by Tara Brown
My eyes open fast. “What?”
He nods. “Fitz and Willow were in love for a long time. They kept it secret. He says that’s how Lucifer tricked her into revealing where you were. He used Fitz as bait.”
I feel sick.
“No. No.”
He smiles and kisses my cheeks again. “We weren’t the first ones to handfast, I guess.”
I sob, “Wyatt, I killed her.”
He holds me tight. “No. Lucifer killed her, Rayne. Fitz felt her light go out. That happens to witches who take on some of the original sin. She lied to him and took his evil. Lying to an archangel is a sin. Fallen or not. She protected you because she loved you.”
I look up into his dark-blue eyes and get lost for a minute.
He bends his face and presses his lips against mine. “I love you too.”
I let him kiss me, hold me, and soothe me.
I close my eyes and let him lay us both back down. He holds me, and the dead take me.
When I wake, I am alone in the small dark room. I look at the candles lit and the shabby-chic décor.
“She loved you, child. You saved her as much as she saved you.” Fitz looks rough. He's sitting in a corner with a big bottle of something. I watch him take a drink and shake his tear-stained face. “She loved you so much, she sacrificed everything for you.” His tone has a hint of bitterness in it.
“I'm sorry,” I whisper. I guess he was one of the things sacrificed.
He looks at me, and smiles. “No. Never be sorry. She did what was right. She loved you and wanted you safe, and she gave up everything to make you safe. Never be sorry for that. Be grateful.”
I nod.
“Be grateful such an amazing creature wanted to help you.” He loses it. He bends over and sobs. His sobs are the harsh, broken kind. He hides his face from me and shakes with pain.
I climb off the bed and walk to him. I wrap my arms around him and we cry together. Our pain is the same.
He looks up at me. “You have to live, for her. You have to. Her sacrifice can't be for nothing.”
“I'll try.” I nod.
He kisses the top of my head and hugs me hard. He gets up from the chair and leaves the room.
I walk back to the bed and try to process it all. I grab the cordless phone next to the bed and dial Mona's number.
“Hello?” She sounds confused.
“Hey, it's me.” My voice is lost. It's a hoarse whisper.
“Rayne?” She sounds scared.
“Yup.”
She sighs. “Oh my God, where are you?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know. I'm with Wyatt somewhere. I don’t know where it is. Are you okay?”
“Yeah. They’ve been here like three times looking for you. Wait, what? Wyatt? Oh my God . . . they have you?”
I sigh. “No. Wyatt and his uncle seem to be on my side. Fitz and Willow were handfasted.”
She snaps. “Shut up. No way. Weird.”
I nod and look around the room. “Yeah. I have bad news though.”
She doesn’t bite right away. She braces herself. I can almost hear her doing it. “Okay.”
“Willow . . . uhm . . . well, she died. I think it was yesterday.” My voice cracks.
She is silent.
“She's gone,” I say as if I still don’t believe it.
Her voice becomes small. “I'm so sorry, Rayne. How? Want me to meet you?”
I think about it and shake my head. “No, stay there. I have to figure out what's next. I'm pretty lost right now. I'll come for you in the next couple days, okay?”
She sounds down. “Yup. Be safe. Please, for the love of God, be safe.”
“I will.”
“I love you, Rayne. I'm so sorry about your mo—Willow.”
I shake my head and try to swallow my tears. “Say mom. She was my mom.”
She starts to cry. “Mom. I'm sorry about your mom.”
I sniffle. “Thanks.”
“See ya in a couple days.”
“Yup.” I hang up and lie back.
“Are you okay?” Wyatt asks from the doorway. He almost takes up the entire thing.
I shake my head. “I'm confused and lost.”
He walks to my side and sits on the bed. “I know. Me too.” I glance at the ring finger on his left hand and feel a pain I have never felt before. There on his hand sits a silver ring.
I feel like I've been stabbed in the heart.
“You got married?” I ask.
