The Underworld

“With Alex?” I gave him a quizzical look. “But he’s not here…and we don’t know when he’ll be back.”

“Here’s the thing, Gemma.” Laylen leaned in toward me, his face holding such seriousness. “I think you’re going to have to make a choice here on whether or not you think we should go get him, because for one thing, if you saw him in The Underworld with you, you’re probably going to need him. Also, with as pissed off as Nicholas probably is right now, Alex may be in some serious trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?” I asked. “Alex never really explained what he was going to be doing there…Do you know, though?”

Laylen’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed hard. “I think Alex didn’t tell you because he thought it’d be better if you didn’t know.”

“It’s bad, though, right?” I shook my head. “Well, obviously it has to be bad, otherwise someone would have already told me what he was doing…Are they like hurting him or something?”

Laylen didn’t answer, but his silence said it all.

Knowing that Alex was getting hurt…Well, it was making me hurt. Literally. I could actually feel this ache in every part of my body. I think it was at this moment that I realized that Alex’s and my electric connection might be even deeper than I’d originally thought.

I remembered the vision where I saw him and me as children, sitting on the floor of the little hide out, with our hands pressed together whispering secret words in Latin. Such a strange moment, considering how we were now. What had changed? Me losing my soul? Or was it something else—something more?

As I sat there next to Laylen, thinking about all of this, I suddenly became extremely aware that whether I wanted to save Alex or not, I had to. It really wasn’t my decision to make. It was my connection with him that was going to make the decision, and the connection was telling me I had to go save him. It was a weird feeling.

“So how do we do it?” I took a shaky breath. “How do we get Alex out of the City of Crystal?”

“So then you want to do it?” Laylen asked. “You want to go get him?”

I nodded. “I think I have to. I mean, if I saw him in The Underworld with me, it probably means he has to be with me when I go there. Although I don’t have the slightest clue how we’re going to get there, since Nicholas took the Ira with him.”

“Okay…Well, do you have any ideas about on how to get us into the City of Crystal?” Laylen rubbed the back of his neck tensely. “Because it might take some time to find a Foreseer who will lend us their little ruby crystal ball that they use to travel to and from the city. Besides, we kind of need to do this on our own so no one knows we’re there.”

“I completely agree.” I told him. “And I think I know a way.”

Chapter 18

Those few days I’d spent with Nicholas ended up not being a total waste of my time. He’d covered a lot about Foreseers and the way that the use the crystals energy to go in and out of visions. He also explained to me that the crystals energy wasn’t just for going into visions. It was also used every time Nicholas entered the City of Crystal. And apparently, all of the individual crystal balls ran off of the energy belonging to a massive crystal ball that stood in the center of the city. All the crystals balls were connected. Because of this, I had an idea that if I really tried, I just might be able to get us into the City of Crystal without a ruby-filled ball, thanks to my unique gift of being able to use the crystals energy without actually having to have a crystal ball present.

But it was going to be tricky. I not only had to get us into the city, but I also had to get us into the city in present time, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to communicate with anyone, or touch anything. This was the reason why Foreseers used the ruby-filled crystal ball to get in and out of the city, because it took them there in the present time.

Although I was a bit skeptical that I could actually pull it off, it was all I had at the moment. So I started practicing day and night. At first, I couldn’t even figure out how to jumpstart whatever was sending me into visions. But then I caught on that it was connected to my emotions. Take for instances, when I was bitten by Vladislav. There had been a ton of emotion running through me then, which was why I think I ended up slipping into a vision. And when I’d drifted away while sitting on the couch with Laylen, I had been retrieving some of my lost memories, which, like Alex had pointed out once, were very deeply connected to my emotions.

So, after a lot of practice, I figured out that nine out of ten times experiencing an intense emotion equaled vision access. Of course, this put a lot of pressure on my newfound ability to experience emotion. And experiencing one on demand didn’t always work out the way that I wanted.

It was with Laylen’s help that I finally started to get the hang of things.

It was my fifth practice day, and Laylen and I were in the room he was staying in. I was sitting on the bed with my legs crossed, facing him as he sat in a chair he’d dragged over beside the bed.

“So what do you want to feel today?” he asked me. “Happy, sad, scared, worried.”

“Not worried,” I said quickly. “That one is not fun at all, and when we used that feeling last time, I ended up getting stuck in the vision for awhile, like the feeling wasn’t strong enough to last or something.”

“True,” Laylen agreed. “Besides, the scared one, I think, was my favorite.”

I shook my head. “No it wasn’t—you almost gave me a heart attack."

He smiled, this beautiful, pleased smile. “Yeah, but it was fun.”

I shook my head, thinking how in no way, shape, or form was Laylen jumping out from behind a closed door to scare me fun. “Well, let’s not do that one, okay. Let’s do something else—something easier on my heart.”

