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But I was tired. So tired.
With effort, I opened my eyes. The light in my bedchamber told me it was the darkest hour, just before dawn. My hand was near my face, my little finger still curled…but Cole was gone, and that’s when I smelled the smoke.
I sat up and noticed I was dressed in the clothes I’d died in nearly three hundred years ago.
“An interesting development.”
Shadowy figures swarmed the room—the Vices and Eisheth, and yet I wasn’t afraid. Eisheth screamed in rage—a good sign that things were not going her way.
“You’ll burn, Ambri,” she screeched. “If we can’t have you, you’ll burn all over again…”
The darkness seemed to broil and swirl like dark water. The demons dissolved away while the room filled with billowing gray vapor. I could hear flames chew through the other rooms of my flat.
I’d have imagined the thought would cause me some concern, but I was strangely calm.
Because Cole was safe.
I didn’t know how I knew that, but it was true. He was safe and so nothing else mattered.
I smiled and thought about trying to escape, but the smoke was quite thick now and I was so tired. I lay back down and watched the gray curls move across the ceiling. I could hear the fire coming closer. The flat was burning. My books were burning. Cole’s portrait of me was burning. A shame to lose it but he was so bloody talented; he’d paint another. Paint whatever he wanted because he was safe.
My eyes fell shut again. Love for Cole Matheson infused every part of me, making me warm.
Or maybe that was the fire.
I coughed and grew sleepier. I curled around the pillow and thought of Cole. How happy he’d made me and how grateful I was for our short time together. How much I loved him. It was incalculable. Like a deep blue sea of warm water that had no end.
And I was drifting down into it. Safe. Happy.
Arms went around me. A woman’s arms, like a mother’s embrace. One I’d never had. They held me close as I sank into the blue infusion.
My brave boy. My brave, brave boy…
thirty-three
“Ambri!”
I came awake with a gasp and fear lancing through me. I’d fallen asleep. I’d failed to protect him and now they had him. They had him and now he would hurt forever…
Slowly, the room began to resolve around me, and I shivered. A cold draft was blowing in from somewhere and everything was dim and murky. And eerily familiar.
My glasses were on the nightstand next to the bed, on top of my heavy art book. As I reached for them, my old basement flat in Whitechapel came into sharp clarity.
“What the fuck…”
My phone lay on the book too, and I grabbed it. It told me the time was 4:33 on the morning of November ninth. I stared around in disbelief. Against the wall were my portraits from my time at the Academy. Those that I’d lost in the flood. Across the way was my tiny bathroom, the door ajar. Upstairs, I heard Ms. Thomas shuffling around, making her early morning tea.
I threw off the covers and reached for my sketchbook and flipped through it frantically. A few sketches, a few studies of hands or faces. No demons.
No Ambri.
“No…”
Dawn was breaking. I threw on the nearest pair of jeans—old, paint-spattered ones—and a sweater, my coat that wasn’t warm enough, and tore out of my flat.
I started to hail a cab but checked my wallet. Empty.
Because it never happened. The gallery shows, the tour…none of it happened.
