there in the real world. You gotta do it for your friends—for Stark—for your grandma. Zo, you even gotta do it for me.”
Zoey’s body twitched, but he could see she was making an effort to hold herself still.
“Not without you, Heath. I don’t want to go back to the real world without you.”
“I know, babe,” he said softly. “But sometimes you gotta do stuff you don’t want to do. Like me right now—I don’t want to leave you, but it’s time for me to move on.”
Her eyes widened, and her hands went up to cover his gripping her shoulders. “You can’t leave me, Heath! I’ll die if you leave me.”
“No, babe. You’ll do the opposite. You’ll pull yourself together, and you’ll live.”
“No, no, no! You can’t leave me.” Zoey started crying. “I can’t be here without you!”
“That’s what I’m trying to get you to see, Zo. If I’m not here, you’ll go back where you belong and stop being this pathetic, ghost thing you’re turning into.”
“Okay, no. No. I’ll pull myself together. Just stay here. Stay with me. It’ll be fine, you’ll see. I promise, Heath.”
He’d known she’d say something like that, so he was ready with his answer, but that didn’t make it break his heart any less. “It’s not just about you, Zo. It’s also about what’s right for me. It’s time I move on to another realm.”
“What do you mean? Heath, I don’t understand,” she sobbed.
“I know you don’t, babe. I don’t really understand it, but I can feel it,” he said truthfully. As he spoke, the right words came to him, and as they did, peace filled Heath, soothing his heartache and making him know beyond all else he really was doing the right thing. “I did die too soon. I want my life, Zo. I want my chance.”
“I-I’m sorry, Heath. It’s my fault, and I can’t give your life back to you.”
“No one can, Zo. But I can have another shot at life. Not if I stay here with you, though. If I stay here, I’ll never have lived, and neither will you.”
Zoey had stopped sobbing, but tears still leaked from her eyes, flooding her cheeks and dripping down her face as if she were standing outside during a rainy summer day.
“I can’t. I can’t go on without you.”
Heath shook her gently and made himself smile. “Yeah, you can. If I can do it, you can, too. ’Cause you know you’re smarter and stronger than I am, Zo. You always have been.”
“No, Heath,” Zoey whispered.
“I want you to remember something, Zo. It’s important, and it’ll make more sense when you have yourself together again. I’m gonna leave here and get another chance at life. You’re gonna be a big, famous vamp High Priestess. That means you’re gonna live like a gazillion years.
Then Heath turned and walked away from his true love. The air before him opened, curtainlike, and he stepped from one realm to another and disappeared completely.
Utterly broken, Zoey staggered back to the cedar tree. Silent as a corpse, with tears leaking steadily down her face, she resumed her circular pacing.
Chapter 28
Kalona couldn’t tell how long he’d been in Nyx’s realm.
At first it’d been such a jolt to be wrenched from his body by the Darkness Neferet harnessed that, physically and spiritually, he’d been unaware of anything except the awe and fear of having returned to Her realm.
He hadn’t forgotten the beauty of the place—the pure wonder of the Otherworld and the magic it held for him. Especially for him.
He’d been different when he’d belonged there.
He’d been a force for Light, protecting Nyx against anything Darkness could conjure to attempt to sway the balance of the world toward the evil and pain and selfishness and despair on which it thrived.
For centuries uncountable, Kalona had protected his Goddess against everything except himself.
Ironic that it had been love that Darkness had used to bring him down.
Still more ironic that, after he’d fallen, Light had also used love to entrap him.
He wondered briefly if love could possibly do anything worse to him than it already had. Was he even capable of it anymore?
He didn’t love Neferet. He’d used her to free himself of the earth’s imprisonment, and then, in turn, she’d used him for her own means.
Did he love Zoey?
He didn’t want to be the cause of her destruction, but guilt wasn’t love. Regret wasn’t love, either. They also weren’t strong enough emotions to make him want to sacrifice the freedom of his body to save her.
Moving through the Goddess’s realm, the fallen immortal had put all questions of love and its painful trappings from his mind and focused on the task at hand.
The first step was to find Zoey.
The second was to be certain she could not return to the earthly realm, so that he could reclaim his body and fulfill the oath he’d sworn to Neferet.
Finding Zoey hadn’t been difficult. He’d only had to concentrate his will on her, and his spirit had ridden the tide of Darkness directly to her—to the fragmented pieces of her soul.
The human boy he’d killed was there with her, or rather he was with the part of her that was most purely Zoey in this lifetime.
It was odd to see him comforting her—reassuring her—and then, somehow, instinctively, guiding her to the Goddess’s sacred grove. A place so purely made of Nyx’s essence that, as long as the balance of Light and Dark remained in place in the world, no evil could ever enter it.
Kalona remembered the grove well. It was within it that he had first realized his love for Nyx. In that terrible time before he chose to fall from Her, it was the only place he could go to find even a small measure of peace.
He’d tried to enter again. To follow Zoey and Heath and be finished with this burden Neferet’s machinations had laid upon him, but Kalona had been unable to breach the barrier of the sacred grove. The attempt had left him weak and breathless, reminding him all too well of the way he felt whenever he was entrapped by the earth.
This time it was the peace and magic of the Goddess’s earth that had rejected him, and not imprisoned him.
He had been too much a part of Darkness for Nyx’s grove to accept him.
Kalona half-expected Nyx to appear before him at any moment—accuse him of being the interloper he so obviously was—and, again, cast him from her realm.
