by Ivy Sinclair
Perhaps that was why she was digging into this the way that she was. The idea of mating with someone and claiming them through a bite that was only visible to other shifters had a primal connotation that still had a magical feeling to it. The whole thing did seem slightly romantic.
Maggie couldn’t believe that she was starting to actually come around to the idea and liked it. She wasn’t ready to jump into it yet, but the more that she looked at Tony and studied his features and learned more about him, the more that she was charmed by him. She was starting to think that there would be far worse things in the world than being mated to Tony Atwood.
Where in the world were those thoughts coming from? Maggie didn’t know, which was yet another reason why she was eager to get to the school and do her research. She needed something to do to feel more in control of her life again.
Back at the school, Tony helped her out of the car, and then they were escorted by Simon yet again to the art museum. As they walked, Simon pointed out several of the school’s newest art acquisitions hanging on the walls. Then they came to a long hall that was roped off by a velvet red rope.
“This is the new wing,” Simon said.
Maggie read the fine print of the program a little bit more closely. It turned out that the Urban Dwellers had dedicated several pieces of fine art to St. Ignacious for the school’s art collection. It seemed that St. Ignacious apparently had one of the better art collections on the entire eastern seaboard. So Tony was also there in an official capacity that day; something he had failed to mention to her when he first invited her to homecoming.
“Is there anything else I can get for you before the ceremony starts?” Simon asked.
It was her chance. “Directions to the ladies’ room?” Maggie asked. She knew that she had seen the headmaster’s office on their way to the art gallery.
She saw Tony’s raised eyebrow, but there was no way that he would follow her to the bathroom. At least, she hoped he wouldn’t follow her to the bathroom. She knew that everybody was going to be converging on the art gallery for Tony’s dedication in a few minutes. Since it was a Saturday, she figured there wouldn’t be any staff in the office. She would just have a quick look around. She moved through the hallways quickly, following the directions that Simon had given to her. She tried to take note of the various turns as she went along so she could find her way back. She realized she didn’t have a lot of time before Tony would come looking for her, but she figured that the people starting to come into the art gallery would slow him down a little bit.
She arrived at the door to the office. She turned the knob. It was locked. She looked around. And then she pulled a credit card out of her purse and jimmied the lock. “Thanks for that lesson.” There were several skills that she and her friends had learned when they were bored that had come in handy over the years.
Maggie could see that the office was empty. There was a long row of file cabinets along the back wall. She quickly made her way to them. She could see that there were years on the outside of the drawers. She wondered why they hadn’t moved to a computerized system already. It seemed very archaic, but it was going to make her life a lot easier. She moved her finger across the drawers until she found 1999. She pulled the drawer open, willing it not to squeak. She quickly scanned through the names. She didn’t see any of the names that she was looking for. Disappointed, she pushed the drawer shut. Maybe Tony had been right.
Then she frowned and had another thought. She pulled open the drawer for 1998. She started to scan the files when her fingers stopped after going through just a couple of them. Jillian Anderson’s name stuck out at her like a sore thumb.
She quickly pulled the file out. She opened it up and found a smiling picture of the redheaded girl staring back up at her. It was her. She had been a student at St. Ignacious and had graduated the year before Tony, Kyle, and Eric.
There was definitely something amiss. She knew that now, and finding Jillian’s file confirmed it for her. As she straightened and turned around, she had the terrifying realization that she had miscalculated everything once again. She was no longer alone.
She had no idea if it was a ghost or a real person, but Jillian Anderson stood on the other side of the counter, staring at her. Maggie saw the girl’s lips move, and she heard strange words coming out that reminded her of the chants she heard as a child. Then Maggie lost consciousness as she slid to the floor.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Tony knew that something was very wrong. Maggie had gone to the bathroom just before his speech was getting ready to start. She hadn’t reappeared yet. He was distracted, looking for her in the crowd. He saw a faint bit of red hair over one of the shoulders of the people in the back. He was relieved. He couldn’t fully see her, but he thought that she must have been too embarrassed to come any further to the front if she arrived back after he started his speech.
Tony finished his remarks and listened to the applause. He shook the hand of the headmaster and cut the symbolic yellow ribbon hanging above the red velvet rope. Then he opened the rope and motioned for the crowd to pass through and see the newest acquisitions in the Atwood wing of the art gallery.
He moved off to the side, eagerly waiting for Maggie to reach him. As the people in front of him parted, Tony felt his heart stop for a moment. The person standing at the back of the crowd wasn’t Maggie. The red hair should have been a dead giveaway. It was so much brighter than Maggie’s. But the part that sent his mind for a tailspin was that Jillian didn’t look a day older than her pictures from eighteen years ago.
