Caleb fell silent as he considered that. “You know, that actually explains a lot about you. And a lot about Adarian.”
“What do you mean?”
Caleb moved to sit on the cot underneath the bar-covered window. “Normally, a Malachai is born to parents who hate it. Both mother and father. The father because he knows if the child lives, he will die—most Malachai, including Adarian, murder their children as soon as they find out about them.”
“You mean I had siblings?”
“Yeah, and he killed every one of them. Except you … which never made sense to me. You, he wanted protected. And the mothers hate because of the way their children were conceived, the babies. Again, your mother is different in that she embraced you. So if what you’re saying is true, you are a Malachai conceived in love and nurtured. That, my friend, has
never
happened.”
“Which means I can love, right?”
Caleb’s gaze lost focus as he thought it over. “It means something. Not sure what. But…”
It gave Nick hope. Maybe he could avert his future and find a way to save them all.
Wishing he had an answer, Nick moved to the other cot, closer to the door.
“So, how did you save Kody, by the way?”
Nick cringed at the question, then hedged at the answer. “I took her to help.”
“And that would be…?”
“Someone who helped her.”
Caleb growled low in his throat. “I don’t want to play this game with you.”
But it wasn’t a game. It was serious business. Nick had made a pact that he knew he shouldn’t have. One Ambrose had thrown down a tantrum over when he’d learned about it.
“What have you done?” Ambrose had snarled in his face.
“What I had to.”
Ambrose had held his hands out like he was choking Nick. “A dog can’t serve two masters.”
“I’m not a dog.”
Ambrose curled his lip. “You’re so stupid. I knew I should have killed you.”
Nick had snorted. “Wow, that hurts me in my tender place. Nice to hear me say I wished myself dead. Love you, too.”
Ambrose shook his head. “You don’t understand. I made your mistake … later in life, but I did the same exact thing. I bound myself to my enemy and it did not work out well.”
“But we’re changing the future. Right? For all you know, I might have already fixed things.”
Ambrose had paused in the circle he was pacing around Nick’s room. “That’s where it gets tricky. There are things that will happen regardless of the actions we take.”
“Such as?”
“You meeting Kyrian and working for him. No matter what I’ve tried, that always happens. I can’t stop it. I can only change the events that lead up to it and the time in our life when it happens. That one moment of meeting him, however, is written in stone. But…” Ambrose squinted as he ruminated. When he spoke again, his voice was a full octave lower. “You might have found the answer for us.”
“What do you mean?”
“Why did you save Kody?”
Nick pressed his lips together as he debated telling him. But in the end, it wouldn’t matter. One way or another, Ambrose would learn the truth. “I love her.”
Ambrose sneered. “Love? You don’t even know the meaning of that word.”
“Oh yes, I do. Don’t you dare tell me I don’t.”
Ambrose shook his head. “You’re too young to understand it.”
“No, I’m not. I know what I feel and I know it’s real. I would die for her.”
“Then you’re even dumber than…” Ambrose paused as his eyes danced around. He closed the distance between them and smiled a smile that made Nick’s blood run cold. “We are destined to become a Dark-Hunter. That, too, I haven’t been able to avert. Until now, the catalyst has always been the death of our mother. But…”
Nick wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that word. “But what?”
“If you love another woman, a woman I’ve never known existed before, then maybe she’s the one who dies instead.”
Agony exploded inside him. “No! You’re wrong.”
“Think about it.” Ambrose jerked him into a tight hug. “You’re right, kid. You may have found the answer I’ve sought all these years. That has to be it. You love Kody enough to die for her. It only stands to reason that she’d be the one you lose to launch you into a DH.”
That was not what he wanted to hear. While Ambrose might enjoy the thought, it made Nick ill.
“I won’t let her die. I won’t.”
Anger turned Ambrose’s eyes a deep shade of red. “Listen to me, moron. Who would you rather bury? Your mother or your girlfriend? ’Cause I’m telling you right now, one of them is going to die horribly.”
“I won’t allow it.”
