Chapter 23

I was plummeting deeper and deeper into the murky water. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t see. So this is what drowning feels like, I thought numbly.

I kicked my legs, trying to fight my way back to the surface. I refused to drown. I could not drown.

“Gemma,” a feathery voice floated up from beneath my feet.

Huh? Was I hallucinating?

I kicked harder and paddle with my arms, giving a very lame attempt at doggy paddling.

“No Gemma, down here,” the voice rippled up through the water.

And then I knew. I don’t know how I knew, just that I did. I knew the voice didn’t mean me any harm. I was supposed to listen to it.

I was supposed to go to it.

I let my legs and arms fall limp, allowing my dead weight to sink me downward to the sandy bottom of the lake.

“Good,” the voice purred. “Now keep coming. I need your help.”

What do you need my help for? I thought because speaking would do nothing but get me a mouth full of water.

To my shock the voice responded inside my head. I need you to save me.

How?

Just trust me.

I don’t know why, but I did. I do trust you.

Good. Now whatever you do, don’t panic.

Why would I panic?

The voice didn’t answer, but I figured out why very quickly as fingers wrapped around my ankles and yanked me down. Despite what the voice said, I panicked and clawed at the water, frantically trying to get away, but it was useless. I tried to scream, but water flooded my lungs. If I didn’t get away, I was a goner for sure. If I didn’t get away, I’d end up a prisoner in The Underworld, at least until I went insane and they killed me.

I needed to get away…

Shaing…shaking….huh….someone…shaking…my shoulder. My eyelids shot open. Disoriented and groggy, I jerked away from whoever was touching me.

“Jeez, Gemma,” Alex said with his hands held up in front of him in a holy-crap-just-calm-down-I-didn’t-mean-you-any-harm kind of way. “Settle down.”

I did a quick scan of my surroundings and realized I was still in the backseat of the GTO, which was now parked in the garage. Laylen and Aislin were nowhere to be seen. It was just Alex and me…Why was it just Alex and me?

“Where are Aislin and Laylen?” I asked, rubbing my sleepy eyes.

“Their already inside,” he gave a nod in the direction of the garage door, “getting things set up.”

Yawning, I stretched out my arms. “So why are we sitting out here?”

“Because you fell asleep and I couldn’t get you to wake up.” He paused, looking as though he was considering something. “Were you having a nightmare?”

A nightmare. That was putting it mildly. “Why do you ask?”

“Because you were getting all squirmy and making these moaning noises.”

Oh. My. Word. I was absolutely mortified. “Oh.”

He waited for me to explain further.

I didn’t.

“Alright.” He sounded a bit irritated. “Let’s go inside.”

Oh, whatever. He could be irritated all he wanted. I was under no obligation to tell him about my dreams. Giving him a recap of what I’d just dreamt about meant having to relive it, which is something I so didn’t want to do. Yeah, I knew it was just a nightmare and everything, but the feelings of fear that I’d felt during it still lingered inside me. And how could I not be afraid? I’d dreamt about the Death Walkers and look how well that had turned out for me. The term “it was just a dream” totally didn’t apply in my life. I knew there was an actual real-life possibility that I really could run into a…what had Alex called them? Water Faeries.

Back inside, Alex immediately jumped into get-a-hold-of-Stephan mode, hitting redial on his phone over and over and over again.

Several failed attempts later, he took up banging his phone against the table like he thought beating the crap out of it would somehow make Stephan miraculously answer the phone. Yeah, all that resulted from that was the back of his phone popping off and the battery sling-shooting out across the table. After that, he gave up his redial mission and tucked his phone away in his pocket.

Feeling tired—my little catnap during the car ride home had done nothing for me—I plopped down in one of the chairs at the table. The box Aislin had gotten from Adessa wasn’t too far off on the table in front of me. It looked so much like a jewelry box, with its tiny encrusted jewels and shimmering shade of gold, that I half expected it to be full of pearl necklaces and diamond earrings. But no, inside the box lay a glinting red crystal. I had the urge to reach out and touch it, let my fingers brush along the jagged edges and see what it felt like. But after the whole getting-sucked-away-after-touching-a-Foreseers-Crystal-Ball incident, I decided to resist the urge.

“So this is it.” Alex came over with his hands stuffed inside his pockets and leaned over my shoulder to get a better look at the crystal. “That’s what’s going to gets us to Afton and back.”

Aislin, who was sitting across the table from me, nodded enthusiastically. “Adessa said it would work better than any other crystal.”

“I sure hope so,” Alex uttered under his breath.

Aislin either didn’t hear him or chose to ignore him. “So we should probably get going.”

Alex reached over my shoulder to collect the gold box. “Where do you want this?”

Aislin made grabbing gestures with her hands. “Here, give it to me.”

