“Why do you look like a flare?” she asked him.
“I am an Envoy, made of energy.” He lifted his hand to her cheek, where it tingled against her skin.
Oh, the Aether was frustrating! It was hard to remember anything that happened there.
But more was coming back to her. She remembered now. His name was Asher, and he and several others had fallen out of the Aether long ago, and now they could only visit the Aether, as a human does in a dream, but the Earth always pulled them back.
And they hated it.
It was driving them insane. It was driving them to…
“What happened to Holly?” Hailey asked in a whisper so faint she wasn’t sure he’d heard. But when she looked up, she found a heart-wrenching longing in his eyes.
He placed his hands over her shoulders and moved them down the length of her arms then beckoned her to stand with him under a great sycamore on a hill overlooking a clear river.
“Cobon killed her,” he said, his voice gentle but strained, “just as he killed your mother.”
“Cobon… Is he an Envoy too?”
Asher nodded.
“But why?” she asked, her voice rising. “Why is an Envoy killing the people I love? What did I do wrong?”
Asher moved his hand to Hailey’s shoulder, which instantly calmed her, and he took his time in forming his answer.
“You did nothing to deserve this.” He stroked her cheek, and Hailey pressed her head through the warmth he emitted. “Cobon believed that Holly could tear open the Aether so that we could go home,” he told her.
“Why would he think that?”
“Holly came from a line of women who have for centuries collected your family’s energy.”
Hailey shook her head, confused.
Asher studied the violet skies for a moment. “When someone dies, their energy is released from their body along with their soul. An Envoy’s duty is to ferry that energy across the Aether and then back to Earth and into another human at the very moment of their birth. That energy fuses the soul and body together. It’s life energy, and it’s powerful.”
With a wave of his hand, he drew a bright streak in front of them.
“It’s beautiful.” Hailey reached out to it, smiling. “What happens to someone’s soul after they die?”
“I don’t know,” he said faintly, and the band of light he’d painted crystalized, hung for a moment in the air, and fell to the ground. “Cobon fashioned a stone to hold your family’s life energy on Earth,” he continued. “As the generations passed, the energy in the stone grew, until he believed there was enough stored inside to split open the Aether.”
This story sounded familiar.
“The legend of the black rock. It’s a fairy tale.” Hailey’s mother had told her this story when she’d given her the necklace.
“It’s no fairy tale, Hailey. It’s Cobon’s experiment. We all have them…our own theories, our own research, our own…obsessions.” Asher paused here to gaze at Hailey, and she met his purple eyes, hungry for more information. “We all just want to go home…” he told her wistfully.
She held his gaze, reliving her own anguish at having been pulled from her childhood home.
“But it failed.” Asher’s voice boomed, and Hailey jumped.
He seemed suddenly angry—as if he cared more about a stupid experiment than he did about her sister.
“Why didn’t you stop him?” Hailey demanded.
Asher, looking wounded, moved toward her, but she backed away. “Don’t run from me, Hailey,” he warned, and Hailey planted her feet to the ground, her heart thumping.
“Asher,” she said more gently, “why didn’t you stop him?”
