Moonbeam

Chapter 6

ELENA

Life started to return. I felt many things at once: the pain in my side where…my eyes popped open. Blake was the first one I saw, worry etched on his face.

“Shh,” he said. My bed shifted as he climbed up beside me. “Easy.” He lay his head near mine, cupping the back of my head softly. I could count his black eyelashes. I could stay here forever. Except for the pain.

Alarm crept in. “What happened? Where am I?” I trailed off. Taking in my surroundings, I realized I knew this place. It was our room. I relaxed marginally.

Blake just hugged me tighter. I thought you were dead! I felt so helpless.

“I’m okay,” I said aloud, my voice hoarse. I breathed in his scent. His closeness, his unique scent calmed me down. I was safe, I was alive, and he was here. It was all that mattered.

His thoughts invaded. A flash of the events I’d missed, all his worries, my family’s worries, and frightening images of blood and war kept me occupied for a few minutes. They were fast, but the emotion and the clarity made them so real. He’d been completely beyond himself.

Two days?

How scared he’d been when I’d blacked out, the connection broken again. How they’d waited for the scientists. My heart beating softer. The sensation of his unending terror was suffocating.

Where is Silho?

He showed me that Isabel had taken her and she was at the manor, safe and sound.

Then the scientists came. Ralph. The revelation. The antidote. I gasped.

Louie’s berries?

He nodded.

I met Kingston through him, a history scholar, which didn’t make sense at all. They spoke about the peculiar arrow. He said it was two hundred years old and that it belonged…to my mother. My mother had shot me…

We’d jumped back in time.

“What?” It came out louder than I wanted it to. Shock rippled through my entire being. We’d jumped back in time. My mother…

I didn’t care that my mother had shot me. She’d thought…whatever she’d thought…It was war. We’d jumped back two hundred years.

“What is going on in that mind of yours?” Blake asked. He couldn’t connect the pictures of my jumbled thoughts.

Save my mother? Goran! We can warn them.

Blake squinted and then he got what I was thinking.

He jumped up. “No!”

For the first time I realized we weren’t alone. Across the room, Constance and my father jumped at his seemingly sudden reaction.

“What is going on?” my father asked.

Blake got up from the bed and started to pace.

I noticed Annie sitting on a chair in the corner. She looked relieved. All of them did. But more worry lines appeared.

“Elena, I’m not going to do that.” Blake’s voice broke my gaze from Annie.

Just like that, he’d said no. “Blake, if what you showed me is the truth…” I thought back to that time underneath the tree when I couldn’t remember anything. When I’d thought he was saying goodbye. He had jumped back. It was his ability, not the Dent.

That time he’d been gone, just vanished. What if it hadn’t been caused by breaking his oath? What if it was linked to this? This might be the beginning of the bright light, all those bright lights he and George had been speaking about for years.

My eyes found Blake. He squinted at me.

He shook his head. You don’t know that.

I spoke aloud. “I do, Blake. It explains everything.”

My father cleared his throat. “What is going on?” Our silent conversations frustrated all of them

Blake’s eyes flashed. Was it condescension or embarrassment? “Elena thinks I own a new ability.”

“Own?” Constance asked, looking from Blake to me still sitting in my bed. “But only Dragonians have abilities, not their dragons.”

“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” I said out loud. Silently I added, With the dent. You know it is. You were there, Blake. It explains why you didn’t remember me the first time you met me. Because you weren’t there. But you were there the next time.

Blake closed his eyes, rested his hands on his head. The way he did when he felt frustrated. I had to get through to him.

We can go back twenty-seven years and warn my parents. We can tell them that Goran is the one who is going to betray them.

“Elena, I’m not going to do it!” he said, pulling me out of my blithe thoughts. The feeling of meeting my mother for real, and being able to grow up, have a different life, disappeared instantly with his words.

Why?

I’m not going to mess with the past. You never know what it is you are going to change.

I stared at him in disbelief. He hadn’t even given this a second thought. It was no from the beginning.

“What is going on? You are scaring us,” my father said in a gentle tone.

Blake knew how badly I wanted my mother, how badly I wanted to have grown up this side, to not have the past I had. He knew.

We’d always tried not to talk about what-ifs, because they didn’t exist. But here in front of us was a real what-if. We truly did have the ability to change things.

And he didn’t want to fix what had happened.

“It’s final, Elena!” he roared. He stomped out of the room.

“What the hell is going on?” Annie sounded freaked out.

I sighed as tears welled up in my eyes.

“Elena.” My father spoke softly and stroked my back with his one hand.

I shook my head. “He doesn’t want to go back and warn you about Goran. He doesn’t want us to change that past.”

My father listened with concern etched across his features as I told him everything.

“Blake does have a point, sweetheart. You can’t tamper with the past.”

“Dad, if we could warn you that this was going to happen, that Goran was behind all of this…Wouldn’t you try to save Mom?”

“Save Mom? What about Constance and Annie, Elena?” My father sounded disappointed.

I realized how ungrateful I must sound.

“Don’t, Albert. I’m with Elena. It means that the Creepers would’ve never come, and Katie would still be alive, caring for her daughter the way she always wanted. Lee would still be here. Annie wouldn’t…” She couldn’t finish. “All your men, nobody would have experienced the darkness that came with Goran.”

I just stared at both of them. I felt terrible, wanting my mother back, changing this life that was already good and sweet.

“I appreciate it, but Blake made up his mind,” I said.

She looked at me with eyes filled with compassion. She came over to my bed and sat down next to me, rubbing my shoulder.

My father spoke. “Some things are meant to stay in the past, Elena.” He sat down in the spot Blake had occupied a few minutes earlier, near Constance. The thought of being able to correct his mistakes was a hard pill to swallow. Something sweet yet unknown. Fear, danger, all of it was reflected on my father’s face. He almost never carried that look anymore.

“Then why did he get this ability, Dad? Why? Don’t you want to be able to do things differently? Save Mom?”

“Don’t ask me that, Elena!” He got up and paced.

Constance, Annie, and I just stared at him. Then Constance smiled. “I would love to go back and save Lee if I had the ability.”

He stopped. He leveled a stare at her as if what she said was blasphemy. “And give up your place as my queen?”

She went over to my father and laid her hands on his cheek. “My dearest Albert. You seem to be forgetting something. If Elena and Blake go back, we wouldn’t even know we were married. If it means all the people in Paegeia can be alive and well, without living in constant fear of what happened so many years ago, then yes. I would give up everything.”