Chapter Twelve

I must fail in my don't-think-about-Invictis quest, because instead of a pure, black sleep, I wake up in a dream… or however it works. I find myself sitting on the roof of Frank's bar, a cup of ramen in my hands. The night sky is dark above me, littered with stars, though their intensity is downplayed thanks to the lighting from the street below.

It's like a weird, déjà vu memory. Everything is exactly as it was the night I saw the flash in the alley across the street. The same cars are on the road, the same people walking by on the sidewalk. Lot of college students, excited to go out and drink, party it up while they can.

I sigh as I set the bowl of ramen to my right, and I wonder if I would've been like them, if I grew up with a normal family. A mom and a dad who didn't die. Hell, I'd even take one loving parent. Something. Anything.

I'm not alone up here, for a heavily accented voice speaks to my left, "What a peculiar place." He does not sound aggravated or like he's trying to be hurtful; just stating what he believes to be a fact.

He must be standing a little behind me, while I sit with my legs hanging off the edge of the roof, because I can't see him, even with my peripherals. Which is fine; I don't need to see him. I know exactly what he looks like.

Super tall, blond, blue-eyed, built like a fucking sculpture, with an aged-up face that doesn't even belong to him.

When I don't say a word, Invictis muses, "Where is that fire, I wonder? You are the one that called me here."

That makes me groan and glare at nothing in particular. "I didn't call you here. I can't do this shit. If I could dream of whatever I wanted to dream of, the last place I'd want to be is here. The night I first met you." If I sound annoyed, that's because I am.

I don't want to be here. I don't want to have this conversation with him. I don't want to talk to him at all. Seeing him, talking to him… it makes things harder on me. I have to keep reminding myself he's not a man and that I hate him.

Because I do. I really do hate him.

But I also… don't.

"If you could be anywhere you wanted, where would you be, then?" Invictis asks, sounding bored, like he doesn't really care about the answer either way.

"I'd be at the zoo, with my dad," I whisper, staring at the alley across the street, at the place where everything changed. Honestly, I don't know why I bother entertaining any sort of conversation with him. Sooner or later I'll piss him off, get myself pissed off, and then we'll be at each other's throats, unable to do anything because this is just a dream.

Invictis's voice is way too serious as he whispers, "As you wish."

The familiar scene around me fades. It starts with the buildings across the street and the alley, then moves to the road and sidewalks. I move off the ledge as the world literally morphs in front of my eyes, changing until I see a tiny girl skipping in front of her dad to get a better look at the glass in front of the elephant exhibit.

My heart nearly stops when I see my dad's smiling face walk by, right in front of me. My head turns as I watch him catch up to the girl—me. The little Rey practically body slams the glass, and my dad scolds me and tells me not to do that, that it might startle the animals.

"Oh, my God," I murmur, unable to say anything else.

Around me, things are blurry. The people walking by have no faces. The only things in true focus are little Rey and my dad, and about twenty feet around them.

My heart swells when I see my dad kneel beside little Rey and point to where a baby elephant is with her mom inside the enclosure. They'd just gotten fed, so they were active and close to the observing area. We were lucky; you don't always get so fortunate when you go from exhibit to exhibit.

It's so much to see, so many overwhelming emotions inside me, that it becomes difficult for me to stand. I don't feel grounded, like I could just float up into the sky and never come back down. A weird sort of weightless. So I do something without thinking; I reach behind me and place my hand on the strong chest I know is there.

Touching him grounds me, keeps me from falling or floating. I hold my breath as I watch the little girl clamor for another picture. My heart skips a beat when I hear his laugh and see the way the corners of his eyes crinkle.

"Oh, God," I whisper, unable to say anything else. I don't want to look away from my dad, but if I don't, I feel like I might cry. Yeah, yeah, I know. It's dumb, but I never thought… everything might be fuzzy around the edges, but being here, seeing him again, reminds me of everything I used to have.

And everything I lost.

I turn away from the memory, following the route my hand took in that I curl against Invictis's chest. Lower chest, I should say, since he's so damned tall. My breathing comes out short and quick, in erratic bursts. I'm incredulous, but it's an overwhelming feeling, and I don't know how to handle it.

Invictis does not move away, but with what he says next, it's clear he's confused. "You said this was where you would want to be. Have you changed your mind?"

"No," I quickly say, turning my head back to my dad and little Rey. The memory must've changed around me while I was too busy hiding myself against Invictis's chest, because now we're at the cheetah exhibit, trying to spot where the big cats are hiding.

Fuck. My heart hurts.

