Toxic Part Two (Celestra Series Book 7.5) (30 page)

I sit up on my elbow and pluck out a foil packet just the right size to house a condom.

“Sorry.” His cheeks fill with color. Gage is bashful to the last drop just as Emerson suggested.

“So, what else are you hiding from me?” My heart thumps unnaturally at the prospect.

“Nothing.” He holds up his free hand to attest to the fact. “Just had it on the dresser—thought I’d bring it along.”

“Are you a liar, Gage?” It comes out lower than a whisper, just this side of teasing.

He holds my gaze much longer than he ever should have to. His left eye twitches as if he were weighing his options.

“No, Skyla.” He takes up my hand and dips my finger into his mouth as if it were a confection. “I’m a lot of things, but I am not a liar.”

It makes me wonder what exactly those other things might be.

I shake out the small square package. “Maybe we’d better use it.” Like before he breaks my heart.

“Are you sure?”

I pull him back down and dip into a kiss that tells him how sure I really am. If Gage Oliver is bound to break my heart, he may as well do it right.

Gage runs his hot hands across my hips and drips them down slowly over my skin. He runs his fingers on the inside of my panties and I move in an attempt to help wiggle free from their protective layer. I want to feel Gage against me. I want to feel all of the intimacy he has to offer before Logan blows the whistle and declares it game over for Gage and me. That’s when the real heartache begins. When I have to choose whose team I’m really on. But tonight—tonight it’s just Gage and the condom that’s been burning a hole in his pocket for the last several months.

The foil square glides in my hand and I tear it open, never wavering my stare from his smiling eyes. Here we are. This was finally going to happen.

Gage sinks a sultry kiss over me with the tenderness of a thousand lovers and the room starts in on a violent spin.    

***

The ground jolts. The butterfly room, the island, it all disappears.

Gage and I rouse to a black-and-white world, a layer of grime over the clouds ready to bleed their oil on the parched soil below.

Gage rolls off me revealing the landscape of the ethereal plane.

“Is she shitting me?” I marvel. Apparently the prospect of keeping me chaste is like a starter pistol for the next region. At least I’m still in my dress.

“I’m betting she’s not.” He reaches past me and pulls a bastardized Ruger from behind a rock.

“Get up!” Logan runs over. “Noster pulled out. It’s just Celestra.” He gives an impoverished smile. “The Counts are already calling it a win. The whole damn faction is out for blood today. I’m staying with you.”

“You can’t stay.” I bounce to my feet and push past him, scanning the vicinity for Delphinius. I see his tall frame across the field next to the border of the forest. “There he is.” I take up Gage by the hand and pull him close.

“I’m not leaving.” Logan aligns himself on the other side of me as we run from bush to bush to get to the forest. “They’ve split into two groups, one to conquer and one to kill.” 

I stop midflight. The idea alone takes my breath away. I wonder how long before Celestra decides to pull out altogether? Could there be a war with just me? I know for a fact I would die trying.

“We’ve lost too many already,” I say. 

“That’s exactly why I’m sticking around.” A spasm of grief shoots across Logan’s face. “I’m not losing you, Skyla.”

“Yeah, well.” Gage gives him a nice hard shove in the opposite direction. “Nobody wants to lose you, either. Go hide in a gulley somewhere—keep your ass alive.” He wraps his arm around my shoulder and treks us across the expanse of bushes until we hit a barren strip that leads to the woods.

Logan appears, panting from behind and interlaces our fingers. It feels as if he’s fusing the two of us together, as if our souls already have.

“They’re going to kill you,” I hiss. “It’s treason. You’ve sworn your allegiance to them and if they catch you making nice with me or my faction friends on the battlefield, it’s game over.” I yank my hand free from his grasp and swat him hard across the chest. “Go,” I shout.

Logan steps into me with defiance written all over him. “No,” he says it with controlled anger.

I wrap my arms around him tight. “So help me God I will fall on a spirit sword before morning, if anything happens to you in this region. Think this through. You’re extinguishing your future, hastening our demise, not protecting it. I have Gage.” I wipe the mud off Logan’s cheek, leaving a smear an inch thick under his left eye. Logan looks like he’s ready for a heated scrimmage, one that requires a football as its primary objective, but still, he’s fierce and gloriously noble. “I promise I won’t die.”

