My heart sped up.
Disappointment and frustration brewed in me. Three months. For three months, I had heard nothing from him. I thought I was free of this mess, save for the bird following me. I thought I could live my life, pretending I didn’t know anything about why the world was the way it was, about how there were gods out there in the mortal world on what sounded like impossible quests that could bring light to our world of darkness, and about how I could help these gods.
I wished Ceris had taken away my healing ability too.
The coffee machine beeped. I dragged my feet to it and prepared my coffee. Black, no sugar. I hadn’t drunk any mochaccino since the Fates brought me back. I was afraid I liked mochaccino only because Victor had told me he liked it during a vision, and I wanted to distance myself from coincidences like that as much as I could.
Raisa exited the bathroom dressed in tight jeans, a red blouse with a gray knit cardigan over it, and full makeup.
“Hmm, hot date?” I asked, not really interested, though I should be. She was a good friend and she deserved my attention.
She wiggled her eyebrows. “Something like that.”
Raisa had been going out with the guy who lived across the hall. As the good friend she was—her words, not mine—she tried setting me up with her guy’s roommate. There was nothing wrong with the roommate. He seemed okay, kind of cute even, but I wasn’t into him.
“All right. Just please, if you come back after midnight, be quiet. I need to wake up early tomorrow.”
She raised her eyebrows. “When don’t you need to wake up early?”
“Good question.”
She grabbed her purse from her closet and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek. “Don’t wait up.”
“Ha, as if.” I reached for her hand and squeezed it. “Be careful.”
“Don’t worry. We won’t leave campus.”
“Good.”
She waved goodbye and left the room with a wide smile.
Raisa went through life as if it was a party, even after demon attacks and other horrible stuff. She cared, of course, she was sad about those things, but she didn’t let it bring her down. I guess she pretended it didn’t happen and thought it could never touch her. I wished I could be that carefree.
Trying not to let my mind go back to the fact I had seen Victor this morning, I refilled my coffee mug.
“Hello, child.”
I froze. My mug slipped from my fingers and crashed on the floor with a loud crack, splashing coffee everywhere.
No, no, no. Two unexpected visits in one day?
Slowly, I turned and faced the Fates.
Three identical women stood in front of my bed, wearing matching white gowns, and looking ageless and powerful. I shuddered.
I thought this day couldn’t get any worse. Oh, God, how wrong I was.
The gray eyes of the one in the center met mine. “Good to see you, child.”
I pressed my lips together before I said I didn’t feel the same. “Why are you here?”
She stepped in my direction. “Because we need to give you your soul back.”
Of all the things I expected to hear, this wasn’t one of them. My mouth fell open, and I literally forced it closed. “What?”
“You’ll need it.”
“I’ll need it? For what?”
She shook her head once. “We can’t tell you that.”
Typical. I crossed my arms. “And you’ll just give it back to me? No favors? No deals?”
She smiled. “Child, we’re not evil. We don’t want you harmed. Actually, we want quite the opposite.”
“But why?”
“Can’t tell you.”
I groaned. Talking to them was always confusing. Instead of answering my questions, they left me with more.
She extended her hand to me, and I squinted at it. What if they were messing with me? What if they were lying and whatever she did to me actually made everything worse? What if they brought me back to the center of the problem, even though all I wanted was to be left alone?
“I already told you, child. If we wanted to harm you, we wouldn’t ask permission. We would have already done it a long time ago.”
True, but that didn’t make me less wary.
I couldn’t deny, though, it would be nice to go to bed at night without worrying the Fates would show up and claim me.
I placed my hand in hers.
A rush of energy flowed into me, cold one second, warm the next. It was like when I was healing Victor or Micah, but receiving instead of giving. The energy cascaded into me and coursed up my arm, around my shoulder, and spread through my chest. I shivered. It coiled around my heart and into it. I gasped. My body became jelly, and I fell into a seated position on my bed.
The Fate let go of my hand. “Done. Your soul is yours now, and you may use it as you want.”
“This damn cold,” Raisa complained as we walked out of our dorm building. We had an early morning biology class together on the west side of campus.
There was snow everywhere, but I was happy about getting out. Since moving onto campus, weekends were terrible. Especially when snowing. We were stuck in our tiny dorms with nowhere to go. Well, almost nowhere. Raisa, for example, went to the room across the hall, and I didn’t even want to know where the spare roommate went.
I tugged my beanie down over my ears and my scarf up over my nose and mouth. “The walking in the snow bothers me more,” I said, kicking at the frozen fluff with the tip of my boots.
Raisa linked her arm through mine and pulled me with her. “I’m a walk-in-the-snow expert.”
“Yeah, right.” I remembered last year, when she had fallen on her butt in front of half the campus after slipping on an icy patch. I wouldn’t let her drag me down with her this time.
“So,” she said, “why don’t you want to go out with Cale?”
Cale. That was the name of her guy’s roommate. Just the fact that his name didn’t stick to my brain told me volumes. “Again with that? I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You mean you don’t want to talk about Victor?”
I glared at her. “Raisa.”
“What? You never talk to me about him. I’m worried. The guy takes you on a trip, which I think is supposed to be romantic, and then you come back alone and never talk about the guy again. It’s a little odd.”
Oh, I thought so too. Especially because the romantic trip had no romance in it. Well, maybe one tiny moment, but even that had been misguided. I was sure it had been misguided.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I whispered, glancing at the trees. Rok was there jumping from branch to branch, following me.
“But—”
“How’s your guy?” I asked, interrupting her. I had to change the subject. I knew she couldn’t help but talk about her love life. Unlike me, Raisa loved talking about everything.
She smiled. “He’s okay, I think.”
“Just okay?”
“Well, I’m kinda disappointed because he’s considering going back to his parents.”
“Because of how bad things are?”