He looks at the hand and then tucks it under him. “No, this is the promise that I will marry her. We replace the silver with gold when we do the ceremony.”
Relief floods me. He isn’t married yet. He's still mine in some twisted, screwed-up way.
I look into his dark-blue eyes and get lost. They're like the sea. I can float in them and let myself imagine possibilities without the pain of reality attacking me. He mutters, “You know I love you, and I know you love me, but I don’t know how to be what we are and be together.”
I watch his eyes and smile. “Me either. Your mom wants me full of sin and then dead. My family is a freak show. I don’t even understand how he killed Willow.”
He sighs. “The fae are made up of the light of the world. The small piece of light is what makes them fae. The nixie light we used to heal you is from the light of the world. Those water witches are fae. All the witches are fae. They are bound by a rule, one rule. A golden rule: ‘Do what ye will and harm none.’ They are bound by it.”
I frown. “This is like following a breadcrumb trail, but like the crows ate half the stupid breadcrumbs.”
He laughs. “Anyway! The light is easily corrupted. A dark deed, a lie to an angel, murder . . . not in self-defense, theft; any of those sorts of things can kill the light. When the light is gone, the fae die. They were made of the light, in the light. When they're murdered, their light may be taken.”
I shiver. “Like the nixie who died to save me.”
He nods. “They cleansed you. They removed the sin you ate but at a cost. Sacrifice. Everything with God is sacrifice. Willow sacrificed her light to save you.”
“I wish she hadn’t.” Eleven people have died for me.
He kisses me lightly, like a feather would. “I'm grateful to her. I would die without you.”
I kiss him back and try to forget there is a silver ring making promises I don’t want him to keep.
His fingers trace along my tank top and shoulders. He makes chills and shivers everywhere. He kisses my shoulder and up into my neck. I push him away. “Please don’t.”
He pulls back and gives me his grin. “You want this, Rayne. I can feel it.” His fingers knead into my thighs.
“I do, but I'm scared you'll take away my pain.”
He kisses me again and whispers into my lips, “I want to take away your pain.”
I shake my head. “I deserve it. I need to feel it. It makes her real.”
“Let me hold you.”
I curl into him, giving in too easily. He lies back and wraps himself around me, pressing into the back of me.
“Will you marry her?” I ask.
He kisses my ear. “You feel like adding to your pain, do you?”
“I want you to tell me no.”
He challenges me with his stare. “Tell me you don’t love Constantine Basarab, and I will.”
I roll over and look at him. “Not the same way I love you. The girl I was before, Ellie, she loves him. Her memories and mine are merging. The things I remember are all hers. I remember bad things about him too. Not just the way she loved him. He betrayed her—me. He gave her to your mother. He stabbed her with a sword and made her weak. I remember it.”
He grabs at me. “I would never betray you like that. You must know that.”
I shake my head. “You already did. You got engaged to that girl, and you let them take me to the tower. Fitz betrayed me then too.”
He shakes his head. “No, my mother lied. She said the first s
in gatherer wouldn’t be full for months. She lied to Fitz and me. And I got engaged because I must. My entire family has arranged marriages. Always has.”
I watch his eyes. “Why didn’t Fitz ever get married?”
He smiles his huge cocky grin. “Lied and said he was gay.”
I laugh. I don’t mean to, but it's funny. Lying about being gay to avoid an arranged marriage is genius.
“Does she want to marry you?”
His cocky grin gets bigger. “What girl wouldn’t want to marry me, Rayne? Of course she does. She loves me. She thinks she's won the man lottery.”
I frown. “Gross. Lucky you're humble, because that could really inflate your ego. Man lottery. That’s disgusting.”
He laughs.
I don’t. “Thanks for that. I needed something to cool me off. That worked. I'm going back to sleep again. I'm exhausted.”
He grabs my arms. “Oh, come on. It was a joke. No, she doesn’t want to marry me, okay? Happy? No. She is as annoyed and devastated as I am. She's playing pretend very convincingly though. Whereas, I am the shame of my family.”
