Toxic Part One (Celestra Series Book 7) (28 page)

“I went all in,” he says it so quick, so loud—I hold my breath a moment.

I imagine Gage sitting at some high-stakes poker game, Chloe as the deceptive dealer, shuffling cards marked to her advantage. They’re a team, taking down unsuspecting players. Anyone foolish enough to sit down beside him can easily become a victim. And here I am, once again firmly seated by Gage Oliver’s side. And yet I desperately want to believe him, hear him out once and for all.

Oh dear God.

I will never learn.

***

Once the boat docks, all of Paragon’s patrons are quick to evacuate what has become a vessel plagued with unfortunate sanitation issues. I have a feeling the said plumbing debacle was not only sponsored by a faulty set of lavatories, as the ferry employees insist, but a handful of laxative-laced smoothies my mother was eager to dispense this morning.

Mom, Tad, and Chloe decide there would be nothing more curative than a shower and a change of clothes, so they opt to catch the very next boat back to the island, which actually pleases me more than the fact they’ve spent the last half-hour bonding with porcelain. I could use a little distance between Chloe and me. Honest to God, if I have to subject myself to another braless morning with her airbags staring me in the face, I’m going spare the next victim on her kill list and decapitate Chloe myself. Now that I know I can bury a body in the past, the fact that it’s both unethical and illegal no longer holds the chain of fear it once lorded over me.

“You two have a good time.” Demetri bows into me. “I hope the beauty of the city will be enough to rekindle the flame you once held for one another.”

I seriously doubt that. The only flame he wants to kindle is the one under my feet once the Counts dub me a dry well. I’m sure Demetri would like nothing more than to roast marshmallows as I turn into a giant piece of Celestra toast. 

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” Darla chews her gum with the speed of windup teeth. “We’ve got a room to decorate with our love,” she whispers pulling him toward the waterfront.

Seriously? Gross.

Demetri turns around and sharpens his evil eye on me. “Skyla, I almost forgot.” He bleeds a smile that assures me, whatever he’s about to spew, he most certainly never forgot. “May I speak to you alone a moment?” He steps under the shadowed awning of the fish market a few feet away and I follow.

“What?” I ask almost amused.

He pulls a giant disc out and flashes it proud like a knockoff Rolex. It’s the same disc that fell out of my pocket during the faction war and cost me yet another loss.

“I want you to have this,” he says, wielding it in front of me. “Accidents don’t count. You have to want to forfeit the region. If anything, I want this to be a fair fight.”

I stare at him a good long while before retrieving it and stuffing it into my purse. This has “I want to get into your mother’s pants” written all over it, but hell if I care. I need this disc.

I don’t say thank you. I don’t say a word.

Demetri nods at me and joins Darla out on the wooded boardwalk just shy of the harbor. I watch as they drift off in the fog with his arm slung low on her back. I wonder if my mother wishes she were headed to some magical hotel room with Demetri instead of Darla. Mom is panting after the enemy and she doesn’t even know it.

Gage crops up beside me.

“What was that about?” His dimples tremble, still insecure regarding whether or not I want him around.

“Nothing.” I shake my head. “So, we’re here,” I say, fanning my arms out at the city. “What should we do?”

Gage steps in front of me and casts a shadow with his frame even in this dismal light. “We should go back to Paragon.” He blows the words into my ear. “Two years ago—the butterfly room.”

I nod and without regard for whoever might see us—we disappear.

***

Gage and I end up in a dank room with no light and the steady tap of rain beating over our heads.

“What version of hell is this?” I ask, as the cloying scent of dust and mildew fills the air.

“It’s your house, well, Chloe’s—the attic,” he whispers, pulling open the door to the butterfly room just enough.

There he is, two years his junior, his hair slicked to perfection. He’s wearing his dark blue football jersey with the number forty-four thick and glossy across the back. Chloe is there sitting cross-legged, content with the task at hand—cutting small paper wings out of colorful tissue paper. She looks remarkably the same, her hair and sharp features still stunningly gorgeous. A twinge of jealousy pinches through me at the sight of their heads knit together.

