When night fell, they were forced to stop. Naya needed to rest, and Pandora could hardly see through the darkness. With all the strengths titans possessed, night vision wasn’t one of them. And while running through a flat desert landscape lit by glowing stars had been easy, beneath a carpet of trees, spotting uneven rocks and jutting roots had become more and more difficult with the setting sun. The moon was hardly more than a sliver in the sky, barely giving off light. Through the gently fluttering leaves, Pandora stared at the thin crescent while Naya quickly fell asleep beside her.
“What are you thinking about?” Sam asked gently, appearing by her side as the medium’s eyes slipped closed in slumber.
Pandora turned to look into his deep sapphire irises, remembering her nightmare as fire flashed in the depths of his pupils. Those angry orange-and-red flames were completely out of place with the man sitting beside her. “You.”
“What about me?”
She released a sad puff of air, glancing back to the forest floor, digging her fingertips into the dirt just to have something else to stare at. “I had a dream about you, and about me. We were…” She paused, drawing circles in the loose soil, watching her hand stain brown. “We were being swallowed in fire. Or maybe just you were. And I was holding you there. I don’t know why or how or when. But it felt real. It felt like a memory, maybe.”
“It wasn’t,” he told her quietly, bringing his hand down to cover hers, skin warm as usual, touch even softer than his voice. She met his gaze, trying to probe the depths reflecting back at her. “It was a dream, Pandora, only a dream. Don’t let it worry you.”
“Don’t let it worry me?” The corner of her lip twitched as she sighed. “Easy for you to say.”
His mouth lifted into a smile. “Do I look like someone who’s been burned at the stake?”
“No,” she answered, gaze dipping to his narrow hips, to the long legs stretched out before him, to the broad shoulders casually leaning against the tree trunk at his back. Barely four inches separated their bodies, and his golden skin was unblemished. Smooth and not bubbling, clear as her eyes could see. His muscles were strong, not shriveled. His hair fell in waves around his sculpted cheekbones, not frizzed and fried.
He was perfect.
With her focus still on him, Sam rolled smoothly to his feet, able and uninjured. Then he extended his hand forward, an invitation. “I have something I want to show you.”
Pandora’s eyes flicked up to his, which twinkled brighter than the sky above their heads. “What?”
“Just come with me. It’s a surprise.”
“I’m not a huge fan of surprises.”
His grin widened for a moment. “I know.”
She narrowed her gaze, trying to read his ever-mysterious expression, but he was still new, in this lifetime at least. She hadn’t known him long enough to read the grooves of his face, the shape of his brows, the emotion glimmering behind his eyes.
Jax had never been able to trick her, in the innocent way at least. She’d always seen through his fibs, always read the white lie on his lips. His excitement and enthusiasm jumped from his body, obvious and easy. Familiar. Comforting.
But Sam was something else entirely.
As Pandora lifted her arm and slid her hand into his, palm touching palm, her chest twinged as a bolt of energy zipped down her spine, electric. Her skin buzzed, intrigued and excited, captivated by him. And for the first time, she realized what it was—nerves. But the good kind, filled with all sorts of fantasies that fluttered at the edge of reason, veering into a place she hadn’t been before.
“Follow me,” he murmured, sinking into the shadows.
Pandora let the darkness take her, holding on to Sam as he led her through time and space. They emerged at the edge of a lake, midnight blue and perfectly still, a mirror sparkling with reflected starlight. Deep evergreen fringed the edge of the water, a frame with the universe trapped inside. Mountains topped with white cut into the indigo sky.
Sam squeezed her hand, fingers no stronger than a sudden gust of air, and signaled for silence. Smile wicked, he pointed across a bed of smooth stone, anticipation palpable as he watched her, waiting for her reaction.
Pandora squinted as she stared at the vacant spot, confused for a moment, until her breath caught in her chest. She inhaled sharply, eyes widening and smile spreading as she squeezed his hand. Looking at him for the barest moment, she found he’d never turned his attention away from her. For once, he seemed to be the one utterly enthralled.
She broke the gaze, turning back to the edge of the water where a white wolf had materialized from the shadows of the trees, a beacon in the darkness, oozing with lethal grace. She sank her muzzle to the water’s edge and dipped her tongue, drinking once, twice, sending a flurry of ripples across the surface of the lake, making it glitter. Two pups followed soon after, more cautious, hugging her paws. And just when Pandora thought the majesty had ended, the rest of the pack emerged, some guarding, some drinking, some watching the edge for prey on the cool fall evening.
“Come on,” Sam whispered, drawing on the shadows.
Together, they edged closer, stepping softly over the shallows, trapping the sound in the darkness. Sam released her hand and gave her a push, laughing softly, letting his mirth fill the charcoal mist. Pandora stumbled on overly excited feet, making her way to the center of the pack, careful not to disturb their peace.
She was mesmerized.
