HOW MANY ANSWERS YOU SEEK ARE JUST A PART OF YOU, WAITING TO BE FOUND?
The game has changed.
Fresh from her first brush with mortality, a fragile Sadie Matthau is playing human in New York while the Survivors endure unimaginable tragedy. Wrought wit...
IN TOTAL PANIC, I TELEPORTED TO THE HOUSE IN FRANCE BECAUSE I KNEW IT would be empty.
I screamed and fell to the ground.
"Alexander!" I cried. "Alexander!" I yelled at the top of my lungs. Then I lay on the cold marble floor and waited.
He appeared, and my tunic and jeans were exchanged for a black dress that fitted so tight against me, I couldn't move my legs, couldn't breathe, and couldn't allow any other movements lest both my breasts fall out of it. I remembered it from an Alexis Mabille collection a few years back.
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"Yes, my darling?" he cooed, reaching a hand out to help me stand.
"How did you do it? How did you get to Corrina?" I asked, a tearful hoarseness crowding my voice.
"Why does it surprise you that I could find her?" he asked. He seemed genuinely amused.
"It's not that I think you can't. It's just that . . . So far this hasn't been real. I dream you, or you make me see things that aren't real, or maybe you take me to a place inside your mind, but whatever the case, it hasn't been real. But now the shoes. Now Corrina. Now you were there at the same time others were there. You pointed out a physical object to me. You put a real thing there, not a dream thing."
Alexander smiled. "It makes you wonder what else you dreamed and what else was real, doesn't it? Makes you wonder what really happened whilst you wore these little gowns? Is it hitting you now? Sinking in?"
"You're screwing with me," I said. "But you won today. Can't you lay off? Can't you leave Corrina out of this and for just one second leave me alone?"
"I've never left you alone, Sadie. I'm in your mind, and I feel what you feel, and I think what you think, because at some point you let your guard down. I stopped being able to find your mind not because you and I share two halves of a power but because you let me in at your very core." As he said this, he put his arm around my waist, and I shuddered. But he tightened his hold and I knew from an abundance of experience that there was no getting away from him. He ran one hand across my collarbone and then down between my breasts, which the dress did such an excellent job of putting on exaggerated display. He leaned in and kissed my neck as he cupped my flesh, and he whispered. "It was all real, Sadie. You and I have a better relationship than you do with the vieczy punk, a better relationship than you did with the stupid human." Tightening his grip around my waist, he cooed, "We certainly have a more complete one. You and I are . . . one."
I fought harder then, to break free or to make it seem untrue or to try to forget. But it was no use.
He had me right where he wanted me. He always had.
"I was dreaming. Hallucinating." My voice cracked.
He smiled wretchedly. "You need proof. Where's your phone?"
I thought of it, in the pocket of a pair of jeans I was no longer wearing in this dream-space, and he conjured it into his hand. He unlocked it, navigated to a stopwatch function, and started the clock. For a fleeting second, I wrapped my mind around the image of Alexander Raven using an iPhone.
