before dragging me toward my friend who struggles into a sitting position.
“No…wait.” My cry is swallowed in sudden stillness. Blackness rushes before my vision returning in a surge of dizziness. I recognize the clifftop immediately. The cold, silent stone monument marking the graves of their family is a dark silhouette against the fiery orange backdrop of the setting sun.
“Illusions…please, you can’t let this happen,” I implore him, fisting the front of his shirt and frightened to let go.
He stops my words by cupping my cheeks and capturing my lips in a slow melting kiss that leaves me trembling against his hard chest before he takes a step away.
His solemn gaze wanders over my face and hair as if memorizing every inch of it. “Be safe, Robin.”
Tears blur my eyes even before he teleports away. I sense Snatch moving closer before I’m enveloped in a pair of comforting arms. He doesn’t say a word but holds me in a tight embrace. Spilling free, they dampen the front of his blood-stained, skinny, bare chest. Snatch rocks me silently, love in every movement. Love we both know I don’t reciprocate, which makes me hate myself even more.
“You weep for my son.”
“I love him. Them,” I tell the soft, feminine voice, already sensing the presence of someone with us.
Jerking around, Snatch keeps me tucked behind him protectively as he moves to confront the owner. “Who the hell are you?”
A woman floats before the monument, her ethereal glow enhanced by the rays of the dying sun. Curls fall around her slim shoulders, translucent beauty making her look like a heavenly being more than a ghost.
“I know her.” I whisper, staring in disbelief at her familiar features. “You’re the one who saved me from becoming a wraith when I was poisoned.”
“I am the spirit of Morpheus’ mother,” she explains, a ghostly breeze I don’t feel playing with the length of her long gossamer skirts. “I could not let you fall to that curse when you were needed here.”
Stepping out from behind my friend, I wipe the tears from my eyes. “Little good me being here has done anyone. It just seems to have had disastrous consequences.”
“It wasn’t another god that murdered us as he told you; it was a monster. The one they are destined to become when all four parts of my son unite becoming whole and the evil side takes over destroying the others in the process with his superior strength.”
A taut silence reigns while that information is grasped.
“In order for him to do that, he’d have to have the ability to time travel.” Approaching her slowly, her loneliness and despair washes over my senses. A feeling of defeat has my shoulders slumping. “You mean they can’t be saved if you’re already dead? They aren’t strong enough to defeat the Doll Maker persona? Did Morpheus know before all this?”
The apparition hovers, watching the sun sink into the ocean. Its reflection on the water beckons to the waiting stars ready to take up their own eternal vigil. “No. The evil has yet to take over permanently and grant him that ability. He believes another of our kind who went mad was our murderer. Someone we trusted.”
“If things have already happened, then we don’t have the power to change them,” Snatch points out quietly, plummeting to sit on a tree stump. “So, we stay out of this while Gabriel and Thanatos save the universe and our necks.”
“But you do,” The dead goddess disagrees with a faint wan smile.
“Wait? What? You can’t change something that’s already happened.”
Dawning realization has my eyes growing wide in comprehension. “It hasn’t happened for him yet, which means we can stop the evil version of Morpheus from taking ultimate control and killing his parents. That means you’ll all still be alive right?”
“No.”
“No?” I echo with a frown thrown into confusion.
The ghost shakes her head sadly “Our deaths were written by fate that day which cannot be undone. Time has a way of bending certain events to its will. Another will come for us instead of Morpheus playing out actions that were set in stone long before they were ever set in motion. Be warned, Robin. He can never know the truth, the weight of the guilt it would cause would crush him completely, and he would be a hollow version of the man you love. You can save him if you act now. Alone they will fall to darkness. Together they will rise to the light. You’ve already set them on the