Iridescent (Ember 2) (6 page)

“I feel weak.” She raised her hand, stopping Lofi when she opened her mouth to protest. “I do, but it’s more than that. I’ve never been so out of control. I don’t know if I can stand this much longer.”

“Candra, your best friend just died. If you weren’t feeling out of control, I would worry more.”

Candra bit down on her lip, knowing she wasn’t getting the extent of her emotional turmoil across successfully. She concentrated on the pinched flesh and wondered how much she should share—the dreams, the voice in her head…

“I keep thinking I’m okay. For a few minutes now and again, I am. Then the loss hits me all over.” She rubbed her breastbone with the heel of her hand, right where it hurt the most. “I remember she’s gone, and I want to explode. How can any one person be expected to take this much pain?”

Lofi shrugged. “One person isn’t. We are all here for you.”

“Are you?” Candra flinched at the accusation in her tone. It caught her off guard. A burning sensation crept upward from her tumbling stomach. She hadn’t eaten the breakfast Brie had made and had left a full plate of food behind at the wake. They had served pigs in blankets and soggy triangle sandwiches no one appeared in the mood to eat. “Are you really here for
me
or for what I am?”

Lofi narrowed her eyes speculatively and took a deep breath, giving more thought to her answer than Candra expected. Lofi had always been the most honest, although occasionally, her honesty took some deciphering. “Yes, and yes.”

It wasn’t the answer Candra had expected. Maybe it was a little more
honest
than she’d wanted to hear. Her jaw slackened a little.

“Well—” Lofi sat down lightly on the table and pulled her feet up onto one of the chairs “—I’m not sure we can separate the two. What you are, it’s the reason we are here. It’s the reason Sebastian sought you out.”

Candra slid down onto the floor, keeping her legs out straight, and shivered. Cold tiles were the very least of her worries. “Lofi.” She paused and crossed her legs, questioning one last time if sharing was a good idea. Except her brain didn’t want to cooperate in making any kind of decisions. So she closed her eyes, picturing the image clearly behind her eyelids, and went on regardless.

“I keep having these really vivid dreams. In one of them, it’s the depths of winter. I’m standing by the lake in Fairview Park. It’s snowing, and the ground is frozen over. The sky is so beautiful, swirls of silver and midnight blue textures. Almost as though it’s been painted with oils on a canvas…and it’s dark, but I can see perfectly. I want to reach out and touch it, but every time I do the color moves, shifts…or something. I can’t reach high enough.” Candra reached forward into nothing, straining to touch the beautiful sky in her dreams. Her eyes remained closed, seeing the silver slink into the night above her. Mercury, she decided; it was mercury and not silver. No, it was a memory, not a decision. Something told her reaching for something beyond her was dangerous—lethal. A dreadful shudder rushed through her at the recollection. She tried to hide it, but the barely audible hitch in Lofi’s voice indicated that she’d failed.

Candra pulled her hand toward her and closed her fist, ignoring how her fingers tingled. “I walk out onto the ice. It’s thick and hard to keep my balance. I’m not even sure it can hold me, but I know I have to keep moving. I have to get to the center of the lake… There’s something waiting for me.” Her eyes tightened, straining to see clearer, and her heart rate picked up. Despite the chill radiating through her body, a warm dampness formed over her lip. “The ice begins to crack.” The sound resonated in her ears, like a blade dragged over glass. “I have to get there, so I go down on my stomach to keep going, crawling. All the time, the ice is shivering below me, fracturing outward like a spider’s web. I’m trapped in it. Then I see her—”

She stopped suddenly, almost choking on the vision inside her head. Ivy’s eyes peered out at her from below the ice, wild and terrified. Her cheeks puffed out from struggling to hold onto her breath. She screamed silently for release from her frozen prison, her fingers scrambling against the slick, icy surface, finding no purchase.

