Page 36 of Cherry Moon

Just as trapped as me.

“Every part of you is locked in here with me,” Bony Hag proclaimed.

Ignoring her, I muttered, “You’ve got this, babies.”

If only my enthusiasm wasn’t starting to melt like chocolate cake in the Sahara Desert.

Ugh.

CHAPTER TEN

GABRIEL

Iheld the dust in my palms, willing it to be Aki again.

Nothing happened.

Teardrops splashed the dust, my prayers to the tenshi puffing across the surface.

The dust remained dust.

The prayers went unanswered.

I existed outside of time and space, trapped in a new nightmare reality where Aki was dead and my heart broke every thirty seconds.

“How can you just leave me?” I rasped.

The silence of the room lay thick around me.

“Aki, please…”

In some of my darker moments in the dead of night, I’d wondered what it would be like if Aki died before me. How it would feel, if I’d know if we weren’t in the same place when it happened. Terrible things like that.

I put it down to the mind being a trickster, loving to poke at our darkest thoughts. But I never expected for them to come to be here in this safehouse.

“Aki…”

The dust began to slip through my fingers.

“Please, Aki. Please.”

I couldn’t cry, the tears on hold. As if crying were the release I didn’t want to face.

Release meant reality.

Curse reality.

“I’m begging you to come back.” I dropped the remnants of the ash, clasping my hands together in supplication. Fully at the mercy of a miracle.

“Please don’t let him be gone,” I begged. “Give me something, anything, to put this right.”

The door opened.

“It’s not his time.”

Zach stepped into my field of vision, signing at me.

I looked up, the sorrow probably evident on my face.