Page 8 of Beyond Reason

Or maybe Xavier was just one of a kind.

Except…

The man on my couch leaned forward, his elbows propped on his knees as he looked up at me. “Trust me, this is just as weird for me as it is for you.” I highly doubted that. There was a stranger lounging on my couch… and, for some reason, I didn’t want to kill him.

I wasn’t trying to make him leave.

I was just… staring at him.

I seemed incapable of doing anything else.

When I didn’t say anything, he finally stood and stepped toward me; his eyes roamed across my bare chest, taking me in slowly before lifting back to my face. It was the strangest sensation, wanting to recoil, wanting to step back. After Xavier died, everything in my world had turned cold. I wasn’t a psychopath or a sociopath like so many of the people I’d worked with, but I’d been around enough of them to learn how to shut off my emotions. I’d been through enough to realize that it was easier not to feel anything than to feel the pain that refused to fade no matter how many years went by.

But watching him walk toward me, it was like I had double vision. I could see the slender man with wild curls, and I could see a taller body… all lean muscles and dark brown hair pulled back in a tail. I could see bright green eyes and a galaxy of freckles across his nose that I used to count while he slept, used to make constellations from—a map to infinity. Late at night, when I stared at him, I thought I knew what forever looked like.

When he’d laid dead at my feet, I’d made a new map that led straight to limbo from the spattering of blood that painted his freckles red.

He didn’t stop until he was standing in front of me, and the wide-eyed expression on his face was one I recognized.

It was the way he looked up at me the first time I’d seen him, when he was bleeding out. He’d said one word to me then.

Just one.

And he was saying it again now, the ghost of my heart, living and breathing and impossible.

“Please?” His expression was lost, wrecked… broken and just a little afraid. “Axel… I didn’t know where else to go.”

Chapter 3

Xavier

My feet carried me to a place that my mind could barely remember. It was almost like I moved in a daze—the world around me was off, just like the hospital had been. A little different… like everything I’d experienced for the last two weeks while trying to figure out what was going on.

The way to Axel's house was the same; it was all a little too much in comparison to what I recalled… but the streets were familiar.

The twist of the road still followed the path I’d walked before. It had taken me a few days to remember it, but I had.

The long driveway was so green, and in my mind’s eye, I could see the ghost of half-sprouted trees where they stood tall now.

Time had changed everything.

And somehow, the more I stepped forward, the more I realized I’d walked this path a hundred times before.

Axel.

He was the only thing I could clearly remember, his name the only word my tongue seemed eager to form. He was like a light, flickering and fluttering in the distance—it lured me in, drew me forward.

I just wasn’t sure if I was stepping into warmth or flying like Icarus, too close to the sun and too eager to feel its heat to realize my wings were melting.

I wasn’t afraid to burn.

And apparently, I wasn’t afraid he was going to hurt me, because I barged into his house like I didn’t look like a completely different person… like I hadn’t spent days in a condo that I couldn’t remember trying to figure out what was going on. I’d moved mechanically, familiar and yet not. Even though I’d never seen the place before, I knew where everything was. I knew how devices I’d never seen in my lifetime worked. In those two weeks, I’d learned to trust the instincts of the body I was in.

Because that’s exactly what was going on.

I was in a body that wasn’t mine—it was all there on that little flash drive that I had with me when I woke up. It had taken me a few days to figure out exactly what it was, exactly what it was for, but once I’d found Marshall’s computer and set my fingers across the keys, that motion came to me on instinct as well. Opening the files revealed a truth that I’d half suspected but didn’t want to admit.

My life wasn’t my own—at least, not only mine.

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