Page 132 of Fractured

Sunlight over me—warm and bright.

“Rune,” I thought I whispered. “Vair…”

My hands pressed against the grass, and by some miracle my arms had enough strength to hold me, to push me up until I was sitting.

I was sitting on the ground with a bright blue sky over me, and a scorching hot sun falling in my eyes. Another scream sounded in the distance, and there were footsteps and there were shouts, and every inch of my body was shaking, and…

“Nilah?!”

My heart fell. My lungs emptied. My shaking hand rose to my face to shield my eyes from the sun, and I blinked and blinked a million times before the shapes around me gained color and began to make sense.

Fiona. My dad. Betty.

I was sitting in the front yard of the same house I grew up in, in that same neighborhood, surrounded by trees and houses and a dozen people watching from a distance.

My family and my best friend were watching me, too, from the driveway, their eyes wide,shocked,unable to move yet.

“No.”

I shook my head.

I stood up—somehow, I actually stood all the way up and I looked around and I saw the neighborhood, all of it exactly as I’d left it.

No Midnight Palace. No dead king. No Rune and no Vair.

No shadows.

No, no, no…

Magic spiked inside me, and this time it gathered in my skull, attacked my own thoughts, my own memories. A scream ripped out of me and my arms wrapped around my head because it was going to explode any second now. My skull was going to break to pieces.

Ground underneath my knees. Hands on my arms, on my face. Voices I once knew so well, that I’d prayed to hear again for so, so long, telling me that I was okay.

But I wasn’t because Rune was in Verenthia, together with Vair and Raja, and the truth we fought so hard to uncover.

And I was back home.