Page 29

Chapter 29

People Change

Blake

The living room had emptied, all except for Cassius, who sat on the couch with a purring Bambi on his lap. “Hey, Cass.”

My best friend looked at me with the saddest eyes I’d ever seen. His normally bright green gaze looked clouded over with a dense fog. He had been walking through the house like a ghost with an iron ball chained to his ankle, and I didn’t blame him. I had tried to talk to him on a few different occasions, but he never felt as though it were the right time, and I respected that. I gave him space while trying to do things in the background that made life a little easier for him. I made sandwiches for him and had done a load of his laundry without him asking. But things were getting to a head, and it was time we confronted the issue at hand.

“This is so fucked,” he said, dropping his head into his hands. Bambi looked up with a little “coo,” her long teeth rubbing against the leather couch.

“Want to step outside for some fresh air? ”

“Sure,” he said. He gently scooped Bambi up and placed her down on a pillow. She stood and stretched, her claws catching on the fabric.

“She’s probably going to want to follow you. I noticed she’s been your shadow lately.”

“She has, huh? She’s a good kitty. Probably can sense how messed up I am.”

I let out a pained breath. He really did look like he’d been through the wringer. He must have lost at least five pounds, and the dark circles under his eyes were like two permanent shadows he couldn’t escape from.

We walked out of the house in silence. The desert was calm, the last rays of sunlight stretching out toward the darkening sky. It was peaceful. A complete contradiction to how I felt inside.

Cassius sat down on the steps to the front door. I leaned against the railing. A gentle breeze started to stir, bringing with it the typical cool that came with a desert night.

“How did I get here?” Cassius asked. He kept his gaze trained straight ahead. “How? How did my dad betray me like this? Betray everyone like this?”

“I wish I had an answer for you.”

“He could have gotten us killed. Did he even think twice about that?”

A hard, icy-cold lump formed in my throat. I could hardly swallow around it. I didn’t think he did, but I also didn’t want to say that out loud. I let the silence speak for me, filled with the occasional chirps of crickets. It was hard to imagine the position Cass was in. I couldn’t comprehend my own father ever betraying me the way Cass’s had. And it was made all the worse by the fact that he had already lost his mother. Her death had pulled them together with a bond that only true tragedy could form, and now that bond was ruined. Destroyed. And without it, Cassius was sent adrift. It was as if he had lost both his parents, even though one still walked this Earth.

“Maybe there’s a good explanation for all this,” I offered weakly.

“You and I both know there isn’t.”

“He could be being controlled somehow? Or coerced.”

“I know my father—at least, I thought I did. He’s not someone who can be controlled.”

“Anyone can be controlled by something or someone.”

Cassius offered a flickering smile. “You’re always the optimistic one. I appreciate it. I do. But I also think it’s bullshit. My father made his choice; he stole that dagger and worked with my uncle to try and abduct Xavier. He didn’t care who got in the way, who got hurt.”

A thought formed in my clouded mind. “Why does he want to use the dagger so badly?”

“You know why. They want to go back in time and free the Chaos King. Why else?”

“It doesn’t make sense to me. Your dad is a smart man; he knows that nothing good would come from that. And he never showed signs of ever being the Chaos King’s servant. So why is he so hell-bent on freeing him?”

Cassius shrugged. “Does it matter? The fact is that he does.” He leaned back, tilting his head back to stare at the stars. “What would happen if he gets what he wants? Would we even know? Or would we just blink and all of a sudden, the world is different?”

I thought back to the brief moments that Xavier manipulated time, for vastly better reasons than the one Cassius’ dad wanted. “We’d blink and things would change. We wouldn’t even know it.”

“Fuck. Who knows if I’d even be born. How does he not… how does that not hurt him?” Cassius choked back tears, trying his best to hold them down. They were too strong. He sucked in a deep breath and let out a sob on the exhale. I wrapped an arm around his shoulders and pulled him into my side. “It’s so fucked.”

“It is,” I said, unable to sugarcoat this. Tears pricked at the corners of my eyes. I wanted to hold my composure together so that my pain didn’t add to my friend’s, even though my heart hurt so badly for him.

“It’s like… I just think back to being a kid. To him being so excited for me on Christmas mornings, to him taking me to school, to him being such a fucking role model. He was my hero. He was my mom’s hero. He… he… he’s a monster. And I never knew it. Never saw it.”

“There’s no way you could have. And he may not have been a monster back then either. People change. Something may have happened that caused him to crack. Maybe losing your mom affected him more than anyone ever knew. Pain can break people, especially that kind of pain, that grief.”

