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ChapterFifteen
Ibolted upright in terror.
Illyria!
Where was she? She had to still be nearby. She wouldn’t have just walked away without causing me way more damage than what I was feeling. Instead of flayed alive, I simply felt sore and antsy.
I looked around and realized I was no longer in the forest, but in a cave. And the warmth beneath me was from another body.
Remy. He’d come into the forest and stopped things before Illyria could really hurt me… then the rain… then the cave.
I turned to look at him, but my sudden jerky movements had woken him already, and he was reaching out to grasp my arms.
“Are you all right now? Did it wear off?”
“What do you mean?” Even as I asked, I knew what was different from before I’d fallen asleep.
I could move again. My limbs were now fully under my control. To test it, I lifted my arms and touched my face, my neck, then reached up to touch my hair. As I ran my hands over it, I could feel the spot where part of my curls were missing.
With that, rage roared to life inside me again.
“Illyria did this. She snuck out in the middle of the night and I followed her, but she knew I was coming. It must have been a vision.” I clenched my fists, both in fury at her and in frustration at my own stupidity. I hadn’t even stopped to tell anyone where I was going, and I left my phone behind. In truth, if she had killed me, I couldn’t have even been mad.
After all, it was the psycho’s prerogative to murder an unprepared ingenue, wasn’t it?
“Why would she strip your clothes off?”
“I think she had plans to give me several new scars, but luckily you came when you did, and all I lost was a patch of hair.” Even though that still infuriated me. It was definitely going on my list of reasons I needed revenge against her, and pretty damn close to the top, too.
“I don’t understand what she expected to accomplish.”
“I think it was vengeance for everything that has happened between the two of us. I was more worried she had help coming. I was terrified when I heard your footsteps crashing through the underbrush.” Remy’s look of concern touched me, but it wasn’t doing anything to soothe the frantic buzz that still beat through my blood. “How did you know where I was?”
“I felt you.”
“Felt me?”
“It’s happened before, remember? That night in the city. Whenever your power flares strongly, I can sense it if I’m close enough. It hit me like a blast from a cannon tonight. Or more like a fire hose, I suppose, since it was a continuous blasting.”
I was not about to touch “continuous blasting,” so I let him continue.
“I followed the pull I felt from you, and it led me into the forest. I was terrified you had discovered the portal and tried to cross it.”
“Portal? What portal?”
“There’s a portal to the Underworld on the campus property. But there’s a reason they don’t tell any of the students about it. It’s beyond dangerous.”
“Then how do you know about it?”
“Well, it’s kind of our purview to know everything about death, including where the back doors are located.”
“If it’s okay for death gods to know about it, then why was it ‘beyond dangerous’ for me to find it?”
“Anything to do with the gods is dangerous, Fury. They don’t care about us, so if they think we are trespassing on their property, or overstepping our bounds, they will not hesitate to put us down. It wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened.”
“They would kill me just for using a portal to the Underworld?”
“Most likely. We don’t belong there, and they have no problem reminding us. Why do you think we grow up with humans?”
