effort, on my part, not to bow at his feet. Everything in me yearns to be near him, with him. Wesley Parker is the keeper of my heart whether he knows it or not. He doesn’t remember a thing about our old life in Kansas, where we stole kisses on lazy summer afternoons. He believes he’s Wesley Paxton, some pompous aristocrat in the making with a pocketful of money to prove it. He thinks I fell from a tree and fabricated Cider Plains, and all those sweet memories of who we were—that they were byproducts of my injury. But I know the truth. I didn’t fall from a tree house and end up at the hospital. I dove through a windshield and ended up at Ephemeral. Wesley and I were both dead and now we’re alive as the children of Nephilim descent, belonging to a crooked faction known as the Countenance.
A guttural laugh garners my attention from across the expansive flat rock. It’s Fletcher, my true brother both in the real world and this quasi-fictional one in which we’re wealthy, healthy, and supposedly wise. His blond hair glints like a threat as he brays in the night like a donkey.
Fletch comes around and hands us each a long, silver blade. The metal handle sears the palm of my hand like a branding iron as if it had sat in the freezer, the oven.
“You don’t need to kill,” Wes whispers. His dimples tremble as if he were sorry I had to experience any of this to begin with. “We just need to puncture them for a sprinkling of their blood. Each of us makes a private decision on whether or not to kill.”
I try to process his words as a pale blue fog drifts into the vicinity. It puffs around the stone, around our bodies as if it were a presence that came to join us—a form of wickedness in disguise. The Countenance themselves profess to be angels, minus the harp, and wings, and overall notion of righteousness.
Cooper blinks through my mind—my angel in the truest sense. He’s the blond god of Nordic descent who is more than ready and willing to take on this rogue Viking—this Philistine that Wes has morphed into.
But Wesley is my only hope of freeing my mother and my little sister, Lacey, from the demons who stowed them away to have their blood drained—their Celestra blood—as a means to enrich their own demonic breed. Of course, I’m not lucky enough to be a Celestra. I’m a full-blooded Count—a purported enemy of the aforementioned faction, and how I came to be a spawn of pure evil is still a mystery to me. It’s one of the many things I’d like an answer to, but for now, rescuing my family is top priority. The questions I have, the answers I seek, will all have to wait.
“Wes, would you kill for me?” A tiny smile hedges on my lips as I clutch the blade like a threat.
“You bet I’d kill for you.” Wes dots the homicidal intention with a kiss, and my insides rip with fire. Wesley has far too much power over me. All of the headiness of first love resides with him. He creates a buoyancy in my spirit whenever he’s around. I wish he didn’t. I wish I hated Wesley with everything in me. That would make being his enemy a hell of a lot easier.
A series of childlike screams erupt from an overgrown crate that Blaine and Fletch haul over—the sacrifice of the evening, no doubt.
A ragged breath escapes me as I cast a glance at the forest that skirts the vicinity. Cooper is out there somewhere, amidst the creatures that roam these woods, in an effort to watch over me.
“You don’t have to kill for me, Wes.” It comes out soft like a dream. Everything feels like a dream in these nocturnal woods tonight.
Kresley licks her lips while glaring right at me. Her fingers curl around her knife like a promise. She’s the one Wes spent his time with, surrendered the most intimate part of himself to while we were apart, and now she wants him back with a fervor.
Wes picks up my hand and gives a gentle squeeze.
Forget about killing the damn birds. I’ll be too busy making sure Kres keeps her weaponry the hell away from Laken.
A dull laugh rattles from me as I free myself from his fingers. I still have enough of Cooper’s Celestra blood satiating my cellular structure, enabling