Page 124 of Walking in Darkness

They once again careened to a standstill, their boots skidding over the coarse, jagged rocks as they stumbled in shock.

Gasps of disbelief jutted from their aching lungs as they gaped at the affliction set out before them.

It was a giant fissure.

A crack that buckled through the cragged, rutted floor.

A fracture that opened directly to Earth below, and Kruen were slipping through it.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Aria

“Rise up and go.”

It was the faintest voice. A high-pitched tinkling in her ear. Dragging her through the nothingness where she typically hovered between sleeping and reality.

That moment when she was neither human nor ethereal.

“Do you feel it? The call?” the voice whispered. “You were made for this. Rise up and stand for the ones who cannot stand for themselves. End the one who seeks to destroy. Only you can. It’s time. It’s time to lead.”

The call howled around her, dragging her spirit in a direction she didn’t understand. The only thing she knew was she had to heed it.

And the sky opened up in the distance.

A magnet.

A lure.

The gravity a hook deep in her soul.

And in it, she saw his face.

Ambrose.

And Valeen’s voice whispered again, “Go.”

A cry ripped out of me as I flew upright in bed, disoriented as I held the blanket covering us against my chest.

My mind was a hurricane. Still stuck somewhere between Faydor and the fog where I’d drifted right before awakening.

Where I’d been removed from Faydor, and rather than being catapulted back to this reality, I’d been held in a dream.

Pax jolted up by my side, as if we’d been attached, both of us waking at the same moment. He grabbed for me the second we were both upright, palms rushing out to frame my face.

“Did you see it? Did you feel it?” he demanded. “Were you dreaming, too?”

My throat was too thick to speak, so I only nodded, croaking out a bare “Yes.”

There was a sudden pounding down the hall before a fist battered at the door. One second later, Dani threw it open. She stumbled in, pink hair a mess, desperation written in her expression. “I had a dream,” she gasped, “and so did Timothy.”

“We did, too,” I managed to force out.

“It feels like we’re being called somewhere else. Someplace specific. But where?” she begged, her desperation bleeding out onto the floor, the echo of her words climbing the walls with her urgency.

“That’s exactly the way I feel,” I told her.

But I thought we all already knew it. That the dream had been the same for each of us.