Rivulet (16 page)

The bookcase to my darkroom was ajar, and I saw Mason there, waving me in. In a stunned fog, I went to him.

One thing I now knew for sure: death was like a dream, an all-too-real dream.

Mason slammed the bookcase closed behind me, as if he wanted Gavin and Cadence to know we walked by them. I knew him well enough to know he was furious, but I couldn’t understand why.

“We gotta talk,” he said to me when I reached the bottom stair.

“I’ll get our revenge on Rasure,” I said quietly. I was relieved. I didn’t want to tell him that we were dead…

“We must not be talking about the same thing,” he muttered as his chocolate eyes met mine.

“Whatever you want to tell me, I promise you, my news is more important.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Trust me, Mason,” I said, reaching for him, but he dodged my touch.

“She came on to me, Indie.”

“What? Who, Sophia? That doesn’t matter right now. Nothing matters because—”

“Cadence. She came on to me, and it wasn’t the first time. I told her if she didn’t tell Gavin that I would. Obviously, she didn’t,” he said, pointing at the stairway.

“She was trying to cheat on Gavin—with you?” I asked, completely mystified. That didn’t sound like the Cadence I knew.

“You want me to really piss you off? She came on to Wilder last fall, while you were still hooked up. I don’t know what her deal is, but I’m sick of her messing with my boy’s head, playing all innocent, trying to get him to talk about his sister. He was over that. The second you helped him, he was over that, and what does she do? Dig around in his head and bring it up again, get him ticked off and sad when all the while she’s coming on to his best friends. Psychologist-wanna-be my ass. She’s a born actress, and right now Gavin is playing the part of the fool.”

I didn’t know what to say to him. I could tell he had been holding this in for a while and that he couldn’t stand it any longer.

He cursed under his breath. “I didn’t mean to throw that at you. But right now, as far as I’m concerned Cadence is a bigger threat than Rasure.”

He sat down on my couch and leaned forward, raking his fingers through his hair.

I took a breath and closed my eyes. If I were alive, I would defend Cadence, tell him she was empty, that she’d fought rejection and abandonment her entire life and this was her way of making sure she was wanted. Granted, it was a shallow way, and she needed to understand that random physical acts would not fill that emptiness inside her soul…but I was dead. So was she, and none of this mattered anymore.

I sat down next him and let my hand rest on his back. He shivered once as my emotions produced the cold I was known for. “Have you ever heard that question if this was your last day, what would matter? What would you do?”

“I
knew
you would defend her. You don’t understand. When she is not around you, she is a completely different person, not the Cadence you know. I think she envies you, that she has always been jealous. I’m not even sure it’s the money she’s jaded about.”

He really was mad and letting his emotions cloud his judgment. Cadence knew she would never have to worry about money. She knew that I would take care of her. I mean, yeah, she was upset that the moment she became a part of a family it vanished, but who wouldn’t be? “I’m not defending her. I’m telling you it doesn’t matter because…because our life is over.”

Sharply, he looked at me. “Indie, what the hell is going on with you?”

“With us, you mean. Mason, we’re dead. Living in a cycle of our last day until our minds figure out we’re gone.”

“Is Rasure messing with you? Did she drug you or something?”

“We were in a car crash. We ran off the road, then sank in the lake. My emotions turned it to ice. I had to fight to get you out, we all fought to save each other.”

As I spoke, his face turned white as a ghost. He knew exactly what I was talking about. I’d just turned a light on in his head.

“A car ran us off the road, you and Wilder, then us …”

“Right,” I said in a shaky voice.

He stood up immediately and began to pace back and forth, cracking his knuckles, the act he always goes through before he gets on stage or does something that takes a dose of adrenaline to get through.

“Why are we still here?” he asked after a beat or two.

“I don’t know. But I’m not walking into some peaceful light. I think our bodies are on life support or something. Rasure will pull the plug on me. I’m not sure how long your family will hold out.”

“Not long, not if they listen to me,” he said through a locked jaw. When his brother nearly drowned, hit his head on the rocks in the river years ago, his parents kept him alive for months. Mason finally convinced them to let him go and made them swear they would never do that to him.

He sat down next to me, looking exhausted all at once. “I’m not going peacefully either.” He reached his arm around me, and I let myself lean into him, knowing it could be the very last time.

“Listen, Rasure is some kind of evil. I’m going to end her. I’m mad enough to end her—to become some kind of vengeful spirit, but I don’t think you are. I think you need to let go.” Grief slammed into my soul. I’d never seen my life without Mason. He truly was one of my best friends, someone I knew I could trust.

He leaned back on the couch, having a hard time holding his eyes open. Tears dared to spill from my eyes.

“I’m mad enough,” he promised. “She killed us…I need to get that damn key,” he muttered.

“You remember the key?” I asked, glancing to the room. The film I thought I’d developed was nowhere in sight. The camera was still sitting where it always was. There was too much dust on it for me to think that it had been moved.

“Yeah, I was the one that found it. It fell out of those clocks you had us take to charity. We kept it, showed you at the bar, but by then you’d already told her who you gave them to. From the bar, we watched a truck come and load everything we dropped off across the street. That same truck ran us off the road a few hours later. She killed us over a freaking key.”

I felt my skin boil. “I have it,” I said, showing him the skeleton key I was clenching with my hand.

Sleepily, he glanced at it. “That kinda looks like it.”

“It is it. I pulled it from the lake.”

He didn’t argue. His eyes closed, and I shook him, but he didn’t move. “Mason...oh God, Mason!” I said through tears as my hands outlined his boyish face, the innocence that hid the daredevil in his soul. I screamed his name again but he refused to budge.