“I’ll keep her safe.” Gage gently pulls me over. “I won’t let anyone hurt her. I swear. You have my full permission to kick my ass if anything happens.”

Logan rides his tongue over his teeth as he glares at Gage’s arm strapped around me. “That’ll probably happen anyway.”

Gage and Logan lock up in a death stare, but I step away, opting to assess the clearing rather than watch the Olivers’ emotional brawl.

The clearing spans more than fifty feet of dry, cracked soil.

Gage spontaneously picks up my hand and leads us, quick as blur, to the other side. I glance back at the empty void.

Logan didn’t come. He listened.

A swell of relief rides through me. I don’t want Logan dead, not now, not ever.

We make our way over to a thick crowd and find a couple of girls and four boys about our age laid out on dry soil with arrows lodged in various places. A boy with dark hair starts to shiver, vibrating over the ground like a motor.

“Give him blood,” I shout making my way to him. It’s only safe to presume those standing around gawking are Celestra because for one, they’re not blue.

I snatch a dirty arrow off the ground and slit my arm open just above the line of injury Ezrina caused. A thin seam of crimson pillows to the top and I get on my knees to bring it to his lips. His face is pasty—lips are purple. He pants, opening his mouth for the medicine of my marrow. His iced skin touches mine then he disappears.

“Shit,” I hiss.

“Skyla.” Gage pulls me back by the shoulder. “Your blood doesn’t work here.” He says it sweetly, almost as an apology. His eyes sparkle like the sea and he hides a smile that says he’s proud of my fruitless effort, no thanks to my mother and her incessant need to punish me. “But we can still help.”

Gage and I move over to a girl with an arrow speared through her abdomen.

A boy with cut features, a chest like a brick wall, rolls up his sleeve and replicates my effort on his own arm and I recognize him instantly.

“Cooper!” I say it like he’s an old friend. “Where’s Flynn?” I look past his shoulder for his
Count
-erpart.  

“Laying low. He’s not so hot on fighting with the resistance anymore now that he’s easily identifiable.”

“Sorry about that. It’s my fault.” Sort of like everything else. He lets the injured girl take all she needs. He’s nurturing her to health with his blood as if it were natural to procure medicine from your bodily fluids.

“We’re going to win this thing, you know that?” His hair gleams darker than I remember it, the exact color of a burnt umber sky as it prepares for a storm. He reminds me of Logan in a way, and this endears me to him.

“Yes. We win,” I say, charged from the proclamation, as if it already happened, as if the odds weren’t heavily stacked against us.

A burly man, with auburn-colored hair, slices both his arms and lets the injured come and take their fill.

We could save our kind, outsmart the Counts.

“We need a triage,” I say. “We need at least half a dozen of us willing to aid in recovery at all times. We can’t lose anyone else.”

“Are we giving up?” A young girl steps forward. God—she looks Mia’s age, with long, dark hair and beautiful, swollen lips.

“No,” I say, carefully extracting an arrow from the girl beneath me, “but keeping alive is just as important as winning.” The injured girl lets out an anguished cry as she tries to bat me away. I show her the bloodied stick before tossing it to the ground.

“Delphinius,” Gage calls to a group of men twenty feet away.

I glance up and see him there, lanky and unnaturally elongated. He dwarfs each one of us. We’re all grasshoppers in comparison to his magnificence.

He blips over and lands just shy of the girl I’m mending—peers over my shoulder to observe my efforts. “You’ll need much more than you can provide. There’s a trail of bodies leading all the way to the falls.”

“Ahava?” My pulse quickens at the thought of being so close to the sword of the Master. It’s my goal in life or death to reach it.

“No. You’re to get to the Jasper River to claim this victory.”

“Geography please,” Gage says as he situates an injured boy toward Cooper’s newly punctured wrist.

Truth is, I feel weak and dizzy just watching, but I can’t stand the thought of losing another Celestra, and to lose another soul when we can make a difference would be akin to suicide.

“Past the forest,” Delphinius thunders, “follow the river. A lake with three falls rests at the base. Ten Countenance must die and their blood poured out into the water for the victory to lie in your favor.”

“They have to kill ten Celestra to win?” I swallow hard at the idea.

“Yes.” Delphinius twitches ever so slightly as he sets his nose to the wind. “Seventy-four have perished this hour.”

“No,” I say, getting up.

