A sudden energy moved through the air between us, like that moment, the one just before a storm when you feel the anticipation of something dangerous stirring. The sensation felt alive and thick in the air around us and my hands clenched at my knees.
“Sins of our fathers,” he whispered.
The mention of his father made my chest tighten. “Your father,” I said, leaning closer to him. “Why does he really want me here? Is it to take Mary’s place?” I cringed at the thought of calling her my mother. I didn’t have the right to call her that, and she had no right being called a mother. I couldn’t even wrap my head around the thought of it, of once again in my life not being important enough. Insignificant should be my middle name.
“He wants you to make him live again.”
Okay, so I was only significant to the wrong people. “And why was I healed? Did he do that? Who is Erebus?”
“I found something, in a book. Theogony.” His voice became nothing more than a whisper.
“Hesiod’s Theogony. I saw that book on your desk once.” I didn’t know if it was the fact that I admitted to snooping around in his room when I first got here, but the way he stared at me, I felt it slip over my skin. He wasn’t even touching me yet I felt him everywhere. Like silk brushing up against me. My arms, my neck, my face, pressing against my chest—I felt him on every inch of me. “Tell me,” I said, clearing the knot in my throat. “Tell me what you found.”
He leaned forward, shifting to the edge of the chair, closing the distance between us, and I felt instantly dizzy. “According to Theogony, in the beginning of creation, only chaos and void existed throughout the universe.”
“Chaos,” I whispered, remembering a story I once heard Addy tell. I remembered her explaining to me that chaos didn’t mean turmoil or unruliness in this story. No, chaos simply meant a great dark void. Nothingness.
“Chaos created Gaia, what we know as earth, and then Eros, which was love. Gaia came into existence in order to become the home of the gods.”
“And who was Erebus?”
“Chaos also created Erebus, who was the darkness of the underworld.”
We sat in silence for a few moments, watching each other. “So this darkness of the underworld person or thing, it visited me?”
“I don’t think it’s a person, Raine. I think…I think it’s Ravenswood.”
I slumped back against the wall, confused. “Ravenswood?”
“The darkness in the underworld.”
That didn’t make it any clearer.
“What about Eros? Instead of darkness and all things creepy, can I just find Eros? Can’t I have the love part of the story?” My voice was a whispered plea, humiliating and weak. A choked half-laugh, half-sob bubbled up from my throat, and I tried desperately to stop the burn of tears that threatened the corners of my eyes.
“Raine, to me you’ve always been one of those beautiful things I could only love from a distance, like the stars in the night sky or a piece of art, untouchable and pure.” He slowly lifted his hand and softly swept a loose strand of hair from off my cheek, making heat rise to the surface. “And now you’re here in front of me, close enough for me to touch. You never even realized you already had that love part of the story. You just never saw me.”
“God, the way you look at me. I never had anyone look at me like that. If I do leave here, that look…I know that look would haunt me forever.”
The weight of a stare has been so greatly abused in the tons of romance novels I’ve read, I laughed it off when two characters would feel that pull of electricity between them. Yet, right there, in that moment, as he looked into my eyes, he—we—were everything. The moment meant everything, more than all the other moments in my life before it.
It went against logic and reason, against happiness and sanity, but there it was between us, like a tangible thing, the small hopeful beginning of something—of something all the moments in my life were meant to lead up to.
Then those damn bells started to chime.
But the feeling still remained. Between us. In our stare.
The feeling of coming home. Of no longer being alone.
Something beyond the both of us—older than all of humanity—something that made the deserts seem young. It was an indescribable thing that blazed in the space between our bodies—not because of lust or necessity or other worldly things, but because it seemed the world and everything inside it willed us, bound us together.
Slowly his form started to fade.
“Don’t go, please.”I didn’t want him to leave.
Mathias stared at me with so much intensity I had to look away. “I didn’t want this for you.” The air felt heavier somehow, suffocating.
“Well, now I’m here. Please don’t go—don’t fade away yet. What are we going to do?”
