Chasing Freedom (Book 2)

Chapter Nine: Her Dark, Non-Beating Heart (Cole)

Chapter Nine: Her Dark, Non-Beating Heart (COLE)

"No way!" I exclaim, moving closer to Skylar so I could put my hand over her chest.

She flinches ever so slightly under my touch. "I didn't believe it either, didn't even notice it until Axel pointed it out, but he was right, it really isn't beating."

I try to ignore her flinch even though it bothers me. I would never hurt her, if that's what she was worried about.

"How is that even possible?" I ask. "I've never heard of that."

She hesitates before answering, "I have no idea. I should be dead right now. But I'm not, which obviously has to mean something... right?"

"There's never been a person who came to The City of Lost Souls with a non-beating heart but working lungs. I don't think there's such thing, Skylar. You may be the only person in the whole world like this... What do you reckon it means?" I ask.

She shrugs, "I don't know, maybe that I have some figuring out to do? When I went to The Other Side, my mom told me that it wasn't my time to go, that my death was a mistake. So they gave me a second chance; to go home or back to my mom and family."

"And you don't know what you're going to do?"

Skylar shakes her head, taking a long sip of the vodka beside her. She winces as it runs down her throat and scrunches her nose in disgust, "or how I'm going to do it. But I don't think that matters because even if I knew how to get home, I don't know if I'd want to."

I stare at her blankly, "why wouldn't you want to go back?"

She opens her mouth and then closes it, struggling to find the right words. "I'm a different person now. There were things that happened to me that changed me. I'm not the same Skylar that I used to be seven months ago, but my friends would never understand."

I sit up straighter to look at her, "what are you talking about? What could you have possibly done that was so bad that your friends would never forgive you?"

Skylar sighs deeply, looking down at her fumbling hands in her lap and then looks back up, except this time, her eyes weren't the same.

The sight of them almost made me jump out of my own skin.

Her eyes were ice-cold, a deep shadowy blue, little waves of darkness swirling around in them. And there was something so familiar about the way they looked, the way they captured your attention and held your lingering gaze.

For only a fracture of a second, I couldn't figure out what it was.

And then it all started to make sense.

Those were my eyes.

I had looked at those same pair of blue eyes in the mirror every single day of my life, and even a small part of the one that I lived here in The City of Lost Souls.

Until randomly one day, they were gone.

I could feel the darkness somewhere deep inside me, but for some reason, couldn't reach out to it.

I had thought it was the worst thing in the world; not having the darkness on my side because I had grown up with it in every corner I turned. It was always there, and then it eventually became part of me. I had grown so accustom to it that I didn't think I could live without it.

But then suddenly one day, I didn't have any other choice.

I could never figure out why. Until right now.