by Elena Lawson
I looked down and the two of them followed my gaze, finding what I was seeing.
“Digging for buried treasure?” Adrian asked, one brow raised, sarcasm dripping from his words.
“Harper?” Cal pressed.
I swallowed hard. “I just came out for some air, and to—to talk to my guardians. But then I stepped on this and—”
“And you decided it was a good idea to dig up what looks like it might be a coffin in the middle of the afternoon?”
I cocked my head at the little bit of wood showing through the dirt. “I don’t think that’s what it is. Listen.” I stood up, finding my legs horribly stiff, and stomped on the board. The echo from below it was unmistakable. There was a room of some sort underneath. A large space. A cellar, maybe? But why had it been left to rot?
“See?” I said and moved to stomp again. “Can’t you hear it?”
“Harper,” Cal warned, stepping in closer.
I jumped with both feet on top of the wood, and didn’t have time to register the looks on Cal and Adrian’s faces, or the sharp snap of wood breaking before I fell through the top of the earth and into a hole as black as black gets, screaming all the way down.
13
When the dust settled, I realized I hadn’t fallen all that far. Maybe six feet down, but man did it feel a lot further. Cal and Adrian had the trap door above torn clean off its hinges in seconds, and were already in the dank hole, helping me to stand.
“Does anything hurt?” Cal asked.
“Is anything broken?” Adrian chimed in, gingerly touching my arms and elbows, making his way across my back and down to my legs, checking for injury.
I was mid-cough, hacking up a film of dampened dust that’d collected in my throat when the wind was knocked from my lungs. “No,” I sputtered once I was able to breathe again. “Nothing’s broken.”
But where I’d landed on my hip there was sure to be a nasty bruise. I winced when I tried to put pressure on my leg to stand without them as my crutch. It was so dark around us, and the floor was uneven slick stone.
“You have to be the most unlucky person I’ve ever met,” Cal mused to himself.
Just clumsy, I wanted to say, but my chest was still tight, and I didn’t have the energy to joke.
It reeked of mold and earth and metal.
“Where are we?” I asked no one in particular, finally finding my footing.
“It’s a stairway,” Adrian replied, and in the light pouring down from the opening, I could see that he was right. My eyes only needed a moment to adjust. The jagged stone steps we were standing on went up to the opening I’d fallen through, and down, further into the earth. Into the dark.
I wondered how far they went.
“Come on,” I said, trying to pull out of Cal’s grasp. “Let’s see where this leads.”
“Oh, no,” Cal chided, his grip on my waist drawing me in closer. Holding me tighter. “I think that’s enough excitement for one morning.”
“Yeah, let’s get you cleaned up,” Adrian added. “And get some food in you.”
At the mention of food, my stomach gurgled loudly. It was one thing I’d never disagree on, but there was something I needed to see down there.
I didn’t know what it was, but Lara always said things like this happened for a reason. What are the chances that I’d pick that particular willow tree to sit under to talk to them? And then what are the chances that I’d step on an old trap door in the ground—and then fall through it.
I would go inside and get cleaned up and eat, but first I would see what was down there. “Well, I’m going down,” I said without even a smidgen of room for argument and called out the incantation for light. “Lucidus.”
And orb of bright bluish light manifested over my hand and I tossed it as though it were a ball down into the dark, seeing that the staircase went a lot further down than I thought it would.
“Harper, I don’t—” Adrian started.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, taking the first step down. “You guys aren’t afraid of the dark, are you?” Right when I said it a shining black spider dropped from some web above my head and nearly landed on my face. I shrieked and backed into the wall, scrambling to get away from it only to find that I’d landed in another cobweb and the sticky, silky spider’s butt string was attached to my arm. I flailed, trying to get it off, and only managing to move it from my arm to my hand.
It took a minute and when I’d gotten it off, and my speeding heart had stopped racing, and my eye was done twitching, I spun to find Cal and Adrian watching me.
The moment my eyes met theirs they burst out laughing. Cal was hunched over from the force of it, slapping his knee. Adrian seemed to be crying.
“You could’ve helped me!” I shouted, seething when neither bothered to stop laughing. “Assholes.”
I spun on my heel and started down the stairs again, careful this time not to disturb any more spiders’ webs, keeping my arms clasped tightly around me. I had to fight the urge to check and make sure none had crawled on me every few seconds. The phantom itch of their tiny legs on my skin a product of my own imagination.
“Wait up,” Adrian called, and their laughter began to quiet behind me, traded in for the sound of their footfalls rushing to follow me down the steps.
It grew colder the deeper we delved, and before long I could see my breath in the air, and my teeth had begun to chatter.
I had to step over a few rat carcasses, and around what looked like a thin black snake, but I didn’t look closely at it, afraid if I looked too closely at anything down here I would lose my nerve and run screaming back the way we’d come.
“You’re freezing,” Cal said, and took off his shirt, plopping it down over my head before I could protest. I was swimming in the thin bit of fabric, but some of his heat and his smell still clung to it, so I wrapped it around myself tighter.
A long corridor awaited us at the bottom of the stairs, and we followed it around a slight curve. The walls were plain stone. There wasn’t anything in the chamber at all. No buried treasure. No skeletons. Only dampness, a vile odor, and bugs.