Throughout her childhood, she’d dreamed of seeing the wolves up close. Pandora had spent more nights than she could count in these woods, sneaking away from the enclave to study the animals, envious of their lives—the simplicity, the total reliance on natural instincts, the lack of duplicity, of secrecy. In the wild, there were no haunting memories, no endless questions, no unachievable dreams, no disappointments. There was eat and play and love and hunt. There was survival without the weight of humanity making everything messy. And she’d observed as many animals as she could over the course of her solitary youth—bears, elk, deer, bison, rabbits, foxes, rodents. But never the wolves. Graceful and elusive, they normally didn’t travel so far south. But then again, Pandora had no idea where she was, where Sam had brought her through the shadows.
She glanced up and found him across the blanket of white fur, expression tender. His smile deepened when she didn’t look away, when she held his gaze, silently thanking him for this moment. And then he arched his head back, cupping his hands before his lips, and howled into the vacant sky.
His voice didn’t puncture the shadows.
His cry didn’t echo across the night.
But it touched her.
Haunting. Beautiful.
Holding something he wouldn’t, or maybe couldn’t, say out loud.
And somehow, the wolves heard. One stretched its muzzle toward the moon, crooning. The rest followed, a symphony of yips and yowls, all different yet all merging into one voice, one song. Pandora leaned back, sending her own secret prayer up to the stars, letting her voice join the wolves, letting it travel outside the darkness and into the light. And they responded, merging her song with theirs, sending it higher, answering her plea to belong for a moment.
A lone wolf howled in the distance.
The pack froze.
A moment later, they were gone, disappearing back through the trees, dashing across the forest floor toward that call on the edge of the horizon.
But Sam was there.
He brushed his fingers against her shoulder, then gently trailed them down her arm, creating a blazing path to her palm.
“Dance with me,” he murmured.
Pandora glanced up, tracing the lines of his face. “Dance? But there’s no music.”
He leaned close, breath a warm caress against the skin of her neck as he whispered, “That never stopped us before.”
Sam placed her arm around his neck and cradled the other against his chest, swaying slowly to the sound of the wind.
“I don’t know the steps,” Pandora said, self-conscious. Her feet had never felt so large. Her long limbs had never felt so gangly. Her heart had never raced so fast—so uncertain, so unsure, so entranced.
“You do,” he promised, putting his cheek close to hers, wrapping the shadows closer. “Do you know why I showed you the wolves?”
She shook her head.
“Because I know you, Pandora. And I knew you would love them. And just as I knew that, I know that if you let me guide you, the steps will come, because we’ve danced them before, a long time ago, yes, but I remember it like it was only yesterday.”
“I don’t,” she confessed.
He moved, bringing them nose to nose, no space between them, no place to hide. “I don’t want you to, because watching you now, it’s as though I’m experiencing everything for the first time. And I don’t want the feeling to end.”
Pandora glanced away, overwhelmed, and then gasped.
They were in the center of the lake.
He’d moved them over the water, across it.
The shadows billowed beneath their feet, suspending them in midair, not disturbing the stillness of the inky surface. The stars reflected through them, unaware of the two lost souls hiding in the darkness. Everywhere Pandora looked, the world sparkled, a sea and sky of pure glitter.
She tightened her arm around Sam’s neck. “How?”
But he wasn’t interested in talking. While she gawked, amazed, he drew her into his arms, spinning her around, so the world became a kaleidoscope of color with Sam at its center. Pandora followed his lead, moving where he moved, stepping where he stepped. The ebony mist spiraled around them, smoke caught in the draft of their motions, rising with their steps, surrounding them in a midnight haze.
But Pandora hardly noticed.
Her attention was entirely on Sam. Her eyes were glued to his, her body was molded to his, being pushed away and always pulled back, until there seemed to be music playing softly somewhere, a tune only they could hear, echoing across their ebony paradise. Her feet moved on their own, anticipating his strides, matching them as they danced across the water. A carpet of stars was their stage, but eventually, that faded away, until everything was gone except for Sam. The world was black but brighter than it had ever seemed before. He was the sun, the moon, the center. And she twirled around him, always returning home.
“Stay with me,” he whispered as her back molded to his chest. He wrapped his arms around her waist, holding her close. Her head tilted up, pulled by a force she couldn’t control—the spell his voice had cast over her. “Forget everything, and stay here, with me.”
He took her hands in his and lifted them high above her head, turning her in her spot, so they were face-to-face. Her arms fell naturally to his shoulders. His palms found their way down her sides, then rested on the small of her back, touch burning. She arched her face up. He leaned his down, pausing no more than a centimeter away. Golden hair cascaded down, surrounding her in a halo, blocking out the shadows, blocking out the world.
“Let me be enough,” he pleaded.
She didn’t know what to say.
He lifted his hand, finding her cheek. “Let us be enough.”
Could they be enough?
Could this be enough?
She didn’t know.
Maybe?
But the words wouldn’t come. And her time ran out.
The shadows washed over Sam, covering his golden skin in a veil of smoke, pulling him away. And though she wanted to hold on to that moment, the darkness won, as it always did. His touch grew softer, fading away, like a strong gust of wind vanishing as swiftly as it came.
He disappeared before her eyes.
He left her.
And before Pandora could process the goodbye, she was falling, dropping through the shadows, returning to earth with a very rude and wet and cold awakening.
Frigid water shocked her system.
The splash filled her ears for a split second before her head went under.