"No," I say again, softer this time. "It's just—" I drag my eyes away from little me and my dad, angling my head back so I can meet the blue gaze staring down at me. It's when I realize how close we are, how tightly I'm huddled against him, how I still have my hand flat against his chest—though it's more like his upper abdomen now.

He is not a person. The form before me is a lie. He is a weapon of mass destruction, of hate and madness. I remind myself of that, and yet I still can't move away. It's like I'm frozen there, unable to do anything, and that includes thinking logically.

There is no hatred in the sapphire orbs that study me, and his voice is quiet when he asks, "Just what?"

There are dozens of ways I could respond, but I settle with whispering, "It's too much." I'm slow to drop my eyes, letting my gaze roam over his chest—he's wearing the same clothes he wore in the last dream: dark jeans and a t-shirt that hugs his upper body a bit too much. It's… well, not to sound stupid but it's distracting is what it is.

Finally, I tear my eyes off Invictis and look back to my dad and little Rey as I say, "And it's not enough." Though I know I should pull away, I can't. My hand stays firmly pressed against him, like I need to feel him there.

"How can it be too much and not enough?" He actually sounds thoughtful. Maybe he does want an answer. Maybe he just can't wrap his head around complicated human emotions—but that can't be completely true, can it?

I've heard his anger. Seen it for myself first hand. He's been annoyed, exasperated, and frustrated with me… and a weapon shouldn't feel any of those emotions. A weapon is just that: something that kills. Something that hurts.

The scene around us changes again, this time to an enclosure in one of the buildings, where the exotic birds are. My dad and little Rey stand before one of the biggest enclosures, ooh-ing and ah-ing at all the brightly-colored birds.

"Ever since he died," I say, staring at the back of my dad's head, "things haven't been the same. I've been so lost." Slowly, I turn my head back to Invictis, though I stare now at my hand that still rests comfortably on his abdomen.

And then I admit something I don't think I've ever admitted before: "I'm still lost."

I am. I'm being pulled in a million different directions, told what to do without really being guided. I'm confused and bewildered… and I'm scared. I'm a nobody. A nineteen-year-old girl shouldn't have to shoulder the burdens of an entire kingdom. I shouldn't have to fight an ancient weapon just to stop it from annihilating everyone.

I'm drowning and I don't know if I'll ever reach the surface.

The last thing I want to do is look up at Invictis after admitting that aloud, but when he says not a single word, I do just that. My head angles back, and my gaze flicks up to his face.

Astute confusion turns into suspicion on his face, and just like that the memory fades around us. In the blink of an eye we are back on the rooftop in the middle of the night, near the edge, where I left my ramen cup. Something in him must snap, because his hand finds my neck and he jerks me away from him.

"What is this?" he hisses, his lips hardly moving with the whispered words. His large body curls over mine, and I'm trapped between the rooftop's knee-high wall and his body, his hand around my neck. "What kind of game are you playing, Rey?"

When he says my name, I swear I can close my eyes and picture him as nothing more than an annoyed tattoo on my wrist, flashing gold every time he speaks. Of course, it finally hits me: he's not squeezing my neck. Not hurting me. He's just…

He's just holding me.

"Game?" I echo faintly. "This isn't a game to me."

His fingers clamp a little harder around my neck as he jerks me forward, stopping me short of colliding with his body. "Now who's the liar? Perhaps your attempt at humanizing yourself would sway a lesser being, but I am more than that. I am more than you. You will not be the cause of any change in me."

"So sure of yourself," I whisper, "but what makes you so confident any of this was about you?"

" You brought me here. You called me into your mind while you slept—"

I talk over him, "And, unless I'm mistaken—which I don't think I am since it literally happened moments ago—you're the one who brought us back to the zoo. You're the one who reached into my mind or however you do it and pulled out the memories from me."

In another flash, we're suddenly downstairs, in my apartment. I'm trapped between a wall and his strong body, his hand still firm and snug around my neck, and it doesn't feel as though he's going to let go anytime soon.

"You." He forces my chin up, and the expression on his handsome face is one of quiet rage. A quiet rage with an undertone of something else, something sneakily lacing itself through the current of his emotions.

He blinks, and the blueness in his gaze transforms into molten gold. "What are you doing to me?" Invictis whispers the question so vehemently it makes me shiver, and the hand around my neck drops an inch or so to my collarbone, where his large hand then rests.

"I'm not doing anything." And I'm not. I'm just… what am I doing? What are we doing here? Did I really call out to him and bring him here without meaning to? And why the hell is it so easy to lose myself in the moving golden color of his eyes?

"Again, you lie," he accuses me. "You… you lie."