I laugh again. “I could have guessed that easily. Your sister seems like she is your mother's pet though.”
He nods. “She is. She is the one who called our mother when Constantine sent the vampires to collect you the first day you came home with me. She is exactly like our mother.”
I frown. “You knew those vampires were coming for me, even then? You knew about Constantine then?”
He looks like he might lie or at least attempt it, but he doesn’t. He nods and shrugs. “He's always been after you. For the last three lives you’ve had, he has been with you. Always as a husband. When you said you were with him again, I panicked. I thought you'd gone bad again.”
I frown. “How do you know about this?”
He speaks plainly, “Lore.”
“What?”
His smile stays on his face but I can see it's forced. “Lore. We have legends and stories about you dating back to the beginning.”
I push him away. “You knew this was my last life?”
He nods. “I only found out after you ran away from me. I'd studied you my whole life, but I never knew who you were. We always assumed Lucifer had you kept somewhere. When you got away from me, Fitz fessed up about knowing about you all along. He had helped Willow several times at keeping you safe.”
I shake my head. “I don’t remember him. Not at all.”
He chuckles. “Well, besides her stabbing me in the neck, I'd never met her either. They kept each other secret. Very secret.”
“What was life like before I came along?” I ask.
He laughs. “Plain. I trained and hung out, and had regular girlfriends, and planned my life after college. Obviously, it's always been the family business for me, but I never imagined it would be this annoying and stressful. You have a gift. Let me tell you. Stressing me out is not easy, and yet you do it with ease.”
I blush and snuggle into his embrace. “Why didn’t you ever just tell me the things you knew about me?”
“My whole life has been training for the moment you would be reborn and killing the things that go bump in the night. You and I are enemies, Rayne. Natural enemies.”
I close my eyes again and sleep. All I ever do is sleep.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“RUN, RAYNE! RUN BACK TO HIM! WAKE UP!”
I open my eyes and look around the room. I heard Willow. I swear I did.
“RUN!”
The voice isn’t Willow's, but I can hear it outside of my head. The voice is screaming at me like the nixie did. I climb from the bed and open the door to the hall.
I open it a crack and look around the empty hallway. I close the door and go back to the bed. I pull on all my layers of clothes Fitz cleaned for me. I pull on my boots and try not to notice the slight dampness from the sea.
“RUN!”
I sigh and look up. “I'm frikkin’ tired of running, okay?” I whisper to whoever is screaming at me.
I open the door and slip out into the hallway again. The dead are sparkling around me, whispering. I follow their whispers down a long hallway. I open the door they sit in front of and peek inside. No one is there. The room looks like an old-fashioned weapons room.
“LOOK!”
I look around the room. I'm confused and scared.
On the wall in the far-right corner is something that breaks my heart and lifts me up instantly. I run to the wall and pull the sword off. It's a katana. It's my katana. The silver sword gleams, just as it did the day they took it out of me. I shiver, remembering the feeling of the sword being pulled from my side. Memories flood my mind.
Wyatt's mother, Gretel, was the one who pulled it from my side. The sheath is on a shelf below it. I grab it and sheath the sword. I pull the matching dagger from the wall and hold it. There is a shelf of belts and harnesses. I grab a belt and put it on. My body is twitching and shivering. Excitement and fear are rolling around inside of me like storm clouds.
I slide the dagger into the belt hilt and carry my sword. Weapons line the walls. Daggers, swords, maces, axes, nunchucks, arrows, bows, cleavers, knives, polearms, and spears. Guns with wooden bullets and silver bullets fill an entire shelf.
The room freaks me out. There is no doubt a weapon for every kind of creature. A silver knife for the throat of the nixie, a wooden bullet for the vampires, and a silver spear for a shifter. Leather armor and metal armor fill the farside of the wall. Special armor is encased in glass. I recognize it somehow.
I want out.
I turn and walk to the door quietly.
I peer out. Nothing moves in the hall.
The dead whisper and sparkle in the air around me. They want me to follow them a different way.
