Celestial Heartbeat (Book One) COMPLETE

Chapter Twenty Three - Pain

~Evie~

I was sure that Ren was from Mars.

An alien life form trying to monitor and replicate human behavior effectively, but failing to do just that.

Deciding out of the blue to up and leave was not normal. Ringing up to see if my missing-for-ten-years father was around was definitely not normal. Doing both in the space of a couple hours was a mind-blowing amount of not normal.

If Ren couldn't see that then I was probably better off with him being where ever he had disappeared to.

Normality was the name of the game. No more weird powers, no more weird fights with Vi and no more people who my family had doomed. Especially the one that I had the tendency to kiss from time to time.

Instead, it was time to focus on school grades and how my hair looked in the morning. Stupid little things like that. Stupid things that felt almost impossible to care about in the slightest. Despite my best attempts to stare myself away from it, I still could not shake the guilt of knowing that Ren would be going full wolf sometime soon. Now that he'd decided to go off wherever it was that he went, chances were he was going to be alone. That didn't seem right.

Alex and Chris were still in school, still acting normal. Whatever Rens plan was it was one that left him on his own.

After a long internal debate with myself I decided to go to nightingale after school. I was a little scared to go back there, but I thought that Ren was more than likely to attempt to drink his sorrows away and nightingale seemed like the place he'd go.

I didn't see the flaw in my plan until I actually arrived.

Nightingale was gone.

Vanished. Or rather, invisible. Where it should have been was a rough and empty dirt lot, right in the middle of it was a stone depiction of what looked to be a real nightingale. How fitting.

I knew there was no way that nightingale had disappeared over night. The truth of the matter was that it was a bar for magic folk, including those like Ren whose magic was a curse rather than a gift.  And as much as it pained me to not be able to see it at all, it only made sense that now, after my magic was gone, Nightingale would cease to exist in my reality, too.

I was fairly certain that Ren was inside. The tell-tale sign being the motorbike identical to his own parked a few meters back. It was useless though. If it was Ren’s bike as I believed all it meant was that he was in the invisible bar while I was stuck outside of it, unable to even see it.

Frustrated with how close I was, I sent him a quick text instead.

‘Hey. I'm outside nightingale. Can we talk?’

Out of spite I also corrected his name in my contacts to 'Ren Chevalier' instead of his ridiculous self-given title. It may have made me smile in the past, but right now seeing the name come up on my phone just pained me.

It took ten minutes of me standing and shivering in the cold, uncertain and tensed before Ren finally replied.

‘I'm not stopping you from coming in.’

Idiot. I would've already been in there if I didn't have the magic problem going on.

‘You might not be. But magic kind of is.’ I sent back.

I almost burst a blood vessel in my brain when all he sent back was ‘oh’.