He gave me an intrigued look. “How about we try happy? We haven’t done that one yet.”

My mouth instantly fell to a frown. “We haven’t done that one yet, because I’m not sure I know how to feel happy yet. Well, I mean sometimes when I look at the stars I think I might feel happy…but I don’t know. I think it might be a different kind of happiness then what you’re talking about. Maybe not, though…I don’t know…”

He didn’t look at me with sympathy like I’d expected him to do, but more with determination. “Well, then I think it’s about time you knew for sure if you have.”

Oh, Laylen. Sometimes he made my heart ache—in a good way. “I wish it was that easy, but…I mean, how—how do we do it—make me happy.”

“You can’t force happiness, it just comes.” He leaned back in his chair, his face twisted in deep thought. “I think you and I both could use a little bit of fun…a little bit of relaxation.”

I stared at him like he was insane. “How are we supposed to relax, when we’ve got so many non-relaxing things to deal with?”

“We take a break,” he said as if it were that uncomplicated.

“You say it as if it’s that simple, but it’s not. I mean, we can’t go anywhere, since we have Stephan, the Death Walkers, Demetrius, and a lot of vampires after us,” I told him, counting out the list on my fingers. “Besides, do you know how to have fun, because I don’t?”

He got a look on his face that could only be described as a look someone got when they were about to do something they weren’t supposed to. “I think I have an idea.”

“This is what you think will make me have fun and be happy,” I asked Laylen, staring up at the enormous rollercoaster, the tracks twisting and turning and flipping in loops, like a giant death trap. And the busy sidewalk we were standing on made me even more uneasy. All it would take was for one wrong person to walk by us and we’d be screwed. But Laylen had sworn that we would be fine, because almost everything that was after at us, more than likely wouldn’t come out during the daytime; and that the bundles and bundles of people roaming around would keep us inconspicuous.

However, I wasn’t as optimistic. Being around people had never really been my thing. And when I had a crazy man with a scar, and his yellow-eyed, Chill of Death assailants after me, being around a huge group of people was definitely not my thing.

“This is what you think will make me feel happy?” I asked again just to make sure I understood him right. “A rollercoaster?”

Laylen nodded, looking absolutely sure.

So we headed up.

I couldn’t believe I was doing this. Riding a rollercoaster—never in a million years would I have ever thought I would be doing such a thing; and doing such a thing when we were being hunted.

But Laylen was persistent, guiding me along as we weaved up the aisle, until we reached the ticket area, where he purchased two tickets, and then the cashier sent us on our way to the loading area.

It was there that I realized that my jittery nerves weren’t just because I was worried we might run into someone. I was also jittery about the idea of getting on a rollercoaster. So by the time I slid onto the leather seat in the far back cart, I was trembling.

“You’ll be fine,” Laylen assured me, pulling down the bars that would—hopefully—hold him in the cart when it whipped upside down.

I pulled down my bars and secured them tightly against my shoulders. I heard someone from the front let out a scream as the cart started to creak forward. I held as still as a statue, my hands gripping the bars tightly. The wheels clanked as the cart rose up the tracks; the brightness of the sun glared in my eyes. There was a pause, where the cart just hovered at the top, and for a split second I thought we were stuck, but then it lurched forward and dropped. Then we were flying, wind blowing through my hair as the car went up and down, flipping loops and taking sharp turns. In the beginning I was terrified, but by the end I was laughing. And I mean really laughing. I wanted to hold onto this moment with every ounce of strength I had in me and never let it go.

By the time we stepped off of the cart and back onto the ground, I had tears rolling down my cheeks.

“Was I right or what?” Laylen asked, grinning from ear to ear.

I nodded, wiping my tears from my cheeks. It was the first time I’d ever had to wipe tears of happiness away. Who would have thought riding a rollercoaster would have brought them out.

“So you’re happy?” Laylen asked, looking at me with hopeful eyes.

“Yeah…I think I am.” I felt the back of my neck where the prickle was poking and then I felt myself starting to fall. “I think I…I …” I was slipping away and before I crashed onto the floor, I grabbed a hold of Laylen’s arm. But instead of catching me, I ended up yanking him down with me.

Yanking us down, down, down as the City of Crystal flashed through my mind.

Chapter 19

My face smacked hard against the floor. And I mean hard.

I pushed myself up to my feet, rubbing my sure-to-have-a-goose-bump forehead. My jaw just about hit the floor when I noticed that my feet were planted firmly on top of a translucent crystal floor, a midnight river flowing beneath it, bits and pieces of gold twinkling in the water like stars. Dark red crystals hung from the glittery charcoal ceiling above, and to the side of me, rubies waved across the snow-white crystal walls.