Chapter Thirty-Nine Aria
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Aria
“Rise up and go.”
It was the faintest voice. A high-pitched tinkling in her ear. Dragging her through the nothingness where she typically hovered between sleeping and reality.
That moment when she was neither human nor ethereal.
“Do you feel it? The call?” the voice whispered. “You were made for this. Rise up and stand for the ones who cannot stand for themselves. End the one who seeks to destroy. Only you can. It’s time. It’s time to lead.”
The call howled around her, dragging her spirit in a direction she didn’t understand. The only thing she knew was she had to heed it.
And the sky opened up in the distance.
A magnet.
A lure.
The gravity a hook deep in her soul.
And in it, she saw his face.
Ambrose.
And Valeen’s voice whispered again, “Go.”
A cry ripped out of me as I flew upright in bed, disoriented as I held the blanket covering us against my chest.
My mind was a hurricane. Still stuck somewhere between Faydor and the fog where I’d drifted right before awakening.
Where I’d been removed from Faydor, and rather than being catapulted back to this reality, I’d been held in a dream.
Pax jolted up by my side, as if we’d been attached, both of us waking at the same moment. He grabbed for me the second we were both upright, palms rushing out to frame my face.
“Did you see it? Did you feel it?” he demanded. “Were you dreaming, too?”
My throat was too thick to speak, so I only nodded, croaking out a bare “Yes.”
There was a sudden pounding down the hall before a fist battered at the door. One second later, Dani threw it open. She stumbled in, pink hair a mess, desperation written in her expression. “I had a dream,” she gasped, “and so did Timothy.”
“We did, too,” I managed to force out.
“It feels like we’re being called somewhere else. Someplace specific. But where?” she begged, her desperation bleeding out onto the floor, the echo of her words climbing the walls with her urgency.
“That’s exactly the way I feel,” I told her.
But I thought we all already knew it. That the dream had been the same for each of us.
We were being compelled.
I blinked, trying to process what the visions meant. Where it was leading us. “I’m not sure . . . but . . . I think the area is close. I think I can feel it. Maybe a few hundred miles away.”
It was only then that I heard the wailing of sirens. So many of them in the distance. That and the thwomp, thwomp, thwomp of helicopters as they flew overhead.
Dread soured in my stomach. It had started. The chaos we’d known was coming.
Timothy suddenly appeared in the doorway, a tower behind Dani. “We gotta go.”
His features were a contortion of grimness and determination.
“I know.”
“We need to think about this.” Pax’s words slashed into the air, and he shook his head as if he could throw off the disorder. “We don’t know what we’re going to come up against. There was a crack in Faydor, and Kruen were jumping through it.”
Dani wheezed, “Oh God.”
“Yeah. We found it deep in the recesses of Faydor. It’s why the Kruen were acting strange. They were drawn toward it. No clue how many of them we’re going to encounter. What kind of strength they’re going to have on this plane. We can’t take them all on ourselves.”
Pax’s teeth ground as he said it, anger spilling free. The memory of what we’d come upon last night in the farthest reaches of Faydor.
The crack.
The rending.
The ruin we knew would already be waiting for us.
“We don’t have any other choice.” I tossed off the covers and hopped out of bed. “We have to go. Now. It doesn’t matter what we come up against. You know we’re fated for this. You know it’s the reason we’re all standing here together. There’s no cowering now.”
Pax radiated his reservations. The need he felt to protect me butting up against the truth of what we were destined for.
My guardian.
My shield.
My husband.
The one who saw everything inside me. My purpose and my dreams.
The one I knew already had his answer, even though he wanted to fight against it.
He scrubbed both hands over his face before he gritted out, “If we’re going to do this, then we’d better fuckin’ show up prepared.”
“Ah, now I like the sound of that.” A big grin spread across Timothy’s face.
“What the hell does that mean?” Dani glanced between the two of them.
Pax shoved off his covers and stood from the bed, too. “It means we do whatever it takes.”
The four of us looked at each other as reality sank heavily on our hearts.
We either stopped Ambrose today, or we’d meet our end.
Thirty minutes later, we were peeling out of Dani’s garage in her Civic. Pax and I were in the back, Timothy in the front passenger seat, and Dani at the wheel.
It was early, dawn just breaking at the horizon and cracking through the sky.
A sky that was intact above us, though I still shivered at the sight.
Dani rammed on the accelerator and flew down the road, again wiping tears that dripped down her cheeks when she glanced at the house that sat up the road from her own.
It was where she’d left Pixie. Dani had taken her to her elderly neighbor’s and told the woman she had an emergency and needed to leave town for a while.
She’d promised she’d return as soon as she could.
Only I’d felt the wavering of the lie.
The way she’d been unsure if she would see her cat again.
If she would make it back.
If she would even have anything to come back to.
It was where our own humanity collided with our purpose. Where we struggled with our mortality.
Struck by the magnitude of the uncertainties that stretched around us.
A foreboding so thick in the cab of the car that it was difficult to breathe. Our lungs heavy and tight. Tremors of alarm and trepidation ripping through our bodies and shattering our spirits.
Pax clutched my hand as Dani flew down the street.
“Where exactly am I going?” she asked.
“East” was all I could say.
It was the only thing I was certain of.
The tugging at my spirit that guided our path.
A different place than the men had taken me last night.
“Yeah, east,” Timothy agreed, no doubt getting the same indication.
“I know,” Dani whispered, the words barely audible. “I just . . .”
Timothy reached out and set his hand on her thigh, trying to offer some of the peace that had seemed to slip away with each second that passed.
But any hope of peace had been torn away when Pax had turned on Dani’s television as we ran around packing the few things we could bring. When we’d seen the carnage that had begun to spread across the world.
The complete panic and turmoil the world had been cast into.
No answers for the tragedies that befell the world. The murders and the fires. Wars started between allies and friends. Every manner of crime right out in the open. As if the reasons for hiding sins had been stripped away.
So far, we hadn’t seen any reports of strange beings, but there was no question the Kruen we’d seen breaking through the two realms were responsible.
Pax searched for a route on his phone, and I could feel him scouting around within himself, looking for his own lure.
For the power inside him to discern where to go.
“Take I-84,” he finally said. “We need to make a pit stop first. There’s a camping and hunting store three blocks up. We need supplies.”
Disquiet whirled around us.
From the opposite direction, three cop cars approached at high speed. Red and blue lights flashed, and their sirens blared.
Dani pulled off to the side of the road, and we were all silent as they whizzed by.
An ambulance and fire truck came from the west, crossing at the intersecting road and continuing in that direction.
We held our breaths as the world spun out of control around us.
Once they had all passed, Dani mumbled, “That is, if there is even a store left,” before she pulled back onto the road.