Iridescent (Ember 2) Read Free

wouldn’t allow her to accept what her head and heart already believed.
    The woman sat again, this time placing her hands down first and then lightly sitting until she fully positioned herself on the thick plush down of Candra’s comforter.
    “It’s better if Sebastian doesn’t see me yet.”
    “Why?”
    She shrugged dramatically. “What can I say? I know what I know.”
    It was all too bizarre for Candra. The last week had been confusing in the worst possible ways. Sebastian loved her, and she loved him; it felt so natural to her. The beginning of their relationship had turned out to be bittersweet when she discovered her courtship with Draven had been a ruse. He had set them up to finally make peace among the Watchers. To make matters worse, apparently an even more deadly menace loomed. Candra had also spent the past week in mourning. She’d attended her lectures in a daze and had accepted the condolences of her classmates with little acknowledgement of them. Now this.
    “I’m really not sure I can take any more,” she said wearily. She released her long hair from the tight clip holding it in place and fell back on to her bed beside the young woman…Ivy. Candra shut her eyes and tried to force her brain to accept the name and attach it to this stranger’s face in her subconscious. Her subconscious didn’t want to cooperate, and the name slipped away, leaving the woman’s face inside her head battling with Ivy’s for recognition. Like a new penny spinning on its edge, she saw Ivy, then the woman…then Ivy…faster and faster until they appeared to become one. Except they weren’t one. As soon as the penny stopped, it would fall flat, leaving only one of them on top.
    Candra sat up again and stared at her, pressing her fingers into Ivy’s cheeks. She squeezed them in the way she’d molded Play-Doh as a child, as if she could fix Ivy back the way she used to be.
    “Watcha doing?” Ivy asked, drawing out the words, her voice muffled by her distorted mouth and her eyebrows arching.
    “This is going to take a lot of getting accustomed to.” Candra studied her face, pulling the flesh this way and that, familiarizing herself.
    “Are we done now?”
    Candra brought her hand up to her own temples, rubbing circles to relieve the building tension headache. It was hardly past eight, and she was already exhausted. “How can you be so blasé about this?”
    The woman lifted her hand behind her shoulder and scooped her long, silken hair over to the front, where she began working it into a braid. “Believe me when I say that landing on your floor in this body was not the weirdest thing that happened to me this week.” She shrugged, looking up at Candra from under long black lashes. “Besides, you know me. I was constantly changing my appearance.”
    “Your hair, make-up, clothes…” Candra argued incredulously. “You never became someone else.”
    Ivy stopped and looked up from where she’d been gazing at the radiance her dark hair picked up from the muted light. “But I’m not someone else. I’m the same as always…with a few minor adjustments.”
    Candra shook her head, still struggling to reconcile this woman and Ivy into one being.
    Ivy smiled and rolled her eyes before she continued. “I know who I am. My identity isn’t tied up in my appearance. The outside—” she waved one hand around in front of her, holding on to the braid with the other “—is just decoration.”
    “You’re making me feel very shallow,” Candra joked lightly. “I would be seriously freaking out.”
    “You did seriously freak out,” Ivy corrected her.
    A wave of mixed emotions overcame Candra. Her life had become a cyclone of changes, a tempest of sensations she could barely register before one moved on to the next. They slowly managed to grind her down, piece by piece.
    “What was it like?” she whispered in a hushed voice, unconvinced she really wanted the answer.
    “Dying?”
    Candra nodded.
    “Baffling.”