Alex handed it to her and she took out the crystal. She retrieved a lighter out of her pocket and lit the wick of the black candle she’d brought with her when she transported us from the bus. Then she set the candle, the lighter, and the empty gold box down on the table.

With her eyes fixed on the glittering red crystal, which she now had grasped in her hand, she asked Alex, “Are you ready?”

“Just a sec.” Alex pointed a finger at Laylen. “Before I go, you better be absolutely certain you can handle this.”

Laylen rolled his eyes. “I’m absolutely certain I can handle this. Now go.”

.    “You better be,” he told him and whipped a finger in my direction. “And you need to promise that if something does happen, you’ll make sure to get away no matter what.”

“Okay, I will,” I promised with zero hesitation.

He looked surprised by my cooperativeness.

Hey, I may be a stubborn brat sometimes, but when it came to not getting killed, I was more than willing to cooperate. Well, I did have to minus the whole trying-to-jump-out-of-the-car-and-run-away incident back at Adessa’s. Oh yeah, and the time I’d tried to run away when I’d first found out about what I really was. But other than that…Oh fine. Whatever. Most of the time, I was a brat. But at least I wasn’t being one now.

Alex still looked taken aback. “Well good.”

“Now are you ready?” Aislin asked, dipping the tip of the crystal into the flame.

Alex scooped the Sword of Immortality up from the table. “Yeah, I’m ready. Let’s go.”

Without taking her eyes off of the crystal, which had now started to smolder a rose tinted cloud of smoke, Aislin instructed Laylen and me to, “Move back a ways unless you want to get taken with us.”

I followed Laylen over to the farthest corner.

As soon as we made it over, Aislin started whispering, “Per is calx EGO lux lucis via.”

The smoke rising up from the candle slowly shifted to the shade of blood red.

Alex got more fidgety the further Aislin got with the whole transporting process. He kept throwing nervous glances at Laylen and me, along with a couple of strange looks I couldn’t quite decipher the meaning of.

“Per is calx EGO lux lucis via,” Aislin voice grew louder.

Another strange look from Alex, this time directed solely at me. His bright green eyes held so much worry that, for an instant, I thought he might run over to me.  I wasn’t going to lie, the look made me feel kind of edgy. It pushed worried thoughts of my own through my mind, and had me questioning just how high of a chance the Death Walkers showing up was. High enough for him, Mr. Stoically Calm In Frightening Situations, to look uneasy.

He kept his eyes glued on me as Aislin screamed, “Per is calx EGO lux lucis via.”

A flash of red. A thunderous burst. And then, just like that, Ailsin and Alex were gone.

I stared at the spot that they’d vanished from, the electricity fizzling out of my body and leaving a giant empty void in its place. Weird.

I shook my head, tried my best to tuck the feeling away, and turned to Laylen. He was watching me with an expression that could only be translated as curious.

“What?” I asked, curious as to what was up with his strange look.

“Oh, nothing.” He shrugged. “It’s just that you look so much like her.”

I tilted my head to the side, perplexed. “Like who?”

“Like your mom.”

Whoa. That threw me for a loop—a big, giant, excited loop. I perked up. “I do? Really?”

He nodded. “Yeah. Well, except for the color of your eyes.”

I frowned. Of course it would exclude the color of my eyes. Why wouldn’t it? No one else had violet eyes. I was really going to have to consider getting some colored contact lenses.

“What is it with you and your eye color?” Laylen asked, semi-amused. “You know the color’s not that bad. In fact, it’s pretty awesome.”

“Awesome huh? I’d say more like different.” And freaky. I sighed. “When you’ve been as different as I have the idea of being normal sounds really nice. But you can’t be one hundred percent normal when you have freaky violet eyes.”

“Yeah, I can understand how you’d want to be normal, considering everything you’ve been through,” he said as he started for the table. “But being normal is way overrated. Trust me.”

“Oh yeah.” I followed the Keeper/Vampire over to the table and sat down.

He laughed, dropping down into a chair. “Yep. Or at least that’s what I’ve been told.”

“So...” I began, wanting to go back to talking about my mom again. “Did you know my mom very well?”

He nodded, stretching out his legs in front of him. “I knew her pretty well.”

“What was she like?” I asked eagerly.

“Well, she was really nice. There was no bad in her at all, and she was also one of those people who you knew you could trust.”

I was soaking up every word he said like it was the oxygen that kept me alive.

His forehead creased over. “You know I’m really surprised you don’t remember anything about her.”

“How could I?” I wondered. “I was only a year old when she died.”

He stared at me, dumbfounded.  “No you weren’t. You were four.”

I shook my head. “No, I was one.”

“No, you weren’t,” he insisted. “A few weeks after you turned four, you went to live with Marco and Sophia.” He paused. “Who told you you were one?”