Candra’s breathing became more erratic, and her pulse pounded relentlessly below her skin. She wanted to tell Lofi what she saw, but the words wouldn’t come. In the dream, she clawed at the ice. What had seemed so fragile a moment ago had become utterly impenetrable. She couldn’t get to Ivy. Panic set in, and her muscles twitched inside her flesh as tiny electrical currents raced through her. She couldn’t breathe at all now. She banged on the barrier just as Ivy did. Cold seeped into to her, needles of ice jabbing at her skin. They were both hitting the same spot, but Candra knew Ivy was losing her battle. Her eyes were beginning to roll, and bubbles of air popped from her nose.

As kids, they had loved bubbles. They’d remained out on the street for hours, holding up circles of plastic and watching the sun make rainbows across the shiny round surfaces of the bubbles as they floated away.

Candra’s chest burned. The ice pressed hard against her and shook with the force of the rapid slaps of her fist. The pain vibrated through her bones, and every harsh breath pulled the smoky cold inside her lungs, freezing her from the inside out. It hummed through her veins, and she understood instinctively that it would take only moments to reach her heart.

In the distance, she heard a voice calling to her. She told herself to keep going. All Candra knew was that she couldn’t lose Ivy again. The ground below her quaked violently, and a deep crack appeared in the ice. Candra’s insistent thumps intensified at the same time Ivy began to twitch and jerk. Through the murky water, Candra witnessed life draining from her eyes. Ivy’s fingers pressed forward, skimming the under surface of the ice lightly before she began to sink.

“No,” Candra screamed, unsure if it was real. The sound tore at her throat as if it were real, but she couldn’t pull herself away from the dream. Fire ripped through her fingers as she clawed her nails across the crack, desperately wanting to aggravate the rift to breach the surface.

“Candra.” Sebastian’s voice called to her. His hands clung to her shoulders, his strong, warm hands trying to pull her away.

Below her, Ivy sank farther and farther down, disappearing into the inky blackness. With one final ferocious blow, the hairline fracture ruptured outward, and the surface exploded. Ice water consumed Candra, slicing across her flesh and delivering a jolt of undiluted terror instantly to her heart as death claimed her.

Chapter Five

F
OR
O
NCE
, S
EBASTIAN
W
AS
G
LAD
to be clingy and glad that his stubborn pride wouldn’t allow him to let Candra walk away. He had planned to check up on her, and if she’d told him to leave the kitchen, he would have.

He found her in a fetal position on the floor in the grips of some kind of waking nightmare, with Lofi crouched beside her, attempting to coax her awake.

“I don’t know what happened,” Lofi explained in a rush of words. “We were talking, and she just seemed to pass out or something.”

Sebastian fell to his knees on the other side of Candra. His fear escalated to dizzying horror as he watched her body spasm and pain flicker across her expression. Behind her closed eyelids, her eyes darted back and forth quickly, confirming that she was dreaming.

“Candra. Candra, wake up.”

“Brie,” Lofi called urgently, edging back to give Sebastian more room.

He slipped his arm under Candra and pulled her into his lap, but she began to fight him, thrashing in his embrace, aggressively slapping him away.
Not now,
he internally groaned. Draven would see this as a further chink in Sebastian’s relationship with Candra. Even unconsciously, she rejected him.

“What in the Arch…” As if on cue, Draven filled the doorway, his massive shadow pitching them into darkness.

Brie pushed him out of the way; her fierce mothering instincts overrode any sense of self-preservation in his presence.

“What did you do to her?”

Candra’s strength caught Sebastian unaware, and a sticky wetness dribbled over his jaw and down his throat from where she tore at his cheek with her nails. He circled her wrists with his fingers and managed to awkwardly tilt his head and rub his jaw against his raised shoulder. He wanted to wipe all the blood away, but that would mean freeing Candra’s hands. He could handle it if she hurt him, but not if she hurt herself. Whatever conflict raged inside her head, it wasn’t leaving much wiggle room for gentleness.

“What did she say?” he demanded, flashing angry eyes toward Lofi.

If she’d said something to cause this… Damn Lofi and her constant meddling, always believing she knew better than everyone else did.

“Nothing. I don’t know… She began telling me about a dream, and then she went quiet and started shivering. Then you came in.” Lofi stepped back, a vague panic in her rounded eyes.

