“I don’t know about you, but I could do this all day,” he said in a tone that made my skin crawl. “In fact, I think I might take you back with me—keep a hold of you for awhile.”
Take me back? Take me back where? I flipped out as the possibilities of where he was thinking of taking me poured through my head. I did the only thing I could think of to get away. I bit down on Nicholas’s hand, sinking my teeth into his clammy skin. He let out a scream that vibrated at my eardrums, and then I felt his grip loosen, allowing me to squirm free.
“Laylen!” I shouted, sprinting for the doorway again.
Nicholas’s footsteps thumped against the tile floor as he chased after me. I felt his fingers graze my back right as I took a step up the stairs. Then he was pulling me back to him.
“Help!” I screamed, flinging my weight forward.
And then a miracle happened. Laylen was suddenly there, prying Nicholas off of me, and I skittered away from them as Laylen gave Nicholas a hard shove onto the living room floor.
“If you ever touch her again,” Laylen said, standing over Nicholas. “You won’t be able to walk out of here.” At that moment, I could have hugged Laylen, but I’m not sure it would have been very rewarding for him, since I’ve never really hugged any one and it would probably just end up as a very awkward moment.
“Are you okay?” Laylen’s bright blue eyes examined me over.
I nodded, rubbing my soon-to-be-bruised shoulder.
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Did he hurt you?” he asked.
I shook my head and dropped my hand from my shoulder. “No, I’m okay.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
All of a sudden, Nicholas was on his feet. He swiped the Ira off of the apothecary table and ran across the room, to the far corner, putting as much distance as he could between himself and Laylen.
Laylen moved for him, but Nicholas winked at me, and then he was gone. And so was the one thing that could get me into The Underworld.
Chapter 17
“So he’s been lying this whole time,” Laylen said, stunned. “I can’t believe it.”
“I can,” I told him. “The first time I ever met Nicholas, he pretended he was just a normal guy in the grocery store, not some faerie/Foreseer there to make me go to the City of Crystal with him.”
After Nicholas had disappeared with the Ira, Laylen and I had sat down on the velvet purple sofa. The house was silent. After Laylen had finally told Aislin that Alex had gone away to the City of Crystal to fulfil a promise to Dyvinius, she got super stressed out. So Adessa had taken her out for the day, to get her mind off of things.
I explained to Laylen in detail what had happened between Nicholas and me, and what I saw in my Underworld vision. But what we were going to do about it, I didn’t have a clue. And neither did Laylen.
“I still can’t believe it,” Laylen mumbled, shaking his head. “Why would he go through all that trouble to hang around here if he was never planning on taking you there—if he couldn’t take you there?” I shook my head, feeling more frustrated than I ever had—the prickle had confirmed this just a few minutes ago. “Who knows…But what I want to know is why I saw myself down in The Underworld…and with Alex. If I actually saw us there, doesn’t that mean there’s a good chance it will actually happen? We just have to find a way to do it.”
Laylen contemplated this while fiddling with his lip ring that looped his bottom lip. “You said Alex was there…” He scratched his head. “Okay, well I think that might be where we need to start.”
“With Alex?” I gave him a quizzical look. “But he’s not here…and we don’t know when he’ll be back.”
“Here’s the thing, Gemma.” Laylen leaned in toward me, his face holding such seriousness. “I think you’re going to have to make a choice here on whether or not you think we should go get him, because for one thing, if you saw him in The Underworld with you, you’re probably going to need him. Also, with as pissed off as Nicholas probably is right now, Alex may be in some serious trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?” I asked. “Alex never really explained what he was going to be doing there…Do you know, though?”
Laylen’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed hard. “I think Alex didn’t tell you because he thought it’d be better if you didn’t know.”
“It’s bad, though, right?” I shook my head. “Well, obviously it has to be bad, otherwise someone would have already told me what he was doing…Are they like hurting him or something?”
Laylen didn’t answer, but his silence said it all.
Knowing that Alex was getting hurt…Well, it was making me hurt. Literally. I could actually feel this ache in every part of my body. I think it was at this moment that I realized that Alex’s and my electric connection might be even deeper than I’d originally thought.
I remembered the vision where I saw him and me as children, sitting on the floor of the little hide out, with our hands pressed together whispering secret words in Latin. Such a strange moment, considering how we were now. What had changed? Me losing my soul? Or was it something else—something more?
As I sat there next to Laylen, thinking about all of this, I suddenly became extremely aware that whether I wanted to save Alex or not, I had to. It really wasn’t my decision to make. It was my connection with him that was going to make the decision, and the connection was telling me I had to go save him. It was a weird feeling.
“So how do we do it?” I took a shaky breath. “How do we get Alex out of the City of Crystal?”
“So then you want to do it?” Laylen asked. “You want to go get him?”
I nodded. “I think I have to. I mean, if I saw him in The Underworld with me, it probably means he has to be with me when I go there. Although I don’t have the slightest clue how we’re going to get there, since Nicholas took the Ira with him.”
“Okay…Well, do you have any ideas about on how to get us into the City of Crystal?” Laylen rubbed the back of his neck tensely. “Because it might take some time to find a Foreseer who will lend us their little ruby crystal ball that they use to travel to and from the city.
Besides, we kind of need to do this on our own so no one knows we’re there.”
“I completely agree.” I told him. “And I think I know a way.”
Chapter 18
Those few days I’d spent with Nicholas ended up not being a total waste of my time. He’d covered a lot about Foreseers and the way that the use the crystals energy to go in and out of visions. He also explained to me that the crystals energy wasn’t just for going into visions. It was also used every time Nicholas entered the City of Crystal. And apparently, allof the individual crystal balls ran off of the energy belonging to a massive crystal ball that stood in the center of the city.
All the crystals balls were connected. Because of this, I had an idea that if I really tried, I just might be able to get us into the City of Crystal without a ruby-filled ball, thanks to my unique gift of being able to use the crystals energy without actually having to have a crystal ball present.
But it was going to be tricky. I not only had to get us into the city, but I also had to get us into the city in present time, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to communicate with anyone, or touch anything. This was the reason why Foreseers used the ruby-filled crystal ball to get in and out of the city, because it took them there in the present time.
Although I was a bit skeptical that I could actually pull it off, it was all I had at the moment. So I started practicing day and night. At first, I couldn’t even figure out how to jumpstart whatever was sending me into visions. But then I caught on that it was connected to my emotions. Take for instances, when I was bitten by Vladislav. There had been a ton of emotion running through me then, which was why I think I ended up slipping into a vision. And when I’d drifted away while sitting on the couch with Laylen, I had been retrieving some of my lost memories, which, like Alex had pointed out once, were very deeply connected to my emotions.