Nevermore (The Never Sky #2)

Chapter 4

4

S he was stunning, as she always had been. Though dressed like a doll in layers of pretty lace, she stood on a pile of bodies, bathed in the blood of the innocent. The curls in her hair were soaked through with blood, the red enveloping her signature golden brown.

Eight years old. She was eight years old.

Stepping toward the child, toward my Quilly, heart in my throat, I did not look down. Did not consider who I stood upon as I climbed the hill of the fallen to get to her.

“Quill.” I tried to keep my voice calm, still, void of judgment. But only anguish and despair seeped from my lips. Only a cry of pain. Not for those below me. Not for the slaughtered. But for the soul of the child that had shattered the world. The Fera.

She turned to me. Nothing but hatred rolling from her glare as she bared her teeth, letting her power race forward, overtaking the way my heart ached for her. Her control over emotions, hers and those around her, had grown. It suffocated everything I felt; transformed it into something wild and furious.

“I love you, Quilly. Please don’t take that away from me. Let me love you. I don’t want this anger. Take it back.”

“You left me,” she roared. “You were supposed to return.”

“I’m trying. I’m trying so hard.”

The child soared forward, so close I could see the blood spattered across her skin like freckles, so close I could hear the tremble in her cry. She sank into herself, into the child I’d known her to be and not the monster that waged war in a broken realm. Tears of blood streaked down her round face. She turned, surveying the slaughtered before falling to her knees. “I think I hurt these people.”

“It’s not real.”

She looked up to me, as she did the day I’d met her and swept her away from the monster that’d been my boss. She and I were the same. Kindred spirits.

I knelt, reaching my hand forward to tuck a wild curl behind her ear. But my fingers passed through.

“Are you mad?” she whispered, staring down at the ground. “Can you forgive me?”

“Of course I can. You and me against the world, remember?”

But, as if she hadn’t heard me at all, she reached for someone below her, a body discarded within the masses. The child tried to clear red hair from a familiar face, streaking it with blood instead.

“Paesha will be home soon and she can fix this, Thea. She can fix me. You’ll come back too.”

My stomach rolled as I stared into the vacant green eyes of a woman that’d been a sister to me.

Sorrow coated me, stealing my ability to think and breathe. Growing like a thorn in my throat, refusing to let me swallow as tears burned my eyes. Thea. Nevermore to laugh. Nevermore to love. Nevermore to dream.

“It’s not real,” I whispered again, to myself more than the child that could not hear me.

But then the world flickered and faded, the bodies vanishing to nothing as a familiar being soared forward. She shined so bright her dark skin practically glowed, matching her perfect smile. Ro, the meddling goddess that had promised she would help protect Quill.

“You failed,” I said through clenched teeth.

But she didn’t react to my hateful words. Instead, she only repeated words she’d already said to me, as if reminding me why I’d chosen this.

“She will bring down that world, and the rest will follow. Because sadness is only a root from which anger grows.”

“No shit. But how am I supposed to get back to her?”

Though her mouth moved, whatever words she uttered were silent. Less than a whisper. Nothing at all as a piercing pain ripped through my body and wrenched me out of the horrible nightmare.