“You’re in the only place I can be,” he says, turning around and putting a hand on my back to steer me with him as he walks down the path.

I move nervously with him, my heart erratic in my chest. “What do you mean by fix the past?”

“I mean, we’re going to do what probably seems like the impossible,” he says. “We’re going to reset time and erase some of the past to hopefully create a better future for the world.”

My heart quiets inside my chest. Calms. For the briefest moment, I swear I feel sparks of heat, tiny firecrackers. If what he’s saying is true—if we’re going to erase some of the past to hopefully help the world—then maybe I can also help Alex.

Maybe I can reset it so he doesn’t die.

Maybe I can bring him back.

As we hike down the path toward the unknown, I watch my father out of the corner of my eye. He looks so much like me; brown hair, fair skin, tall, and of course the violet eyes. It’s almost too good to be true and with faerie/Foreseers like Nicholas roaming around, who can turn into a mirage and make me see things that aren’t real, I have to wonder if my dad isn’t real or nothing but an illusion manifested, perhaps, by my death. Maybe Aislin’s mirage protection spell isn’t working anymore. Maybe I’m the one who’s dead.

“Am I dead?” I dare ask.

He shakes understandingly. “No, you’re fully alive.”

I continue to study him; sharp features, a warm smile, confidence in his walk. “Are you dead then?”

He shakes his head, a sparkle in his eyes. “Not quite.”

“Is that even possible? To not quite be dead?”

He considers this carefully, gazing off at the columns lining the path. “You’re here in your vision form.”

I swallow the massive lump in my throat. “So my body is still back on earth? Passed out?”

“Yes, pretty much.” He pauses. “But don’t worry, today isn’t the day you’re going to die, Gemma. I promise.” His silver robe swishes across the floor as the path curves upward, almost as if it’s bowing into the sky and carrying us along with it. “We only have a few minutes before you have to return and I have something very important I need to show you.”

“Okay.” Light glimmers from the ceiling. “Is it how to reset time and bring back Alex?” I half expect him to yell at me, for putting a guy before the world’s needs, but he simply nods.

“If all goes well and you’re able to pull it off, then yes, Alex will come back too,” he says, nodding.

“So this is all in my hands?’ I ask. “I mean resetting time?”

“You sound skeptical?” He notes curiously as the path dips downward again and I have to work to keep by balance and not fall to my ass and slide down.

I shrug with my hands out to my side. “It’s just that I’ve seen and heard things that make me think that it’s not possible to change time. Or that I should.”

“You’ve seen them in your visions I’m assuming?”

“Sort of…” I gape at him. “Wait, you know I can see visions?”

He smiles as we arrive at the bottom of the hill, then we veer to the right down a slender hallway lined with porcelain columns engraved with gold leaves. The ceiling is swirled with various shades of yellow and blue, creating an effect similar to Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night. The place is surreally gorgeous, unlike anything I’ve ever seen.

“Where do you think you inherited your Foreseer gift?” my father asks as I gaze at the beauty around me in awe. “And, just like you, I have unique Foreseer abilities.”

I tear my attention off the scenery and focus on him. “So you can do things besides just see visions?”

“Yes, but that is a story for another time,” he tells me with a sad smile on his face as if it’ll never happen. “Right now, you need to focus on creating a better future for the world.”

I have a ton of questions I’m dying to ask him. It’s my first time meeting him, and I want to know everything I can about my mother, my past, him. But there’s urgency in his voice that keeps my lips sealed. And besides, deep down in the pit of my heart, most of my attention is on Alex, back at the beach house, dead, something I need to fix. In fact, just thinking about it makes my heart feel like it’s rupturing open and bleeding out, but whether that feeling is coming from the star or from my own emotions, I’m unsure.

I bite on my nails and remain stuck in my own head and the what if’s as we make the rest of our journey. At the end of the hallway there’s a stairway stretching up a sloped floor toward a brick mausoleum. Two massive pillars form an entryway to the heavy wooden door on the front of it where there’s a red light glowing from a barred window.

“What is this place?” I ask, hoping that it just looks like a mausoleum and doesn’t actually have dead bodies inside it.

He doesn’t answer as he climbs up the stairs toward the mausoleum. I rush after him, the steps cold underneath my bare feet, making me aware that I don’t have any shoes on and painfully hyperaware that I can barely remember anything up to the point where I woke up from my possession and Alex was dead on the floor. This has me worried about what I did while I was under Stephan’s control. What if I’m not remembering more evil things I did? What if I hurt more people?

I glance down at my arm where he branded me with the mark, now gone, my skin back to it’s smooth, paleness. I remember how Stephan told me that I had evil in my blood and that’s why he was able to put the mark on me. What if that was true? What if do have evil in me? What if this showed terribly when I was possessed? Even if I do manage to reset time and erase it, it can’t necessarily erase what’s inside me.

“Everything okay?” my father asks, sensing my distant thoughts.

I nod, unsure how to ask if somehow I have evil blood in me. And what if it came from him? “I’m fine… just thinking about Alex… and how he was…”

“I understand,” he says. “Losing someone can be difficult, especially if you’re not used to death.”

I want to say that I am used to death, though. Hell, I grew up thinking both of my parents were dead. But now I’ve met them both, fully alive and breathing so it’s not really relevant. And besides, during most of the time I thought they were dead, I couldn’t feel emotions so there was nothing inside me gnawing away like it is now.

“Hopefully, I won’t have to get used to it yet,” I say with a forced smile.

“Hopefully,” he agrees, coming to a stop in front of the mausoleum door. He reaches for the brass handle and the hinges creak as he opens it, as if it had been sealed shut for ages. Then he ducks his head and steps inside the dark and hesitantly I follow.

It takes my eyes a moment or two to adjust to the lack of light and my skin and lungs take even longer to get used to the damp air. “It feels like death in here,” I whisper, hugging my arms around myself.

“That it does,” my father replies, giving me no hope that this building isn’t a final resting place for the dead. He hunches over even more as he begins to descend farther into the dark. The low ceiling drips murky water on our heads and the cold tile floor is cracked and stained. The pillared walls are deteriorating, chipped and flawed, but in a hauntingly beautiful way. Decorated with red lanterns, the whole place has a soft glow which flows around the room and lights the way down a narrow tunnel.

“This way,” my father instructs with a nod of his head, reaching up to unhinge a lantern from the wall and carry it with him.

I trail after him, the air growing heavier the further we go and the floor feeling more like ice than tile. I start noticing little details the more my eyes adjust to the dark. The way vines flourish from the ceiling, the sound of a river flowing from somewhere nearby, how on each pillar there is an eye carved in the center, the pupil an S wrapped by a circle—the Foreseers’ mark. Is this a place for the Foreseers? Is it linked to the City of Crystal? That idea makes me nervous, especially if Nicholas has access to it.