The Fog

The rug’s mosaic patterns lifted and took on light and shadows from the space below. Poppy’s shoes, mired in an invisible field stronger than any pull she’d known with her other jumps, became shackles she couldn’t slip free of. The charged heat slithered around her ankles and the awkward slope of her arch in the ridiculous shoes—the pain that had settled, almost unnoticed, evaporated. Her feet numbed.

Demitri looked down at her feet. His breath clipped out on a tide of growing panic. A desperation to assemble thoughts while the inevitable lurked. He clutched her shoulders.

“Tell me one thing you remember about your own life—the future you’re so desperately trying to return to.”

The deadening wave rolled up her legs, its capacity to steal the nerves as potent on her thoughts as the body she occupied. She tried to focus on his words, but she remained tied to the gravity of it all slipping away. Away from another penance. Away from him.

“Don’t you see? They’ve stolen everything. Every spirit you’ve become has taken away another part of yourself until you can’t claim anything as your own.” Demitri’s eyes blazed, wild and focused on reaching her. “I know, because it happened to me. I had to rely on journals my brother would send me each time I carried out a mission. It’s no way to live, Tasha. Reading about your life as if it were some theater production with nothing left in here.”

His touch skimmed down her arm. He took her hand in his own and pressed it against the internal, rapid-fire assault on her heart. The deadening fog overtook her clenched stomach.

Elvira squeezed between them, dwarfed beneath his substantial arm. “Listen to me, Cheeks. If you stay with Sir Screw-This-Up, the institute will find you in breach of contract. Your future will be gone and we…”

“We….What? What?” Tasha pleaded.

“If you relinquish that part of yourself in favor of mortality, we’ll never see each other again. Our thread will be severed. Forever. Or a mortal’s view of forever, that is.”

Tasha glanced down. The bond—the touch—linking Demitri to her was visible, but empty. Her breaths shifted into hyper speed, but she no longer owned them in her lungs.

As if he, too, could feel the ambush, his touch climbed higher. He threaded his strong fingers through the hairs at her neck and cradled her face as he would have an artifact he’d found on a jump he would relinquish his own life for.

“I’ll find you, again and again, until you see what this is doing to you. Until you remember me in each and every jump you make.” He lifted her hand to kiss it, but it could have been another’s. “They’ll never set you free. They’ll always be another. Stay with me and every memory we create is yours. Ours. Isn’t that true freedom?

The void scaled her neck. She closed her eyes and minted his touch in her mind, a reserve of something concrete and grounding, even as her pulse-point slipped away.

“Please. God, no.” Demitri’s voice fractured.

Tasha opened her eyes and found Elvira. For all the woman’s half-truths and deceptions, for every sting of sarcasm that eclipsed a tender heart, she stood as still as a statue and made no attempt to wield her magic, as if her daughter’s free will held the highest ground in the fairy realm. No time for words. Just the unguarded presence of a mother’s love for her child.

Demitri’s hands slipped away, not from her vision, but from the place that telegraphed to her heart. The paralyzing warmth stole her final capacity to reach out. Her lips parted to speak, but she’d become mute.

Her eyes became her only words.