Turning away from me, Izzie took in the rest of them. “Payne, you’re going to have to let someone else hold her. You’renot immortal. You risk being exposed to my touch by touching her skin. We can’t chance it.”
Looking down at Joy, Payne seemed reluctant to let her go, which was weird considering he usually ran away from her.
“I got her,” Barron said, scooping her up in his meaty arms. “Okay, let’s get this started.”
“Everyone touch me at once.” That was all Isabella had to say, and they latched onto her like leeches. They all started screaming, but none of them seemed able to let her go. I stood as the bystander, in the eerie minute it took for Isabella’s skin to blister and bubble until she was screaming. I was already reaching out for her when she opened her eyes and whispered my name. “Sebastian.”
This would be the only time her touch physically hurt me. The brutal force of everything the Reapers had given her, she had brought into me like an avalanche. For a second, I was suspended in air, only I wasn’t. Not really.
Isabella pulled away from the others and gripped me, then she forced me to my knees and that was it. Because whatever spell she had used, burst out of me like lightning as it struck the vortex straight down the middle.
It didn’t crumble. Instead, the maelstrom disappeared under the force of her magic.
Sucking in a breath, I planted my hands on the ground and coughed. When I glanced up, the sky was clear. We did it. I gave an imaginary fist-bump to both worlds for surviving as I grinned. My parent’s castle was destroyed, as well as most of the woods, but we had just prevented the Apocalypse.
Only it was a small feat. Because the vortex had been open long enough to wreak havoc on the human world. The death toll number was rapidly going up because even though wehad just ended it, they were still suffering from what we had taken so long to destroy.
In a way, we had failed terribly.
And it wasn’tweas much as it wasme. I glanced back at my reason. She was gasping for breath just like I was, and when she met my eyes, she burst into a beautiful smile that made my heart pitter-patter like a lovesick fool.
Iwasa lovesick fool.
Was this the choice the witch, Melinda, had been talking about?
If I could go back, I’d make the same choice to go after Izzie like a maniac until I had her in my arms again.
Maybe that made me a bad good guy, but the humans would never know a Reaper delayed saving the world—including his own life just to get his girl.
“We did it.” Isabella laughed as she said it.
I wouldn’t tell her the human world was in chaos. At least parts of it were. Not yet. Just a few more hours of the beautiful smile taking over her small face.
There would be a lot of work from here on out.
“Isabella,” a dark, penetrating voice came from behind me. I recognized it and stood, materializing a scythe in my hand. “What have you done?”
Thirty-Four
Far below, a monster stood waiting. The outcome of this day, he already knew. Even so, he watched and waited, and when the end began, he smiled and laughed alone. The sound was a hollow echo that bounced off the walls of his home.
Then as quickly as the end came, it was gone again. Harvest screamed in anger, but the monster still stood with a smile on his face. Maybe not today but soon. Very soon.
His prison was coming to an end and with it, everything else that stood too moral for the new world.
Just as the vortex was destroyed, the same vision that haunted his thoughts, brutally ripped through his mind again the same way they had before. Only more vivid. Stronger. Closer.
Blonde strands. Blue eyes. Bare. She came to him like the nuisance she was inside his head. Chocolate. Blood-red flower petals. On his knees. She beckoned the Devil so hard in the vision that he swore he could feel the taste of her on his tongue.
Then the vision twisted into something else, and his eyes turned blood red as he roared. He turned from the window, tossing the table into the air.
Then just as quickly as his anger came, he laughed, then laughed some more until the echoes proved just how insane he always was.
It was funny to him. No one had the power to takehisfuture.
And it was beneath him to fall prey to a woman or lust.
He might as well have been the one to create the word.Lust.
