Dylan drew back, smiling. “I know what to do. Do you trust me?”

She jerked her gaze back to his and took a deep breath. “I want the memories to go away. I can’t stand it. I’m haunted, Dylan. They made that happen. I feel like I’ve been ripped apart and sewn back together with a knife and rope.”

“I’ll make it better. I promise.” Dylan took her hand and squeezed. Then he slid an arm around her shoulder and drew her against him. “Come on. We’ve got lots of work to do.”

Leah looked back over her shoulder, but Kellan and Shay had disappeared.

Kellan drove through the night. At first I didn’t realize that we hadn’t gone back to the house. I hadn’t wanted to ask because I wasn’t sure what I was going to do about Vespar, but when we’d been driving for an hour, I knew we weren’t going home. So I looked up and regarded him. He had a determined look on his face, like he could do anything at that moment.

Then I felt a tug in my stomach. It was Kellan, telling me he didn’t want to talk at that moment, but to trust him. That’s when I knew something more than learning that we were soulmates, had changed between us. Something had started to grow between us, like an invisible rope, and I felt it pull me. It pulled on me when I’d been standing with Damien. Kellan had tugged on it and I knew what he wanted me to know, that it was okay to talk to other Nephilim, and that he wasn’t worried about Damien anymore. Now he pulled on it again and I knew we’d be driving for a long time that night. So I moved to the backseat and lay down, closing my eyes. I didn’t need sleep, but I rested there anyway, listening to the drive, feeling Kellan and how something rock solid had come over him.

When the first light of dawn started to peek over the horizon, I sat up, realizing I had fallen asleep for a bit. Kellan still looked refreshed. Then I grinned and leaned over my chair’s headrest in the front. “You look like you could drive for a week straight.”

The invisible rope relaxed, and I knew Kellan had relaxed with it. The corner of his mouth quirked upward. “I needed to make sure we’d get a head start.”

“From?” My mind wandered a bit, and I knew whom he meant. “From Vespar?”

Kellan nodded, grim again.

“Where are we going?”

“To get some help.”

“What?” My head jerked up. “From who?”

“Another messenger.” He watched me in the rearview mirror, his eyes studying me, wanting to know everything I felt. “She’s friendly to some of us. She’s not aligned with your father.”

“Why?”

“Because you need to know answers that I can’t give you. And you need to learn about what you can do. It’ll help you be able to control the messenger inside of you.”

I shook my head, feeling… I didn’t even know. Nervous. Agitated. Scared. And pissed. “You just decided this without even talking to me about it!”

A glimmer of a smile appeared over his face, but his eyes snapped to mine, angry. “We need space from Vespar right now. Unless you’re ready to declare war with him and face the consequences, then we needed to get away. He won’t know where we are. He can’t track us if we’re driving in a car, using human transport. He definitely won’t want to follow us even if he does figure out where we’ve gone. This messenger is not one to take lightly. She loathes demons that kill.”

I sat back and muttered, faint under my breath, “And Vespar loves to kill.”

“Yes.” Kellan stopped the car and turned around. His eyes were fierce. “He does, he does now. He started when we were young, but now the taste is unquenchable in him. He won’t stop. He can’t.”

“Then we have to kill him.” Even as I said it, no emotion was evoked inside of me. Shouldn’t I have cared? He was my half-brother.

“That’s not a question. What is the question is Gus—what she’ll do when we kill Vespar, if we can trust her or not.”

I closed my eyes swiftly, feeling a stab of pain in my heart. He was right. Gus would go crazy if we took away her other half. She’d go mad, and she’d go dark, really dark. I bit my lip because I realized that Vespar wasn’t really the one we were avoiding, it was what we’d have to do about our sister, my sister.

I felt another tug on my stomach and opened my eyes. Kellan was watching me. He was always watching me. This time he asked with his eyes if I was all right, and I nodded, closing off my emotions, pushing them down. We’d do what we had to do, and then I cleared my throat and asked with a raspy voice, “How much farther?”

He nodded outside. “We’re here. This is where we’re staying.”

We had parked outside a small white house. Trees surrounded it, not allowing for a lawn. As I got out of the car, I heard the sounds of a small river close by. I walked around the back of the house, stepping carefully around the trees. Their roots had started to grow out of the ground and I climbed up on one that curved higher than the rest. As I did, with a hand resting on the massive oak beside it, I saw a sparkling body of water that rested just underneath a small hill behind the house. A waterfall filled it from my right, splashing onto smooth rocks that glistened underneath the water.

Kellan climbed up beside me and rested an arm behind me, placing it on the tree next to mine. I leaned back against him and asked, “What is this place? It’s beautiful.”

“It’s a sanctuary.” He touched my shoulder and turned so we looked at the house. “The house is protected. The only things the human eye can detect are the trees. No human can see the house, and no tree will fall onto it in a storm. They’re magically entrusted, too. This spot is where the oldest and toughest trees live. They’re alive, Shay.”