“Are you this hands-on during all of your lectures, professor?” Her tone is playful, but I note the breathy tremble just beneath.

“Never,” I say truthfully. “You’re the first to inspire me.”

An electric current charges the air between us, loaded with too much chemical attraction to ignore.

I hold the elastic band up. “Before I saw you, your hair could have been pulled back or loose. I’m not aware of the style until I observe you, then one of the possibilities becomes true, and the other collapses. This is an oversimplification of the Copenhagen interpretation. Now”—I run my fingers through her hair, relishing in the way she shivers at my touch—“with the many worlds theory, no collapse occurs. Your hair is in many styles all at once. It’s not pulled back or loose; it’s both at the same time.”

She tips her head back farther. “But as the observer, you’re now entangled with my hair, professor.”

Goddamn, the way she says professor does something dangerous to me. The deviant urge to wrap her hair around my fist and entangle myself so deeply inside her burns through me with vicious need.

“Exactly, and this is where our shaman finds himself,” I say. “If we accept that many worlds exist, where nearly every choice, every possibility exists simultaneously, then we can pose a question of what would happen to the shaman’s mind, a single consciousness, if he obtained entry to these worlds.”

Halen laughs. “See, my head hurts just trying to fathom it.”

“We’re not meant to,” I assure her. “As the shaman becomes entangled with the many worlds, this induces a state of mystical ecstasy. To those who view him from the outside, it looks like madness. But let’s consider it’s the what if paradox. All worlds have a possible highest experience, and he’s attempting to experience them all at once, in search of the divine. ”

Halen considers this a moment. “But if you spend a lifetime in search of the highest experience, then you never get to truly live the one experience. Maybe I’m simply too logical, but to me, that’s madness.”

As she says this, I swear, she’s stolen the breath right from my lungs. “I find you remarkable, Miss St. James.”

She glances down at her ring before she meets my eyes again. “It’s Dr. St. James.”

I run my tongue across the ridge of my teeth. “Noted.”

She drags in an unsteady breath. “Thank you for that stimulating lecture,” she says, defusing the gathering tension. “Oh, and also for the use of your jacket. Here⁠—”

“Wait—” She freezes as I reach out and capture a small moth that’s entangled its wings in her hair. Her breath stills, and I’m desperate to taste her lips, to hear her release that breath in a throaty moan.

My mouth hovers close to hers, a dare, a promise.

A goddamn inevitability.

She watches as I release the insect to the night, and it flutters toward the illuminated lamppost above us. When I return my focus to her, I accept the jacket and slip my arms into the sleeves, savoring her scent.

The parking lot is silent, the whole world has ceased to exist in her presence. Absently, she spins her ring, and a devious part of me wants to slip it off her finger, to primally claim her right this instant.

From my periphery, I catch sight of Wellington stumbling away from his parked car. He’s obviously inebriated, and I think I’ve finally had enough of our petty squabbles and decide to report him. Halen could’ve been driving on the same street as him, and that thought comes with a snap of quick rage.

She looks back at her parents as they reach their car, then says, “I should go, too.” She takes a step away from me, then another. As I watch her retreating farther from me, a hollowness carves out my chest.

“Little Halen,” I call out, and she turns around.

Making my boldest move yet, I stalk toward her and take hold of her hand. “I don’t want there to be a what if for us.”

She looks down at our entwined fingers, the inked sigils I’ve tattooed into my skin. I don’t want to let her go.

“I have to see you again,” I tell her.

She slips her hand free of mine. “Then I guess you’re going to have to find me, professor.”

I close the distance, so close I sense her stop breathing. “Across time and space, heaven and hell, this life and the next in any world”—I reach out and tuck the tempting streak of white behind her ear—“I will find you, Halen St. James.”

OceanofPDF.com

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Saying thank you for reading my work just doesn’t feel like enough. Lovely reader, this was a labor of love and madness, and there were many days where I feared this would be the book that broke me.

So firstly, thank you for being here, for reading my words, for giving me a reason to breathe. Every author has a love-hate relationship with writing, and while there were days where I feared I might quit, the desire to tell Halen and Kallum’s story, to give readers an escape, kept me writing.

Secondly, I wanted to reiterate that this is a work of fiction. The philosophies throughout this series are not scholarly references. As Kallum said in book two, he cherrypicked the details, which I have very much done here in order to create a backdrop for their story. Kallum’s opinions of philosophers and teachings are not my own (his ego has no rival), and he’s cunning enough to know how to bend and twist these philosophies to further his personal agenda (which he did to the extreme).

If you’re interested in learning more (and from direct resources) about occultism, chaos magick, Dionysian Mysteries, Nietzsche, Carl Jung, Shadow Self, Cleopatra the Alchemist, or any other piece of history, theology, and mythology within, I urge you to delve into your own research, and enjoy the journey down the beautiful, magical rabbit hole.

Thirdly, there were themes and symbolism throughout this series that I wanted to touch on more closely.

Kallum’s deeper reason for why he referred to Halen as his moon goddess. Alchemy has been layered through this series, and to me, personally, alchemy is everything and anything, but here is a direct link to where you can find this quote from below, which gives deeper insight to the sun and moon references: https://www.rcpe.ac.uk/heritage/alchemy-college-collections

“The Sun and Moon are major symbols in alchemy. They represent the two most precious metals, gold (Sun) and silver (Moon). They also represent sulphur and mercury and are often depicted as a couple bound together in marriage or as the Mother and Father of the Philosophers' Stone.”

Halen often used fire to describe Kallum’s eyes and his nature, referring to his volatile temperament as the sun or a star going supernova. In contrast, Halen was Kallum’s albedo, the silver moon condition in alchemy for reaching the purest, divine state.

And then we have the marsh trees of Hollow’s Row. As the story begins with Halen seeing the trees, I wanted to end with Kallum’s thoughts on them so we come full circle.

When Halen first introduces us to the marshland of Hollow’s Row, she says, “I don’t like the trees.” This is symbolic foreshadowing of her character that we can’t possibly know at this early point, but deepens her character. While Halen is an intellectual in her own right, she doesn’t have an eidetic memory, and can’t call on her knowledge in the way Kallum so readily does, which is why she keeps a journal of her research. When she first glimpses the trees, somewhere in the dark waters of her unconscious she makes a chilling connection to them.

In Dante’s Inferno, the seventh circle of hell, the circle of violence, there exists one of three levels that is reserved for those who attempt and complete suicide. The souls are transformed into ghastly, gnarled trees where the harpies devour the leaves, causing them pain.