just a nightmare.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Not one bit.”
She stills in my arms before her body relaxes into me, her soft lips pressing against my skin as she returns my embrace.
This dream wasn’t ordinary. I feel it in my bones.
It’s about the mission I’d just ensured we’d be going on by leading us to complete our bonds.
The mission I must do everything in my power to stop us being sent on.
Oatmeal is something I have grown to enjoy over the years as a breakfast food. I like to add a little maple syrup and thinly sliced banana.
This morning, I sit alone at one of the small corner tables in the third-floor cafeteria, moving the goop about my bowl absently, mind playing and rewinding, then replaying the events of my nightmare.
Blood blooms from Nyxeris’ chest as she screams, her body encased in her blue electric power. We can’t get to her before she’s dragged away by… something. Someone.
I don’t know.
What I do know is dread overtakes my entire body whenever I see or think of this vision of mine.
What’s more, when I touched Erich while he was losing control last night, I could sense more than his emotions. Words flowed into my brain that were not my thoughts, but his.
Need. Claim. Want. Mine.
Garbled, heated, just barely coherent.
I’ve never been able to pull words from someone’s mind before, only push my thoughts into theirs, albeit not very well.
“It’s wild,” someone whispers from the table behind me. “I don’t know what happened.”
Someone else mumbles, “It’s like an eruption or something.”
My brow draws tight before I rise from my seat, dispose of my uneaten food, and make my way down the stairs to the main floor, where there’s a commotion at the back doors.
“Sometime last night.”
“Just out of nowhere?”
“Yep. Sho was outside when it happened. Told me about it when he came back.”
“I didn’t realize the academy was on top of a volcano.”
“Faculty says it’s not.”