“I thought you said they needed ten?” Gage rises, perplexed by the psychotic mathematics.

“The blood of ten in the lake. They have eight.”

The man with the brandy-colored hair looks up before tending to the remaining victims.

“Let’s go.” Gage takes my hand.

I bend over and pick up a bloodied arrow.

“Useless without a bow,” Gage warns.

“We’ll see.”

“Skyla,” Cooper calls just before we round out the thicket, “keep safe.”

“I will.” I say it hushed because I’m not so sure I can.

I tighten my grip on Gage as we rip through the woods.

“It’s downhill.” He picks me up and we glide through the air. We follow the river as it snakes clear to the bottom.

The sky swallows all of the lavender glory from above, regurgitates it into a bruised navy welt with dark ash clouds. A red trim lines the precipitous billows as they reflect the lake drenched with Nephilim blood.

Three separate falls dump into a large reserve. It’s so strikingly similar to the Falls of Virtue, a replica of the one down in the Transfer, it makes me wonder what it all means.

“Oh, God.” I gasp.

The water holds a burgundy cast. It glows under the moon like wine at midnight.

“The bodies are gone.” I marvel. “But the blood stays.”

A loud blast goes off.

Across the way, next to the middle fall, a pale blue Count flexes something over his shoulder—he sends a body flying into the water, rough, like a sack of potatoes.

“That was a Celestra—a
person
.” I snatch the Ruger from Gage and run to the base of the lake to hunt the bastard down. I come upon him at the shore as he crouches low enough to see his reflection. He observes the necrotic water as if examining his handiwork and I fire the potent pistol. A glowing blur moves in behind him, and I discharge a few shots in his direction for the hell of it. 

“You got ’em.” Gage taps me on the side in excitement.

We bolt over, jumping tree roots and limbs to get to them before they rouse from their paralytic stupor.

“Shit!” I seize at the sight of Logan lying on the ground—the toxic dart pinned high on his heart like a lover’s note. He blinks up a moment before gazing out into the sky and sinking into unconsciousness. “No!” I drop to my knees and press a kiss over his forehead.

Gage takes the gun and the bloodied arrow out of my hand. “Turn away,” he instructs as he leans over a man in his early twenties, a tattoo of a snake rides up over his forearm.

I turn my head and hear the distinct sound of a melon getting pummeled.

“Wait here,” he whispers. Gage disappears down the trail to the lake, blood soaking the ground on his heels.

I pet Logan’s brow, slow and remorseful—my sleeping lion, fierce and noble as any king that ever lived.

A heavy splash garners my attention and Gage speeds back, panting. “He disappeared”—his teeth shine like lanterns—“as soon as I threw him in.”

“I’m sure he’s lined up in the queue down in the Transfer as we speak.” It’s Ezrina’s busy season, courtesy of the war. “Look!” I point over at a blue shadow darting in and out of the evergreens across the way.

Something small and presumably lethal swishes by my head, and Gage fires back nonstop until we see an iridescent film on the ground.

“Got the bastard.” Gage starts to head over and I pull him back.

“This one is mine.”

“Skyla—” His breath warms my neck as he holds me. “I don’t want you to do this.”

“Others are living it. I need to fight.” I take the bloodied arrow out of his hand and glance up with an apology pouring from my being. “I’ll be OK. I promise.”

“I’m coming with you.” Gage tucks Logan beneath an Elder tree as we make our way into the woods and extricate the body. It’s a girl with dark springing curls, same paper-white skin as Emily, and for a moment, I think maybe it is her only she’s not a Count. Gage carries her to the river and lays her over the ground just shy of the water’s edge.

I hold the arrow over her eye an unreasonable amount of time. I don’t know how long the effects of the Ruger last or if I want to find out, but I can’t help but look at her long thin limbs and wonder if maybe she’s in cheer, or if she likes a sweet boy who writes poetry or a boy with a dangerous smile.

“I can’t.” I toss the arrow to the side. I knew I’d make a lousy warrior. “I can’t kill under pressure like this,” I say stupidly. Although, odds are I would have a hard time killing without pressure. I lean in and whisper, “You’re safe.”

In an instant she seizes my wrist and lands me on the ground, bashing my head over the pea gravel. My temple lands on the jagged edge of a rock, and the world surrenders to darkness for a moment—an entire bevy of stars spray out in front of me like you see in cartoons.