Page 4 of Soulbound Shadows: Part 2

It was shocking to realize that, for all the intensity of my relationship with Evangeline, I had so few links to her life before me. We had been so caught up in each other and in finding the ascendancy array, we weren’t able to do many of the things that generally happened in relationships. Could something be called a date if you wound up fighting a giant statue? It didn’t matter now. All I had were scraps of knowledge about Evangeline’s regular stomping grounds. I knew a handful of establishments she frequented and two of her friends. She had mentioned her adoptive parents to me a few times, but I didn’t know their first names or even which state they lived in. Their daughter could be dead, and I had no way to tell them.

No. No, there was no way. If Evangeline was gone, truly gone, I was certain I would know somehow.

I slumped onto one of the plush sofas in the library and lay on my back, staring up at the ceiling. I would know if she was dead..

Surely.

I closed my eyes.

I was somewhere warm and comfortable. Music played softly in the background, Billie Holiday’s crooning distorted and foggy like it was coming from one of the wax-cylinder phonographs I’d so adored when they first came out. I stretched languorously and opened my eyes. I was in a room that I knew was Evangeline’s living room, although it didn’t look much like the actual place. Half of it was overgrown with plants, and the kitchen was now the entrance to a stable I’d had in the 1850s. Strings of bright, colored feathers hung from the ceiling and the walls.

“I missed you,” Evangeline said. I had come to awareness of the dream with my head pillowed in her lap, and she was looking down at me with a smile. Her chestnut hair floated around her, and I could see patterns in the curls.

I wanted to tell her that I’d missed her too, but my tongue was leaden, and I couldn’t make myself talk. She smiled down at me as though I’d said something, and I pushed myself up so that I could kiss her. Her laughter vibrated against my lips, and I tangled a hand in her hair, holding her close.

Evangeline let me crowd her, overeager, and she lay back against the arm of the sofa. Everything was hazy, pink, and warm. We were naked. Had we been naked before? It didn’t matter. Our bodies moved together, slick, hard, hot, wet, nebulous and overwhelming in the way sex always was for me in dreams. I couldn’t put a name to what we were doing, but I knew it felt good, knew I wanted more.

We were in a new space now, a room that was both my bedroom and not. Evangeline was above me. We moved in perfect sync, so connected we might as well have been one being, one fluid entity with no ending and no beginning.

“I need you to promise me something,” Evangeline said, her eyes glowing gold.

“Anything,” I tried to tell her. The word stuck in my throat, and I thought I might choke on it.

“You have to promise,” she said. Gold began to drip from her eyes, falling like gleaming tears. The blurry, pink warmth of her was changing, turning into cold metal. Where her tears hit my skin, they seared icily and stuck there.

I tried to make myself speak again and again. Molten gold started filling the room, creeping up over the edges of the bed, climbing inexorably closer to us with each movement of our bodies. I pulled desperately at Evangeline, trying to make her see the danger around us, but the more I tugged at her, the closer the gold got. It wasn’t safe, why couldn’t she see that?

“You have to promise,” Evangeline said again, coldly. “Why won’t you promise?”

The metal was crawling up my body now, flowing up my skin. It poured into my mouth, up my nose. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t do anything, couldn’t stop it. Evangeline stared down at me, face blank, as the liquid gold closed over my eyes.

I jolted awake with a strangled gasp, drenched in sweat, and I still couldn’t breathe. A dense, suffocating weight pressed down on my neck and chest, and in my nightmare-addled state I didn’t care that I didn’t technically have to breathe, I just wanted the weight off. As I scrabbled at it blindly, my hands met something soft and warm.

“Aah,” came a small but extremely emphatic voice from the region of my neck. I flopped against the cushions of the sofa with a groan.

“Hello, Pothos,” I said tiredly, dragging a hand over my eyes, which had the lovely side effect of rubbing Pothos’s fur directly into my tear ducts. My eyes stung, but at least now I could pretend it was just from that. Silver linings.

“Aah,” the cat said again. I was fairly certain he wasn’t exactly a cat, since I’d never met a cat that shed grass or grew flowers along its spine when it was happy, but it seemed rude to try to figure out what exactly Pothos was. He seemed content enough to be shaped like a domestic cat most of the time, although he did occasionally cough up mulch onto the carpets.

“You miss Evangeline, too, don’t you?” I murmured, brushing my fingers along his fuzzy green cheek. He leaned into the touch briefly, then nipped at my pointer finger with sharp little teeth. A warning shot, making it clear now wasn’t the time for petting. Sighing, I pulled my hand away.

“I’m worried about her,” I admitted. “She wouldn’t have left you behind if she could help it, would she?”

“Aah,” Pothos commented, then rearranged himself so he could clean his butt.

I looked down at the small, green creature industriously licking itself on the middle of my chest, then jolted upright, dislodging him. Pothos! Could it really be that simple?

“Sorry, sorry,” I said when he huffed at me. “I think you and I might be able to help each other. You see, you clearly miss your owner. So do I, but her apartment won’t let me in alone. But Chanel likes you, doesn’t she? Because you’re a very good, er, cat. So, if I go with you…”

Pothos stared up at me skeptically, one hind leg still in the air and a tiny sliver of his tongue sticking out. It was a horrible thing, having a cat judge you. After a moment, he came to a decision and jumped up onto my shoulders, draping himself across them like a stole.

“I take it you approve of this plan, then,” I said, bemused.

“Aah,” said Pothos.

I left the library and moved silently through the house, with Pothos still sprawled on my shoulders. It was quiet. Of the four of us who lived there, none of us were in a particularly conversational mood. Even Lissa, who usually chattered in her overwhelming big sister way until one of us was pulled out of our gloom, was exhausted.

“… hard on him,” I heard from the drawing room as I walked past. “But it doesn’t seem fair to keep him in the dark about this.”

---