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Olivia wasn’t coming. Brady is wrong, I thought, trying to convince the both of us. Do you agree?”
     
    “ I know there’s nothing that will keep us from finding them again,” he answered.
     
    “ Brady said something else”, I thought, feeling Landen suppressing his anxieties.
     
    He sighed and nodded. “ Brady thinks that one of our past lives was in Analess. He has a theory that I was Oba and you were Jayda,” he thought.
     
    I looked forward and took in his words. It wouldn’t be such a farfetched idea; apparently, we’d lived several lives oblivious to us. “ Well, it seems we defeated this darkness before,” I thought.
     
    “ Yes, but only after the darkness had consumed me and I learned that I’d loved another woman and had children with her, leaving half of the ancestors believing that they could never find someone. I just don’t want to settle for anything in this life. I want to defeat this curse, and I don’t want anyone who comes after us to pay for the choices we make. It overwhelms me when I think of it in that light,” Landen thought, wrapping his arm around me tighter.
     
    “ You’re being too hard on yourself. You don’t even know if that’s true - and if it is, we can’t change what’s already happened.”
     
    “ That’s what Marc said. I just have to work through it,” Landen thought.
     
    “ Well, don’t waste your energy trying to hide your emotions from me; I know them as well as my own,” I thought, looking up at him.
     
    He smiled down at me. “ I’d imagine that you do,” he thought, smiling and bringing his perfect dimples to life.
     
    “ What did Preston whisper to you when he hugged you goodbye?” I asked.
     
    Landen tilted his head, and I felt curiosity grow in him.” He said everyone deserves to be healed – why would he say that? I mean, who would I not heal?” he thought, looking down at me.
     
    I raised my eyebrows as the memory of one person came to mind.
     
    An understanding came across Landen’s face.” He was telling me to heal Drake,” Landen thought as his jaw tightened.
     
    “ So we will see him,” I thought, feeling plagued.
     
    Landen pulled me closer to him. “I’m not concerned if we do, and I would heal him - even if I was the cause,” Landen thought, a little offended by Preston’s words.
     
    I held him tight.” Let it go; you have no way of knowing why he said that. He’s just a little boy,” I thought.
     
    “ In this life,” Landen thought, smiling at the memory of Preston and Libby.
     
    The gray, ashy passages of Esterious came into view.
     
    “Landen,” Marc said. “There has to be a passage inside the palace. I can’t imagine Drake using the ones that we use.”
     
    Landen stopped and stared at the passages along the wall. “I think when I fought with Drake that first time, I threw him in this one,” he said in a confident tone.
     
    “Let me go first,” Marc said, stepping in front of Landen. Dane came to my side. Marc stepped through, then we followed him.
     
    The passage did lead inside the palace, to a stone room. An enormous bed draped in black silk centered one wall, and the ceiling opened above us; the night sky was clear. Around the bed on the floor stood tall ivory candles, and paintings reflecting my image hung on every wall. At the foot of the bed was a podium, and you could see the outline of a book in the dust.
     
    “This must be where they invoked the nightmares,” Marc said.
     
    I could feel the anger and tension building in the room, but my emotion - one of sorrow - was the strongest one among us. I imagined Drake as a little boy, being asked to lie in this bed with lit candles all around him and Alamos speaking words over him; seeing the demons, hearing them. Though it was obvious that Drake had grown used to his monkey friends, I couldn’t imagine that was always the case.
     
    Landen looked at me curiously. I answered his emotion and thought, “ When they started, he would