“You have no choice.” Ambrose had spat those words out coldly.
Now, Nick was feeling the truth of Ambrose’s prediction. By trying to keep Kody alive, he’d already screwed up. Badly.
And as he stared at the glass over the window, he saw images appear.
In one, he saw his mother in a chair inside a house he’d never been in before. Her lifeless eyes were wide open as he called out for her to wake up.
In the other, he saw an older version of Kody. Dressed in a white wedding gown, she lay in his arms, covered in blood.
Her
blood.
It’s your imagination.
It had to be.
Yet inside, he knew the truth. Those were the two possible futures for him. Just like Ambrose had said. One of them would have to die.
He might not have saved Kody at all—only delayed her death. Ambrose had talked about rearranging time frames. He could change when things happened, but not the things that were destined to happen.
Instead of saving Kody, he might only have bought her a little more time.
That’s better than nothing.
Or was it? Had he let her die, his life wouldn’t be so complicated. He’d have never made a bargain that might very well be the death of him.
The more he thought about it, the more he hated the Fates or Ambrose or whoever was causing this to be his future. It wasn’t fair to see what was coming and to have no way to avert it. That was the cruelest blow of all. And the more his anger built, the more his body temperature elevated.
“Nick?” There was a note of panic in Caleb’s voice. “What’s going on in your head?”
Sitting on his cot in their cell, Nick lost his ability to understand Caleb. Instead, all he could see, hear, or feel was his own anguish. It wrapped around him until it suffocated him. No matter what he did, it only made things worse.
It killed the people he loved.
The darkness swallowed him again, but this time it was inside and not outside his body. And it hurt so deep in his essence that he felt like his very soul was being flogged and flayed.
He was standing out on a ledge, looking down at a landscape that terrified him.
This was his life and he’d already ruined it. Fifteen and it was over. The damage done, and so deep that it couldn’t be unraveled.
“Nick!”
He ignored Caleb as his pain tripled. And in that one moment when it hurt the most, he had total clarity.
There was only one way to stop the pain. It was extreme, but …
If it worked, it would stop everything.
Don’t do this.
It would destroy his mother.
She dies anyway.
Or Kody would.
And he heard Kody’s precious voice in his head.
We all make our own decisions.
It was time he made his. If the darkness wanted him, it could take him.
With one condition.
The answer had been here the whole time. This … this crap would end tonight. He would make sure of it.
“Nick!” Caleb shook him, trying to make him understand his voice. But he wasn’t getting through whatever had sunk its fangs into him.
Worse, Caleb saw the physical manifestation of the Malachai powers. Nick’s skin flashed from its human tawny shade to the swirling demon skin. His eyes from blue to orange to red …
If Caleb didn’t stop this, if he didn’t find a way to reach Nick before the demon swallowed him, all of them would die.
“Do you really want to die?”
That question hung in Nick’s mind, taunting him. In his dream, he looked out into a field and there he saw his future. For the next two years, he’d be a laughingstock in school. Everyone had seen him arrested.
Everyone.
Even his grandparents.
The horror of his mother’s expression … The doubt in her eyes.
And what waited for him? More loss. Either his mother or Kody. And others Ambrose refused to name. Why should he continue living when the cost of it would be their lives?
If he were dead, there would be no reason for any of them to die. That would stop it completely. It would. They would be free. His father would no longer be after him to kill him.
The pain that had lived inside him since the hour of his birth would end.
I’m so sick of it all.
And he was. At fifteen, he felt like a battered old man. Life was so hard. Some days it seemed like the only purpose of it was to see just how hard it could kick him. How low it could make him sink. It had needlessly slapped him senseless most days. And for what?
Why did it have to be like this? Why did people have to be so mean for no reason whatsoever? Why did they have to attack? Bring someone down?
End it.
You can control that much of your life.
Suddenly, Grim was beside him. He was dressed in a flowing black robe, his face barely visible from inside his cowl. In his hand, he held a black knife that looked like a military KA-BAR. Silently, he held it out to Nick.
