Again, we’re heading in the no go zone, like two stars gravitating toward each other. “What other things have you felt?” I ask, knowing I shouldn’t.

He seems reluctant to answer, but does anyway. “Anger. Frustration. Pain. Sadness.” He pauses, looking at me instead of the road yet still managing to keep the car perfectly aligned in the lane. “Desire. What about you?”

“What other emotions have I felt?”

He shakes his head slowly, brings his hand away from the steering wheel, and puts his finger on my throat and draws a line down to my chest where he can probably feel my heart beating rapidly. “Have you ever felt desire?”

I can barely breathe. This wasn’t my intention. In fact, I was trying to do the opposite, yet once again we can’t stop touching each other and “eye fucking” as Nicholas put it.

“I feel it now,” I say, boldness slipping out of me in a way it never has.

He groans, eyes flaring with desire. “Fuck, Gemma, I—”

“Alex stop!” I scream as a shadowy figure runs out in the road. Alex slams on the breaks as his arm shoots out in front of me, securing me in place. Tires screech. The car lurches forward…metal crunches…a bright light…yellow eyes… blackness…

Then nothing but quiet.

I have never felt pain like this before. It’s as if my body has compressed into a small, warped ball, my bones broken and bending in ways that shouldn’t be possible. Everything hurts so badly. Death. I have to be dead.

“Gemma,” someone says, but their voice sounds so far away. “Gemma, can you hear me?”

Wait a minute. I know that voice. It’s the most wonderful voice in the world. I lift my eyelids, even though it’s excruciatingly painful, and see the beautiful guy staring down at me with the brightest green eyes I’d ever seen.

“Are you alright?” the guy asks, leaning over me, looking so worried. All I want to do is hug him. Hug in the midst of the stars which seem to be dancing around me, so pretty.

I turn my head to nod, but it doesn’t budge. There’s gravel in my hair and stuck to my skin, along with something warm and liquid.

A girl joins the guy. I know her too. She has tears in her eyes and dirt and blood in her golden brown hair and she looks terrified.

“Look.” She points at my stomach. “Alex, I don’t think…”

The guy’s eyes widen and with one swift movement, he scoops me up in his arms. “Get us out of here,” the guy shouts at the girl as he cradles me against his chest, making me feel safe. “Now!”

She gapes at him helplessly. “Where do you want me to take us?”

“To Stasha’s.” There’s panic on the guy’s face, and I want to tell him it’ll be okay—everything will be okay—but I can’t seem to find my voice. “You have your crystal, right?” he asks the girl.

“Yeah, but what about him?” She turns and points at something on the ground near a pile of twisted metal that’s on fire, smoke rising to the sky.

“We’ll have to leave him here,” he says. “If we don’t get her out of here, she might not make it. Besides, you know they take care of their own when it comes to this sort of thing.”

“Yeah, I know.” The girl is disheartened, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Let’s go then.”

The boy says something else to me, but I can only see his lips moving. My eyelids are so heavy, so I shut them.

I’m dying. There is no pain, no anguish, no burden of the star. Everything feels complete, except for one thing. A piece of me is missing. Not an actual piece, but something I was connected to—electrically connected to. Alex. I need Alex. I feel so empty without him, but what does that mean? Does the fact that he seems to make me feel whole mean that I’m in love with him.

Love.

Forbidden.

I try to open my eyelids and see where I am, measure what I need to do to escape this hollowing feeling burrowing on the inside of me, but I can’t, so I start to surrender, give up, let it gnaw the rest of me apart until I won’t be anything but a shell. And for a brief instant, I feel better because I don’t feel a thing.

“You can’t give up Gemma,” my father whispers. “You need to fix my mistakes.”

“But I can’t move,” I tell him. “Everything hurts. My body… life… it’s too hard.”

“I know,” he replies. “Trust me, I know how hard things can seem and how it seems like everything is up against you, but it’ll get better. You just have to fight until you get there.”

“But what if I can’t?” I ask. “What if I’m not a fighter?”

“But you are… You got this far, didn’t you? Now open your eyes,” he says. “Today isn’t the day you’re going to die. Now fight for that.”

Fight. My eyelids slowly lift open. Light hits my pupils, engulfs me. I can see the future again. Alex and I by the lake. Hugging each other to our death as a wall of ice surrounds us. I feel as though I should be freezing to death, but there’s so much warmth radiating between us that it spills around the world.

I awaken peacefully, opening my eyes as if I’ve woken up from a serene nights rest. But seconds later, the pain rises in my body and I let out a moan as I take in where I am. In an unfamiliar bed, covered with a blanket and the room is crammed with plants. They are everywhere. On the shelves, the dresser and leafy vines dangle from the ceiling.

I slowly sit up, hunching over as my stomach burns in protest. I lift the bottom of my t-shirt and see a very large section of my stomach is bandaged up. I sift through my memories, trying to recollect how I got here, hurt, but I’m drawing a blank.

“We got in a car accident,” Alex says and I turn my head toward the doorway. He’s standing there with his arms crossed, bags under his eyes and his hair sticking up, shirt and jeans torn and stained with blood.

“You look tired,” I say. “Are you okay?”

“Am I okay? Gemma, you should only be worried about if you’re okay right now.”

“Where are we?” I ask, pulling the bottom of my shirt back over my stomach as I gaze around at all the plants.

He sits down on the foot of the bed, leaving some distance between us. “At Stasha’s. The plants are healthy for her gift.”

Pieces of what happened are starting to come back to me, but I don’t think in order because they make no sense. “We were in a car accident… I can barely remember leaving the house.”

His gaze flicks to my head, like he’s checking for injuries he might have missed. “A Death Walker ran out into the road,” he explains. “We hit it and ended up crashing the car.”

“What about the Death Walker?” I ask. “Did it die?”

He gives me a look. “It can’t die, only from the Sword of Immortality.”

“So it’s still alive?” I ask anxiously.

He reluctantly nods. “Thankfully, though, it was just one… and it ran off after we hit it… although I’m not sure what it was doing there in the first place and alone.”

“Do you think it caused the accident on purpose? That maybe your dad sent it?”

“I’m not sure why he’d just send one.” He leans back against the footboard with a quizzical look on his face. “And what I really don’t get is why he’s not coming here himself to get us.”

Something clicks, another lost memory of an erased time. “While I was in the Wastelands, Stephan said something about when you reflected the memoria extracto or whatever the memory erasing rock was called, that it did something and he had to keep his distance for a while.”

This makes Alex even more lost. “Why, though?”

“Maybe because of the sacrificium protegat.” I say it robotically, not even sure what the words mean.

“Where did you learn about that?” Alex asks curiously.

“I have no idea…” A voice whispers to me inside my head, one I’ve heard before but can’t place from where. Not because I’ve forgotten, but there seems to be some sort of wall blocking me from putting it together. “It just popped into my head.”