"Are you ready?" Her voice trembled slightly, a mixture of hope and apprehension threading through her words.
"Yes." Ready as I was ever gonna get. This time I was going to try to follow her into the threads.
She nodded, her pretty green eyes lit with a fierce determination. The corner of her mouth twitched upward, not quite a smile. "Okay. Close your eyes," she murmured, her voice dropping to a whisper that somehow resonated through me more powerfully than a shout. Her fingers squeezed mine again. "Follow me."
I obeyed, letting my eyelids fall shut. For a moment, there was nothing but the chanting in my ears and the feel of Talin's hands in mine, the steady thrum of the bond between us.
Then the threads were there.
They bloomed behind my eyelids in a wide array of colors. The ones connecting the people in this room glowed brightest, thick cords of light pulsing with emotion and magic. I noticed the bond between Killian and Lizzy blazed nearly gold, fierce and possessive. Brogan and Esme shone a reddish-orange, newer but no less solid. The others all had their own unique colors too.
And ours. Gods, ours.
The thread connecting me to Talin burned white-hot, so bright it should hurt to look at. But instead of pain, I felt only rightness. Like this was exactly where I was supposed to be, tethered to this woman, ready to follow her into the dark.
"Do you see it?" Her voice sounded distant, echoing as if from the bottom of a well.
"I see everything."
"Now watch."
She tugged on a thread. Alex's thread. It was the same electric blue I glimpsed in her earlier visions, but now I could see its full length and where it attached to Kenya. Most of it existed here, in this room, before it disappeared into a darkness that had no place in the physical world.
Talin followed it.
And following the call of blood, both hers and mine, I went with her.
One moment we were sitting in Ancient Magicks, surrounded by protective magic and the people we trusted. The next we were falling through a space between spaces, tumbling through dimensions that were never meant to hold living souls.
The threads were everywhere here, thousands of them, millions maybe, creating a web so complex it made my head spin. They pulsed and shifted, connections forming and breaking between heartbeats. This was what Talin saw. This was the weight she carried every time she reached for her power.
Elias?
Her voice cut through the chaos in my head, an anchor in the madness.
I squeezed her hands tighter. I could still feel them, solid and real, even as the world dissolved around us.
I'm here.
She pulled us deeper, following Alex's thread through the tangle. The blue strand grew thicker as we traveled, more substantial, until it was thrumming with pain and rage and desperate, clawing hope.
The realm shifted.
The threads closed in around us, thousands becoming millions, millions becoming infinite. They pressed against my consciousness, whispering secrets I didn't want to know, showing me futures and pasts that never existed. But I got the feeling they could, all you had to do was follow a different thread.
Talin, slow down.
She didn't respond. Her presence beside me dimmed slightly. The white-hot thread connecting us flickered.
TALIN.
Alex's blue strand pulled her forward like a current, and she followed it with single-minded determination. But the deeper we went, the stranger this place became. The threads no longer just connected people. They split and branched, showing possibilities, choices not yet made, lives not yet lived.
I saw myself turning away from Talin that first night at the club. Saw her walking away, disappearing into the New Orleans night, our thread never completely forming. In that reality, she tried to save Alex alone and burned herself out completely, her magic consuming her from the inside.
I saw another where I claimed her that first night, too rough, too desperate, and she ran from me. Our thread formed but broke, jagged edges that cut us both.
Talin, we need to go back.
