Page 100 of Unhinged Magic
He misted away, leaving nothing but air in his wake. I blinked repeatedly, unable to comprehend the events that had unfolded in front of me.
An uncanny quiet followed.
“I can’t believe he’s gone,” came Skye’s hushed voice, staring at where Landon had stood only moments prior.
Words abandoned me, like they didn’t trust me to speak. My lips moved, sounding muted words, and in that moment, I found myself slammed with so many emotions at once I could barely keep myself upright.
“Wesley?”
Ripping myself from my stupor, I pulled her into my embrace, gripping her tightly. “I thought I had lost you.” I caressed her hair, committing her scent, her touch to my memory, like she could vanish at any moment. “Please tell me this was your plan all along?”
She snuffled, wiping her nose. “Yes, this was how I hoped it would end, that Landon could somehow move on, only I didn’t expect you to be here, too.” She stared up at me, questions burning deep in her turquoise depths. “How?”
A loaded question. One I didn’t know the answer to. My neck fucking throbbed, and I had a suspicion Ty had something to do with it.
I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter. What we need to sort is how we get back.”
Skye held me close, her warm breath on my neck like my very own antidote. “I don’t know how long we have been in this void. I don’t know how this...”
Before she could finish her sentence, I felt her being ripped from my embrace, dragged backwards by an unseen force. Terror embedded itself in her face as we were torn apart, her arms reaching for me.
“Skip!” I bellowed as she dissipated before my eyes.
Then my vision evaporated.
Skye
Igaspedasairfilled my lungs, propelling me awake.
“Ohmigod, Skye!” Morgan’s voice teared through my ears, and I winced. I blinked at the group staring down at me, nothing but pure disbelief distilled in their posture. It emerged in shaking fingers, tear-stained eyes and slightly parted lips.
“I can’t fucking believe it,” said Tyler, moving his gaze over me in haste. He gave Morgan a sidelong glance, but it seemed she was lost for words.
I sat upright, my vision distorting slightly and making me dizzy. “Am I…” I struggled to finish my sentence.
“Alive.” Reid’s clipped tone tore me from my confusion, he moved out from behind Morgan, his focus hardened to mine.
It was like staring at a side of him I’d not met before. I found his constricted torso wound tightly, his shoulders hunched as if heavily burdened. Like life had just taken something of importance from him. A muscle in the side of his jaw twitched, and he clutched something in his fist. A cloth maybe?
“Reid?” I didn’t need to speak my question, my wobbly voice sounding everything it needed to.
He steeled his gaze to somewhere behind me, closing the space between myself and whatever held his sight in a vice grip in seconds. I turned, following his long strides until he knelt beside a body.
Wesley.
Every cell inside of me froze. My whisper cut through the ghastly silence filling the walls of the familiar manor. “Wes?” I scurried over to him, Morgan’s cry to be careful barely registering in my mind. I was lulled back to my final moments with him, when something tore me from his embrace which such ferocity, I imagined I was being dragged into the afterlife. Only it seemed I had been wrong. Because here I was, alive.
But it seemed Wesley was not.
“Is he?” I couldn’t say the word, my tongue not letting me speak it aloud.
Reid bent at the knee, his free hand drifting to Wesley’s wrist. “I can’t say for sure.”
I stumbled on my words, struggling to put together the scene before me. “What do you mean? What happened?” Dropping to my knees on the other side of him, they hit the ground with an ache, my hands sweeping over him without touching him once. His lifeless figure lay spread at an unnatural angle, dust collecting around his body like a shrine. A shiver tore down my spine.
Staring up at the group, uncertainty etched itself into their eyes. Tyler palmed the back of his neck, Morgan wrapping her arms around her front. I eyed Reid, still clutching something in his hand in a tight fist.
He darted a look at Tyler, who opened his mouth as if to speak before Reid interrupted. “He asked me to break his neck.”