Ugh.
“Do you think this could be…?” Adrian trailed off.
“No. Why would there be one here?” Cal responded quickly, though he didn’t seem confident in his answer.
When at last we came to the end of the tunnel-like hallway, we were met with iron bars. What?
“Lucidus,” I said again, adding another orb of light to the first so we could see more of what lay beyond the barred doorway.
I squinted into the dark but could only see more stone.
“Watch out,” Cal said, and I moved out of his way.
He took hold of the iron bars and snapped them from their old, rusted hinges. The clatter rang out in the enclosed space so loud I wanted to cover my ears.
“Sorry,” he said after tossing it against one of the walls.
I shook my head and stepped into the wide room, feeding more magic into my light spells so they would glow brighter.
The room was bare—except for the chains attached to the back wall. They were thick and anchored deeply into the stone. Manacles circled the ends. One for each hand and foot of a person, and another, wider, that I had to assume would go around someone’s neck.
What in the hell had we just found?
An aura of despair tainted the space. And it was almost as though I could hear the screams of whoever this chamber was used to hold. How old was it? Could it have been from before my father’s time? One of my deranged ancestors? Martin told me both Alistair’s parents had their bouts with less than sane behavior when I’d asked. Maybe dear old grandma and grandpa Hawkins used this cell for something.
All I knew was that I didn’t want to believe it had anything to do with my father.
“It’s not what you think.” Cal broke the thick silence, his voice grim, and expression sour when I turned to face him.
Shivering more than just from the cold now, I
asked, “Then what is it, Cal? What is this place?”
Adrian knelt down to touch two fingers to one of the manacles. He jumped back the instant his skin met the icy metal, cursing. “It’s coated in monkshood.”
The fuck? “Monkshood?” I asked, trying to make sure I heard him correctly. So, a shifter had been kept here? Somehow, that seemed even worse. I felt sick.
What must Cal and Adrian think now? That my family had captured and kept one of their kind down here as… as… oh hell, I couldn’t even think of why anyone would do such a thing. But did insane people need valid reasons for doing the insane things that they did?
“It’s a moon room,” Cal explained. “But why there’s one on your property is… questionable.”
Questionable was the nicest way he could’ve put it. But wait…
“What’s a moon room?”
Cal pointed to the chains laying against the stone. “When a born shifter is young, or when a changed shifter is newly changed, it’s near impossible to control brother wolf. For the first year or so of moon-induced shifts, we truly become animals. For as long as we’ve been on mortal soil, we’ve used places like this to keep others safe.”
“We chain ourselves up until we become one with the beast inside,” Adrian added to Cal’s explanation. “Until we can control the animal urges.”
Cal ground his teeth, lost in a distant memory. “It’s still done in much the same way as this today. Atlas has three moon rooms underground at the camp. The thick layer of earth between the shifter and the moon, and the monkshood dipped manacles temper the change enough that the wolf isn’t strong enough to escape. And the distance below ground helps with the… noise.”
The screaming, he meant. That part I knew about. How in the beginning the change is excruciating until your body adjusts to it.
The curses didn’t mess around. It was easy to pretend in the light of day that my familiars were just men that changed into beautiful beasts, but that wasn’t the extent of it.
They’d had to suffer like whoever my family had kept chained up down here. They’d experienced the pain of shifting over and over until their inner wolves could be tamed. And even now, they were forced to shift at the onset of a full moon—even if it wasn’t so bad anymore.
I mean, they could just shift and then shift back to their human forms, but just knowing you didn’t have control over it would drive men like them to fury.
And all because of what Cyprian—my ancestor—had done.
The guilt made me want to vomit. “There’s something I should tell you both,” I started. I’d been wanting to get this off my chest for ages, and after last night, I felt more secure in them being able to understand. That they wouldn’t blame me for the sins of my great, great, great, great grandfather. They wouldn’t, right?
I took along breath in, readying myself to explain, unable to look either of them in the eye.
“Miss Harper!” called a voice from down the tunnel. “Miss Harper! Master Cal? Master Adrian? Are you down there?”
Martin. I wondered if he would come looking.
“We can talk about it later, whatever it is,” Adrian said. “Let’s get out of here.” He reached out to take my hand and I let him grab it and help hold me steady as we fumbled all the way back up and out into the searing daylight with Cal brooding behind us with slow, measured steps.
The three of us half groaned and half sighed as the sun alternatingly scorched our eyeballs and warmed our chilled skin.
“Oh, good. You’re not hurt. I thought perhaps you’d fallen through.” Martin had his hands clasped at his front, and he looked remarkably pale at the sight of us—or maybe it was the opening we’d just walked out of that had him uneasy.
That was when I realized, if anyone still alive today that knew what—or who—that moon room was meant for, it would be Martin.
“Martin,” I said, attempting to brush some of the dirt from my knees and hands, but I was probably just making it worse. “Do you know what that room is? Who it was used for?”
“I…” he began, wringing his hands, but didn’t finish. “I’m sorry, Miss Harper, but you shouldn’t have ever found it. It’s not my story to tell. I’m sorry.”
