If I needed any more confirmation of what reality was, I’d just gotten it.
Elsa crooned about fears that couldn’t touch her. God, if I never heard that song again, it would be too soon. I clenched my fists.
I remembered the warm gold of the pub lights, the clink of glass, the buzz of voices rising when I bought the room a round. I’d stood on the table, drunk on laughter and freedom. That was the Quinn I wanted back.
Instead of waiting for Alex to join me on the bed, I stood as if the mattress were my table at the bar. Ezra told me I was in control. This room came from my memories. Alex even traded me a ‘penny for my thoughts’ when pennies didn’t exist in his time. He’d built all of this for me. We had to be in my mind still. I didn’t have a good track record with controlling my brain, but I was different now.
My ‘friend’ walked into the room. Gone was the man attempting to look like Xan. Alex was the palest man I’d ever seen, skin so white it looked powdered. His heavy tunic hung loose on a frame swallowed by a beard and a fall of cerulean-blue dreadlocks threaded with gray.
It was hard to read his facial expression under the hair covering his face.
“You’re so desperate for company you’d lock me inside your head and wear my fear like a blanket?” I asked.
“It wasn’t going to stay a nightmare.” Alex hugged himself, as if needing comfort from his own decisions. “You live with them long enough, they stop being monsters. They just become… yours.”
I swallowed hard. When I woke up, still on my surgeon's table, I believed everything had been a dream. It hadn’t even occurred to me that I could still be in the future. The nightmare of my old life was what Alex said—comforting in its familiarity.
But that’s not what I wanted.
“You don’t have to live in your nightmare either.” I pretended to hold out a drink, knowing Alex followed my thoughts.
Alex’s eyes twinkled. I couldn’t see his mouth under his beard, but I’d bet he smiled.
The ground shook. The smell of roses became so thick it made me cough. His gaze filled with regret. The scent hit harder, thick as syrup. My vision wavered, Alex’s older and younger faces flickering in and out like mismatched slides. What had to be a younger version of him, still strikingly similar to Xan, stepped forward and took my imaginary glass, though his older self didn’t move. The young man flashed me a grin, somehow flirty and innocent at the same time.
The world fractured.
A dizzying concoction of emotions that didn’t belong to me swirled. Anger, hate, love, loss, and loneliness overwhelmed me.
Like safety glass shattering, the fracture split. For a brief moment, I saw Alex’s broken face between the thousands of tiny lines. Then I fell.
A roar split the air, followed by my screams.
You only die in dreams if you hit the ground.
I jerked awake, staring at an unfamiliar ceiling made of weathered wood and magically smoothed metal. Magic didn’t flow around me; it thrashed like a churning river.
“Quinn.” Ezra wrapped me in his grip.
For a heartbeat, I just stared, afraid he’d vanish like everything else. Then I grabbed him and kissed him like it was the last thing I’d ever do. Emotions slammed into me—scalding heat, choking grief, a whip-crack of fury—until I thought my skin would split and pour them out.
Another roar split the air, and the ground trembled.
I broke our kiss. “I heard you. You never left me.”
Ezra gripped the back of my head and pulled me into his chest. “I’m yours. I’ll never leave you again.”
I gripped his waist and pressed myself into him as if I could merge us into one. Love I didn’t know I could feel squeezed my heart so hard it hurt.
The thick, oily, rose-scented air finally cut through my emotions, pulling me back into my complicated “reality.” A not-so-sane giggle slipped into the power-laden air.
My hand flew to my stomach without my asking, and I pressed my belly button ring into my skin. The smell of scorched skin jolted me into another memory, Cayden’s runes liquefying and running down his arms. I’d helped my best friend destroy his Prophet. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I’d taken everything I could reach and shoved, which included Ezra and Alex’s cerulean-blue magic.
When I thought Alex’s name, his attention brushed mine—no voice, no image, just the unmistakable awareness of being seen. My shoulders locked before I could stop them. A heartbeat later, the pressure eased, like he’d deliberately looked away.
Questions crowded in, sharp and insistent, but only one mattered.
A cauldron bubbled with Ezra’s plum purple in the far corner. With a thought, I replaced it with my magic. It responded instantly. Clean. Effortless. My power was whole again; the collar no longer blocked it.
