Lux (The Nocte Trilogy, #3)(60)

But as I walk into my room, I decide I must’ve imagined the whole thing. Salome? Cain and Abel? Judas? Ancient biblical curses and Dare’s grave?

These things are impossible. Rom beliefs aren’t real.

I’m confused, like normal. I haven’t been sleeping well.

Obviously.

That’s the explanation.

I raise my hand to tuck my hair behind my ear, and that’s when I freeze.

My fingers smell like carnations and stargazers, the flowers that were on Dare’s grave.

It was real.





Chapter Twenty-Five





“We’re related,” I tell Dare, and my voice is urgent and my hand is on his chest. “We can’t…we can’t…we can’t be together.”

Dare’s face is pained and he knew.

“You knew,” I whisper, and the pain in my heart pangs loud loud louder, and he looks at me, and his gaze is so sorrowful and real.

“Things change,” he tells me, and I snort with disgust because we were together and it was incest and I still love him more than anything but Finn. I still love him I still love him I still love him.

“God, I want to die,” I groan, and I push him away and he shakes me hard hard harder.

“Don’t you ever say that again,” he snaps. “Don’t you ever. We’ve been through worse and we will weather this storm, Calla. We’re not truly related. It’s just complicated.”

I look at him and my eyes feel like they will explode with pain and with sadness.

“I don’t want to live if I can’t be with you,” and my words are painfully raw with honesty. “I truly don’t.”

“It won’t be this way,” Dare insists, and he is hiding something from me.

Something

Something

Something.

“What is it?” I ask, and I’m hopeful for just a moment.

“I want to tell you everything, but it’s something you have to figure out for yourself,” he tells me. “You have to see it, or you won’t believe it. It’s complex, it’s complicated, it’s real.”

His fingers lace with mine and the touch doesn’t feel wrong, it feels right.

He pulls me to him, and he kisses me, and his lips are warm and his breath is hot and his body is hard against mine.

“This isn’t wrong,” he tells me, and his lips move against my cheek. “Does it feel wrong to you, Calla-Lily?”

No

God

No.

It feels as right as anything.

His hands splay against my back and he whispers. “Don’t ever say that you want to die, Calla. It’s not your fate to sacrifice yourself. It’s not.”

“How do you know what fate has planned?” I ask him, and I pull away so that I can see into his face and he is so serious so serious so serious.

“Because I just do.”

“That isn’t an answer,” I tell him.

“But it is,” he says, and then his hands fall away and he walks into the house.

I’m alone, and the answers chirp from the trees, across the moors and I have to get them. I have to get the answers, because my sanity is slip slip slipping and if I don’t figure it out soon, I’ll be lost.

I know that.

I know that.

So I find my brother, and I insist that we seek out the truth. Finn loves me so he comes and he’s doubtful, but he’s here.

I stand at the mouth of the woods, and the trees bend and hiss and sway, and words form on my lips.

“One for one for one.”

“What does that mean?” Finn asks me, because he’s standing at my elbow.

He won’t leave me, not now that he thinks I’m as crazy as he is.

“We have to keep each other sane,” that’s what he said yesterday after I told him what happened in the mausoleum and in Sabine’s room.

I look at him now.

“I don’t know what it means,” I tell him honestly. “I just hear it in my head, over and over.”

Finn looks at me, and he’s scared and his pale hand grasps mine.

“That’s bad, Cal,” he tells me, and he doesn’t have to say the words because I already know. Of course I know.

I step into the mossy forest, and I’m surrounded by the cool ferns and shadows, and I don’t know why, but I know I’m supposed to be here.

“Don’t,” Finn urges me to come back, and he won’t follow. “I don’t like the way it feels in there.”

“I don’t either,” I tell him, but I keep going, one foot after the other, because I’m being pulled by an invisible tether or a cord.

Finn stays and his face is worried, but he’s unable to follow, and I don’t judge him for that. The feeling in the woods is oppressive, and dark, and terrifying.

There’s something here.

Something here for me.

Ahead of me, a shadow moves, it lurches, it glides.

I follow it, unable to remain still. It flits in and out of trees, and so do I.

And then finally, finally,

It’s gone, and I’m alone.

I feel the stillness, and I taste it with my tongue, and I’m alone.

I stare about, I whirl in a circle, and there are charred wooden pieces arranged in a circle, a bonfire.