Creator of the world Ametrine? My hallucinated stone necklace dweller? Impossible. I’d rather be crazy than it be real. I look around, trying to find center. Drums. Stage. Broken glass. Car through the storefront. None of it helps.
Eli pauses at my panic, then continues, watching me closely. “But Kaleida would tell you that it doesn’t matter because love lives on in death.”
The idea of love being a part of all the death I experience is jolting. But like death, love is messy and painful. Fragile yet brutal. Short-lived or long-lasting. Death and love go hand in hand.
I look into his eyes, expecting to slip into their darkness and falluntil I hit bottom. But they’re bright, Kelter’s colors sparkling through them again. I can’t look away, not from the man who understands death like me, who claimed me and saved me from myself.
I can’t force out more than a whisper. “And what do you say?”
The green bursts in his eyes fall victim to shadows. “Life lives on in death, and love is deadly.” His jaw muscles tighten, and his dark aura wraps me in its cold embrace as he speaks. “At least for me.”
Chapter 18
EVER
We return from the music store—by foot this time. Lock after lock slides open on the other side of the door to my room. Kaleida pulls the door open, a massive smile on her face, bright beneath her brown skin and freckles. “A lock stone would be so much easier.”
I twist each deadbolt back into place and kick off my boots. Then socks—pure habit. Dawn spills through the broken window, a cool light revealing the awkward mash-up of bodies lounging on my bed. Milo is sprawled on his back, hair wet as if he’d just bathed and eyes fixed on the ceiling. He inhales a roll of teva. Sitting beside his legs, Sypher holds a box of cereal in his lap, shoveling fistfuls into his mouth, and at his side—
“Who the fuck is that?” Eli asks.
I nearly lose my balance. “Maverick J., what are you doing here?” I haven’t seen him for years, not since the last time he walked out of here reeking of boring sex and take-out food and never came back.
“Oh, Sypher found him on the way back here. We took a wrong turn. He was circling these orange cone things alone in the dark,” Kaleida explains.
“Hey Ever, it’s been a while,” Maverick J. says, swishing silky black hair out of his fair-skinned face. He’s matured since I last saw him. Rugged and firmer, less of a stomach, a more pronounced jaw. But he’s still wearing that damn orange construction vest. At least he has a shirt underneath. This can’t be.
Eli’s knife is already against his throat before I’ve had a chance to accept reality.
Sypher throws himself across Maverick J.’s lap in a less than graceful move and shoves Eli. “Don’t hurt Mav. He’s not dangerous.”
He’s really not.
Eli conceals the shock on his face within a second and pulls away slowly. “He’s Wendell’s replacement?”
Milo keeps toking on the teva roll despite the scuffle, a smile in his glassy eyes.
“Mav?” I ask, still recovering from seeing his face and not quite prepared for Sypher’s reaction. He calls him Mav? They just met.
“He almost got hit by one of those speeding metal carriages,” Milo says, handing the roll to Eli and arranging his hands beneath his head.
“A car,” I offer.
“Yeah. He could barely function from the elixir. It seems to be getting worse in the hours since we got here.” Milo gently kicks Sypher’s belly. “This guy didn’t want to leave him out there, so we brought him back here and gave him the antidote.”
These damn men. “So you brought him back here like a lost dog?”
“What’s a dog?” Milo asks.
I can’t even process the reality behind his question. How could two realms become so different in only two hundred years?
Eli turns around to me. Invisible fingers walk down my neck and back. I swallow the taste of blood as if trained to accept it. “Did you fuck this guy?” he asks.
“It was years ago,” Maverick J. says, throwing his hands up in a claim of innocence. “I’m sure I’m not the only one.”
How are they possibly discussing my past fucks right now?
Eli knocks Maverick J. back, banging his head into the wall, then plants his knee in his lap.