They trickle over to where a huge brick fireplace and chimney are.
“PRESS THE STAR TO SEE THE STARS!”
I sigh and close the door. “You guys are annoying.”
I walk to the huge fireplace. I see a small sign that reads: Caress a star to see the stars and find eternal love.
I look around for the star but see nothing.
I hear a noise in the hall. The dead cluster their sparkles around a picture across the room.
It's tiny and black and white. I squint to see the picture. It's a man and a woman sitting on a hillside with the moon in front of them. You can only see the backs of the man and the woman. I look closer. It's Fitz and Willow. I'd recognize the daisy chain on her head anywhere.
There is a single star in the sky. It's close to the moon. I look back at the door. It opens as my finger touches the star.
Suddenly I'm freezing. The wind whips around me.
I'm standing on a hillside. I look around. It's the hillside from the picture.
“Who are you?”
I turn to see a woman holding a basket. She's dressed funny. Like in my memory. She wears full, gathered skirts with an apron. In the dim light of the night I can barely make out her face, until my eyes do their thing. Then I can't help but notice she looks familiar.
“Who are you?” she asks again. I take a step forward.
“Rayne. Rayne Phillips. Who are you?” I say.
She takes a step toward me. “Elise. I'm Elise. No one is supposed to come through that picture but Fitz and Willow.”
I look down. “Willow is dead.”
She drops to her knees. “No.” The basket tips, spilling dark berries to the ground. I bend and pick them up.
“She is.”
“How?”
I grip her basket and try not to cry. “Lucifer. He took her light. Who are you?”
She smiles at me. “The guardian. I was a sister to Willow.”
I frown at her outfit. “Why are you dressed like that?”
She laughs. “I am frozen. This place was made for Willow and Fitz. It's where they could come and be with each other without the world to interfere.”
I shake my head. “I don’t understand
.”
She smiles. “I sacrificed myself for her. She saved my life, so I came here for her. One of us must be here for the magic to remain. I hold the picture open, like a portal.”
“Can anyone come through?”
She shakes her head. “No. You have to have true love for Willow or Fitz to be able to do it. Only love for them will permit a person's entrance. The love must be the purest kind of true love.”
I pass her the basket. “This is like a fairytale.”
She snorts. “There is no such thing as a fairytale. They are old tales, told over generations. Sometimes they get twisted, but they're always just stories.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Either way, I need to get out of here. But not in the weapons room at Fitz's. I need out another way.”
She laughs. “You need Willow's portal.”
“Where does it come out?”
She shrugs. “My house.”
I stop and think. “Wait, so you leave when they come here, and then the rest of the time, you're here?”
She nods. “Yup.”
“If she's dead, you won't be needing to stay then?”
She shrugs. “I'll have to ask her and see what she wants me to do. She and Fitz may want to stay here forever.”
“She's dead, Elise.”
She shakes her head. “Her light is gone. That doesn’t make her dead. Witches don’t die, per se. They shift. She's not in human form, but she is still here, somehow. Make no mistake about it. She is here. This place can't exist if she doesn’t also exist.”
I cover my eyes and shake my head. “I can't do any more riddles right now. Please, just tell me how to get out of here.”
“The star, of course. The way you got in. The star on the left is his, and the star on the right is hers.”
I look up at the two stars in the sky, one on either side of the moon.
“Just reach up and press your finger on the right star.”
I look at her and nod. “I'll come back to free you.”
She shakes her head. “No. I need to stay here. I need to keep the secrets here safe.”
I am confused, but I look back and press the right star. Instantly, I am in a small room. It's a tiny living room, cozy like my house. I walk to the front door, expecting to see a world like no other with magical pixies fluttering about. Instead, when I step out, I see a busy street with cars and trucks zooming past. I am standing on a sidewalk in a city. It's dark and noisy. I turn back to the door but it's locked. I realize I'm holding a sword and have a dagger on my belt. I look like a freak. I turn and walk. I have no phone or keys or car. I wish I were back with Elise.