“With Alex?” I gave him a quizzical look. “But he’s not here…and we don’t know when he’ll be back.”
“Here’s the thing, Gemma.” Laylen leaned in toward me, his face holding such seriousness. “I think you’re going to have to make a choice here on whether or not you think we should go get him, because for one thing, if you saw him in The Underworld with you, you’re probably going to need him. Also, with as pissed off as Nicholas probably is right now, Alex may be in some serious trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?” I asked. “Alex never really explained what he was going to be doing there…Do you know, though?”
Laylen’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed hard. “I think Alex didn’t tell you because he thought it’d be better if you didn’t know.”
“It’s bad, though, right?” I shook my head. “Well, obviously it has to be bad, otherwise someone would have already told me what he was doing…Are they like hurting him or something?”
Laylen didn’t answer, but his silence said it all.
Knowing that Alex was getting hurt…Well, it was making me hurt. Literally. I could actually feel this ache in every part of my body. I think it was at this moment that I realized that Alex’s and my electric connection might be even deeper than I’d originally thought.
I remembered the vision where I saw him and me as children, sitting on the floor of the little hide out, with our hands pressed together whispering secret words in Latin. Such a strange moment, considering how we were now. What had changed? Me losing my soul? Or was it something else—something more?
As I sat there next to Laylen, thinking about all of this, I suddenly became extremely aware that whether I wanted to save Alex or not, I had to. It really wasn’t my decision to make. It was my connection with him that was going to make the decision, and the connection was telling me I had to go save him. It was a weird feeling.
“So how do we do it?” I took a shaky breath. “How do we get Alex out of the City of Crystal?”
“So then you want to do it?” Laylen asked. “You want to go get him?”
I nodded. “I think I have to. I mean, if I saw him in The Underworld with me, it probably means he has to be with me when I go there. Although I don’t have the slightest clue how we’re going to get there, since Nicholas took the Ira with him.”
“Okay…Well, do you have any ideas about on how to get us into the City of Crystal?” Laylen rubbed the back of his neck tensely. “Because it might take some time to find a Foreseer who will lend us their little ruby crystal ball that they use to travel to and from the city. Besides, we kind of need to do this on our own so no one knows we’re there.”
“I completely agree.” I told him. “And I think I know a way.”
Chapter 18
Those few days I’d spent with Nicholas ended up not being a total waste of my time. He’d covered a lot about Foreseers and the way that the use the crystals energy to go in and out of visions. He also explained to me that the crystals energy wasn’t just for going into visions. It was also used every time Nicholas entered the City of Crystal. And apparently, all of the individual crystal balls ran off of the energy belonging to a massive crystal ball that stood in the center of the city. All the crystals balls were connected. Because of this, I had an idea that if I really tried, I just might be able to get us into the City of Crystal without a ruby-filled ball, thanks to my unique gift of being able to use the crystals energy without actually having to have a crystal ball present.
But it was going to be tricky. I not only had to get us into the city, but I also had to get us into the city in present time, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to communicate with anyone, or touch anything. This was the reason why Foreseers used the ruby-filled crystal ball to get in and out of the city, because it took them there in the present time.
Although I was a bit skeptical that I could actually pull it off, it was all I had at the moment. So I started practicing day and night. At first, I couldn’t even figure out how to jumpstart whatever was sending me into visions. But then I caught on that it was connected to my emotions. Take for instances, when I was bitten by Vladislav. There had been a ton of emotion running through me then, which was why I think I ended up slipping into a vision. And when I’d drifted away while sitting on the couch with Laylen, I had been retrieving some of my lost memories, which, like Alex had pointed out once, were very deeply connected to my emotions.
So, after a lot of practice, I figured out that nine out of ten times experiencing an intense emotion equaled vision access. Of course, this put a lot of pressure on my newfound ability to experience emotion. And experiencing one on demand didn’t always work out the way that I wanted.
It was with Laylen’s help that I finally started to get the hang of things.
It was my fifth practice day, and Laylen and I were in the room he was staying in. I was sitting on the bed with my legs crossed, facing him as he sat in a chair he’d dragged over beside the bed.
“So what do you want to feel today?” he asked me. “Happy, sad, scared, worried.”
“Not worried,” I said quickly. “That one is not fun at all, and when we used that feeling last time, I ended up getting stuck in the vision for awhile, like the feeling wasn’t strong enough to last or something.”
“True,” Laylen agreed. “Besides, the scared one, I think, was my favorite.”
I shook my head. “No it wasn’t—you almost gave me a heart attack."
He smiled, this beautiful, pleased smile. “Yeah, but it was fun.”