Chapter 33
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Lennon
“Nevan, now!” Paul’s voice tears across the dark, and the world disappears into clouds.
My hand slips from Lucien’s as they populate out of nothing in every direction, thick, gray, and damp, swallowing the light, the floor, everything. I have one second to think, the useless clouds Ridge made fun of before something slams into my chest.
It hits me dead center and lifts me off my feet, driving me backward through the fog. I slam hard against another body, and an arm clamps across me while we slide back another few feet together into the dark and stop.
“Take them back, Nevan,” Paul yells again, this time from somewhere ahead of me.
The clouds vanish all at once, sucked away as fast as they came, leaving the hard circle of light snap back into place, and I can see again.
I twist to find out who’s holding me.
Tessa. Or a Tessa, and for one disoriented second I don’t know which one, and then I look down.
There’s a plant around my waist.
A green stem, thick as a wrist, wound twice around my middle and twice around the Tessa behind me, lashing the two of us together and back, away from the center of the light.
The Tessa’s grip tightens when I pull against it. “Don’t even try it, sweetheart.”
“Ridge,” I breathe out. “Let go.”
“Never again.” Tessa’s voice, Ridge’s words. “You do stupid shit when I let you.”
I look up to where I was standing, thinking of what Ridge saw.
But then Paul steps right into my place, where I just was.
Not Paul-Tessa. Paul. He’s let the face fall—the gray-streaked stubble, no glasses, but every inch of him him—and he’s standing between Lucien and me with his feet planted and green erupting all around him.
Lucien throws what looks like rose stems at him, every thorn on them the size of a thumbnail, and they fly at Paul like a fistful of barbed wire.
Paul moves and literally folds sideways, faster than anyone should be able to, and the thorns shred through where he was.
He answers with a wall of green that slams up out of the floor, but Lucien is somewhere else when it lands, behind Paul now, and the thorns come again from a new direction.
It’s not a fair fight. I can see that even through the panic. Lucien builds in a blink what takes the rest of us a few seconds. He’s here, and then he’s there with no time passing in between. There’s a faint smile on his face, and it looks like he isn’t even trying very hard.
But Paul fights like a man who, after having this exact nightmare for five years, has had a long, long time to study his opponent. Every time Lucien moves, Paul is already turning toward where he’s going to be, because he knows him.
He knows him.
He has been pinned, paralyzed, and tortured by Lucien in his sleep so many times that it looks like he has memorized the rhythm of him, and he uses it, ducking and weaving, giving ground, baiting.
Lucien gets careless, even laughs mid-strike as if this is the most fun he has had in years, but then he overreaches and steps exactly where Paul has been herding him for thirty seconds, when the green comes up.
Plants come around Lucien from the floor, vines thick as my arm, winding up his legs, his chest, locking his arms to his sides, hauling tight until he’s standing rigid in the center of the light, bound upright.
Pinned.
The most dangerous thing any of us has ever met looks down at the plants holding him in place, and then up at Paul, and his green eyes go wide.
Lucien obviously can’t quite believe it. I guess no one has ever managed to do this to him, and he genuinely did not think the even-tempered psychologist in a cardigan was the one who would.
Paul is breathing hard. There’s a line of red opening along his forearm where a thorn caught him.
Shit.
We have to help him, we have to.
“You want to go to elsewhere forever?” Paul asks, cutting off my thought. “Then let’s go.”
My stomach drops.
No.
No, no, no.
Paul isn’t trying to stop him.
Paul is trying to replace me.
The arm around me locks rigid when Ridge murmurs. “Oh, no you don’t.”
Lucien tilts his head inside the cage of vines and chuckles. “I really don’t long for an eternity with you, Dr. Bennett.”
Then it can’t work, right?
Seraphine said the souls have to recognize themselves.
Isn’t a contract based on consent?
“Pity,” Paul says. “You’ll have to take it anyway. Like I had to take five years of you.”
The vines move, dragging Lucien’s right arm up slowly, forcing his hand out flat into the empty air between them, palm open, for a handshake he is not agreeing to.
Paul lifts his hand to meet it. “You started something tonight, so finish it with me. I know what you are. You know what I am. That’s enough to bind, so shake on it, and let them go.”
“Paul!” I throw my whole body against the plant around my waist, but it doesn’t give an inch. “Paul, nooo!”
I twist wildly in Ridge’s arms, and that’s when I see the rest of them.
Two Tessas, off to the side, both lashed flat against nothing by Paul’s vines the same way Ridge and I are.
The real Tessa and the Nevan one beside her, white-knuckling even now.
Paul tied us all down, every one of us. So none of us could do exactly what I am trying to do.
He made up his mind to be the one who pays, and he made sure no one could stop him first.
When Paul’s hand is an inch from Lucien’s, the vines around my body rip apart. I turn to find Tessa’s face dropping off Ridge, his real shape tearing up through hers, dark, furious, and very much Ridge.
The dark behind him peels. It comes off the black in long sheets, the way his monsters always come, shadows with too many edges. He hurls it across the light toward Paul. It hits him in the side and slams him back, off Lucien.
“You,” Ridge snarls out at Paul. “Do not get to sacrifice yourself for me. Again. You selfless-fucking-idiot.”
“Ridge—” I start, but he cuts me off with a kiss.
“I made you a promise.” His hand grips my hair, and he catches my bottom lip in his teeth and bites, enough to make me gasp, and I’ll feel it after. “I promised I’d help you get Tessa back. I keep my promises, sweetheart. Even without the dream logic.”
“Ridge.”
