I was numb again, jogging through the halls I’d once known so well, following the children I’d born and now barely recognized. It was a dream. It had to be. There was no way that Olivia Carey had used her powers to try to choke the life out of me, no way my home had been taken over by my worst enemy. No fucking way I’d missed my children’s formative years. They weren’t warriors. They were coddled and protected.
Rhys was an eleven-year-old with a cocky grin who wouldn’t ever think to order his parents around. Rhys was a good boy who followed the rules. He was every teacher’s pet.
Evan played with dolls, not bows and arrows.
I was going to wake up. I had to. I would wake up and be safely in our bed at Summer’s palace. I would be in between Dev and Daniel, and I would tell them all about this awful dream and they would laugh at me. I would go through the portal again, but this time we would find ourselves back in Danny’s office and everyone would be so relieved to see us. We would take down Myrddin and move on with our lives.
I didn’t have to believe that prophecy. I could control this.
If I could only wake up.
“Evan, to your left,” Rhys yelled as he moved by a connecting hallway. He didn’t even look back. He simply tossed the words over his shoulder as he jogged along.
Evan zipped past her fathers and was firing down the hall before either could protest. She had two arrows off and landing in her targets as Fen leapt to her side. He growled and the third shadowy figure who’d been coming down the hall took off running. But not before Evan got off another shot, and I watched the last attacker go down even as Kelsey hustled me along.
“I think the kiddos know what they’re doing,” Kelsey assured me. “Let’s follow their lead. This is their world. They know it far better than we do.”
It was their world. Not mine. It couldn’t be mine.
We ran, the ground still rumbling under us, and suddenly we found ourselves moving through familiar doors into a dark place. Ether. But not Ether.
“What the fuck did he do to my club?” Dev stopped and stared at the changes the years had wrought.
Ether had been a high-tech nightclub where all of the supernatural world came to play. It had a light-up dance floor and a sleek bar. It had been modern and energetic.
Someone had decided to give the whole place a Hell makeover. It had been redone in shades of red and black.
“I win!” A muscular man walked from behind what used to be the bar. It had been exchanged for what appeared to be some kind of shrine. I didn’t have a chance to really look at it because Lee was right there. He held every bit of my attention.
He was so changed, but when he high-fived his brother and then grinned my way, I could see my little boy.
“I bet Rhys that Papa would be way more upset about Ether than he was about how old we are,” Lee admitted.
“I assure you, Rhys wins that bet,” Devinshea promised. “I’m upset about many things. The atrocity they’ve done to my beautiful club is merely one of them. I don’t want to see the penthouse, do I?”
“According to our spies, you do not,” Rhys replied.
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