I know for a fact Chloe was a proficient stalker of his from before I ever set foot on the island. I read all about it in her notorious diary.

“This was from your vision,” I whisper. He had seen the tiny room covered with paper butterflies in his dreams.

Yes
. Gage pulls me in close, nuzzles his head into my neck and breathes in my scent.

“So”—Chloe leans back on her hands, tilts her head at the Gage sitting across from her, full with suspicion—“I guess I’ll be going soon.”

Gage looks up and puts down the scissors.

“I have some things lined up,” she says. “You know, for later. I’m coming back.” That last part bullets from her like a threat.

Gage gives a morbid nod.

“There’s this girl.” Chloe shakes her head. “She’ll be here, living in my house, my room.”

Gage looks past her shoulder, scours his eyes over the wall as though a picture were emerging.

“She’ll be here taking my place.” It comes from her broken, strangled as though she might cry. “I need someone to keep an eye on things. I don’t trust her.”

“What’s her name?” Gage breaks his gaze from the wall and leans forward with a newfound interest.

“I don’t want to say it,” she rasps. “She’s beautiful. That’s all you need.”

Something in me knew she was talking about the girl from my dreams.
Gage rubs his thumb over my hand as we listen in on the rest of their conversation.

“She’s coming after everything I own.” Chloe straightens with a sense of resolve. “She wants to be me. She’s got it out for me, and I’ll bet good money I die at her hands.” There’s a look in her eye like she might know exactly why, but she’ll never tell.

“Sure, I’ll keep an eye on her.” He shrugs, glancing up at the wall once again.

“Perfect. You can be her boy toy—break her heart like you broke mine.” Chloe flourishes under the guise of their agreement.

Gage doesn’t say a word, simply raises his dark brows and gets back to the task at hand.

“So that’s it?”
I ask, still unsure if I can trust him enough to know I’m not being manipulated.

That’s it.
Gage assures.
When we were reading her diary, and she mentioned the well-placed boyfriend, I wondered if that was me. It certainly wasn’t some sinister plan to take you down because of my devotion to her
.

It doesn’t make any sense. Why not tell me ages ago?

I take him in with the shower of golden light spraying over his beautiful face from a crack in the seam along the wall. It’s as if the light magnetized in his direction, as if it yearned to grace his features and sought him out for the sole purpose of illuminating him. At one time, I believed all of creation should bow to his eminence. He was so perfect, and now I don’t know what to think.

There’s something else you need to see
. He wraps both arms around my waist.
One more light drive?

“One more.”

We appear in the attic again, and for a second I’m unsure if we ever left, but we spot Gage in his former glory alone in the butterfly room.

This is the week before. I thought I saw something on the wall when she first dragged me up here, so I waited until she was at school and teleported over
.

Gage stands in the butterfly room examining the blank walls, inspecting them with a studious interest that far exceeds the attention the chalky plaster deserves.

After I had the dream about these walls covered with tissue paper, I wondered what it meant. I knew that there was a reason I was seeing the butterflies, far beyond decorating Chloe’s bedroom
.

“What was it?” I look up at him.

Watch
. He nods back into the orange glow of the tiny room.

The old version of himself places the flat of his hands against the wall and taps against it with a determined fervor, like patting down a thief.

The wall lights up, it pocks unnaturally as an image forms.

Then we see it, plain as day.

“Oh my, God.” I breathe the words out.

“It was faint at first,” he whispers. “I thought I saw your face. But then I was seeing you everywhere, in my dreams, the clouds, the trees. I was in love with you long before you ever set foot on this island.”

The walls brighten under his strange command. There I am, a glowing creature with my face displaying far more beauty than it does in reality with a tiara pressed into my hair, as I gaze upward, kissed by a tangerine light.

“I’ve had that vision before,” I say. “I distinctly remember being in awe of the peace on my face.”

“The second I saw it, I knew I needed to cover it up. Whoever gave me that vision of the butterflies must have thought the same thing. This is what I was looking at the day Chloe asked me to watch over you. I was already doing it—already shielding you from her. Whatever that moment is, it’s your destiny, Skyla. And someone up there has taken great pains to protect you.” He picks up both of my hands. “And so have I.” 