One cut.
One moment of one last pain.
Everything would be over. He would hurt no more.
As Nick reached for the knife, he felt another presence beside him.
“Don’t do it, Nick. This isn’t you.” Kody. The sound of that sweet, soft voice reached out and touched him in places he didn’t fully understand. She covered his hand with hers and then laced her fingers with his. They were so soft as they slid against his skin.
“Close your eyes,” she breathed in his ear.
Without question, he obeyed. His head swam as images blurred through his mind in rapid succession. He didn’t know what he was looking at. Not until Kody kissed him.
She pulled back and laid her hand to his hot cheek. Then she spoke to him in a language he’d never heard before. Yet, he understood her words perfectly.
“There’s an enemy inside all of us, Nick, that wants to do us harm. It hates us passionately, and it wears us down with echoing insults we can’t escape. No matter what we try or what we do. It’s a never-ending playback that torments us when we’re alone. And especially at night when we’re trying to sleep and there’s no one else beside us.”
The love in her eyes scorched him as she stroked his cheek with her thumb. “But somehow our sanity returns, and drives that madness away. And we are
not
what that voice says we are. We’re stronger than that, and our dark, ugly interloper knows it. I think that’s why it hates us so much. Because it knows that we alone can defeat it. We can send it back to the darkest part of our nature where it belongs. Bury it so deep that we drown out those voices that hurt and torture us. It does not have to control us, and we don’t have to listen.”
She smiled up at him. “No one is immune to the dark interloper. We all feel that those wounds won’t heal. That they go too deep and let so much blood that it floods our souls with utter agony. That we have screwed up beyond repair. But it’s not true. What we have, Nick, is one life. And every day of it is the richest blessing. The bad times teach us lessons about ourselves and others. But most of all, they show us just how strong we are. For we survive what destroys a lesser being, and every day that we live is victory over that interloper. You and I are like creatures. We are not sheep to be slaughtered. We are fighters, and in the midst of our darkest battles, we don’t lie down and get stepped on. We shake our fists at the sky and shout, ‘Bring me your worst. Because I intend to give you my best and I will win no matter what it takes. You may knock me down, I can’t stop that. But I will get back up, and when I do, your blood will be the blood spilled.’”
He wanted to believe that. He did. “I’m so tired, Kody,” he breathed. “It just keeps coming with no let-up. Everything I do is wrong. Everything I touch turns to crap, and I’m sick to death of being blamed for things I haven’t done.”
“That’s the interloper talking, not you. I know my Nick. My Nick is strong.”
He licked his lips as his pain intensified. “If I live, you or my mother will die. What’s the point?”
“What’s the point?” she asked incredulously. “The point is to savor and treasure every moment, every breath. They are precious because they are limited. Nothing in abundance is ever held dear. It’s cast off without any thought whatsoever. But happiness, victory, and life are sacred because they are fleeting and stingily measured.”
“And the pain is never-ending.” Talk about abundance. It was shoveled at him so fast, he was buried in it.
“Not true and you know it. Pain is even more fleeting than the other emotions. Yes, it stays for awhile sometimes, but it always goes eventually. Always. Do you remember what you told Brynna when you stopped her from killing herself?”
“That I wore tacky shirts?”
Smiling, she shook her head at him. “The rest of it?”
“Vaguely.”
“You said, I know you’re hurting. Believe me, I know how it feels to get your emotional teeth kicked down your throat so far that it makes you choke on the last shred of your dignity. That sick feeling in your gut that tells you, you can’t take it anymore. That life sucks hard and it won’t ever get better. That you’re walking on the tightrope, trying to hang on with your toes ’cause you ain’t got no safety net, and you’re barely one sneeze away from being a stain on the floor. But you’re not alone. You’re not. You’ve got a lot of people who care about you. People who love you and who would be devastated if something ever happened to you.’”
“People who will die if I live,” Nick reminded her.
“And do you really think we wouldn’t be every bit as devastated if we lost
you
?”