The most annoying voice ever.

“So you went into a vision?” Nicholas asked.

“Without a crystal.”

“Ah, crap.” I didn’t even bother to say it in my head. I lifted Laylen’s hand off of my shoulder and sat up, dizzy and getting a total head rush. I blinked a few times while I waited for the room to stop spinning.

“Did I hit my head?” I asked Laylen. “When I blacked out?”

Laylen shook his head. “No, I caught you before you did. You scared the crap out me, though. One minute you were talking, and then next you were falling out of the chair.”

“Nice,” I muttered.

“Nice for you,” Laylen teased. “But do you know how difficult it is to catch falling dead weight.” I shook my head and got to my feet.

“So you can go into visions without a crystal ball?” Nicholas asked with intrigued.

Nicholas knowing about this was probably not a good thing. “No, I used a crystal ball,” I lied.

“No you didn’t—I’d have known if you had,” he said with a smirk. “But nice try.”

I rolled my eyes. “Whatever.”

“So,” Nicholas said, marveling at me as though I was the most fascinating thing he had ever laid eyes on. “You can go into a vision without the help of a crystal…fascinating.”

Even though Alex wasn’t here, I could picture him giving me a twenty minute lecture about my stupid mistake of letting Nicholas know about my uncommon Foreseer ability.

“I guess,” I said, acting like it wasn’t a big deal, when really it was since a Foreseer traveling into visions minus the crystal is a very unheard of—if not completely unheard—thing.

“How long have you known you could do it?” Nicholas asked with way too much interest.

I shrugged. “Not too long.”

Nicholas’s golden-eyed gaze practically burned into me, not in a bad way, but in a good way. Or should I say a bad/good way, because the guy had already shown way too much interest in me, and with the way he was staring at me, I had a feeling that his interest way going to increase. A lot.

“Do you know how rare that is?” Nicholas awed at me.

I gave a shrug “I guess. I mean, Alex said there might be one other guy that could do it.” Nicholas’s eyes devoured me. “That other guy is Dyvinius’s younger brother, who’s been a Foreseer for a really long time, and comes from a line of many, many powerful Foreseers. He isn’t some girl who just got her Foreseer’s mark only a couple of days ago.

Do you know how unlikely it is for anyone to be able to do that…you would have to be…” He trailed off.

“Have to be what?” I asked, dying to hear what came at the end of that. What if Nicholas knew something about my little gift?

“Very powerful,” he finished.

Well, crap. Powerful I was. Or at least I had a lot of power flowing around inside me. But Nicholas was not supposed to know this.

Play it cool, Gemma. “Yeah, well, if I am, then that’s news to me.”

“Really,” he said, and I could tell he wasn’t buying it.

“Yeah, really.” Was all I could think of to say.

“So weren’t you supposed to be bringing back that Ira crystal ball with you?” Laylen interrupted, in an effort to sidetrack Nicholas.

“Yeah,” Nicholas said, his eyes still fixed on me as he patted the pocket of his jeans “I have it.”

“Well, shouldn’t you get to work, then.” Laylen was trying really hard to direct Nicholas’s attention away from me and my power, but Nicholas wasn’t having any part of it. “I mean, I’m sure it’s going to take awhile to train Gemma, or whatever it is you’re supposed to be doing.”

“Maybe…” The way Nicholas was looking at me made me want to crawl under the table and hide.

“Maybe not.”

“Regardless of how long it’ll take, I think we should get started now,” I told Nicholas. The sooner the better, at least for my mom’s sake.

“Fine,” he said. “Let’s get started.”

I was quickly catching on that Nicholas had the attention span of a child. We sat down on the living room floor, all Séance-style, sitting cross-legged, facing one another, a regular, violet ribbon crystal ball placed between us as he taught me how to become a

“better Foreseer” and control my seeing ability. But it was going to take forever because he kept asking me questions. Questions that I wasn’t sure how to answer.

“Why do you need to go to The Underworld?” he asked, before we’d really gotten anywhere with my training.

“Um…” I hesitated, not sure what to do. Lie.

Probably not, since he was going to end up finding out when he went down to The Underworld with me.

“To get my mother.”

He nodded. “I met her once. Didn’t she disappear quite a few years ago?”

“Fourteen years ago,” I said absentmindedly, my hands hovering over the crystal ball.

“And that’s where she ended up?” Nicholas asked interestedly. “In The Underworld?”

“Yeah…” I stared down at the violet ribbons, swirling inside the crystal. “That’s where she ended up.”

“How?”

Crap. “I…a…I don’t know.”

I worried he would ask more questions, but instead he picked up the Ira that was sitting on the floor to the side of us, the moss colored glass sparkling beautifully when it hit the light.

“Well, this should get us there,” Nicholas said, twisting the Ira in his hands. “Just as long as we can get you to control your Foreseer power a little bit better, which shouldn’t be too difficult, considering you can enter visions without a crystal ball.” I didn’t say anything.

Nicholas tossed the crystal ball in the air like it was a baseball. “So who’s your father?”

Good Question. “I’m not sure exactly.” He raised his eyebrows quizzically. “You’re not sure? How’s that possible?”

“When your mother refuses to tell anyone before she gets trapped in The Underworld,” I replied, with a small amount of bitterness because I wished she’d have told someone. I mean, why did it have to be a secret? Who was he?

“So for all you know,” Nicholas tossed the crystal ball in the air again, and it spun so quickly that when the light kissed it, it looked like a mere reflection.

“Your father could have been some powerful Foreseer.” He caught the crystal ball in his hands and let out a dramatic breath. “Your father could be Dyvinius.”

I pulled a face. “Ewe. Gross. He’s like sixty.” Nicholas shrugged, his eyes glinting mischievously.

“You never know. Some girls have a thing for older guys. I mean how much older is Alex than you.” I glared at him. “First of all, I don’t have a thing for Alex. And second of all, he’s only two years older than me. I don’t think that qualifies him as an ‘older guy.’”

“You know your second reason kind of contradicts your first. If you didn’t like him then why would it matter whether two years was a lot or not.”

“I don’t like Alex.” I assured him, but my inner conscious laughed at me.

“Whatever you say.” Nicholas balanced the crystal ball on the black and white checkerboard floor. “But I think you’re lying. And I think two years could be a lot if you think about it.”

“How do you figure?”

“Well, for starters he’s not even considered a teen anymore.”

I rolled my eyes at the sill iness of his reason. “Well, how old are you?”

“The same age as you,” he replied, being evasive.

Faeries are tricky. “And how old would that be?” I asked, playing his game.

He smiled slyly as if he knew what I was up to.

“Eighteen, of course.”

Of course. “Can we just get back to you teaching me, please?”

He stared at me for a moment with a slightly irritated expression. “Sure, that is unless you want to try our kiss again.” When I shook my head, he rolled the regular crystal ball —my “training ball,” as he’d explained to me earlier—toward me. I scooted back a little, concerned that if it touched me I would instantly be pulled in.

“So, until we can get you going into and out of visions that you’re intentionally trying to go into, there’s really no point in us trying to travel into The Underworld because it’s one of the most difficult places to get to,” Nicholas explained, finally getting to the point. “One false move and we could end up in the bottom of the lake, where we’d either drown or get taken to The Underworld by the Water Faeries which means we’d be prisoners there—we have to go in a specific way or we’re in trouble. Got it?” I nodded. “So how does it work, exactly? I mean we enter The Underworld through that ball.” I nodded at the moss colored Ira Crystal Ball. “Then what? I mean how do we get the Queen to let my mom go? And how do we get her to let us go? Wouldn’t we just end up prisoners as well?”