“He’s not gone,” I heard Skylynn say and turned to see her standing in front of me.

“Yes, he is!”

“No, he’s asleep, reliving his last day. He thinks he’s holding you right after you told him about your night terror.”

“Who sleeps in death? I told him we were dead! Why did he still fall asleep?”

“It took you a while to understand it, that is, if you even do. You are only as aware as you are because of Phoenix.”

I glanced down at the mark on my wrist, the falcon in flight. “Why did he chain me like some animal? What was that test thing he did on me?”

“He didn’t chain you, he just wanted to be able to find you again if he needs to. You’ve been lost to him for a while. I told you that your energy should be as bright as the sun, but it’s not. It’s almost as dark as his.”

“Is that what that fog test was about? He was trying to see my energy?”

She smirked. “I’m sure that was half the reason. Indie, you two have been apart for a long time, a very long time. And when he found you, your scent was saturated by Mason’s. He thought he lost you, that you had fallen in love with another, that you died with that person, and that it was his job to help you cross over. Beyond that, he was trying to see how much of your soul is still here, how much could have moved on.”

“What?”

“You are all here, Indie. Don’t worry about it. And anyone could see that you, at least your soul, has never forgotten him.”

I stood and faced her eye-to-eye. I held no emotion in my stare. “My soul? How about this life? How about the fact that he is a living fantasy that appeared in my real world? I don’t know what the hell he’s gotten himself wrapped up in, but I know that it’s changed him. I know he was happy, that he had dreams and now he doesn’t. We are not the same people, and I will be damned if I have to beg him or anyone else for my
own
life. Test or no test, right or wrong, he’s
not
going to control my future.”

A proud smile came to her expression. “Keep that resolve. We will fight this together.” She pulled her shoulders back. “Truth be told, you know him better than each of your friends…even me. That is going to help us convince him to let you live.”

“And why exactly does he get the final say?”

“His power can save you. I could find people with power close to his, but because he loves you his energy will grant that you rise from this veil.”

“Obviously, he doesn’t agree with you.”

“And I plan to figure out why. I thought it was jealousy, but he clearly showed both of us on the bank of the river that he was not fighting that emotion, but rather grief. He’s never been a quitter. I think he is just going through a lot of changes right now.”

“Changes that are more nerve-wracking than death?” I mocked, not caring to hear about some supernatural melodrama.

“In a way. People that were lost to him, you and his brother, have surfaced within days of each other—just in time to see how wickedly doomed we all are in this war of darkness.”

I swallowed nervously. The relief I had felt before, that at the very least Guardian and Sebastian had been side by side this entire time, vanished. No wonder he was not the same man anymore. Everyone that brought him laughter and happiness was taken away.

“Guardian. He hasn’t been with him.” My voice trembled.

Skylynn’s eyes grew wide for an instant, shocked that I was pulling memories and random bits of her and Phoenix’s argument together.

“They parted ways for a while, but they found their way back.”

I clenched my stomach as a sick feeling came to me. “Guardian left Phoenix to look for his girl, didn’t he?”

She nodded absently, pulling her brow together.

Maybe this was a part of death, remembering your entire existence. Though I never saw the memories that were racing through my mind in the North Wing, I knew they were real. My mind was starting to remember the very end, and I was trying to block it. I knew I would not be able to withstand it. Guardian’s girl was left in my care. Apparently, I failed my charge.

“I was the one that lost her. Is this war you two are fighting because of that?”

She stared at me for a seemingly endless moment. I had no idea what she was trying to figure out, but I was sick of her and Phoenix treating me like some wounded animal that was not of sound mind.

“This war is not your fault, and it’s not over a girl. It’s a battle of darkness and light that I cannot begin to explain to you right now. We have one sole focus: to save your life.”

“Life or no life, Rasure is going down. I have no issue with being vengeful or whatever else you and Phoenix keep warning me about. I will not convince or beg anyone to save my life. I will haunt that woman across time and space. I will exact vengeance for my family.”

“You’re right. You could haunt her. I doubt that a woman that has lived as long as she has, a woman that breeds evil, would really care that one spirit is knocking things over and tormenting her. You would be like a fly that refused to land long enough for it to be swat. Now, if you were a phoenix, you would breathe. Your family would see you, the world would see you, no one would know that you died and were reborn again. You could end her, destroy the empire she has built and so much more in that form.”

“Is that what the two of you were arguing about? You want him to turn me or something?”

“I want him to save you,” she corrected.

“So what is his problem with that?”

“My guess—that you would be at his side for all of eternity.”

I felt sick, really sick, like someone had sucked all the life out of me and set my body on fire.

“Well, you know what?” I said once I caught my breath. “I don’t want to be strapped to anyone either—not someone that doesn’t want me, that’s for sure.”

Her stare was rife with sympathy. “He’s eternally committed to you…”

I don’t know why, but her words gave me a sense of life once again. “You’re making no sense to me.”

“He is deep in this war. He knows he’s about to walk through hell. Not once, but a million times over. He doesn’t want you at his side when he does that. He wants to keep you safe, in death.”

I knew from the look in her eye that she was one hundred percent serious, but I had no idea what war
they
were in—I had my own to wage. I clenched the key in my fist, prepared to find every lock in this manor and turn it.

“I can call in a few favors, tell the circle we run with that Phoenix is doing something lethal. I know I’m pushing you away, but you’re a big girl now and you do not need me to be your voice. He will not be able to deny your request. That is, if it’s genuine.”