CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
My family slept around me.
They were exhausted from the battle, and undoubtedly from worrying about me after I’d pulled that vanishing act.
I hadn’t had the energy to tell them the full story of what had happened after Nym had grabbed my hand.
All they knew was that Nym was dead and he’d taken me to another time.
I had decided to reveal the rest after they’d gotten a chance to recover.
Or a few hours of sleep, at the very least.
I’d braced myself for their nightmares, but all the minds around me were quiet after everything we’d been through.
Collith was on the couch, exactly where he had been all summer.
But everything was different now. For the first time, Collith and I were truly free.
We should’ve been celebrating, or at least together.
Yet there we were, a wall still between us, each of us sleeping alone.
Well, Collith was. I wasn’t sleeping at all.
I lay there with one arm slung restlessly above my head, staring at the dim ceiling.
I kept going back, going around, remembering every moment and choice that had led me here.
I yearned for a different ending, because I knew what came next.
What I had to do. No amount of regretting or bargaining would change that.
It was why Collith was on the couch instead of in bed with me.
When I finally drifted into sleep, I went to Oliver in a dream.
It was easy now, controlling my power. Understanding it.
I couldn’t recite a list of rules or ingredients like a spell, but the magic was …
me. It existed in every part of my body, in every cell and thought.
It moved and changed as I did. Fighting myself and being afraid was what had caused so much chaos for so long.
Now, after a lifetime of struggle and self-loathing, I finally felt at peace.
Well, I amended, gazing at the dark house in front of me, not totally at peace.
The sky overhead was black and starless, but I didn’t need light to recognize the house that loomed over my head. I had committed every detail to memory the night I’d come here. And so, apparently, had Oliver.
Nothing moved beyond the windows, but I knew he was inside. I wouldn’t have been here otherwise.
Neck arched back, I stood there for a while, long enough that I imagined my feet sinking into the dirt and becoming one with the ground.
It all made sense now, I thought as I gathered my courage.
Lucifer had been fascinated with Oliver from the moment they’d met.
I’d seen the bond between them, even if I hadn’t known what it was.
For the hundredth time, my mind went back to my conversation with Savannah. Even in sleep, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I remembered how the kitchen lights had shone down on us like a spotlight, casting shadows beneath Savannah’s eyes as she’d lowered them.
“How could you do this without even talking to me about it?” I asked. My voice was still dangerously calm.
Savannah was calm, too. “They made the choice so you wouldn’t have to.”
The Order hadn’t made the choice for me, I thought, simmering with barely checked rage. They’d taken it from me. I raised my gaze back to Savannah. “When did you see Oliver?”
“I didn’t,” she answered quickly. “Nym finished the spell, actually. We’d gone over it together, and he knew all the steps.
After we went to Hell, and he brought us back to the loft, he made another …
stop. The original plan was to take me with him and I’d do it, but Nym was too weak after we traveled to Lucifer. So he improvised.”
Realization seared through me. It had taken Nym longer to come back to the loft, I remembered.
I thought he’d gotten lost in time, or we’d left him behind in Hell.
Savannah had let me believe it, probably because that was exactly what Nym instructed her to do.
He knew I wouldn’t have let him do that to Oliver.
The ramifications of the spell were still sinking in. Nothing had changed, not at the heart of it, but I felt the slow trickle of pain. Soon, it would become crashing waves of anguish. Oliver had to die, just as he’d always had to, and I couldn’t waver. Not anymore.
Once again, I lifted my head and refocused on Savannah. My voice became dull as I said, “How did Nym even pull it off? Oliver would’ve overpowered him in a second.”
Her eyes drooped at the corners, as if she felt sorry for me now. She nodded slowly. “Nym thought of that, too. That’s why he went further back.”
I frowned in confusion. “What? Further back would be impossible. Oliver didn’t exist until this year.”
Savannah’s pulse visibly feathered against her throat.
Her fear was all over my tongue, a familiar flavor that I hadn’t tasted in a long time.
She was terrified of how I’d react to this final truth, and her reaction heightened the sense of dread creeping through my heart.
But Savannah looked back at me bravely. There was only the slightest tremble to her lips when she answered, “He traveled to a place the Beast lived before.”
