Witness: See Series (Volume 1)(58)
His eyes followed me as I knelt down at the edge of the pile, then crawled closer to him.
“You’re in pain?” I whispered, remembering the shadows pouring into him – the light pulling it out of him.
“Not too bad…just feel weak – tired.”
“How often has that happened? How many times have those shadows poured into you?”
His eyes slowly moved across my face. “A few.”
My hand slowly moved across his chest. “Is there still darkness inside you?” I asked in a shaky voice.
His hand met mine, and I felt the hum his skin always seemed to provide. “According to Silas, it is.”
A sickening guilt absorbed me as I fought back tears. “I can’t conceive that to be real – another life – some kind of battle between light and dark. We’re just kids – fighting to have a normal life…together.”
His eyes held my gaze and reflected the guilt and grief that I felt. “Silas told us more today than anyone has told us in our entire life…it all makes sense now – why I’m so different from all of you. Why you feel an odd desire to protect me. I think he’s right: I’ll destroy you if we don’t say goodbye.”
Every part of me froze. I couldn’t comprehend the last words he said. He couldn’t have said that we had to break up, that we had to live a life without each other. When his words began to echo in my mind, I had to run. As I rose to my knees, his hand reached for mine.
“Let me go – you don’t wanna be with me,” I said as I choked back tears. Before I could pull away, he’d pulled me to him and I was lying in the center of the pile of curtains and sheets, with him above me.
“Don’t leave me,” he pleaded as his hand cradled my face.
“You just said -” Before I could say another word, his lips were on mine. As mine moved against his, I felt a pull of raw power and emotion – one that told me that if this were our last kiss, I wanted it to be my last breath. I know I’m not one of those mushy girls who say how they feel or repeat the word ‘love’ as if it has no meaning - but right now, I wanted to be that girl. I wanted to tell him how undeniably in love I was with every part of him...I just couldn’t find the words.
His lips slowed against mine. “Without you, there is no point to my existence,” he whispered. “You are the reason I fight this urge to become a demon.”
“You’re not a demon,” I said as my eyes fell into his. “You’re an imperfect soul who fights demons – just like me.”
He rolled to my side and studied every feature of my face with his alluring emerald green eyes.
“I don’t like being the bad guy…I liked it better when I was saving you from Britain – what they are...to find out that I’m one of them is almost too much to bear.”
“You’re not a bad guy. If you want to give any credit to what Silas told me, then see the positive to it; see that in some distant past, I saved you from this - and I know that I’d do it again.”
His eyes filled with sorrow. “I’m not trying to be self-loathing, but you have to see that you were trying to save the lost souls, not me. I was ending them...you wanted to stop the source, not help me.”
“You don’t know that. You can’t remember it anymore clearly than I can. If any of that is true, I doubt you were just a source. If anything, you and I proved then that everything and everyone can change; all they have to do is make the decision to do so.”
His eyes became even more pained. “I don’t know how to change. I don’t know at what point I’m deciding to be good and at what point I’m taking the light of your power.”
“You’re not taking it - I’m giving it to you. I don’t know how I did what I did tonight, but it stopped the shadows from pouring into you and pulled what was there out of you.”
He furrowed his eyebrows, enhancing his alluring eyes. “How do you know that wasn’t what it wanted? That it wanted you to display your power there? I thought by focusing on you that I was saving myself, but now I’m afraid I was leading you into that evil.”
“How?”
His fingertips began to move across my jawline. The look in his eyes told me he was fighting a battle inside of him that I’d barely begun to understand.
“Before, I’d be in a situation where I either needed to focus on you or chase after an image of you; it was like it was training me to see you as a life force. Tonight was the first time it commanded me to ‘take you’, like it knew that I wouldn’t think clearly enough to refuse that command...that I’d see it as a relief...it knew you were there.”
“I want to be your relief. I wanted to give you whatever you needed to stay the person I know that you are.”
Pain echoed in his expression. “There’s a fine line between me taking it and you giving it. Tonight was the first time you were really there, the first time I could have hurt you. It could have gone wrong – very wrong.”
“But it didn’t. Obviously, I had a natural instinct I fell back on – one that’ll save you from this.”
“Perhaps,” he mumbled. “I just don’t know which direction to take now. We were gonna have this concert to help as many lost souls as we could – but now it’s silent...it’s silent because they’ve been pulled into that world...they’ve followed me and the others there.”