“Okay, right.” Arthur rubbed his head. “Usually when you want to reverse a spell you have to actually…reversethe spell. So we just backtrack through the same steps we took to create the spell. You need a lock of each of our hair.” He whipped his hand up, and his blade chopped a long lock of gold hair. He dropped it into my hand. “You tie those around your wrist, then we all go to sleep, I guess, and you drag us back.”
“Do we go to sleep, or wake up?” I asked, as Flynn carefully cut off two tiny locks of the babies hair and placed them in my hand. “Aren’t we all asleep now?”
“I don’t feel asleep,” Flynn said. “I can’t wake up if I’m not asleep. And I don’t exactly feel like a taking a nap right now.”
“Shut up for a minute. I have to think.”
The guys were used to thinking about the world in terms of magic and spells. I wasn’t. I needed to see things in my own way to make sense of them.
I theorized that what I was doing when astral-projecting was moving my consciousness through the multiverse into one of many possible realities, one of the “Many Worlds” postulated,in which theoretically a counterpart of my own consciousness resided. There was a radical idea in theoretical physics that dreams were windows into events occurring in an alternate world seen through the eyes of our counterpart consciousness. But since my conscience washere, in the dream, then which world was I really existing in, and in which world was my counterpart consciousness? Was I asleep, or awake?
My brain hurt. This was where Corbin would really come in handy. He had a way of being able to translate my theories into magical practice. I rubbed my temple, trying to play through the scenario in my head.
“We have to wake up,” I said, firmly, although I wasn’t really certain at all. “Or, rather,Ihave to wake up and pull the rest of you back with me. Quick, everyone, give me a lock of your hair.”
Flynn lopped off a loop of his red curls, then bent down and chopped off a lock of Corbin’s dark hair. Meanwhile, Rowan tied one of his dreadlocks around my wrist. He plaited the other three together to create one loop.
I turned to Blake. “Wake me up.”
He grinned. “I knew you were going to ask that, Princess.”
“You got us this far. And I know you can do this, too. You got inside my head once before. Do it again. Wake me up.”
He shook his head. “If I put one foot wrong, this dream and all of you inside it will collapse, and I won’t be able to get you back. Besides, I don’t want to knock about inside your head. It’s scary in there.”
“Just do it,Prince,” I threw his title out. “Get us out of here, and as soon as we’re back, we’ll find a way to free you from the king. We owe you one for everything you’ve done.”
Blake smiled. “Careful. You don’t want to be in the habit of owing favors to the fae. We tend to collect at really inconvenient times.”
“You’re not fae.”
“Nowthatis a matter of interpretation.” Blake’s eyes pierced mine.
Something shifted inside my head. At first it was an itch at the back of my skull. Then the itch spread, becoming a dull, throbbing ache. Random thoughts and memories flared up – Louise Crawford coming out of the kitchen with an enormous rainbow birthday cake, eight candles burning on top, Kelly and I singing in the worship choir, me having a screaming argument with our science teacher after she insisted creationism was a valid scientific theory.
“Wha—” I started to say, but the memories stole my voice. They flooded me, pouring over me like water, swirling through my joints, pressing between my ribs, cocooning me in parts of my life I desperately wished to forget.
My parents texting me to meet them at the Ferris wheel. Me, screaming at that stupid fae, Kalen, when I should have been with them, the wheel falling, burning, buckling. The people screaming. My parents bodies burning.All because of me.
The air crackled with heat. The smoke seared my throat. Every part of my body shook with the horror of it, as though it were happening again. Itwas…
A nightmare.Blake had dug deep into my brain and fed me my worst nightmare in Technicolor.
Behind every tortured face, between the mangled struts of the wheel, through the thick smoke of the fire, Blake’s eyes blared – fierce and determined, heedless to the pain they brought with them.
A dark void opened up in the ground beside me, swelling in size until was a great gaping hole in the earth. Trees and roots disappeared into its depths, sucked away into oblivion. The Ferris wheel toppled in after it, and the ghost train, and my parents’ burned, charred bodies.
Clutching Connor against my chest, I met Blake’s eyes. The connection between our minds sizzled – and a sharp pain tore through my skull. I screamed as Blake’s fingers dug deep into my consciousness, pulling out all the grief and guilt I carried with me, and threw it at me in a cannonball of sorrow and torment.
My body shuddered as the pain hit me, and whether it was physical or mental pain I no longer knew. They were the same. I burned up in the horror of it, my skin on fire, my bones boiling.
“What are you doing to her?” Arthur grabbed Blake’s arm.
“Don’t—” I gasped, but Blake’s grip on my mind tightened, and hepushed.
The push came from inside my body, like a parasite forcing its way out through my ears. My feet teetered on the edge, struggling to keep their grip. Flynn reached for me, his mouth moving as he yelled something, but the void swallowed all sound. Bright light filled my eyes, rolling toward me like a train coming into station.
I fell.
