By the time the seating arrangement was all settled, Laylen emerged from Adessa’s looking somewhat happy. Hmmm….I wonder what was up with that.
He climbed in the car. “So what happened?” he asked me.
I furrowed my eyebrows. “What? With the crystal ball?”
He nodded. “Did you get sucked into a vision?”
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“What!” Aislin shouted. “She got sucked into a vision and no one told me.” I felt like I was getting strangled to death—that’s the effect just thinking about the vision had on me.
“I’ll explain it on the way back to the house,” Alex said. If I wouldn’t have known better, I would have thought he said it because he’d sensed my lack of comfort with the subject. But I did know better so…
“Okay.” Laylen started up the car, and the engine roared to life.
Aislin was more reluctant to give up on the discussion. She remained turned around in her seat, continuously eyeballing Alex and I until Laylen merged the car back onto the busy main street of Vegas. Then the dancing lights and throngs of people distracted her attention away from us.
After we’d made it back onto the highway, and the last of the lights had fizzled 458/695
away, I rested my head against the window, and, without even meaning to, I fell asleep.
Chapter 23
I was plummeting deeper and deeper in-to the murky water. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t see.So this is what drowning feels like, I thought numbly.
I kicked my legs, trying to fight my way back to the surface. I refused to drown. I could not drown.
“Gemma,” a feathery voice floated up from beneath my feet.
Huh? Was I hallucinating?
I kicked harder and paddle with my arms, giving a very lame attempt at doggy paddling.
“No Gemma, down here,” the voice rippled up through the water.
And then I knew. I don’t know how I knew, just that I did. I knew the voice didn’t460/695
mean me any harm. I was supposed to listen to it.
I was supposed to go to it.
I let my legs and arms fall limp, allow-ing my dead weight to sink me downward to the sandy bottom of the lake.
“Good,” the voice purred. “Now keep coming. I need your help.”What do you need my help for? I thought because speaking would do nothing but get me a mouth full of water.
To my shock the voice responded inside my head.I need you to save me.
How?
Just trust me.
I don’t know why, but I did.I do trust you.
Good. Now whatever you do, don’t panic.
Why would I panic?
The voice didn’t answer, but I figured out why very quickly as fingers wrapped around my ankles and yanked me down.
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Despite what the voice said, I panicked and clawed at the water, frantically trying to get away, but it was useless. I tried to scream, but water flooded my lungs. If I didn’t get away, I was a goner for sure. If I didn’t get away, I’d end up a prisoner in The Underworld, at least until I went insane and they killed me.
I needed to get away…
Shaing…shaking….huh….someone…shaking…my shoulder. My eyelids shot open.
Disoriented and groggy, I jerked away from whoever was touching me.
“Jeez, Gemma,” Alex said with his hands held up in front of him in a holy-crap-just-calm-down-I-didn’t-mean-you-any-harm kind of way. “Settle down.” I did a quick scan of my surroundings and realized I was still in the backseat of the GTO, which was now parked in the garage.
Laylen and Aislin were nowhere to be seen.
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It was just Alex and me…Why was it just Alex and me?
“Where are Aislin and Laylen?” I asked, rubbing my sleepy eyes.
“Their already inside,” he gave a nod in the direction of the garage door, “getting things set up.”
Yawning, I stretched out my arms. “So why are wesitting out here?”
“Because you fell asleep and I couldn’t get you to wake up.” He paused, looking as though he was considering something. “Were you having a nightmare?”
A nightmare. That was putting it mildly.
“Why do you ask?”
“Because you were getting all squirmy and making these moaning noises.” Oh. My. Word. I was absolutely mortified. “Oh.”
He waited for me to explain further.
I didn’t.
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“Alright.” He sounded a bit irritated.
“Let’s go inside.”
Oh, whatever. He could be irritated all he wanted. I was under no obligation to tell him about my dreams. Giving him a recap of what I’d just dreamt about meant having to relive it, which is something I so didn’t want to do. Yeah, I knew it was just a nightmare and everything, but the feelings of fear that I’d felt during it still lingered inside me. And how could I not be afraid? I’d dreamt about the Death Walkers and look how well that had turned out for me. The term “it was just a dream” totally didn’t apply in my life. I knew there was an actual real-life possibility that I really could run into a…what had Alex called them? Water Faeries.
Back inside, Alex immediately jumped into get-a-hold-of-Stephan mode, hitting redial on his phone over and over and over again.
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Several failed attempts later, he took up banging his phone against the table like he thought beating the crap out of it would somehow make Stephan miraculously answer the phone. Yeah, all that resulted from that was the back of his phone popping off and the battery sling-shooting out across the table. After that, he gave up his redial mission and tucked his phone away in his pocket.
Feeling tired—my little catnap during the car ride home had done nothing for me—I plopped down in one of the chairs at the table. The box Aislin had gotten from Adessa wasn’t too far off on the table in front of me. It looked so much like a jewelry box, with its tiny encrusted jewels and shimmering shade of gold, that I half expected it to be full of pearl necklaces and diamond earrings.
But no, inside the box lay a glinting red crystal. I had the urge to reach out and touch it, let my fingers brush along the jagged edges 465/695
and see what it felt like. But after the whole getting-sucked-away-after-touching-a-Foreseers-Crystal-Ball incident, I decided to resist the urge.
“So this is it.” Alex came over with his hands stuffed inside his pockets and leaned over my shoulder to get a better look at the crystal. “That’s what’s going to gets us to Afton and back.”
Aislin, who was sitting across the table from me, nodded enthusiastically. “Adessa said it would work better than any other crystal.”
“I sure hope so,” Alex uttered under his breath.
Aislin either didn’t hear him or chose to ignore him. “So we should probably get going.”
Alex reached over my shoulder to collect the gold box. “Where do you want this?” Aislin made grabbing gestures with her hands. “Here, give it to me.” 466/695