Whatever's happening is thick, and it fills the air between us so much it becomes hard for me to breathe. Or maybe it's due to his hand resting on my collarbone. That hand is big enough that it swallows me, and I swear I can feel him even through the fabric of my shirt.

"You lie," he says again. Don't know if he has a heart, but if he does, it's not in it anymore. His normally strong voice comes out soft and faint, whispered in a way that makes me fight for breath.

No words want to come out of my mouth, so I struggle to say, "You're the liar here. You lied to me from the moment we met. You lied about everything, to get me to do what you wanted me to."

His head is bent, his tall frame slumping over mine. His eyes still glow like they're made of liquid gold, and a pair of more entrancing eyes simply don't exist. "I would not be whole if I did not push you from every direction."

Gladus's attack on Laconia. The fake Emperor. Getting me all riled up to do his bidding because he couldn't do it himself. Oh, yes, he got me good.

"And now you're whole," I say, "and I'm supposed to lose my mind like the others, but I'm not. You know what I think?" A half smirk tugs on my lips as I feel the hand on my collarbone sneaking its way up to my neck once more—only this time he doesn't grip my neck like he's debating on choking me.

This time it's nothing more than possession, but you know what they say: possession's nine-tenths of the law.

"I think, maybe, the one losing their mind this time… is you."

The words are barely out of my mouth before he frowns at me and growls out, "You cannot change madness. You cannot."

"Can't I?" I see his nostrils flare. "Is this the part where you list off a few threats? Make ‘em count this time, Rune. Give me some imaginative ones, ones that'll keep me awake at night, wondering how you'll pull them off."

When he doesn't say a word, I whisper, "Come on. Give it to me. Give me your worst."

Maybe it's my silly human sensibilities, but based on the look he gives me after that, I can't tell if he wants to kill me or kiss me—and that ignores the existential question of whether or not a weapon can want something like that in the first place.

All I know is it's a deeply angry, insanely troubled and conflicted, sexy as hell look, so when he pulls away from me and lets me go, I can finally breathe easy.

His golden eyes burn with a searing intensity, and the last thing I hear before the vision of my apartment fades around us is "You." Just one word. A word that doesn't even mean much, considering, and yet it echoes through the air, stifling, as if that lone word took everything out of him.

And who am I to judge? Maybe it did.

The world around us fades away, bit by bit until blackness is all that envelops me. Rune disappears during the change, and the last thing I see are his golden eyes.

I'm alone in a sea of blackness, nothing but the tendrils of darkness to keep me company. Angling my head back, I shout into the void, "Pouting now, are you? Figures." I pause for effect before asking the darkness, "Say, are you sure you're not human? Because with the way you're acting—"

Invictis must not like the insinuation. Before I can finish, black smoke coils around my legs, my arms, all the way up to my neck. "Rey." His monstrous voice fills my head, so low he sounds like an alien, a voice that shouldn't exist.

The black stuff squeezes my body enough to make me gasp, but no harder. Not hard enough to hurt. The one around my neck curls just beneath my chin, thick enough that I can feel it when I try to swallow.

"What do you hope to gain by returning to Pylos and Acadia? Do you think any vestiges of those fallen empresses can help you?" His voice is eerie enough that it creeps along your skin and gives you goosebumps; I'd shiver if I wasn't surrounded by snakelike tendrils.

"Sounds like you're trying to convince me to give up," I say, grinning even though I shouldn't.

In a blinding flash of white, Invictis appears before me, hovering in the blackness, not in his human form but in his ascended, humanlike one. Just him and his golden, faceless body, no wings. Eight feet tall, he appears even larger than that above me, his form part human and all armored, shimmering and unreal even with no light to reflect. What light surrounds him comes from inside of him, from where his face should be—where there is just an outline of a head, like a halo.

That's when it hits me: even without the wings, he looks like an angel.

A twisted, golden, vengeful angel with the power to make anyone go insane. Isn't that what they say the true form of an angel does to people? If you believe in that sort of thing, anyway. I never gave it much thought, not until now.

Invictis is older than Laconian civilization. He is a weapon now, but he had to have been more before.

"Do you think I cower in fear over whatever foolish feat you are trying to accomplish?" Invictis asks, his deep, unnervingly low voice emanating from his faceless figure. "You cannot stop me. Nothing you do will stop me from fulfilling my purpose."

"And then what?"

I must take him off-guard with the question, because he is silent for a moment. "Then… what?" The way he repeats what I asked, he truly does sound confused. "Laconia will be in ruins, and not a single living soul will remain."

The black tendrils coil around me a bit tighter, so it's not too easy, but I manage to say, "Yeah, and then what? Like, what are you going to do once your purpose is fulfilled or whatever? Where will you go? What will you do? Do you even know?"

