Page 624 of Flirting with Darkness

He saw the blue lightning dance across his fingers, dance through his eyes, his aura that violent red even as the cooler colors rippled around his robed form.

Only then, Ghost understood.

His father didn’t care about him at all.

He wasn’t here for him.

He wasn’t here for his wife.

He had come for the mage clock.

And he fully intended to kill Ghost to get it.

Ghost felt the precise instant when that bolt of shadow and light left his father’s fingers.

Worse… far, far worse… he heard the scream of despair from the woman watching from the balcony above. He felt her fear for him, her grief, like a punch to the center of his chest.

He didn’t look back.

His hand went into the pocket of his coat.

He gripped the clock in his fingers, holding it tightly to his palm.

He held the sword, one handed. He held the watch in the other.

Then he ran for his father, determined to see this through to the end, one way or another.

He still gripped both things in his hands when the lightning struck him.

21

THE NEW PLACE

The bolt hit him in the center of his chest.

It threw Ghost back, infusing his limbs, his muscles, his bones, neck, his face. Blue light obscured his vision. Pain bound his limbs and throat and chest, too intense to even scream. He fell back, unable to breathe, to move.

He heard Natalie scream––

Then that cut off, too.

He was still falling, but now it was dark.

Pitch blackness swallowed him.

Still, he knew he wasn’t alone.

He could feel the other there, spinning through darkness with him, lost in the same nothingness of day and night, time and no-time, as Ghost himself.

He had a memory of this now.

A memory of a similar shock hitting into his spine, fusing the bones in a single line of mind-obliterating pain and fear. He remembered snatching the clock off a black pedestal underground, the clock’s blue face now small and round with a silver and gold casing, like the two metals had been melted together and infused strangely, giving the clock a watery pattern on the backs and sides. That unusual pattern contrasted sharply with the pale blue of the central face, the odd characters that weren’t really numbers…

Ghost knew who he was.

He had forgotten somehow, through all those years.

Something in him now remembered.

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