Lucille
Chapter
Fourteen
Iripped open the library door and charged toward the dark bookshelves. My shoes smacked against the white marble, “Cato!”
“Yes,” he drawled from behind me.
I twisted. “How do I skip ahead in your stupid book and learn the advanced levels of dream-walking?” I demanded. I didn’t have time to learn anything but how to turn back time to save my mom.
“You don’t.”
I stepped toward him. “Tell me how.”
“No.”
I was about two seconds away from grabbing Cato’s robes and forcing him to tell me when his eyes flashed black with white specks, and the air deadened. I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t even move. Then, as if in slow motion, Cato touched my forehead with a flaming purple finger.
“Let’s see if you can pass.” His voice no longer sounded like him. It sounded ancient and echoed as if a multitude of others spoke through him. It reminded me of the Drune in The Divide.
I blinked, and Cato stood farther away, holding open a book.
“Why are you still standing there? Is this not what you asked for?”
“I—”
Didn’t he just tell me no?
Hesitantly, I walked toward him, reaching for the book as if he’d slam it closed and laugh in my face. He didn’t. He only watched me unblinking. Once the book was in my hands, he glided away.
“Remember our creed, Princess.”
A creed that went against the very thing I was trying to accomplish. No, I’d rather not.
Holding the book open and close to my chest, I hurried to my room, locking the doors. I holed up there the rest of the afternoon and night, reading the chapter on Praetervado—the most dangerous form of dream-walking.
It took the most power of the four types. The dream-walker wasn’t just invading someone’s dream to relive the past. They weren’t invading a dream or a memory at all. Michael had been wrong. No shocker there.
Praetervado was traveling to the past.
The text said that we showed up to the outside world as figures haloed in a dark purple hue, easily hidden in the shadows. But if someone saw us, we would be revealed, and the consequences could be detrimental to the future.
I didn’t understand the point of Praetervado if the Thrones never used it to change the past. Their creed seemed a touch overreactive.
Finally, on the last page, it detailed how to enter Praetervado. The dream-walker had to be fully in tune with either the memory or the question they were asking, and they had to provide an offering.
I frowned. I didn’t make any offering the other two times I entered Praetervado. Did I?
I thought back to the dream-walk with Michael, recalling the events leading up to it.
Oliver and I had been running from Powers.
Then one hit me with a lightning bolt. But I didn’t offer anything.
I barely remembered what I had been thinking before getting electrocuted.
The second time, I dream-walked to my mom as she talked to Lilith about my potential birth. It happened after the Hellhound attack.
I thought about both scenarios, comparing the events. Maybe I didn’t need an offering? I wasn’t exactly a Throne. Or… I reached back, touching my starburst scar, then trailing my fingers along my ribs.
Could it be that simple?
Excited, I opened my end-table drawer and pulled out a dagger.
Tapping into my Hellfire, I threw up a barrier between me and Ronen, wrapping it with extra flames so he wouldn’t feel my pain.
Then I sliced my palm, cringing, but too excited to really care about the cut or blood.
Emptying my head of everything but the scene of Michael’s torture, I forced myself to sleep.
I woke behind a wooden, rotting pillar. Chains creaked overhead, and rusted knives decorated the wall.
I smiled. Even the vertigo that hit me put me in a good mood.
I did it. My offering worked. I made it back to the past. But my smile swiftly fell when I heard, “I’ll tell you. If you make a runed deal with me.”
I didn’t have time—or a plan. My only desire was to stop Michael’s rune before he could carve it. But how?
Dread sank into my stomach at the thought of revealing myself. I may not be one for Cato’s creed, but I didn’t have a good feeling about showing myself to Michael and my past self.
But what were my other options?
“A three-way bind.”
Shit. Shit. Shit.
Panicking, I formed an icicle in one hand and a ball of Hellfire in the other. Thought. Strategy. Everything I learned and read from my time in Hell flew out the window.
“I’ll tell you if you make a binding promise—”
My desperation took over, and I leaped from behind the pillar.
My past self stopped talking, shocked by the sight of me.
I hurled my Hellfire, but Michael dodged it.
I stabbed his shoulder with the icicle. He shouted, or said something, but it was lost to the ringing in my ears as my Hellfire hit Aspen in the chest. He had been standing in the doorway, moments away from the rescue I remembered.
Now he was falling to his knees, and someone was screaming.