“You mean the kind I’m feeling right now?”

It was like a punch directly to the chest. “Yes.”

Cassius sniffled, wiping his face. I rubbed his arm. The moment drifted into a heavy silence. Not exactly the comforting kind. Nothing would be comforting through this. Especially not because the hardest part was still ahead of us. We had to now infiltrate that lab and take back that dagger, and that would put us directly in front of the man who caused all this trauma to begin with. There wasn’t even a guarantee that any of this would work either. It would be the most dangerous thing either of us ever faced.

My heart made a few errant beats. My chest tightened. It was as if my ribs had fallen loose and were clicking together inside my body. Nothing felt right. Nothing felt good. It was the anxiety eating away at me. And that was likely only a fraction of the turmoil Cass experienced.

I rested my head on his shoulder and said, “Remember when we were kids, when we’d get lost in the neighborhood and feel like the entire world was a playground?”

“I do,” he said.

“When did that playground turn into a gauntlet?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe it never was a playground. It was all lies.”

“Maybe…”

“Thank you, though. For sticking through this with me. For always being there for me. You’ve helped me keep going; you always had. It was your optimism that did it for me. You never let the gauntlet take that from you. You always thought something better was coming, even when there’s no way to see past the shitstorm.”

“It’s the only way to do it. And it’s true. When has there ever been a permanent rainstorm? The sun always finds a way to come through.”

Cassius nodded his head. I lifted mine. The bent, thick limbs of the nearby Joshua trees appeared to be dancing even though there was no melody in the air. I kicked at a rock by my feet. “You and Xavier seem like a really great match,” Cassius said after a short while. “That makes me happy. Which is difficult to do considering the circumstances.”

“He makes me happy,” I said. A smile tugged at the corners of my lips. “I didn’t think I’d find someone who got me to open up and trust again, to be honest. I wasn’t even looking for it.”

“That’s when it tends to happen, huh?”

“Seriously.”

Cassius leaned back, hands on the stone steps. The desert air was cool now that the sun wasn’t baking the beige rocks and packed dirt. “You deserve it. And you two make the cutest fucking couple. I knew it was going to happen, especially without how bumbly and awkward you were when you first met him. I could tell the butterflies kicked up. And the way he looked at you that first day only confirmed it for me.”

“Really? Why didn’t you say anything?”

He shrugged. “I didn’t want to ruin anything. I felt like I was watching one of those nature documentaries, where they just observe the rare mating rituals of the animals through binoculars.” He chuckled. “Not that I want to see you mating, obviously,” he quickly amended.

My cheeks heated as the scalding hot memory of Xavier taking my virginity rushed back to me. We’d had sex quite a few more times since then, and each time was somehow better than the last. It felt like I’d discovered an entirely new continent, with something fun and new around every corner. A new sensation, a new position, a new sound, new scent, new words. I never wanted the discovery to end.

“Just make sure I’m your best man at the wedding,” Cassius said .

“Let’s not get too ahead of ourselves there.” Although, if I were being truthful, it definitely was something that had crossed through my daydreams, especially lately. But there were way more things to worry about than wedding bells and first songs.

Mainly the end of the world as we knew it.

Cassius gave a stretch and a yawn. It was getting late. The yawn spread to me. We had a long couple of days ahead, so it was best we got some rest.

Plus, I was excited to climb into bed and cuddle with my golden dragon.

“Let’s call it a night,” I said. Cassius nodded and stood. I held his elbow, looking into my best friend’s pained eyes. “It’s going to be okay. Somehow, someway, it’ll turn out okay.”

“I hope so,” he said. He looked back out to the horizon. I could see the tension and fear coiled in his shoulders, wrapping around him like a deadly python.

“Wait… What is that?” Cassius asked, suddenly sounding concerned.

“What?”

“That,” he said, pointing up at the sky. I followed his gaze. At first, I didn’t see anything but a star-blotted black sky. But then, movement caught my eye. Two—no, three… four—dark shadows were cutting through the night sky. Moving incredibly fast.

Too fast.

“Holy shit.” My legs almost gave out from underneath me. A deafening roar split through the air. “Dragons.”

These weren’t regular dragons, though. I could see their inky-black scales, could see tendrils of something hanging off their wings and jaws. They had bright red eyes that glowed menacingly against the midnight curtain behind them.

Shades mixed with dragons.

Nightmares in physical form.

The battle for our lives had finally begun.