Asylum (Causal Enchantment #2)(78)

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Never, maybe.” The room started to spin. “I can’t even heal you! It’s like there’s some sort of antibody for anything done by vampires and witches, coursing through your veins. I had no idea you’d do something so foolish . . . if I had, I would have warned Max.” She paused to reach forward and squeeze my leg with one delicate hand. “But we’re lucky it played out as it did. If Caden had tried to turn you—”

I gasped, my eyes widening as I finished her sentence in my head: Caden would have died. I instinctively tightened my grip on him, needing to feel him next to me, to be sure he was alive. A fresh batch of tears welled in my eyes.

“Come on,” Amelie murmured, taking Sofie by the hand and smacking Max on the rump. “It’s getting crowded in here.”

Sofie’s eyes flitted to Caden and a silent exchange passed between them, one I couldn’t read. The others quietly left, shutting the door behind them, leaving me alone with Caden. He pulled my head to his chest and wrapped his arms around me, running his fingers through my hair until my sobs lessened and my tears dried up. “Here, you should lie down. You lost a lot of blood.” He lowered me down to the bed and pulled a navy blue wool blanket up to cover my body. I was still dressed in the revealing tribal garment.

“What are we going to do?” I asked, my voice hollow, as I gazed up at him. Sadness passed across his face but he said nothing, his eyes roaming my face, his fingertips grazing my cheek, running along my lips, as if he couldn’t keep his hands off me. And why should he? I was finally with Caden again, I realized. As if possessed by some crazed, hormonal person, I suddenly couldn’t control myself. My hands flew behind his head and yanked him down to me with surprising force. I pressed my lips up against his as tears began streaming down my cheeks again, the sound of an invisible clock ticking away in my head. I was already running out of time.

Eventually, Caden reached up to gently untangle my hands from his hair. He broke away from my kiss and lay down beside me, chuckling. “Slow down. I’m not going anywhere.”

I curled up against his chest. “No, but I will . . . soon.” I wasn’t sure which was worse—wearing the pendant or not. Either way, I had no control of my life. “It’s impossible.”

Caden kissed the top of my head and wiped the tears away from my cheek. “No, Sofie will figure it out. She’s smart like that.” He sounded so confident. “Nothing is impossible, remember? You taught me that.”

I stretched my arm out to drape it over his side, reveling in the feel of him. I had Caden. For how long, I didn’t know, but he was here, with me, something I’d feared would never happen. I needed to be happy with what I had. “At least Rachel is gone,” I said half-heartedly, trying to sound optimistic. “And Ursula. And Viggo has no more use for me. So life can kind of get back to normal. We’re mega-rich. We can go buy a nice condo with Amelie, Bishop, and Fiona and leave all this behind. Until I get too old and wrinkly for you, anyway,” I added bitterly.

“Evangeline,” Caden whispered, his voice cracking. I slid away from his chest to look up at his face. Raw pain stared back. “Fiona’s gone.”

I flinched as if he had slapped me. “What do you mean . . . ” A vision flashed in my mind—of a destroyed atrium, strange witches, and Fiona’s dead violet eyes staring up at me. I sat up. “It was real?”

“What was real?”

“I . . . I saw it,” I stammered. “I saw Fiona in the atrium!”

Caden was shaking his head. “Wait a minute; you’re not making sense. How could you see her?”

“I saw the witches and the atrium, and burned bodies, and—”

“What?” Caden looked at me as if I’d grown a third eye on my forehead.

I barely heard him; I kept babbling on about the weird atrium nightmare I had while on the platform. “And that voice—Veronique’s voice—and the statue . . . ” I gasped aloud, groping forward for Caden’s arm as realization dawned on me.

“What?” Caden was growing impatient; he grabbed my chin and pulled my face to look straight at his. “Tell me. You’re scaring me!”

“I think Veronique’s free,” I whispered. It had been real. When the chief reversed Sofie’s magic, he must have also reversed the tomb spell and somehow, because of my link to her soul, I saw it firsthand. She would be free, he’d promised. That didn’t just mean her soul. It meant her physical body.

Caden’s eyes widened, then darted to the closed door. He lifted his finger to his mouth to indicate that I needed to be quiet. “Why would you think that?” he whispered.

By the time I finished quietly describing the vision, Caden was squeezing the bridge of his nose. “This is bad. This is so very bad.”

“Who were those witches, Caden? What happened over there?”

Caden put his arm around me and squeezed me close to him, whispering in my ear, “Don’t mention anything about Veronique to anyone just yet.”

“Why?”

“Because, it’ll set off Viggo and Mortimer.”

Viggo and Mortimer . . . weren’t they long gone? How would they find out?

Caden gave me a strange look. “Come on. You may as well see for yourself.” He scooped me up in his arms and pulled me off the bed, blanket and all. I reveled in the feel of his body as he carried me through the narrow hallway into the main cabin.