The guardian bond surged through me, sending me two different commands: help and punish.
I rushed toward Aspen, and Michael grabbed my braid, yanking me against his chest.
“You evil little swine,” he hissed, his lips pressed to my face and spit hitting my cheek.
As I watched Aspen choke and my black flames eat away at his flesh, the bond drove my actions.
I snatched a dagger from Michael’s belt and swung it toward his neck.
He released me in favor of not getting impaled.
Forming a Hellfire ball, I prepared to chuck it at him, but then I stopped.
The urge to fight and help switched to the full force of needing to punish.
My hand shook as I resisted the sudden compulsion to use it on myself.
Why would I do that?
Then I remembered Ronen’s words. Gabriel had impaled himself as punishment for failing to protect Ronen.
But my Hellfire couldn’t hurt me. The thought extinguished the flame. I had a moment of relief before the invasive energy hijacked my hand holding the dagger and forced me to shove it through my chest. Then the guardian bond snapped. The urges, his emotions, all gone.
I gasped, having no breath to scream or cry. Shock and adrenaline wracked my body as I collapsed, blood pooling down my shirt. All I could do was stare in horror at what remained of Aspen.
“What the hell is going on?” my past self shouted.
Michael sneered down at me, forming a pure-white ball of Glory in his palm. “Evil. And it’s my duty to purge it from this land.” He threw the white ball of Glory at me. But not at the version of me already dying—at past me.
“No,” I choked out through a wet cough, lifting my bloody hand as my Hellfire fizzled at my fingertips.
Michael’s Glory hit her in a burst of white. My past self screamed, her agony washing over me like a residual memory.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. I just wanted to save my mom.
Shadows whipped around Aspen’s decaying body. Ronen. The last thing I saw before I died was him touching his chest, his expression twisted with confused wrath as he watched my past self burn to ash.
He knew I was something to him. But he’d never know what.
I jerked awake, clutching my heart, and found myself not in my bed, but in the library.
“You failed,” Cato commented, removing his hand from my head.
I could remember everything that had happened in the dream-walk, but not how I did it. Like he had taken the important memories and left me with all the horrible ones.
“Wh—what—was that?” I sputtered.
“A test we used on newly created Thrones. It showed us if they were ready to move up in their dream-walking or if they’d succumb to their desires.” Cato’s lips pursed in disapproval.
“So it wasn’t real?” I breathed. I mean, I was still alive. But I couldn’t shake the images.
Cato blinked, then left me standing there, frazzled.
I luscelered to Oliver’s rooms, pounding on the door. Night pressed against the windows. Only scattered snow caught in the sconces’ glow interrupted the heavy darkness. How long was I in that test?
I continued to pound against the door until it opened.
“Lucille?” Aspen’s waves fell every which way, and he had on a pair of low-hung navy sweatpants.
Scanning the bare, unscathed skin on his chest, I reached out as if to make sure it was real. The image of my fire eating away at his flesh. The sound of his choking. His decayed body…
My fingers barely brushed him, sending tingles dancing across the tips, before he snatched my wrist. Desire, guilt, and aching pain snuck through my irrational panic.
For a moment, I questioned whether they were my emotions or his.
But my desire remained a flicker of a flame, not extinguished but nothing compared to Aspen’s.
“Sorry.” I pulled my hand from his grip.
What was I thinking, coming here?
He sighed. “Are you okay?”
Nodding, I scanned his chest again before landing on his sleepy face. Purple bruised the skin beneath his tired eyes. He looked younger, worn down.
“Bad dream?” I asked.
“No. I can’t sleep. All I see is the people I’ve hurt.”
My face slackened with shock. I had assumed he would brush off my question or respond with something that’d placate me. He always had before.
He gave me a small, weary smile. “It’ll only ever be the truth from now on.”
Earlier, when he had laid out his past, I thought it was a one-off—a moment of weakness after I berated him.
Half of what he said I already knew. I appreciated his vulnerability more than he’d ever know, but I never figured it’d last. People in my life had a bad habit of lying and hiding things from me.
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled half-heartedly. Not sure why I even said it when I didn’t mean it. I was one of his victims. The pain he caused was still fresh, and knowing he couldn’t sleep because of it didn’t help, but it did give me a certain satisfaction.
He huffed, shaking his head. “Never say that to me again. I’m the only one who should be sorry.”
“True,” I said, stepping back.