“And.” That crooked, terrible, one-sided smile blooms on his lips. “I promised the bastard that I’d kick his ass.”
“Don’t.”
“I love you more than my life.”
Then the darkness comes out of him.
It pours off Ridge all at once, off his shoulders, his hands, the air around him, and half of it slams into Lucien, wraps him, floods over Paul’s vines until he’s bound twice, plant and shadow, a man caught in two different nightmares at the same time.
The other half catches Paul.
It pins him back against nothing, a foot off the floor, and Ridge is already rounding on him.
“You and I are going to have a conversation about your fucking martyr complex.”
“Let me go, Ridge.” The calm is finally cracking out of Paul’s voice. “You don’t understand what he’ll—”
“I understand fine. You did this once already. You decided you got to be the one who paid, and you didn’t ask me, and I am not…” the shadow cinches tighter, “… doing that again.”
“It isn’t the same.”
“It’s exactly the same. If someone gets to be the martyr, it’s me.”
And while they snap at each other, two grown men arguing over who gets to be the sacrifice, the thing in the cage of green and black starts to laugh.
It’s not a big laugh. It’s the soft, tired sound of a man watching children fight over who has to do the dishes.
“Can the three of you please decide who is sacrificing himself for whom? It’s touching. Truly. It’s also getting tiring.”
Paul and Ridge both turn to look at him, as he comes apart from the cage, as if it had never held him, as if he had only ever been waiting for us to get distracted enough to stop feeding it. The vines snap and the shadow shreds, and then he’s loose, and the light is full of moving bodies.
It happens faster than I can follow.
Ridge throws a shadow, and Lucien is already not where it lands.
Paul slams up a wall of green, but Lucien is behind it before it finishes rising.
They fight him together, the first thing they’ve done as a unit all night.
Ridge is building the nightmares, and Paul is reading the rhythm of the man inside them, but it is still not enough.
Lucien moves between their attacks like the gaps were cut to fit him.
Then a thorn opens Ridge’s cheek, and Paul takes a hit that folds him sideways.
And I stand here, unmoving.
In the middle of the light, heart slamming, watching the three of them tear at each other, and I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to help.
Every plan I walked in here with is dead on the floor.
Think.
They won’t let me do a soul contract with him. Paul made that catastrophically clear, but I can’t stand here and let them do this either. I can’t watch one of them get worn down, caught, and dragged off into the dark while I count crystals in my head.
Lucien needs one opening. If one of them trips up for half a second, he’ll be ripping their subconscious to shreds doing the thing he does best.
Fuck, what if Lucien agrees to choose one of them instead?
Think, Lenny. There has to be—
“Lemon.” Nevan’s voice cuts straight through the noise.
He’s still wearing Tessa’s face, still lashed by Paul’s vines, white-knuckled and straining.
“My left hand.”
My gaze drops automatically.
“Other left.”
My eyes dart to his other hand. His little finger is lifted off his thigh, crooked toward me.
A pinky.
Held out across a circle of light, in the middle of a fight none of us are winning.
My gaze snaps back up to his, and he mouths, rule number four.
Oh.
Oh.
I look at Nevan.
Are you sure?
Because I’m not. Not at all.
And the thing about betting everything you are is that you only get to do it once.
His pinky doesn’t waver.
Okay.
Okay.
In the center of the light, the fighting stutters, drawing my attention back to it. Lucien dropped back. Paul and Ridge are heaving for breath, all three of them circling now, spent, waiting for someone to make the next move.
And that move is mine.
The moonstone is so hot it’s a brick of coal against my sternum.
But I stop being afraid.
I raise my hands, and honey floods out of them. It takes Paul first, floats him to the wall, and holds him there. Then Ridge, mid-lunge, is caught and lifted, pinned in gold beside him. Then I do the same to Tessa, even though she’s still pinned by Paul.
Just to make sure.
Ridge roars my name. “Lenny! What the fuck are you doing?”
“Lennon, don’t do it.” Paul is not yelling. His dark eyes are wet. “You don’t get to go. I just found you.”
It would be so easy to let that stop me.
But it won’t. He has to understand. I will be fine.
Hopefully.
“I promised, I’ve got you. I promised I’ve got you, all of you, and—”
“No.” His composure breaks all at once, the whole careful surface of him. “Lennon, please…”
Lucien moves to stand in front of me again with a triumphant grin, shrugging off the last bits of the shadow that were clinging to him.
I find Nevan’s eyes for one last reassurance, and he dips his head at me. I decide against pinning him to the wall too.
Somebody in this room should get to stand and watch me not need saving.
Lucien tilts his head and looks at me. Really looks the way he did right before he peeled the Tessa off me.
Behind me, Paul is still pleading.
Tessa is sobbing my name.
Ridge is tearing himself bloody against my honey. I can feel it, every pull, like he’s pulling on something rooted in my chest.
The panic.
The rage.
The absolute refusal.
Then the noise muffles and fades away, like I’ve put a door between them and me. My heart should be hammering, but instead, it’s gone slow.
“You keep doing their job for them,” he says, his words warm and fond. “Stepping in front. Don’t you ever get tired of it?”
“Never.”
Please let Nevan be right.
And if he’s not?
If he’s not, then I meant every word of it anyway. I’ll be here, and I’ll be fine. I have been practicing being fine my whole life. At least this time I get to pick it.
“It’s you and me,” I say.
“It was always going to be.” Lucien’s shoulders relax with something like relief.
Lucien holds out his hand.
I raise mine.
I love you, all of you.
Forgive me.
I love you.
Please let us be right.
I put my hand in his, and I shake it.