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“Why did you set up that reservation with Kaden?” There was no way she was leaving without my getting some answers out of her.
“He was strong enough to help get you get settled until I got my situation straightened out,” she said.
A small amount of the tension I’d been carrying since Kaden told me that eased. No sane person would send their granddaughter into the hands of their foe.
“So you’re not the one he was talking about, right? He said, that night at the club, the timing was odd. But you wouldn’t have sent me to your enemy.”
She leaned back slightly and looked to the side. “Well, that gets a little more complicated. Let’s just say we weren’t exactly on the same side of the fight.”
Oh no. This didn’t sound good. This was not what I was hoping she’d say. Not even close.
“What fight?” That slight relief I’d felt boomeranged and magnified until it felt like I’d crack under the force of it.
“There might be some underlying conflicts going on, but I need more time to explain, and I don’t have it. It’s hard for me to stay here right now.”
She didn’t want to tell me. Whatever she’d gotten me mixed up in was so bad that she didn’t even want to say it. I groaned. I couldn’t help it.
She whipped her head in the direction of where Kaden had disappeared.
“I have to go. He’s coming back for you. Don’t say anything about me. Just stick with him and we’ll iron things out later. You’re a tough girl, just like I raised you. You’ll figure it out until I’m back.” She started fading.
“Wait? What about Chaos? Did you do something?” I said, reaching out and trying to keep her with me.
“I fixed that. You should be okay for a while.” Her hand turned into nothing as she faded into air, and as much as I’d been dying to see her, these few minutes weren’t enough, almost adding to the grief.
A hole opened up next to me and a hand wrapped around my wrist, pulling me into it.
I crashed twenty feet down into an icy ocean, the shock of the cold ripping through me painfully. Panic struck as I tried to find the way to air in inky black water. Kaden grabbed me, pulling me up with him. My head broke the surface, and I coughed and gasped, treading water.
“Can you make it to the shore?” he asked, pointing to the city lights in the distance.
“Yes,” I said, heading toward the rocky coast of Nowhere about a hundred feet away, the waves knocking me about every so often as we made our way.
I crawled out of the ocean a few minutes later, taking a second to get my wind. I got up before I was ready as Kaden stood beside me, hand out, ready to pull me to my feet.
We were walking on dry land a few minutes later and heading toward his townhouse. My shoes were long gone, my dress sopping wet. He was still in his evening clothes, but he’d manage to keep his shoes. We walked in, leaving a trail of water.
“I’m going to…” I motioned upstairs, and he nodded, as exhausted from the day as I was.
He was in fresh clothes when I came down, tending a fire he’d started. He put the poker down and leaned on the mantel.
“It’s obviously following you. I can perform a cleansing spell or a masking spell, depending on what was done. I don’t know how long it’ll last, but I can keep redoing it until we figure out how to fix it permanently.”
“I, uhm…” Gram had said not to tell him yet, but I couldn’t live that much of a lie. To have him doing spells, thinking he was fixing things when she’d already done something?
He was waiting for me to finish. “What is it?” he asked.
“I don’t think you need to do that,” I said. I wouldn’t tell him, but I didn’t want to set myself up for a lie that would haunt me.
“Why is that?” He narrowed his eyes and took a step toward me.
What did I say now? Gram had had some sort of run-in with him. If I admitted to that, he’d kick me to the curb. Then what would I do? I didn’t know if I wanted to stay, but I wasn’t ready to leave.
I went with the closest version to the truth I could offer. “Because it came back. It swirled around me but didn’t hurt me. This time I got a sense that something had changed. I think it’s gone for now. I think it’ll be okay for a bit.”
“You might not realize how odd it is that you survived Chaos three times, but I can assure you, it’s not normal. This doesn’t just happen and then stop.”
“Maybe it was just a fluke?” There was a glass on the table, probably his. I picked it up and took a nice, long gulp, wishing I could get my hands on some of that sparkling fountain water.
