“What is?”
“Having both memories. Remembering the Skylenna that I had to watch go through pregnancy all alone, cry under her covers in a dark room every day. And then there’s the mother of my children I got to marry and fall in love with all over again.”
“It is for me too.” I still feel high and unsettled that he’s back. That the love of my life is awake. “I wanted to hear your voice so bad.”
“Mom!” our son shouts in the forest. His footsteps loud and thundering. “MOM!”
I scramble to my feet, slipping my panties back on, and straightening my hair.
Dessin watches me squirm and laughs. “At least this isourversion of traumatizing our children, hmm?”
I snicker. “Yeah. Very different than our trauma.”
Dessin turns abruptly, facing our son who is just staring at him in shock.
“I—I remember when you weren’t here too,” Krimson stutters, looking like his father twenty years ago. He rakes a hand through the top of his brown hair. “I feel crazy.”
Dessin doesn’t say anything. He closes the gap between them and hugs his son.
I hold my hands over my chest and sob. Sapphire should be here for this…
“This has to wait—it’s Sapphire. I don’t know what—I just heard her! She’s screaming! She won’t stop screaming!”
Dessin grabs his son’s shoulders and shakes him. “Tell me what you know about your gift, kid. Don’t leave out a single detail. We are not leaving this spot until you take us to your sister.”
72. Make No Peace with Evil
Sapphire
Twenty-One Years in The Past
Vexamen
It’s that dream again.
I’m hanging off the edge of the cliff, screaming for Krimson, and hearing him call my name over the bangs of thunder and pounding rain launching toward the sopping mud.
“I NEED YOU NOW!” I bellow over the whipping winds of a scourge.
My fingers slip as the mud grows frothy with gray stormwater. The nacreous clouds descend into a cloak of churning charcoal. A tempest with teeth snarls down at my efforts to hold on before I plummet to an unknown black hole of nothingness.
I know this is a nightmare. Iknowit is.
But there’s a sickness that has taken root in me. A virus. A bacterial infection. Wheezing lungs and a fever with the vengeful heart of a leviathan in combat.
“KRIMSON! PLEASE! IF YOU ARE GOING TO COME FOR ME, IT NEEDS TO BE NOW!” I wail as lightning splits the heavens open.
My fingernails are the last to slice into the wet clay.
Can’t hold on.
The nightmare isn’t strong enough to hold back Vrath’s illnesses. It lets the ache bleed into my mind and boil over into my dreams.
My last hope slips on the sludge, and I let go.
“Krim—”
Air meets my palms.
