I thought that I would have more time to talk to Quinn about our plan before we left on the trip to my world that Cassius had promised me. I also thought that I would have time to talk to Cassius, who had barely spoken to me at all. He seemed troubled and preoccupied when I had found him in the main hall.
It was empty, and Cassius had been sitting on his throne within the empty room. His usual posture of having one leg swung over the side of his chair had been traded instead for a forward-facing seat with his chin resting in the palm of his hand.
I had gone to sit in one of the chairs next to him, hoping that he would talk to me about what was on his mind and why he hadn’t come back to the bedroom the night before. But instead, we sat in silence, with Cassius’s heavy sighs as the only intermittent noise in the room. He looked over at me several times, and although I wanted to ask him to tell me what was going on, I felt too bad about my plan to run away to question him. The result of our silence ended up with us both just staring into each other’s eyes until the rest of the room seemed to disappear. Finally, Cassius broke the silence.
“Let’s get ready to leave,” he said as he stood up and reached for my hand.
“Leave for where?” I asked.
“For your world. Boston, I believe, isn’t it?”
“Right now?”
“Yes, I don’t see why not. Unless you have something better to do today?”
I shook my head. I didn’t want to turn down a chance to go home; what if he didn’t offer it again? But I also wanted to make sure that Quinn was coming with us.
“Will it just be you and me going?” I asked.
“No, unfortunately, Athan’s treachery makes traveling alone a bit too dangerous. We’ll bring a few of my men with us,” he said. He looked more than annoyed when he mentioned Athan now; he looked as though he had experienced a terrible grievance.
“Can Quinn come along?” I asked, knowing that Cassius and Quinn, even despite their long-term relationship with each other, seemed to lock horns when it came to me.
“If you wish,” he answered. “Would you care to handpick the rest of my guards who attend as well?” The sarcasm in his voice did not go unnoticed.
I normally would have shot back with a clever retort, but the guilt that gnawed at me about trying to run away just as Cassius was attempting to do something kind for me was starting to become a bit too overwhelming, so I just shook my head instead.
We went back to the bedroom together, where Cassius grabbed a few things from his chest of drawers, and I picked up the black ballet shoes that were resting atop the overstuffed chair. As soon as we were ready to walk out the door, Quinn and two of Cassius’s other men met us in the corridor.
“Ready?” Cassius asked me.
“Yeah,” I said.
When I answered Cassius, Quinn glanced at me with a curious look as if he were making sure that I was still buying into our plan. Although, we really didn’t have a plan per se, mostly just an idea to escape. There hadn’t been enough time for us to formulate an actual strategy to execute.
Cassius reached for my empty hand and then for Quinn’s hand as well. I had no idea what was going on as all of the men seemed to join hands and wait while Quinn muttered words beneath his breath.
This is magic , I thought. Before I had a chance to think anything else, I found the surrounding walls of the caverns melt away in exchange for the gilded and red velvet-lined walls of the Boston Opera House. I stood paralyzed for a few minutes, unable to believe that we were actually here. Then I remembered what Sen had said; for every magical transaction, there was a cost. I wondered who had paid the price for this trip across worlds—Quinn or Cassius? They both looked fine as I glanced over at them.
The opera house was empty, and I assumed that Cassius had probably timed our journey here to be during the middle of the night in order to prevent any interaction with the humans. It was dark, with only the emergency lighting engaged, but Quinn soon remedied that with fae magic that illuminated the entire opera house as if it had its own moon laid into the domed ceiling. The other two men who had come along looked as if they had never visited this world before, and they stood in awe at the height of the building and all the layered rows of chairs that seemed to climb up into the sky. Cassius took my hand, and we walked toward the stage together with Quinn following closely behind. He held his hand up to me as I ascended the stairs at the side of the stage while he stayed standing on the floor below.
“Now,” Cassius said, smiling. “You can dance on the stage of your dreams for as long as you’d like tonight. And I will sit and watch you.”
I looked around the empty stage in awe. It was even more massive than I could have imagined. I also could have never imagined that this was how I would get to stand on the stage of my dreams, by being gifted a solo performance from a half-vampire from another world. I was too overwhelmed to think straight.
“There’s no music,” I said.
“Don’t worry about that,” Cassius answered. “Quinn will provide us with whatever music you need.”
Quinn lowered his head into a deep nod as if his compliance was not requested but required. I knew that meant he would be wielding more magic to bring about resounding music to fill the entire empty theatre.
“I will leave you two to it,” Cassius said as he turned to take a seat in the front and center section of the theatre.
Quinn looked up at me, and I leaned down from the stage in order to talk with him.
“When are we going to escape?” I asked him.
“I’m not sure yet,” he said. “But I’ll think of something, and when I do, you’ll know it’s time.”
I nodded.
“And Mara, we aren’t escaping—just you.”
I didn’t want to run away without Quinn. Not only was I afraid of getting caught while trying to flee, but I was more afraid of what Cassius would do to him when he found out Quinn had helped me get away.
“I don’t think I can leave you behind,” I said as my voice shook.
“Yes, you can,” he smiled. “Now, what kind of music would you like to dance to?”
As Quinn summoned the magic to fill the opera house with the beautiful sound of one of my favorite scores, I slipped on the black ballet shoes and tied the ribbons around my ankles. Then, I stood up and took a deep breath in as I prepared for two of the most wonderful and terrifying experiences of my life—to perform on the most impressive stage that I had ever danced on and to escape from the man that I wasn’t sure if I hated or had feelings for. My knees shook as I rose to my toes, but as I looked out into the rows of empty seats, I saw Cassius looking at me so intently that I suddenly felt nothing else but the thrum of the music in my veins and the heat of Cassius gaze pounding against my chest. I couldn’t help but start to dance.
