The Pain in My Heart [Completed]

Chapter Forty-Four

~Crista

I wait in the hallway motionless with my hand against my chest, feeling my heart beat widely. No. No. This can't be happening. For all we did... there has to be another way. Who are we to let some fairy tell us what our fate is? What does he know?

And then it hits me. That shrill voice I've heard before, many times. "Stay away from the man with the answers."

I turn back down the hallway. Zaria thinks she knows who the man with the answers is, but I don't believe her. I'm not giving up.

Lifting my skirt and carefully stepping my weight from foot to foot, I walk back to Zaria's room without making a sound. I have no idea where Axil and Tyrian went. A small part of me doesn't even want to know. It looks like I won't have to be intervening in any fights.

Creeping up to her door I put my ear against the wood to see if I can hear anything, but I only hear the quiet steps of her pacing back and forth. Plucking up my courage, I raise my hand to the door and knock.

"Zaria," I call out still softly, hoping she'll be able to hear me. "Can I come in?"

A delicate wisp of magic seeps under the door frame, swirls around me, then around the doorknob. The whisp brings a slight breeze that cools my hot face. It turns the knob and the door cracks open.

I slip inside and see her face red as a tomato. She's been crying. I search my brain for something to say... anything, but for some reason, my brain lands on—

"Cool trick."

"I'm sorry," she says, disregarding the comment. "I just needed to speak with Lucy for a moment, alone."

I nod. "I get it. Future seer and all."

She quickly nods her head and sighs.

"Listen, Zaria... I have a plan and I don't think you're going to like it."

She playfully rolls her eyes. "Lucky for you, bad ideas are the only thing I think could possibly pull us out of this." I can't help but smile at her attitude. "What did you have in mind?" she asks.

"A while ago, we heard a voice and I think you heard it too."

"Which one?" she asks flopping on her bed

"Stay away— "

"From the man with the answers," she finishes for me. "Yes. I heard it."

"You think it's Tyrian," I say. I struggle to find the right words. How do you tell your best friend that you think the man with the answers is the same man who murdered her mother and almost her? Lucky for me, Zaria is better with words than I am.

"You think it's someone else?" she asks. "Who?"

I press my lips together, unable to utter his name in front of her. If I tell her, I'll have to explain why I think John has the answers and I'm not sure if that's a conversation I feel like having, or a conversation she deserves right now.

"It's not... well... it's not a person I think you'll want to see."

"At this point, I'm really past doing the things I want and don't want to do. Out with it."

"IthinkweneedJohn," I blurt out as quickly as possible. And though my words were jumbled, they were coherent enough for her to understand the word that mattered most.

"John," she repeats as if she's tasting the word in her mouth. A bitter taste.

I sit down next to her and squeeze my hands together. Before I know it, the whole story is just bursting out of me. "He's been in my head. He's told me answers to questions I wouldn't even know where to start. He's the one that told us to turn around. He had said you weren't chasing Eden, so we decided to come back home... and that's where you were."