Synergy (See #3)(22)

“Don’t you get it?” he said as his eyes locked with mine. “He’ll always be a breath away, and the moment I even come close to losing control, he’ll kill me. We can never be alone again. We can never rest.”

I was seething with anger. I could feel it pumping through my veins. “I don’t care where he is – don’t you get that? Am I grateful that he saved my life? Yes. Do I think he knows what’s going on around us, around The Realm – that he can help us? Yes. But I swear to you, if he lays one hand on you, I won’t rest until he dies.”

“Let me explain something to you,” he said as he stepped closer to me. Matching my furious glare. “This will not be a poetic death. When light leaves you, you will die every death that you’ve ever escaped. It will not be swift; it will take months -- and you will live in hell.”

“Who says?” I made sure my chin was up; that my stare and stance were matching his. If he was trying to make me fear death he was insane. I only had one fear. And he was pushing me to face it. Losing him was worse than any death.

His emerald stare rained down on me with sympathy and a tinge of regret. “Silas. It’s happened before; he showed me.”

“Showed you what?”

I could swear I that I felt the air in the room ache with grief as he continued his stare. If he had the power he would turn back time, go back to our beginning and ensure that we never met, and that was agony. Seeing that in his eyes was death.

“After my death in our last life, you ended your life, but you didn’t die instantly...I guess that’s why I’m almost a year older than you. Silas watched you go through that, and he swears he’ll never witness that again.”

“I guess my point about change has been proven.” I said with a smirk. That expression was my only defense. I could not let him see how afraid I was. I knew if I wavered from my resolve that he’d find a way to leave me behind while he fought this evil.

“What point?” he asked with an ache in his velvet voice.

I swallowed trying to hide my nervousness. “That it happens and it hurts, but when it’s over, you have no regrets, no pain.”

“How was that point made?” he bellowed, looking at me like I was insane. His anger and fear only made me love him more. Made me want to fight harder for him to see that I didn’t care. He was mine. I wasn’t walking away from us. Ever.

“What bad came out of my death then? Let me think. We were born again, we fell in love again, we stood by each other in innocence, every first, every beautiful life changing experience was shared with you. Eighteen years isn’t long enough for the sacrifice you say I made. If you regret my death, then make it up to me now; love me fearlessly and never let me go.”

With one swift step, he pulled me to him and kissed me passionately. I felt his warm lips encasing mine, his strong hands gripping my sides. My lips moved across his jaw, and in his ear I whispered, “I’ll let you know when your debt is paid, a million years from now.”

His arms tightened around me and swayed me from side to side. The coldness in the room vanished and his warmth was all I could feel. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

“You have no reason to be sorry.”

He leaned back and looked into my eyes as he traced my jaw with his fingertips, which were gently humming with his energy. “I’m sorry I can’t beat this.”

“We’re beating it right now.”

“I love you,” he murmured as his eyes fell into mine. “No matter what happens, never forget that.”

“What’s going to happen? What do we do now?”

He let his hands fall from my face, then walked to the couch and fell into it. “I can’t get to those boys. I tried.”

That statement made my heart jump. I knew who was guarding those boys. “What did you do? How did you try?”

His soulful eyes gave me a quick glance, assuring me he had stayed on the safe side of that devil. “I recreated the place that was destroyed in that dimension. I looked everywhere for them. Every time I thought I was close, they’d vanish. It’s like they’re asleep inside a nightmare. I know I’m reaching them because they repeated those lyrics, an angel falling, a devil risen ... I just can’t get them to wake up. They must think I’m a part of it, that I’m going to hurt them or something.”

“Sounds like you got closer than I did,” I muttered, letting out a deep breath. He hadn’t seen the devil I’d fought.

“Maybe if I can find their bodies outside of The Realm, I could see where they were, chase them from their perspective.”

I sat down next to him. “Are you sure it’s Landen? That they took our escape?” I asked, having no idea how we’d find the bodies of people we didn’t even know.

He nodded.

“How? How can you know for sure? We’ve never seen him. Even in The Realm, I couldn’t make out their faces.”

He let his head fall back on the couch and reached to lace his fingers through mine. “I can’t figure out how I even knew to go back, how what I saw was in reality. I really thought it was just a game Bianca was playing.”

“We’ve stepped into reality before,” I mumbled.

We’d figured out that when we saw ourselves into a memory, moved to a place with a thought in this world, sometimes the people there could see us, and sometimes they couldn’t. We assumed it was because some people were more aware than others. We were always careful when we appeared somewhere. We didn’t want to terrify anyone, and at times, from the fearful expressions of those around us, we understood that we were perceived as ghosts or something like that.