Invictis is silent as he floats before me.

"You gotta think long-term goals, buddy," I go on. "It's always good to have some short-term goals, sure, don't get me wrong—those give you some serotonin boosts when you reach ‘em, but the long-term goal is what should keep you motivated behind the scenes. So, I'll ask again: what are you going to do after you destroy all civilization as Laconians know it?"

He lowers himself to the ground—or what would be the ground, if the world around us was more than sheer blackness all around—and walks with large strides over to me. Invictis says not a single word as he lifts a large, golden hand and brings it to my chin.

The coils around my body fade away into nothing, but I'm still caught, still frozen, unable to move as I gaze up at Invictis's true form. A warmth flows into me where his metallic fingers graze my chin, enough heat to fuel a thousand fires.

"Then," Invictis whispers as his thumb roams across my chin in a gesture that is way too tender and gentle for a being such as him, "I will rest." He sounds exhausted, much like I feel. I suppose bringing plagues, blights, and scourges upon Laconia for the last twenty years hasn't been easy, especially given the fact that he hasn't been whole until recently.

"You know I can't let you do this," I whisper.

"You cannot stop me."

"Maybe not, but I'm going to try. It's the least the people of Laconia deserve."

Invictis's golden form shimmers, like the metal his body is made of moves, shifting and changing, never staying the same even though his form remains. His hand moves from my chin, gliding up my cheek, where it finds a new place to rest. It's large enough it can cover damn near half my face even with his fingertips curling around my ear, in my hair. His thumb remains near my chin.

It's weird, and all I can see out of the eye near his hand is his golden, reflective hue. What Invictis says next reverberates from his chest, "You should've fallen already. No being, from this world or yours, can resist me. Why do you still stand?"

I tell him the truth: "I don't know."

His impossibly tall frame moves, and he lifts his other hand, cupping the other side of my face in much the same way. My head is literally in his golden hands, and the only thing I can do is stand there and listen.

Stand there, listen, and bask in his warmth and light.

"You should be on your knees for me," he murmurs. "You should be pliant and more than willing to do whatever I tell you to. Gladus, for all she thought she was, turned on her own people so quickly."

Because I have inappropriate thoughts at pretty much all hours of the day, all I can think is: This guy can pop my head like a zit right now. Maybe I should try stepping away, get his hands off my head. If he kills me here, in this dreamscape, does that mean I die in real life?

"Maybe," I offer up an alternative, "you should be the one on your knees, for once. When you're like this, it'll bring you down to our level, at least."

The light coming from him grows in intensity, and I take that to mean he does not particularly like the suggestion. Oh, well.

"I'll be honest," I tell him as I reach for the hands resting on the sides of my head. "You're powerful. Smart. Vindictive." He lets me pull his hands off my head, and I let them go immediately. "Impressive all around. And who am I to judge? Maybe you are the inevitable, the end of everything. Maybe you're just an apocalypse in a pretty gold package, and maybe there's no hope at all."

I let a defiant grin grow on my face as my gaze slowly travels along Invictis's ascended form. "But that's the thing about us humans. We're resilient. We fight until we're dead, and just because you're the big bad of Laconia doesn't mean I'm going to lay down and take whatever you give me—"

Maybe I shouldn't have worded it like that, because now I'm remembering all of those monster fucker memes I've seen. I don't see a big, golden dick on him right now. Does that mean he doesn't have one, or could he make one, form it to his will or something?

Oh, definitely not a good thought to have.

I shake my head to push the thought from my mind as I tell him, "You and me, we're going to have a showdown. A standoff. And I'm going to give you everything I have, because, who knows? Maybe you just don't affect me like you do everyone else. Maybe I'm immune to your power—and if I'm immune to that, I'd say that gives me a pretty good chance at kicking your shiny ass, doesn't it?"

"When I come for you," Invictis growls out as he takes a step forward, putting his tall, golden body a mere two inches away from me and therefore forcing me to see just how small I am against his true form, " I will annihilate you ."

"Maybe I'll be the one annihilating you," I whisper.

It's too bad Invictis doesn't have a face when he's like this, because it'd sure be helpful to me to know if I'm actually matching his threatening demeanor with my own or if he just finds me amusing or annoying. Without, you know, a face, it's impossible to tell.

"The day draws near." His golden chest rises and falls with a false breath he doesn't need to take. "I will see you in Acadia, Rey. I look forward to seeing what you've learned on your own."

God, he irritates me, but before I can say anything back—mainly a harsh fuck you —the dream crumbles around me, and I wake up in a musty bed, staring at an unfamiliar ceiling.

Shit.