Chapter 40

The Vision

The stale attic air swirls around Gage and me in a cloud of dust and cobwebs. All of those old Bishop memories clotting up the air unnerve me.

So Gage was protecting me right from the beginning. He covered the walls to hide my effigy from blooming into view. Chloe was the snake in the grass, but it was Gage who was holding the gaff ready to shield me from her slithering ways. But he could have told me. We shared a thousand stolen moments in that room where he could have raked those delicate papers off the wall and revealed the prize he was motivated to hide from Chloe’s toxic affections.

“I had already traveled back and met Chloe before she died,” I whisper. “She knew what I looked like. Why cover my face?” Aside from the fact she’d be expressly pissed if I were mocking her from the infrastructure of the house.

Gage pulls me in, warps his fingers around my hair and kisses it. “I don’t know. I think maybe I had an epiphany once I remembered those visions of you. I knew the butterfly room would exist for a reason and I know that reason was for me to protect you—to love you.

“Let’s go somewhere where we can talk,” I say.

“Mind if I lead the way?” Gage whispers as the gossamer languishes around him in the nonexistent breeze.

“Not at all.” I let out a breath that’s crowded my existence from the moment Gage Oliver was pegged as my enemy.

***

Gage and I appear on a white sandy beach. The sun is high overhead as a lush, searing wind, humid as a shower, blows over my skin.

“Where are we?” I marvel at the azure water. It’s clear for miles before it marries the cobalt sea. It reminds me of the color of both our eyes, inextricably conjoined in this never-ending expanse.

“North shore, Kauai—Hanalei.”

“Oh my gosh.” I give a light bounce before plucking off my shoes and sinking my feet in the warm powder. It’s bliss like this in paradise with Gage. Emerald-peaked mountains sit like silent giants behind his shoulders. The sea laps up on the shore, pulling the jealous sand down into the mouth of the water to quench it from the smothering heat.

“There’s so much more I want to tell you.” Gage takes up both my hands and kisses them in turn. “I need you to understand why I saved Chloe at prom.”

“Yes.” My voice spikes unexpectedly. “And please don’t use that protective hedge as an excuse. Marshall said if her ordained time to die was in the vicinity, the Decision Council might have taken her.”

Gage shakes his head. “It had nothing to do with the protective hedge, and I promise you it wasn’t her time to die.”

Great.

Sometimes it feels like Chloe catches all of the green lights, in this life and the next.

“The night before prom, I had a vision.” Gage wraps an arm around my waist and leads us slowly down the shore. “I was going to share it with you, but life got crazy.” He swallows hard as if he were reliving the memory. “But first, I want to say that, after you were taken, I immediately left Chloe. I took off about a mile down the road before I was able to teleport back to the prom where I found Dudley and asked for his help. I figured since you were taken captive, that me outing him as a Sector wasn’t going to affect you.”

A shiver runs through me just imagining how desperate he must have felt to go to Marshall for help.

He nods as if he could read my thoughts. “He was in the middle of closing a chasm from the Transfer to get rid of ‘the visitors,’ as he dubbed them. He said they were floating spirits corrupting the imbalance between the living and the dead.”

“The not-so-nice dead. Those were the souls from the Transfer that showed up that night.”

“He dropped what he was doing and took off after Demetri. I waited for him at his house. When he got back, he said he spoke to your mother, and that the Decision Council was allowing this to happen. He mentioned Demetri had a treble open, so we would be seeing you soon. But I didn’t think it would be soon enough.”

“How did you know to get me?”

“I wrestled that bastard for hours before he agreed to break a rule.”

“Marshall broke a rule?” I’m shocked by this.

He nods. “Said there’d be hell to pay, but you were worth it.”

I take a breath at the thought. I can feel Marshall’s love pour over me in the form of a floral-scented breeze. I watch the ocean lap over itself a good fifty feet from shore where the color blends a bright aqua marine.