Chapter Forty-Eight
COMING BACK TO LIFE DIDN’T FEEL LIKE I’d imagined.
Not that I’d ever imagined such a thing because it was impossible and crazy and yet...I’d come back to life.
Lucien had come back to life.
And as the fog receded and the flood of memories gave me back my past, I tried to understand how this had happened.
Had we ascended?
Were we no longer mortal?
I had so many, many questions, but as my eyes locked with Lucien’s, nothing else mattered but him.
He caressed my cheek with trembling fingers as if he didn’t trust I was real. My hand shook as I captured his, pressing his palm against my face, proving to him that I was.
Touching him...God, nothing could’ve prepared me.
He was so warm and perfect and mine.
My heart grew wings, my soul sang, and the power that’d killed me shockwaved free, ricocheting around the valley and frosting everything.
Golden light seeped from his skin as he gathered me in his arms and folded over me.
His lips pressed to mine, and the second we kissed, the bond ignited with a million stars.
Silver and gold exploded with a rush of power, braiding and binding.
The dreamscape where we’d gone to heal while fighting the ascension settled around us, but instead of taking us away from reality, it hovered like an illusion over it.
The valley shimmered with dreamy mist. The blossom tree sprouted in the middle of this barren land, its petals scattering over black stone.
Somehow, we existed in both places at once. And as our tongues touched and we lost ourselves to the kiss, we became each other’s beginning and ending forever.
Lucien groaned as he deepened the kiss.
It blended sensuality with viciousness, affection with desperation. Centuries of grief and longing poured through both of us, fed and feasted on with every clash of our lips and teeth.
I kissed him back just as fiercely, burying my fingers in his thick black hair, pulling him closer so I never had to let go again.
His hands roamed my bare skin with possessive hunger, sliding down my back, gripping my hips, and pulling me deeper onto his naked lap. I gasped into his mouth as fire and frost collided, twisting together in perfect, aching harmony.
The dreamscape responded to our need, painting over the real world with blinding auroras.
Wrapping my legs around his waist, I rocked against his hardness. He grunted as I took him inside me—connecting physically for the first time since we’d started to die and couldn’t survive without feeding off each other in the dreamscape.
I gasped as he clutched me close, driving hard, filling me.
The feel of him inside—the sensation of returning home...it was too much.
Tears poured down my cheeks as we rocked in a timeless rhythm, shedding death and embracing life, awed and slightly afraid that we’d somehow been remade.
And when our orgasms found us, we panted and trembled, our skin slick with mortal pleasure, immortal powers bleeding with light.
All around us grass sprouted, trees erupted, the barren stone became a lush oasis.
We clung to each other long after the ripples of pleasure faded, before he finally leaned back and cupped my cheeks. Running his thumbs under my eyes, he whispered, “Hi...”
A broken, tearful laugh escaped me. “Hello.”
He chuckled with lingering heartache, then kissed me again, softer this time, full of love and relief and promises that we would never be separated again.
Breaking the kiss, he wrapped me in the tightest embrace and just held me.
I sagged into his hold, slowly coming to terms with what’d happened and how this was possible. I wanted to ask Lucien what he knew. I needed to figure out a hundred things, but...whispers appeared on the edges of my mind.
The quiet murmur of death rose all around me, louder and clearer as if my hearing had improved with my awakening.
Breaking Lucien’s hold on me, I stood and looked around.
The dreamscape continued to twinkle like a mirage over reality, hinting we no longer walked in separate worlds but in both of them.
Silver light seeped from my skin as I turned inward and listened to what the whispers were trying to tell me. I heard the history of the valley—felt every life that’d ever walked here, died here. I witnessed the glacier’s slow retreat. The centuries of wind and rain and time reshaping the land.
And then...tucked in the layers of life, I felt Dillon.
Whirling around, I focused on the pile of bones a few feet away.
My heart kicked as my gaze shot from the old skeleton to the preserved body of a black panther.
I waited for Whisper to talk to me. For his soul to find mine and give me his stories, but...
Dillon’s was too strong. His presence lingered as if he’d waited for me to say goodbye.
Snatches of memories filled my mind. Memories that weren’t mine.
Happy memories of Dillon walking beside Whisper in ancient forests.
Of them sleeping side by side in the moonlight.
Of them travelling to the glacier and lying down to rest.