Before? I shook my head, trying to understand. Before I’d brought Oliver into the world he’d only been in the …
“He went to my dreamscape? It’s real?” My voice was faint. Breathless.
“You made it real, Fortuna.”
Savannah said it quietly, but I still stared at her as if she’d shouted the words at me.
I’d known the magnitude of my own power, of course.
It was hard to deny after I had closed the Gate to Hell and leveled the devil’s army.
But the ability to create entire worlds … my own pulse felt unsteady now.
Then I reminded myself that I did have limits.
“There’s one glaring flaw in your plan. I have no idea how to kill Oliver.
Maybe you missed it, but we already tried to do it a few times.
He’s as immortal as Lucifer. Which I’m now realizing is your fault, because you did the fucking spell that tied their lives together! ” A hysterical laugh burst out of me.
As if Savannah was reading my mind—hell, maybe she was with another twisted, fucked-up spell—her jaw tightened. “I didn’t make Oliver a monster, Fortuna. He’d already killed your parents when my spell took hold,” she told me.
“How far back did Nym go?” I asked sharply. Knowing the exact moment wouldn’t make it more bearable, but it felt important. When had they doomed my best friend and sealed his fate forever? When had we lost any chance at happiness? And why hadn’t I even noticed it happen?
Savannah swallowed. “I have no idea. We didn’t talk about that. He went to whenever the Beast was most vulnerable, I would guess.”
Most vulnerable. My mind halted on those words. I had an idea. A pretty good one, actually.
In the beginning, back when Oliver had first started appearing in my dreams, he hadn’t been the lovely, kind boy I would eventually fall in love with.
At his birth, Oliver had been comatose. Pale, thin, unremarkable.
A broken thing that could not bear the shock of existing.
It was only later that Oliver became strong and beautiful and golden.
He began to paint. He started to manipulate the dreamscape.
He grew into something intelligent and powerful.
My stomach dropped as another realization hit me. No wonder I’d fallen for Lucifer so hard, so quickly.
I’d already been in love with the parts of him that lived in Oliver.
I raised my gaze back to Savannah, and now I wasn’t sure who I resented more.
Her, Nym, Lucifer, the Order … or myself.
“You damned him,” I said thickly. “He was just a little boy. A weird little boy, maybe, but after I put him in the dreamscape, that’s what he became.
And you damned him. Any chance he might’ve had at a life …
it was all gone the second you helped Nym with that spell. ”
This time, Savannah’s voice was steady. “Yes,” she said.
Another silence swelled in the room. The air was so cold and tense that it made me think of the snowy battlefield we’d just left behind.
The ticking of all Nym’s clocks was gone now, and in their absence, Savannah’s fear and my fury were all that was left.
I could still sense that flavor, but there wasn’t as much as I would’ve thought.
Savannah had seen me at my worst—she knew the risks of pissing me off or betraying me.
I looked into her eyes and I saw that she’d accepted the consequences of this choice she’d made.
Tension thrummed between us like a heartbeat.
Then I walked away.
I was still staring up at the house as the memory faded.
I didn’t feel ready to go in yet, but I suspected I never would.
I couldn’t wait any longer. So I walked up the path and climbed the porch steps, each one letting out a whimper as I went.
The front door was slightly ajar. It opened with the slightest push, revealing the same dark hallway I’d seen before. The same awful smell.
I found Oliver in the living room.
His back was to me, his wings drooping. The ends trailed along the floor, leaving a line through all the blood.
I stepped over the bodies and moved to stand in front of Oliver, deliberately keeping my eyes on his face.
The corners of his mouth turned downward, a faint line appearing between his brows.
He looked at me as if he wasn’t completely certain I was there.
“Fortuna?” Oliver said. His voice was faint and confused.
Ignoring the carnage all around us, I reached up and cupped his blood-flecked cheek. “Come with me,” I managed.
There was wariness in Oliver’s eyes, but he followed easily enough.
I led him out of that reeking house and into the fresh air.
The second we reached the bottom of the steps, I cast my gaze toward the sky.
Suddenly stars glittered above us, cheerful guides as we stepped into the woods, where life had always felt so much simpler.