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Buried

JEDIDIAH

T he twins stood in the dark, eyeing me with disappointment and contempt. Their red hair was dull in the absence of light, their mirrored complexions nearly translucent.

Emotion surged through me, sending my heart up my throat. “Raziel! Demitri!”

They glanced at each other in a silent exchange before fixing their eyes back on me.

I ran for them, but I couldn’t get closer. They stayed the same distance away from me in the sea of endless black. They watched me, almost pitifully, as I struggled to get to them.

“What’s going on?” I demanded. “Where are we?”

Nowhere and everywhere.

My spine steeled. Jerking my attention to the left, I found another. A female, with springy black hair and dark skin draped in robes of shadows. Her eyes were pure black pits. She grinned at me, dark and mocking. When she spoke, her voice was inside my head. You are so not ready for what you find here .

“Natalia.”

Yes and no.

I frowned cynically. “What does that mean?”

I have found fragments of myself here. Fragments so profound, the person I was before I came here is no longer. I am more now.

I made a face at her egregious appearance and nonsense. “I hate to break it to you, but you’re possessed.” I backed away from her.

What a mortal judgment, Jedidiah. Have you no spiritual depth? Have you not been paying attention to Nyx’s metamorphosis? What do you think her shifted form is? She is reclaiming her Night. Her Moon. Soon she will wield its flame.

My heart—surprising that I could feel it this deep in the void—thrashed.

“I don’t understand.”

No, you sure don’t. And even after your time here, you still won’t. Your walls are made of titanium, and you do not have the will to collapse them yet. You’ll hardly find any aspects of yourself here this time. You are here to see your brother.

I glared at her. “I don’t have a brother.”

She scoffed. Denial is poison for the soul.

She was not Natalia, the Luna Academy girl. The thing standing before me now was an entity—a malignant spirit taking her appearance. I knew well enough to never trust a fucking spirit.

Clenching my fists at my side and speaking from my fucking chest, I roared, “ LEAVE .”

Without so much as a word or a blink, she vanished.

I breathed hard through my closed jaw. Turned back to the twins, who were even further away now, hardly visible in this treacherous, murky realm.

“Wait!” I called, hustling forward again. “Guys, wait.”

“You have forgotten us,” they said together.

“No!” I shouted. “I haven’t. I swear! I’ve just—”

“Buried us.” They moved backward like phantoms, disappearing into dark smoke.

“No. No, you don’t understand. Wait!” I lunged forward, meeting an invisible edge that had me plummeting into nothing.

My screams were all I had as the viscous vacuum tube of the universe sucked me down, down, down, forever down.

Lifetimes went by before I was abruptly spat out onto a beach. Blinking and choking as a world emerged around me, dimly lit but familiar. Eyes as silver as daggers blaring into mine. Blood on my tongue. Hot agony spreading through my stomach from where my father had just stabbed me. Death whispering promises in my ear of worlds far greater than this.

“You can’t die,” a voice said. But I was fading, laughing as the darkness claimed me.

I was not afraid of death. I welcomed it like a dear old friend.

A rush of cold, invigorating power shot into my mouth and down my throat. Through my veins. Lighting me the fuck up. A voice riding the wind in my ears. “You cannot die.”

I heard him but when my eyes shot open, he was gone and there was—nothing. I was standing in the void again. Alone.

I walked through the fathomless black lands for what was surely an eternity. Forever, I saw nothing. It was as if I’d been banished from the universe.

Until a door appeared. Out of nowhere, nothing. The steel door loomed tall and ominous, summoning me.

A way out, it was surely not. I went through it anyway.