Page 14 of Loving Amari

I look up at him with fear in my eyes. I don’t know what’s happening. I can’t control my magic. Amari starts to climb out of bed, but something happens. The energy gets bigger, like a tidal wave building inside me, and it’s like a blink. I disappear, teleporting right out of the room.

Before I know it, I’m suddenly in limbo, standing around looking at the void. The energy is still pulsing around me.

“Shit.”I’m getting frustrated because I hadn’t planned to come to limbo for a couple of days. I need to be home for the opening event for Amari’s technology center.

I look around and start walking. I’m in a different part of the void, somewhere I haven’t explored before. The darkness here is absolute, like someone snuffed out every star in the universe at once. It’s not just the absence of light. It’s the absence of everything. No sound except my own breathing. No sensation except the strange energy still crackling around my fingers. Even gravity feels wrong here, like I’m standing on solid ground but could just as easily be floating.

The magic still pulses from my fingers, pink threads weaving between them like living things.

Vertro suddenly appears, his massive form towering over me. He’s even bigger than I remember, his body easily the size of a small car. His legs are thick as tree trunks, covered in bristly hairs that seem to absorb what little light exists here. He seems to have a protective stance, his body positioned between me and something I can’t yet see.

Vertro doesn’t communicate like the others. He doesn’t send images since he’s not born of Mother Fate but born of man. But he’s still made of the two children Brookstone and Blackburn used to create him. Verde and Petra live on in him somehow.

I look at Vertro. “What are you protecting me from?”

Then I turn around and start walking again. My footsteps make no sound in this place. I stop when my magic pulses more around my fingers. I hold up my hand, staring at it. The pink light grows brighter, more intense. Then I gasp when the magic spills from my fingers and a door suddenly appears.

A door. In limbo. Where nothing exists unless I make it.

I furrow my brow. “What is this?”

I look to Vertro who’s still watching me, guarding me. The void of limbo is nothing but an endless void of darkness unless it’s something I make. I wonder if this is something Tabatha left behind.

The door is ornate, carved from what looks like dark mahogany with silver inlays forming patterns I don’t recognize. Spirals and geometric shapes that seem to shift when I’m not looking directly at them. I reach for the brass handle shaped like a twisted vine, my fingers trembling slightly. When I touch it, another surge of power shoots through me.

I turn the knob and pull.

The door opens to reveal a small room. It’s strange. There’s a bed pushed against one wall, a dresser on the other, some dim lighting from a source I can’t identify. The space is maybe ten feet by ten feet, claustrophobic. But what draws my attention are the other doors. Four of them. Each one different from the others, positioned on different walls of the cramped space.

I step inside, looking around nervously.

The door suddenly slams shut behind me with a deafening bang. I spin around and grab the handle, yanking on it. Locked.I try to use my magic, pink threads wrapping around the knob, pulling, pushing, burning. Nothing works.

“What the hell is going on?”

My heart races. I look around the room more carefully. The bed is neatly made with dark sheets. The dresser has notebooks stacked on top of it, their covers worn and weathered. The lighting comes from nowhere and everywhere at once, a sourceless glow that makes the whole space feel unreal.

I walk over to the dresser where I see the notebooks. I start to pick one up, my fingers brushing the cover, but I stop when I hear the sound of a crying toddler coming from one of the four doors.

My head snaps toward the sound. A child. There’s a child crying.

I turn around and walk over to the door cautiously. My hand hovers over the doorknob. Every instinct tells me this is wrong. This is a trap. But that crying. That helpless, frightened crying.

I put my hand on the doorknob and turn.

When I open it, I’m shocked.

I know this room. The soft blue walls. The mobile hanging over the crib with little bears and moons. The scent of lavender and baby powder. It’s the nursery of little Prince Solomon on the Royal Island. Queen Anora’s son. My cousin’s baby. King Amir’s heir.

I step through the doorway and suddenly, I’m no longer in limbo. The transition is seamless, like stepping through a curtain. The door to limbo is still open behind me, a rectangle of darkness against the nursery wall.

I turn my head and see a large male in a cloak standing over Solomon’s crib. Blue magic swirls around him, streams of it pulling from the crying toddler and flowing into the cloaked man like water.

Rage floods through me. “What the fuck are you doing to my cousin?”

I use my magic immediately, pink threads shooting from my fingers like spears aimed at his head.

The man turns around and grins at me. He’s a Black man with grey short curly hair and a grey beard. His face is unfamiliar, but striking. Sharp cheekbones. Intense eyes the color of sapphires. He’s wearing clothing from my timeline during King Henry the First’s reign. Long robes with intricate embroidery. A belt with strange symbols.