Page 22 of One Last Touch

Alarm bells rang in my mind as I took half a step away. “What do you mean?”

“She never would have wanted to leave you.” He barely looked at me, just continued to stare down at the headstone like the world had fallen out under his feet and left him in freefall. “If I could have stopped it, I would have.”

Not necessarily a ringing endorsement of innocence but… “I would have too.” He finally looked up at me and the sharpness of his gaze speared me as I choked. “Your eyes…”

The man looked to the left-hand-side of my face and smiled slightly. “Quite remarkable.”

The shape of his jaw, the cleft in his chin, the soft smile that graced his face—it wasn’t possible. I’d come here to affirm my sense of reality and only lost it further. There was no way Edward Alswell was standing in front of me.

“Are you Edward?” I whispered it, barely daring to breathe the words. Had I gone completely mad?

“I think you already know the answer to that.” He crouched down and brushed several leaves off of the earth at the base of the stone. He made it sound plausible, like this wasn’t further proof that I was losing my fucking mind.

I managed to choke out words. “Why did she leave?”

“Because she had to.”

“You forced her to leave?” I stuttered.

He smiled as he looked up at me and I stared, numb. That mouth, that grin, it was a mirror image of my own. Was this a breakdown? “Nobody could force Natalia to do anything she didn’t want to do.”

That was true enough. “Then why?”

He sighed. “Things had gone too far. It wasn’t safe anymore. She wanted to protect you.” He stood and took a few steps away. “She still does.”

“Protect me from what?”

Edward looked up sharply, like he could hear someone calling his name from a great distance and started to fade before my eyes.

“No!” I reached for him and my hands slid right through. I stared at them in shock, clenching and unclenching my fingers. What was happening to me? Was this another dream? Another hallucination? Had I pushed myself too hard coming to her grave and fainted?

“It was good to see you, finally.” His words echoed, like he was no more than a memory fading fast until I was alone in the cemetery again. Or had I always been?

I backed away from the grave, their names blurring together as the world seemed to spin around me faster and faster. I ran.

I couldn’t feel the ground beneath my feet or the air in my lungs, so I pushed myself harder, no longer sure if I was alive or dead or if there was any difference between the two.

The birds squawked at me as I stumbled through the underbrush, stomping through leaves and trying to avoid nettles. I lost the trail, the world seemed an unfamiliar place and I wasn’t sure what I could trust, what was real and what was my own mind, playing tricks on me.

I sank to the forest floor, the dirt cold and grounding beneath my palms. I wasn’t sure what had happened to my gloves, I’d likely dropped them at some point while I’d been stumbling around and generally losing it. The sky had darkened to a deep black and the wind blew fiercely, shrieking through the branches and rattling the trees where they stood. Thunder boomed out, so loud it shook my bones and made my eyes ache and I huddled under a large tree for shelter while I reached for my phone.

Some kind god must have been shining down on me at that moment as I had two bars of service, enough to be able to use maps to direct me back to the manor. I was embarrassingly close-by—fancy being lost five seconds from your front door. Sage was likely going to freak out that I was not only out after sundown, but that I was roaming the grounds in the dark.

I laughed maniacally, the sound echoing into the air as my breath fogged, billowing smoke up to the sky as I blinked around at my surroundings without recognition. What was he so worried about anyway? I laughed again and then screamed when the heavens suddenly opened and the rain pelted the floor like a hammer. Leaves scattered and jumped with the force and I slid several times on both wet mulch and mud, skidding and slipping until at last the house was in view. I hurried out of the woods and onto our perfectly shorn lawn when the air began to crackle, the scent of ozone absolutely unfamiliar but the strong tang left me with no doubt as to what it was as my hair began to float.

I looked up at the sky in awe, seeing the stars shining brighter than ever before, or just the one star really, forking and slamming down—

I screamed as I was thrown out of the way of the bolt. My body thunked to the ground and the breath was knocked out of me as frantic hands turned me over. My eyes instantly went to the spot where I’d been standing only moments before and the large scorch mark that now scarred the earth. Lightning.

A giggle broke free the longer I stared at it, the shock forcing the unhinged sound out of me. Oh my god, I had almost been struck by lightning. I laughed harder until the hands gripping my shoulders shook me and I looked up into the face of Sage, caught in the moonlight, glowing bright silver-blue.

“No.” The word was a whisper but it felt like a shout. “Am I mad, Sage?”

“No,” he echoed. “You’re alive.”

“I can be alive and mad,” I reasoned. “You look like her. You’re glowing.”

“Who?”

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