20. Kiaran #3
I closed my eyes and started toward the exit.
Where I should’ve felt the heat melting through my skin, there was a cool, wet air circling me.
Peeling an eye open, there was a clear path to the door.
Behind me and all the way to my brother’s limp body was ablaze. So I knew who parted this sea of fire.
Amelie.
I took the opportunity and finished the distance, swinging the door open.
The hallway was still free of flames, but the window that held the perfect view of the garden showed a tragic scene of our estate’s most treasured amenity.
Deciding to mourn that later, I took off toward the Grand Sitting room. Bracing myself on the antique trim of the archway, I slipped on the rug as I swung myself around the corner and into the room.
Amelie was perched like a stone statue on the couch, staring in the direction of the bar. Her eyes were glowing, the sapphire blue only a memory as the golds blazed. I followed her gaze to see my mother pouring herself a drink. She looked exactly the same as the day I left.
Her alabaster face was cut with her fierce cheek and jaw bones, lips painted the soft pink she wore every day. Her long black hair that matched mine grew to her lower back and was stick straight. Not a single strand out of place as half of it fell behind her, the other half over her shoulder.
She was even wearing the same dress she donned the day my curse was officially fated. It was the ceremony dress that each of the women at the High Table of the Coven wore for adjudication days. All aside from the headdress that affirmed her position at said table.
The floor length, high neck, cape sleeved gown was a deep blue, as close to the color of Amelie’s eyes as I’d ever seen. Silver diamonds shaped our family crest, holding the cape together in the center of her collarbone.
She stirred the drink, no notion of Amelie’s presence in the room.
A familiar presence gingerly slipped into the room around me, paying me no mind.
“Mom, please don’t do this.” A smaller voice came from the mouth of a much younger me.
“The decision has been made, Kiaran.” Steel gripped my mother’s tone.
“You finalize those decisions!”
“Are you raising your voice at me?” she taunted.
“No…I’m sorry.” Little me bowed his head in defeat.
This memory was of the hours leading up to my sentencing before the Coven. Why was Amelie dreaming of this? How was she dreaming of this? How was this the past but Adan was in the present?
“You made a grave mistake. You tampered with the fates the Coven set forth for you and your baby sister and you know what happens to those who fail to complete High Priestess orders.”
“I didn’t have a choice, Mom. I didn’t mean to kill her…” My dream self’s voice shook. I didn’t remember ever being this weak in front of my mother.
“Yet, you did. Do you not believe murderers should be punished? You’re very lucky that you weren’t sentenced to death,” she said as she floated to the couch without a care in the world.
She tossed her hair over her shoulder with a dramatic motion of her head.
“A life for a life, and all that. Right?”
A sinister smile etched her face.
Little dream me shied away from the look. I remembered it well. The rolling feeling in my gut when she’d give it to me was present now, seeing it again after two hundred years. He turned and sulked out of the room and I watched him descend the stairs, shoulders sunk low and head bowed.
That kid had no idea what was to come. He hadn’t watched his mother sign off on his potential life sentence.
He hadn’t yet been dropped in the middle of a Forest in a desolate cottage, scared and pissed off.
It took everything in me not to follow him, to force him to look at me so I could tell him to run. To just fucking listen for once.
A hand tugged at my attention, where I turned to find Amelie back in her true form. The fear that I’d found in her eyes when I got here was gone, as was the fire that was present just minutes prior, the injuries she should’ve had from Adan were nonexistent, she was just Amelie.
“I burned down the garden.”
“I know.”
“I didn’t mean to come here. ”
Somehow, Amelie had managed to find a present version of Adan and a past version of my mother. She melded time together and was now standing in front of me like a perfectly normal human, completely unscathed by a magic that should’ve made the most powerful Witch crumble when they came down.
Before we could get ourselves into any more trouble in the dream version of Avonya, Amelie fell into a new dream.
One where she and I were happily, and freely exploring the Forest together.
We visited Ethel, stopped by the campsite to mingle with the Lost Souls, and enjoyed being out of the cottage, hand in hand.
Freedom with Amelie in our own personal version of her Heaven was everything to me. Every dream she took me along with was a promise I couldn’t keep, so I tried not to make it. But nonetheless, it was a really good dream.