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“You don’t,” I said, and her face fell, and I went on talking, with no idea what I was going to say to make her feel better, but I couldn’t let her risk herself for me again. “I don’t need you to make up for it. I don’t want to be trapped by some grand fated love. I started to feel hopeful when I was with the King pack and then it just ended with me feeling betrayed and alone.”
I went quiet as understanding crystallized in my chest, hardening into something stony but strong. “I don’t want some big fated love. Because it’s just another trap.”
For a few long seconds everyone was quiet.
Aiden said, “Jesus… what happened to you, Amelia?”
We all smiled then, and we let the subject drift. Rose stole a bite of Dylan’s cake, and he pronounced it the best cake ever and insisted I try it too.
But Aiden’s words haunted me.
I’d be safer if I never found that kind of intense, fated love again.
But when I thought Nathan Longroad had changed me forever, had turned love into a dirty word, that made me feel weak. The girl I’d been, the girl who fell in love with Brennan, had died in that room with him.
And I’d never be the woman she was supposed to grow into.
For the first time, as I looked out the window at the flickering scenery going by, I couldn’t imagine a happy ending. Not even in California.
CHAPTER5
Liam
The next morning,the last thing I wanted was to try to put myself in Nathan Longroad’s head. For one thing, if he were dead, would he be in hell?
Hell seemed superfluous to me sometimes. When other people were so terrible to each other, what was hell? Didn’t we make it on earth already? Did there really need to be something worse beyond? I knew some people believed that in Hell, the people who had hurt others in this life would finally get hurt themselves. I didn’t buy the idea that we could heal ourselves by hurting each other. My brothers kept trying, but they never seemed any closer tohealed.The idea of hell seemed distinctly odd to me.
But that didn’t mean I wanted to risk walking into Nathan Longroad’s afterlife.
I’ve never controlled the visions before. Often, I found myself in the heads of people that I cared about, though I might be in their past or in their future. I didn’t want to find myself in either place. While everyone varies in how much pain is dealt to them, all of us have monsters in our pasts and nightmares in our future.
Most of the time, I never figured out where I was. Who I was. Past or future. It was all a blur, a miserable blur full of warnings and foreboding without direction.
But could I control it?
The thought of going into Nathan’s head overwhelmed me. Instead, I needed to go to a familiar place, a place I had been before.
I’ve known Amelia first through her dreams.
The dreams she’d been having the night before were savage ones. She called out for Brennan, and the ferocity of her longing for him all these years later made my heart grieve. I wanted to touch her to comfort her. She couldn’t seem to escape that room, that motel room where she had lost Brennan.
And if I couldn’t help her get out, maybe I could change it.
I imagined the forest of her dreams that had been such a big part of our childhoods. As I imagined it, the walls of the hotel room seemed to fall away. She and Brennan were still trading those last kisses before everything was destroyed, but now Brennan had her braced against in the trunk of a massive tree. Flowers unfurled around them, and the door faded into the buds and bushes. The demons came to Amelia’s door, but now the door was someplace far away, someplace they couldn’t reach Amelia.
I wanted to stay with Amelia in this good dream, but it wasn’t my place. This place belonged to just her and Brennan. My brother’s presence was so strong in this room I could’ve sworn I smelled him. I wondered again what the afterlife was like, if somewhere he was in this dream too. Maybe the living and the dead met in their dreams.
Reluctantly, I pulled away, dragging myself out of the dream that I wanted to stay in, because it was so good to see my brother’s face again.
Instead, I yanked myself out of it so violently that I sat up in bed.
I needed a break before I tried to plunge myself in Nathan’s dreams. I padded downstairs as dawn was first starting to flush the sky outside the windows. Shaw was up, which showed what an emergency it was. The man usually considered any hour before 8:00 AM to be cursed.
“You slept in your bed last night,” he said.
That must be a surprise to everyone, given how upset I was about Amelia’s fear.
About losing her.