Brie came closer and slipped her hand into Lofi’s.

“Do something,” Brie pleaded as Candra continued to squirm and twist in Sebastian’s arms.

“It’s not a dream.” All eyes turned toward Draven when he spoke. He locked Sebastian in a meaningful glare, apparently attempting to convey something he didn’t want to say out loud. “Sebastian, remember what I told you about Payne.”

It wasn’t as if he and Sebastian had shared many cozy chats over the years, but they had spoken on a few occasions in private over the course of recent events. The most significant being right before the ball when Draven had revealed what he’d learned about the war in heaven and Payne’s visions.

Tension shot through Sebastian, and his shoulders locked rigid.
A vision…She’s trapped in some kind of vision.

“What?” Brie asked, frustrated and sidling nearer, pulling Lofi with her. “What aren’t you telling us?”

Brie was no fool. Until then, she’d felt they had shared a connection, almost like twins but deeper. They’d possessed an ability to sense each other, and although falling had severed that connection, he knew she could tell he was keeping secrets.

Sebastian’s stomach tumbled as he wondered exactly how he was supposed to interrupt a vision and what it would do to Candra if he did. She was more than their weapon—she had become his hope. Her face drained of color, and her heart galloped below where he held her hands close to her chest.

He looked up, hoping someone would hold the key to this new mystery. One more event in a never-ending chain of events that bound them together, and he had yet to unravel it all. Ananchel was the only one missing. Of course she didn’t care what happened to Candra; she probably resented her for taking her precious Draven’s attention away. None of them, not even Draven, showed any indication that they knew what to do.

With barely a seconds’ notice, Sebastian’s wings burst forth through his skin. Their tremendous weight instantly shifted his center of gravity, and his body compensated for it just as quickly. He couldn’t help their appearance; it was controlled by force of will, and strong emotions made that rocky at best. Right now, he didn’t have the desire or the patience to hide his true nature. Their cumbersome size in the small room didn’t help him in trying to maneuver. The gold-tipped, white feathers snagged on one of the metal rod door handles as he pulled them in behind him. The feather ripped away cleanly but stung as sharp as lemon juice over a deep paper cut. Sebastian hissed out a shrill breath but made no other reaction. He could handle a little pain.

It couldn’t have been more than a minute since Lofi had called out for Brie. In Sebastian’s bewildered state, time seemed to stretch out as if it were a malleable element and not something fixed and unbendable. Candra’s entire body jerked violently in the way someone might wake from a dream of falling. Her eyes blinked open but remained unfocused. The color returned to her face with vengeance, flushing her cheeks dark pink.

“No, no, let me go,” she raged, fighting him with every ounce of strength she possessed.

Draven pushed through Brie and Lofi and knelt down at the other side of her. He restrained her shoulders lightly without saying a word. Sebastian met his eyes for a fraction of a second and had to swallow back the queasiness brought on by what he saw: the tautness of Draven’s jaw, the narrowed gaze, harsh breath, and the tendons straining in his neck…

“Let her go,” Brie wailed, breaking into his thoughts.

Gabe hushed her gently.

“Candra.” Sebastian kept his tone soft in the hope that a calm, unthreatening voice would bring her around faster. “Please, try to relax.”

It took several minutes, but eventually, she sagged, limp as a rag doll. Sebastian released her wrists and brushed the hair away from her damp face. Sweat and tears mingled on her skin. It didn’t escape Sebastian’s attention when Draven kept his hands on her shoulders just a beat longer than necessary before he retreated back behind the others. Nor did he miss that Draven had been able to remain composed and keep his wings hidden, the calm center in the midst of a raging storm.

The worst part was that Draven genuinely cared; Sebastian had glimpsed it in his eyes. It was easier to believe Draven wanted her because he was playing out some other agenda, or because he saw her as a conquest, a way to get something over on him. However, Sebastian recognized himself in Draven during that one strained moment and realized Draven had released Candra from their agreement, but he had far from given up on her.