Without another word of explanation, Martin turned away and with a bowed head made his way back to the Abbey.
Adrian pursed his lips. “Could things get any weirder?”
It’d been proven to me time and time again since I was arrested all those weeks ago in New Orleans. Yes.
Things could always get weirder.
“Martin, please. I can tell you know something.”
The old Irishman sighed heavily, clearing the dishes from the table. He’d refused to join us for breakfast, though none of us ate much of anything after what we’d found anyway. And he still refused to tell me anything about the moon room we’d found beneath my ancestral home.
Even after sending Cal and Adrian away to bathe after I’d finished bathing myself, he still wouldn’t talk.
I took the plates from his shaking hands and set them back down on the table. “Don’t worry about the dishes right now. They can wait,” I said. “Let me and the guys handle the cleaning today.”
“I can’t tell you,” he grumbled, and I could tell he was upset I wasn’t allowing him to do his work.
I didn’t want to upset him—that wasn’t my intention at all, so with a roll of my eyes I hope he didn’t notice, I handed him back the stack of barely dirtied plates. “Why can’t you tell me?”
He went to take the dishes to the kitchen, and I followed on his heels. “Because I made a promise, Miss Harper. Haven’t you ever made a promise?”
“Of course, I have.”
“Then you understand.”
“But was this promise you made to someone in my family? If it was, then don’t you think it’s safe to tell me? Wouldn’t they want me to know? Don’t you think they would tell me themselves if they could?”
It was no use; I saw the steely resolve in his eyes. He’d made up his mind, and I didn’t have to know him that well to know he wouldn’t change it.
Martin set the plates down in the large wash basin and brought his wrinkled hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose with two calloused fingers.
My heart fell. “I’m sorry,” I said after a second spent without his response. “I don’t want to upset you, and… I—I respect you for wanting to keep your promise.” I gritted my teeth. I felt like I needed to know what went on in that cellar, but if it’d happen a hundred and fifty or more years ago, did it really matter? I could let this go, right? “I won’t ask about it again. But I hope someday you’ll tell me.”
He looked up at me with a huff. “Thank you,” he said. “And perhaps someday I won’t have to. Perhaps you’ll learn the truth of it all on your own. It wouldn’t be hard to figure out.”
What did that mean?
With raised brows, I turned to leave the old butler to his devices. “We’ll be leaving in the morning,” I said before I crossed the threshold of the kitchen. “Probably early, so don’t worry about breakfast tomorrow, okay? And I’m a terrible cook, but I’m sure I can come up with something for dinner for the three of us. Why don’t you take the rest of the afternoon off?”
I could tell the whole ordeal had shaken him, and the pallor of his skin was still a worrying shade of gray. It was the best I could do as a peace offering.
He nodded, but didn’t answer, and began his cleaning of the dishes and the kitchen with several sigils and whispered incantations. The dishes washed themselves, and in the blink of an eye, the floor was free of any trace that there had been someone cooking. The countertops wiped clean, and the ovens extinguished.
Martin was a strange sort of person, and a powerful witch. But he was also an honorable man. Loyal to a fault. So, even though I didn’t get what I was after, I couldn’t be upset with him. Not even a little.
14
That night went by in a blur. I couldn’t stop thinking about the moon roo
m and what it meant. After some prodding, Cal and Adrian helped me snoop through the house and my father’s study some more to see if there were any more hidden cellars or rooms we didn’t know about. I wanted to look in the cave-like study again, but that room was for my eyes only.
It took a blood relative to open it, after all.
And we didn’t find anything else. We ended up falling asleep super early, the same way we had the night before, in each other’s arms.
My new favorite way to sleep.
The thought of going back to sleeping alone in my dorm room on the lumpy old bed didn’t sound even remotely appealing. In fact, it was downright cringe-worthy. But I still had a few years to go at the academy and I doubted Granger would let my familiars start snuggling with me in my room, or me to sleep out in the toolshed with them.
So very, very sad.
“Are you guys ready?” I called up the stairs, waiting for them at the front door. I was a little disappointed Bianca didn’t show, but I figured she’d be waiting for me back at the academy by now. We had ACE’s to study for and two unit quiz’s this week. Not to mention Granger’s new Magical Defense class would be starting tomorrow, too, and I assumed since it hadn’t been worked into the existing schedule at the start of the year, that it would be added on to the day. Making it even longer than it was already. Double sigh.
Adrian shoved Cal on their way down the stairs and Cal shoved him back with a laugh, sending Adrian down the last six steps and across the foyer to land in a crouch at my feet. I stumbled back, shaking my head, wondering where the change in mood had come from.
But it occurred to me that sleeping in the same bed would have a similar effect on them as it did me—it was hard not to wake up well rested and with a beaming smile afterwards.
I chuckled. “Shall we?”
“After you,” Cal said with a slight bow and opened the heavy wooden door to allow me to step through. “Wait!” we heard Martin calling from somewhere in the back of the house. A house with so many ways in or out, it would be hard to ever know if he was or wasn’t here. Though I wasn’t the least bit surprised he’d shown up despite my telling him he wasn’t needed.