I tried to focus, tried to make sense of it as my shifting vision turned to a door I knew all too well, a door that swung open to reveal a man I had hovered over for month, a man I had been forced to watch slowly die.
“You have to save Daddy!” her shout echoed through me as if she was standing right beside me, something I couldn’t completely discount. “Fight him!”
The walls shivered as I took a step forward, my motions uncontrolled, the forceful movements jutting through me as my hand rose toward Thom.
“You have to save Daddy!”
No!
The word was a tiny spark inside my head as the magic grew, the powerful heat of it triggering a knowledge and a control that surprised me. My magic, my soul, they were connected.
I felt the power grow as my consciousness did, raging through me as the black void flashed before me. The spot of black was gone before the room came again, the walls and surroundings vibrating so badly that, for all I knew, the earth had begun to shake, the earth had turned to liquid.
No!
The call was a shout inside my mind, a determination to keep fighting. It was then that I realized the desperate call was not mine, but that of another. One who was very quickly losing control.
Edmund.
No! It came again.
This time, I laughed.
I laughed as the shaking surrounded me, as the world came into focus, as I ran from Thom, everything drifting from black to grey until there was only black.
The burn was more than I could fathom.
I had spent the last thousand years avoiding this never-ending pain, since the night the black water had licked against my chest, creating long, red lashes that never healed. The pain had gotten worse with each burn, with each drop the black water had littered against my body. The palm I had burned getting the water into Joclyn in a moment of life or death, the welt on my arm from trying to save her, each one had branded me. Now they burned with a deeper agony than I had ever felt, an acute pain that was ripping me apart as I willingly followed it, as I let it devour me.
I followed the burn as I held Joclyn against me, her panic moving through me, her heart beating against mine. A burning force spread to every inch of me, tensing my muscles, tightening in my stomach. It grew until all I could feel was the heat that had encompassed my body, the intensity of it not just mine, but hers, as well.
The pain was us.
The magic was us.
It was everywhere.
I couldn’t stop screaming. I couldn’t escape it.
And then it was gone.
Gone in one numbing blast, leaving me with the shadow of the Black Water and the familiar warmth of Joclyn’s magic against my soul.
There was nothing else. No screams. No panic from my brother. I couldn’t even physically feel Joclyn where I held her against me.
Heart thundering in my chest, I opened my eyes, expecting to see the calm silver of hers, expecting this nightmare she had been trapped in for the last few hours to be gone, for everything to be okay.
However, she wasn’t there. Nothing was there, nothing except a different nightmare, one I hadn’t expected and couldn’t understand.
I wasn’t even sure where I was.
I was surrounded by white, my consciousness thrust into a void, a rip in time where nothing existed except me.
Everything intensified in unrequited panic as I spun on the spot, desperate to find her, to find anything that would clue me in to what had happened. Nothing was there.
Simply air and space.
“Joclyn!” I yelled, dread growing as I searched for my mate. My magic stretched away from me in a frantic need to find her, my hands grasping through the white space before me as though her sleeping body would be hidden beyond what I could see.
Nothing.
“Joclyn!”
No answer.
Thinking from beginning to end over everything that had happened, my mind ran on overdrive as my heart thundered in my ears, the sound slowing down as it faded to a low buzzing that echoed around me like a hive of bees.
“Joclyn?” I said again as her magic filled me, the slow burn so familiar my agitation calmed with the knowledge she was there. She was close.
“Joclyn?” I called again, trying to follow the pull of her magic, trying to find her. Still, nothing. Nothing to follow, just the familiar heat of her, the usual pull coming from somewhere deep inside of me. The immense wall of her power was so strong I couldn’t even feel my own anymore.
She was all there was.
“Joclyn,” I gasped as I collapsed to the ground, the demands of her magic so intense I was certain I would be strangled by it.
“Hello.” A child’s voice blossomed out of the white nothing like a gentle lullaby, jolting me out of my alarm as the weight of Joclyn’s magic restrained me.
“Joclyn?” I asked hesitantly even though I knew it wasn’t her. It wasn’t her voice, yet I knew it was familiar.
“Hello.” The warmth of Joclyn’s magic pulled at me as the child spoke, an unfamiliar heat moving alongside it, moving through it like a shadow.
“Hello?” I looked up, hoping to see the child or some other creature standing before me. But there was nothing.