The lake swallowed her.
And though her instincts were to fight, for a moment, she remained suspended in the cold, sinking deeper and deeper into the abyss, into the calm, into the silence, into a different sort of darkness.
The numbness washed over her. The heat of Sam’s presence faded. For a moment, she was a vampire again, body cold as the pain of humanity turned off. And it felt good to forget for a second. To float in oblivion as her body shut down, as her mind shut off.
But her throat started to burn.
Her chest started to ache.
So she called the shadows back and dove into her darkness, her power, letting it revive her as she took a long, shuddering breath. Suspended in the ebony mist, Pandora reluctantly considered Sam’s plea. Could he be enough?
As lovely as the idea sounded—to forget everything, to leave the titans and her questions behind, to run away with Sam and never look back—could a boy ever really be enough? She’d made a plan like that before, and past experience whispered that it never turned out well. Until she found out what she was, who she was, what her life meant, nothing would ever be enough—nothing but answers.
Pandora reluctantly brought Naya to the forefront of her thoughts and used the jaguar as her anchor, returning to a world that didn’t seem to want her. But it was stuck with her. For now, at least.
When she opened her eyes, Naya was still asleep.
But the sky wasn’t.
The smallest slice of gold broke through the darkness. The world was waking up. And if the night was for lovers, the dawn was for fighters. Which was exactly what Pandora was—a warrior hardened for battle, not a naïve girl blinded by infatuation.
Been there, done that, she thought, shaking her head to clear Sam from her thoughts.
Rolling her eyes with a heavy sigh, Pandora nudged Naya awake.
The sleeping cat growled softly.
“Come on, we’ve got to get up and keep moving while the sun is out. We might make it before nightfall if we’re lucky.”
Naya rolled to her feet, transforming back into a woman as Pandora wrapped them both within the shadows. But apparently, jaguars needed their beauty sleep, because the girl was cranky as she eyed Pandora with one brow raised and her arms tightly bound across her chest.
“What?” Pandora asked, cutting to the chase.
“Where exactly might we make it?” Naya asked smoothly, attitude tangible. “I’ve been pretty good about giving you your space, but your reluctance is making it clear that wherever we’re going, I won’t like it. And if we’re about to dive headfirst into danger, I think I deserve to know.”
Pandora grunted.
Naya raised her other eyebrow, not backing down.
“To the place I grew up,” Pandora confessed, because Naya was right. Deal or no deal, she deserved to know what she was getting herself into. “To the titan enclave.”
Naya grumbled incoherently.
“So you can help me speak to my mother,” Pandora finished quietly.
Naya paused, gaze softening. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“I was afraid you wouldn’t come.”
“I made a promise,” Naya countered, as though the response was obvious.
“Yeah, and I’ve heard that before.” Pandora released a sad puff of air. “It’s not that I don’t trust you to keep your word. I do. I guess I was just, I don’t know—”
“Afraid?” Naya supplied.
Pandora shrugged. “Maybe? But you’re right. You deserve to know where we’re going, especially when it’s another titan stronghold. I’m not asking you to break in with me—I can do that on my own. I’ve done it before. I’m just hoping you’ll wait nearby until I get back with something of my mother’s so you can connect me to her.”
Naya chewed on her lip for a few seconds, at war with herself, struggling between her fear and her integrity. Her anxieties won, barreling out as though her throat were a loaded gun. “And if the titans follow you? If they find me? What then? I just escaped, and I’m not going to get caught again. I can’t, not when my brother needs me, not when he—”
“You won’t get caught,” Pandora interrupted, touched that a girl she’d only known for a few days was so clearly caught between keeping her word to a stranger and saving the brother she dearly loved. But it wasn’t a choice, not really—at least not one Pandora would force her to make. “If the titans come, whether we’ve gotten through to my mother or not, I’m giving you permission to bail. As soon as they sense me, they’ll let you go. Run away and keep running, right to the conduit base, which is in Florida by the way. Start ordering vamps around, and the conduits will find you before you have a chance to find them. Go save your brother and forget about me, if it comes to that. This isn’t your fight.”
Naya dropped her shoulders, looking deflated, as the air left her in one whoosh. “I promised to help you.”
“And I promised you freedom.” Pandora shrugged, and then grinned. “Besides, I’m sure I could find another medium if I had to. You’re not as special as you think you are. I, on the other hand, have an entire race of supernatural beings hunting me down. I’m irreplaceable.”
Naya raised a brow. “You don’t look very special.”
“Looks are deceiving.”
“Good, because at the moment, you’re giving me an aura of wet dog.”
Pandora glanced down, having forgotten that she was soaking wet and still dripping with the lake water she’d splashed into.
“What happened to you?” Naya asked.
Pandora held out her hands and then let them fall. She had nothing. “It’s a long story.”
“Then I don’t think I want to hear it,” Naya replied smoothly. She jumped, leaping across the dirt, and landed fluidly on four paws. She glanced over her shoulder as if to say, Are you coming?
Pandora bit her tongue and marched forward.
Cats, she thought, snorting as her mind flashed back to the sight of the wolves the night before, almost otherworldly in their beauty. I’m so freaking over cats.