aving been restored to my prime, I spent the remainder of the week joining the various members of the Inero family in whatever endeavors they undertook.
These activities kept my mind and body busy for most of my days. However, when I was not occupied I could not stop thinking about my dreams.
Since we’d arrived at Ashlyn’s I’d been having way fewer dreams than normal, which I was grateful for. Unfortunately, the intensity of the ones that lingered remained strong.
I spent a great deal of time thinking about these haunting visions, costing me more than my peace of mind. Although Ashlyn had warned me not to use magic while we were here, I always kept my wand on me. And about once or twice a day—staring off into space, lost in daydreams—as I twirled it through my fingers, I accidentally transformed it out of habit.
I would immediately halt the reaction as it brought me immediate pain. But the small burns or bruises this inflicted were nothing in comparison to the mental weight of my nocturnal foresight.
I’d more or less had the same dream theme running through my head every night we’d been at Ashlyn’s. I kept seeing Natalie, her happy family, and then the end of this happiness beginning with her father’s death that rainy night in the city.
Sometimes the specific scenes changed, but the story stayed the same. Natalie was born to two people very much in love. She was raised in a world filled with familial bliss. And then, like an apocalyptic thunderstorm, everything came crashing down.
Natalie’s father died. Her life outside her home began to be characterized by a constant stream of torment. Her mother eventually fell ill. And Tara kept the boy Natalie had feelings for so far away they might as well have existed in different realms.
It was an awful thing to watch. Furthermore, I didn’t understand why I was seeing Natalie at so many different ages. I was supposed to see the future, right? So why was I suddenly seeing her past too?
That irregularity aside, all my dreams about Natalie caused me to come to terms with one concrete pair of truths. To start with, everything that went wrong in Natalie’s life had been the design of that blonde antagonist known as Tara. Under the orders of Arian and this Nadia character, she was responsible for all of it. Tara was the one who would destroy Natalie’s future in the many ways I’d seen, and in whatever ways I’d yet to witness too.
And then there was that other truth. The one that involved me. It was simple really: I had to stop her.
I didn’t really understand why Tara, Arian, and Nadia were trying so hard to break Natalie. But I did know that I couldn’t stand by and let them wreak havoc on her life.
First and foremost, it was an unacceptable notion and I just wouldn’t have it. And second, there seemed to be a lot more at stake than the life and livelihood of one innocent girl. Otherwise, why else would the antagonists be working so hard to destroy her?
Something big was meant to happen with Natalie, something about her Key Destiny Interval and the opening of the Eternity Gate.
I did not know what this gate was or where it could be found. Nor did I have any idea what a Key Destiny Interval was. But with each passing night I became more desperate to learn the truth. Since I’d first seen those words printed in the folder I’d taken from Fairy Godmother Headquarters they’d been popping up in my life like a recurring zit. I closed my eyes and remembered them clearly:
• Magic Classification: Category 1, 2, & 3 priority
• O.T.L. Candidate: Ryan Jackson
• Key Destiny Interval: 21st birthday
(cross-reference Eternity Gate)
O.T.L. stood for One True Love. I knew that now. But I had no idea what the Magic Classification thing meant. Neither Tara nor Arian had ever mentioned it. And without any concrete knowledge of the Eternity Gate, the only other piece of information I had to work with was Natalie’s Key Destiny Interval. If it and the Eternity Gate were both tied to her twenty-first birthday, I figured if I was going to do something to save Natalie and stop the antagonists, I had to do it by then. This was when their actions around the girl’s destruction were meant to climax. Which meant it was my deadline too—the day she turned twenty-one and not a day after.
Unfortunately, doing it by then was an ambiguous goal given that my recent dreams had left me completely at a loss for just how old Natalie was. Between the wide variety of ages I kept envisioning her at, and the way time moved on Earth in comparison to Book, for all I knew her twenty-first birthday could’ve been tomorrow.
Oh, and there was another problem too. I had zero idea how to go about finding Natalie and stopping the antagonists from hurting her.
To say I had obstacles would’ve been an understatement. Still, I was convinced I would find a way. I had to.
Regardless of the implausibility and the missing information that stacked the odds against me, I was completely set in my decision. I was irrevocably and consciously committing myself to figuring out a way to help Natalie no matter what it would take. If for no other motivation than—as the only person who knew what was coming for her—it was my responsibility.
I could no more explain this instinctive protectiveness I felt toward Natalie than I could my ability to glimpse into her future. Nevertheless, I felt certain that the compulsion was a just one. She mattered. Putting aside everything with Arian and Tara and this Eternity Gate, even forgetting the strange fact that she had a protagonist book in our realm, Natalie had been in my head for far too long now for me to continue writing her off.
For whatever the reason, her fate was tied to mine. And as such, I gathered if I was going to go to such great lengths to alter my own destiny on this mission, I should start looking into ways to change hers too.
I owed her that much. Moreover, I had this nagging feeling that where she and I were concerned, our journey together was only just beginning.