I staggered to my bodyguard’s bones and dropped to my knees.
“Rook?” Lucien chased after me, standing behind me and resting his hand on my shoulder. “Are you alright?”
More whispers filled me. Entire scenes of Dillon and Whisper becoming such good friends after Lucien and I passed away. How they’d leaned on each other. Loved each other. Died with each other.
Lucien sucked in a breath, picking up on what I’d seen. “Those bones belong to Dillon?”
I nodded as tears poured down my cheeks.
I had no explanation for how we’d died that night on the glacier.
How I saw Lucien reaching supernova heat and taking the lab with him.
How I saw every year where Frank ran Snowflake Corp, only for him to die and be scattered in this very spot.
I knew that his children and then grandchildren ran my parents’ company until other forms of energy replaced it, and it was shut down and forgotten about.
I could see through time as easily as if staring through a mirror. It rippled under my stare, hinting I could twist it, tweak it, do whatever I wanted to it, and it would obey.
The enormity of that level of power.
The blinding, blissful energy that no longer tried to break me but had become me.
It was terrifying and thrilling and...my gaze locked on Whisper’s corpse.
I searched once again for his soul.
I begged him to talk to me, but...nothing.
Just emptiness...a pause. Almost as if he—
Leaping to my feet, I grabbed Lucien’s hand. “Help me.”
“I’ll help you do anything.” He frowned, his eyes dropping to Whisper as he lay looking like he’d just fallen asleep. “Help you do what?”
Whisper’s pelt still dripped with water and his face was wizened with age but...his body had remained.
Dillon’s had returned to the earth because his soul no longer needed it.
I could feel him out there...somewhere.
But I couldn’t feel Whisper.
“Look.” I waved at the oasis surrounding us—the fact that we’d caused life to sprout.
“Remember when we combined our blood? How we seem to reincarnate and rejuvenate when we blend our lifeforce together?” Words tumbled free.
“We destroyed the riverbank that night, but we were able to make everything sprout and flower again. We just did it again without any thought.”
Hope flared in his eyes, knowing where I was going with this, but he gritted his teeth as if fighting against it. “But he’s been gone for centuries. His body will be rotten. There’s no way we can bring him back...not after so long.”
“His body will heal if we make it, and...I can’t hear his soul.” I strained to hear the other world layered over this one. Still nothing. “I would be able to hear him if he was free. Just like I can hear Dillon...faintly but I know he’s out there.”
Lucien trembled. “Are we breaking some kind of balance by tampering with things we shouldn’t? What if I lose you again? What if—”
“You won’t lose me.” I grabbed his hand and squeezed. “I think we’ve proven that, haven’t we? We died, Lucien. We’ve been dead and gone for hundreds and hundreds of years. Yet...here we are. We woke together. Found each other. And Whisper is here too. Let me try...”
He stared at me so long, I feared he’d say no. But then he bent over, grabbed a sharp rock from the ground, turned my palm up, and sliced my skin open.
I expected to see blood. To see strange silver liquid—or at least it had been before it’d turned black. Instead, light seeped free. A ribbon of iridescent moonlight, pooling in the centre of my hand.
Without a word, Lucien cut his palm and freed a spool of golden light. It waited like shimmering mist, pulsing with energy. Whatever stuff flowed inside us was no longer human and it would take a millennium to come to terms with that fact.
Tears stung my eyes as I looked at Whisper again.
I gasped as Lucien pressed our palms together, then ducked to place them over Whisper’s heart.
A punch of power barrelled down my arm, pouring into Whisper like silver moonlight. Lucien grunted as if he felt the same tugging deep inside. Leaning against me, he kept his eyes locked on the panther as sunlight soaked from his fingers.
We didn’t move, transferring a combined synergy of power into the third member of our little family. We had no idea what we were doing or if it was right or wrong, but...we tried.
And slowly...Whisper began to change.
The silver around his muzzle and eyebrows returned to jet black. His body warmed; his muscles filled in. The gaunt fragility of age slowly reversed, returning vitality to a long-dead corpse.
My heart quickened as his joints realigned with wet cracks. His whiskers twitched. His chest swelled with a heavy breath.
Tears tumbled down my cheeks as the cloudless sky flashed with a bolt of lightning as if we’d ripped his soul back from the ether and stitched it back into his body.
The panther jerked, bumping Lucien and me off him and ceasing the flow of our energy.