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That jerked me out of my shock enough to laugh. “I guess I just never expected them to say it. Not this soon, anyway. Or ever.”
Geraint sighed. “I’m sure that’s my fault, for withholding those words for so long from our relationship. You should hear it all the time, Ember. I love you. We love you. And we want you.”
“Hey, you had your reasons.” I turned in his arms and we kissed until I needed a breath. “I love you, too, Knight.”
Before our lips could touch again, someone made a gagging sound behind us.
“Oh, please. It’s the end of your world and all you can do is kiss?” The feminine voice with a hint of a rasp was familiar and sent chills through me.
I turned, Geraint still holding onto me. “What else would we do at the end of the world?”
She studied Geraint, hands on her hips. “How’d you get him out?”
Shit. I should have had Baz, not Geraint, stay with me. Hoping our plan wasn’t crumbling to dust, I improvised just like I did on stage any time I goofed a performance.
“I could only save one.” I shrugged. “Geraint was the first. So I took him. Another storm overtook us, but I was able to craft a way out. Unfortunately, it made a hole in the fabric of Dream, and what’s left is sifting away.”
On cue, a slight breeze kicked up, taking dust and sand in a small whirlwind toward the entrance into the prison we’d made.
“We’re trying to decide if we go through, or not. Great job, Effie. Dream is destroyed. There’s nothing left. Even those terrifying clowns are gone.” I didn’t have to fake my shudder at that comment.
The still perfectly coifed woman took a step toward the fracture then looked back at us as if she weren’t sure we were telling the truth. The black gown she wore today had a slit up the side all the way to her upper thigh and her ever present cigarette on a stick puffed away in one hand.
I added a slump to my shoulders and leaned into Geraint as if I didn’t care anymore. He held me tightly and said nothing.
“Come with me.” She held out her hand. “There’s no reason to stay.”
“Everything I love more than life itself is here.” I made no move toward her. “We’re not sure if Geraint can survive without Dream and life isn’t worth living if he’s not in it.”
Her eyes widened as if she hadn’t considered some of the consequences of her single-minded desire to get home. How much she’d destroyed. The lives she’d shattered. My thoughts briefly flicked toward Ash before I refocused on our adversary.
“We’re staying here, Effie, but if you want to go, there’s nothing to stop you anymore.” That was as close as I could make myself get to outright lying to her any more than we were. She had to believe for the magic we’d crafted to work, and if we were too insistent, she might doubt. Also, I was more than a little annoyed with her, but I didn’t want too much anger to override the depression I projected. I thought she’d believe it more than she would the other emotion.
I turned and pressed my cheek against Geraint’s chest.
“You’ll stay for a dream construct?” She sounded curious, almost sad.
“I’ll stay for Geraint and the love we share.”
“Well, I didn’t get that option,” she snapped, her sympathy gone apparently. “I was jerked away from everything I ever loved all for looking too deeply and too long in a mirror. Well, now I’m going home. Even if it’s not the same home I remembered. I’ll find new love and new work. If you’re going to stay while the rest of this crumbles, well, that’s your own fault.”
She turned, took a puff of her cigarette and patted her hair before sprinting toward the fracture as fast as her heels would allow.
I didn’t watch, not wanting her to pause, look back, and see us expectantly staring at her. No doubts for Effie. She thought she had done it, brought down Dream and fractured the barriers between the worlds.
Geraint tensed, then relaxed and a pop compressed the air around us for a moment as the prison door snapped shut.
“She hesitated, at the end,” Geraint said. “But she went through.”
“Good.”
The air around us trembled.
Nic swirled out of shadow. He’d been the one to send the dust swirling toward the opening. “We should take shelter with the others,” he said urgently.
The ground trembled and the air shimmered and pressure built as if a storm were about to be unleashed.
Geraint and Nic grabbed my arms and pulled me to the cave. We crammed in with the others just as shards of glass plummeted out of the sky, shattering on the ground.
