“What in the hell?” I lean closer, squinting at the plaque mounted on the statue’s feet. As soon as I read it, my pulse quickens to the point that it knocks the breath out of me. “Julian Lucas. Lucas? No. There is no way.” I cover my mouth with my hand and back away. Where am I? What is this place?
“Don’t worry, it’s just a statue,” someone says from right behind me.
I spin around and jump back when I come face-to-face with a man that has a striking resemblance to the statue, only he’s alive and breathing. He has shoulder length, brown hair and violet eyes.
“Oh, my God, you’re… you’re…” I place my hand over my trembling mouth and shake my head.
“Hello, Gemma,” he says calmly. “I’m so glad you finally found me.”
“But you’re… how… why…” I can’t form sentences.
Thankfully, my dad understands. “Don’t worry. I’m here to help you.”
“Help me with what?” I finally get a full sentence to leave my mouth.
He smiles. “Fix the past and create a better future.”
I glance around at the strange place I’ve dropped into. “What do you mean? Where am I?”
“You’re in the only place I can be,” he says, turning around and putting a hand on my back to steer me with him as he walks down the path.
I move nervously with him, my heart erratic in my chest. “What do you mean by fix the past?”
“I mean, we’re going to do what probably seems like the impossible,” he says. “We’re going to reset time and erase some of the past to hopefully create a better future for the world.”
My heart quiets inside my chest. Calms. For the briefest moment, I swear I feel sparks of heat, tiny firecrackers. If what he’s saying is true—if we’re going to erase some of the past to hopefully help the world—then maybe I can also help Alex.
Maybe I can reset it so he doesn’t die.
Maybe I can bring him back.
Chapter 2
As we hike down the path toward the unknown, I watch my father out of the corner of my eye. He looks so much like me; brown hair, fair skin, tall, and of course the violet eyes. It’s almost too good to be true and with faerie/Foreseers like Nicholas roaming around, who can turn into a mirage and make me see things that aren’t real, I have to wonder if my dad isn’t real or nothing but an illusion manifested, perhaps, by my death. Maybe Aislin’s mirage protection spell isn’t working anymore. Maybe I’m the one who’s dead.
“Am I dead?” I dare ask.
He shakes understandingly. “No, you’re fully alive.”
I continue to study him; sharp features, a warm smile, confidence in his walk. “Are you dead then?”
He shakes his head, a sparkle in his eyes. “Not quite.”
“Is that even possible? To not quite be dead?”
He considers this carefully, gazing off at the columns lining the path. “You’re here in your vision form.”
I swallow the massive lump in my throat. “So my body is still back on earth? Passed out?”
“Yes, pretty much.” He pauses. “But don’t worry, today isn’t the day you’re going to die, Gemma. I promise.” His silver robe swishes across the floor as the path curves upward, almost as if it’s bowing into the sky and carrying us along with it. “We only have a few minutes before you have to return and I have something very important I need to show you.”
“Okay.” Light glimmers from the ceiling. “Is it how to reset time and bring back Alex?” I half expect him to yell at me, for putting a guy before the world’s needs, but he simply nods.
“If all goes well and you’re able to pull it off, then yes, Alex will come back too,” he says, nodding.
“So this is all in my hands?’ I ask. “I mean resetting time?”
“You sound skeptical?” He notes curiously as the path dips downward again and I have to work to keep by balance and not fall to my ass and slide down.
I shrug with my hands out to my side. “It’s just that I’ve seen and heard things that make me think that it’s not possible to change time. Or that I should.”
“You’ve seen them in your visions I’m assuming?”
“Sort of…” I gape at him. “Wait, you know I can see visions?”
He smiles as we arrive at the bottom of the hill, then we veer to the right down a slender hallway lined with porcelain columns engraved with gold leaves. The ceiling is swirled with various shades of yellow and blue, creating an effect similar to Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night. The place is surreally gorgeous, unlike anything I’ve ever seen.
“Where do you think you inherited your Foreseer gift?” my father asks as I gaze at the beauty around me in awe. “And, just like you, I have unique Foreseer abilities.”
I tear my attention off the scenery and focus on him. “So you can do things besides just see visions?”
“Yes, but that is a story for another time,” he tells me with a sad smile on his face as if it’ll never happen. “Right now, you need to focus on creating a better future for the world.”
I have a ton of questions I’m dying to ask him. It’s my first time meeting him, and I want to know everything I can about my mother, my past, him. But there’s urgency in his voice that keeps my lips sealed. And besides, deep down in the pit of my heart, most of my attention is on Alex, back at the beach house, dead, something I need to fix. In fact, just thinking about it makes my heart feel like it’s rupturing open and bleeding out, but whether that feeling is coming from the star or from my own emotions, I’m unsure.
I bite on my nails and remain stuck in my own head and the what if’s as we make the rest of our journey. At the end of the hallway there’s a stairway stretching up a sloped floor toward a brick mausoleum. Two massive pillars form an entryway to the heavy wooden door on the front of it where there’s a red light glowing from a barred window.
“What is this place?” I ask, hoping that it just looks like a mausoleum and doesn’t actually have dead bodies inside it.
He doesn’t answer as he climbs up the stairs toward the mausoleum. I rush after him, the steps cold underneath my bare feet, making me aware that I don’t have any shoes on and painfully hyperaware that I can barely remember anything up to the point where I woke up from my possession and Alex was dead on the floor. This has me worried about what I did while I was under Stephan’s control. What if I’m not remembering more evil things I did? What if I hurt more people?