Remo grunted, which made Cruz’s thick black brows lift a little. I was tempted to elbow my moody companion so he’d act more civil with the man his grandfather had sent away for life. Why was he behaving like this, anyway? Did he think we were ganging up on him?
It wasn’thisfault Cruz was in here.Hehadn’t created this place.
“And you, Remo? How did you happen upon this place?”
“Amara’s my fiancée.” His voice was as taut as the rest of his body. “Couldn’t exactly let her go through a ghost portal on her own.”
My cheeks warmed at the way he flung this label over me. “It’s an arranged engagement.”
Remo sent me a chilling glower.
“What? It is . . .” I said.
“Why did you call it a ghost portal, Remo?”
“Because it’s a portal that doesn’t exist. A lot like you, Vega,” he added under his breath.
Cruz gazed at him a long minute. Instead of commenting on Remo’s tangible antipathy, he asked, “Your grandfather never told you about it?”
“Never.”
Silence stretched between the three of us.
I wanted to reach out to Remo, tell him he didn’t need to be on the defensive, but Cruz said, “Kingston mentioned you and Gregor were close.”
A wall fell around Remo. “Were.” His voice was ice.
Sensing how hard this was for him, I touched his arm. He moved it away from me.
Not again. . . We’d made up mere minutes ago and now we were back to being . . . what were we back to being? Embittered children with zero communication skills? “Remo—”
He backed away. “I’m going to the waterfall.”
And then he turned and stalked through the brush, leaving me behind with the ghost from my parents’ past.
33
Forgiveness
Even though the jungle had swallowed Remo, the yellow underbrush still shivered from his brisk retreat.
“He was very close to his grandfather, which has made our . . .tripespecially hard on him.” I sighed. “Before seeing this place, living inthis place, he still held Gregor on an exceedingly high pedestal.”
I turned back toward Cruz, found him examining me.
“I can’t believe Catori and Ace had a daughter, and I’m speaking with her.”
“And I can’t believe you’ve been in here for two Neverrian decades.”
An Earthly century. . .
He scraped back his dark curls. “Does anyone know you’re here, Amara?”
“Just Joshua Locklear. I’m hoping he’ll have told Iba and Nima by now.” Then again, if he had, wouldn’t they have made Gregor fish us out?
“Iba and Nima?”
“It means Mom and—”