I didn’t know how long I had been dancing when I heard what sounded like a train crashing through the side of the theatre. It felt like I had been dancing both forever and not nearly long enough. Everything that happened next was a blur.
At first, I thought that maybe this was the sign Quinn had mentioned, the signal that I should make a run for it. But when I saw both he and Cassius jump to their feet with equal looks of shock, I knew something was wrong. The other men who had come with us ran toward the thunderous sound coming from the entrance into the hall, but their screams, followed shortly by their silence, made it unmistakable clear that they wouldn’t be returning to Mystreuce. I wondered with sick curiosity, what the opera house ushers would think of the scene in the morning when they found two dead men in the theater upon showing up for their morning shifts.
“Get down!” Cassius shouted at me.
I dropped to my feet to flatten myself against the stage, but before I had made it all the way down, a sharp, burning sensation entered my chest. Within seconds, Cassius and Quinn were both standing beside me. I pressed my hand to my sternum, where the pain radiated in increasing waves of intensity, and I the warm, wetness of blood seeped through my fingers.
“It’s okay,” Cassius said. He was trying to speak calmly and reassuringly to me, but I could hear the fear in his voice despite his efforts. “I’ve got you; you’re going to be okay.”
I saw Quinn’s eyes darken, and it looked like he was getting ready to unleash something terrible onto whoever was attacking us, but Cassius shouted at him to back down.
“We can’t fight them,” Cassius said to him. “We have to get Mara back to Mystreuce now, or she will die.”
“But I can stop them,” Quinn argued as his eyes seemed to change into something entirely different—dragon eyes maybe, or something else more demonic-looking? I couldn’t tell.
“And at what cost?” Cassius said to him. “I said, stand down. We will surrender, and you will take Mara back to the fae quarters to heal her. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Quinn said. He didn’t seem happy with the command but was in agreement with it enough to do it. His eyes lightened and returned to their normal size and color. Maybe I had imagined the whole thing as I felt myself waning in and out of consciousness.
The one thing that I wished I had imagined was the sound of Dregon’s voice as he victoriously called for Cassius to drop the weapon he had clenched in his hand and surrender.
All of a sudden, my head started to swim with the thoughts of what Quinn’s roommate had said in the fae quarters. Dregon was there; he had been listening. He had heard all about how Cassius was planning to bring me here. Oh God, he heard about my plan to escape.
I tried to hold onto lucidity long enough to tell Cassius what I knew and to tell him I was sorry for trying to run away. But when I opened my mouth to speak to him, blood gurgled out instead of words. I was going to die right here on the stage of my childhood fantasies, and the worst part about it was that all I could think about was how I had betrayed him.
Cassius had brought me here out of kindness and whatever compassion he had left in his half-human heart. He was surrendering himself to his half-brother’s brutal minion in order to save my life, instead of just slaughtering the men where they stood, and I had betrayed him. The last thing I saw was Dregon standing over me as Cassius leaned above my body and guarded me like a shield. When my eyes fell closed, I felt myself being lifted and heard Dregon’s vile laughter and the sound of shackles clamped around Quinn. The last thing I heard before I surrendered to unconsciousness was Cassius voice in my ear telling me that I would be okay.
The next few days passed without any flow of time whatsoever. I faded in and out of being awake and being somewhere else . Even when I was conscious, I couldn’t remember what I had seen or heard. I didn’t know where I was or who was around me. All I knew was that Cassius wasn’t there.
Slowly I started to open my eyes for more than a few seconds at a time, and even the soft light of the fae quarters burned against my retinas. I struggled to breathe as each rise and fall of my ribcage felt as though my bones were breaking and rebreaking over and over again. I had always wondered if people dreamed when they were unconscious. No one that I had ever asked about it seemed to remember if they did or not. I liked to imagine that I would dream for long periods of time in order to keep my mind from going sour as my body tried to heal itself and that the dreams would just fade away once I woke up. I wasn’t sure if I was dreaming now. All my mind seemed to be registering was the pain.
After more time had passed, I started to hear voices during the snippets that I was semi-awake. I could only recognize one of them—Sen. I didn’t know what she was saying most of the time, but every so often I would hear her say, “They’re okay, Mara, and you will be, too.”
I wasn’t sure if she actually said that or if I was dreaming it, but it brought me a small slice of comfort either way. Then one day, I was able to open my eyes and keep them open.
“Hey, look,” someone said. “Sen, I think she’s awake for real this time.”
I pinched my eyelids together several times until I was able to tolerate the dim light. When I saw Sen standing above me, I wanted to cry and tell her everything that had happened, but when I tried to speak, all I could do was choke.
“Easy,” Sen said as she lifted my head a little and tried to pour a few drops of water into my mouth. “Your throat hasn’t managed talking or drinking for quite a while. Give yourself a few minutes.” She sat with me as I struggled to swallow.
When the first few drops of water hit my throat, I realized how ravenously thirsty I was. Sen held the cup to my lips until I had drunk all that I could. I tried again to push a few raspy words from my mouth.
“Where are they?” I managed to get out before my voice gave up again.
Sen looked at me with a solemn expression. “Gone.”