The Deal with the Demon Prince

*Chapter Twenty-Nine*

The blond spun around, and Aurora, not really paying attention, failed to react in time. She bumped roughly into the demon and stumbled back a few steps. Rubbing her nose painfully, she did her best to glower at the Prince.

“Avary’s not who you think he is.”

Aurora uncrossed her arms and willed the glare to disappear. Her green and red eyes stared into his blue orbs, and she calmed herself. She caught a glimpse of an image that she couldn’t decipher, and as fast as it appeared, the image vanished.

“Stop trying to poke into my head,” he said, turning around. “Avary can’t control his inner self.”

“He seems fine -”

Aurora stopped her sentence. A hazy memory surfaced. She remembered him grinning, and she remembered the chill that ran down her spine. The memory swirled inside her head, the content becoming clearer and clearer the more she focused on it. She saw Avary charging at her like a mad beast. She saw Adrian interfering. She remembered the black tendrils shooting out of her and hurting both of them. The one thing that popped out the most was if it weren’t for Cadence, she would have killed Adrian.

“Aurora? What’s wrong with -?”

“Did I?” Her nails dug into his wrist, and her eyes bore into his with evident urgency. It was as if his answer would determine her life, and in a way, it did. Her sanity was hanging on a thread, and he could easily cut that thread with a single word. She was shaking, and he could feel it. “Did I try to kill you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Right after we came into the forest, my memory became vague for a certain amount of time. During that time, did I try to kill you?”

She wanted to scream, to yell, and to shout. Her hand dropped and shot to her head, a sudden headache threatening to explode her mind. Images that she could not make sense attacked her head, flashing so fast one after the other and blinding her. Aurora fell to the ground. She wanted to cut her own head open and release the pressure that was pressing against the sides of her skull.

She heard him mutter something along the lines of Phoebe being right about something, but she couldn’t think. She couldn’t do anything but feel the excruciating pain racking her mind. It wasn’t a physical pain. No, it was something else. Her regeneration would never be able to heal this.

Jasper.

Death.

At this moment, she wanted nothing more than to join her brother. She had seen death. She had seen what death was like. Jasper, he chose death. He allowed himself to die, yet she allowed her cowardice to triumph. Aurora, she chose a goddamn deal. Was this the price? Was this the penalty of defying nature?

As sudden as it’d come, the pain was gone. No, she realized after a moment. It was not gone, but it had alleviated to a mere throbbing at the back of her head. She let out a shaky breath. At least this way, she was able to think. Her eyelids opened, and she stared right into his eyes.

Like an abrupt revelation an avid reader would feel after finishing a book and looking back at all the clues scattered throughout the novel, it clicked. The pain from earlier allowed her to think clearer, and her senses heightened. Everything seemed to have more meanings, yet everything now made sense. It was as if the agony from earlier had allowed her to gain an entire new sense. A sixth sense.

She saw it.

She saw the blood that would soon coat the rocky surface beneath her, and she knew the blood would belong to either if not both of them. She saw the child, a child no older than five, gnawing on the two corpses ravenously. She didn’t dare to look at the corpses’ faces. The strange hallucination or vision ended a second later.