“Holy shit,” he said out loud. He didn’t care if anyone heard him. He wondered frantically now where Maggie was. Then Jillian held up her hand. He saw in it she was holding a small orange clutch. It was Maggie’s. It had all been some kind of trap, and he and Maggie had fallen right into it.
Jillian turned on her heel and started to walk away, giving him a faint cock of the head. She wanted him to follow her.
He quickly moved after her, intending to catch up with her before she disappeared. He heard the headmaster calling his name behind him, but Tony couldn’t let her get away. He hurried to the end of the art gallery hallway near the entrance, and then he saw a faint flicker of red swing around the corner. He dashed after it.
He followed the beacon of bright red hair from what seemed like one end of St. Ignacious’s grounds to the other. He wasn’t really keeping track of where they were going. All he could think about was Maggie. It wasn’t until he saw a few familiar tapestries hanging on the wall that he recognized where Jillian was leading him. It was back to his old room.
He and Maggie had learned that his old dormitory was closed for planned renovations the following spring. Since it was in one of St. Ignacious’s oldest buildings, there apparently was a great deal of it that wasn’t up to current code. For the students’ safety, everyone had been moved out.
It seemed ironic that he would be led here, but, at the same time, it seemed fitting. They would be alone.
Tony cautiously approached the door to his old room. He wasn’t sure if he should knock or not. That was when the door slowly started to open as if answering his unspoken question.
Tony felt a slight shiver run down his spine. Before he even entered the room, he could feel the drafts of air billowing into the hallway. It was so cold. He stopped at the threshold. The room was almost barren.
There were four beds, two on either side of the room, that were stripped down. There was nothing else as far as furniture in the rest of the room. His eyes found Maggie lying perfectly still on one of the beds. Her eyes were open but she stared up at the ceiling with an unblinking, unwavering gaze. He started to move toward her, but then Jillian was there up in his face in front of him. The pupils of her eyes matched her hair, and they blazed in hate that he knew was directed at him.
“What do you want?” he asked the apparition. He wanted to reach across the breadth of distance between them to see if she was real, but he realized it di
dn’t matter. She was a ghost of his past no matter what; a vengeful spirit who had locked her attention on him. It would be his undoing if anything happened to Maggie as a result of getting involved with him.
“You said forever.” Her voice was raspy, as if it had been years since she had used it. She was so close to him that he should have been able to smell her, to hear her heartbeat, but he sensed nothing but cold emptiness from the woman standing in front of him.
He still didn’t understand what she meant. It was as if they were speaking two different languages. He cut another look at Maggie. He could hear her shallow breath and saw the rise and fall of her chest. She was alive, at least for now. That called into question for him the state of the being in front of him.
“Are you dead?” It seemed a ridiculous thing to ask, but at the same time, it was the core of what had plagued him since that night. He saw a faint smile cross her face as if she was amused. “Where are Allison and Tiffany?”
Her face darkened at the names of the other two girls. She looked away from him then and took a step backward. She motioned that he could move again. Tony rushed to Maggie’s side. He touched her forehead. It was cold and clammy. He gave her a short shake, but she didn’t move. She was so still.
Tony glared at Jillian. “I swear to God, if you’ve hurt her….”
“You’ll what? Eat me?” The joking words held no humor, but that wasn’t the part that twisted Tony’s gut. He realized the words hadn’t been spoken out loud. They were spoken inside his head.
They were in a precarious situation now. Jillian was clearly deranged, and she was playing with him. He didn’t know the extent that she planned to go in her game, and he didn’t want to find out. He needed to figure out a way to talk to her and negotiate a way out for them.
He thought about Maggie’s ribbing earlier about not believing in supernatural things. The fact that Jillian had just used telepathy to connect with him wasn’t unheard of. The ability existed for humans, although it was rare. In shifters, it was the mark of an alpha. He could reason that away.
But the fact that she had been able to skip ahead of him seemingly appearing and disappearing in time and space leading him to the room, made his head want to explode. There was nothing about any of that he could reason away with a logical explanation.
For the moment, Jillian seemed content to watch him, as if she was the one observing his behavior. If that was accurate, the irony wasn’t lost on him.
Tony focused on the catatonic woman beside him. He stroked Maggie’s hair and then leaned over to give her a gentle kiss on the forehead. “I promised that I wouldn’t let anything happen to you,” he whispered in her ear. “Just hang in there with me, babe. I’m here.” He didn’t know if she could hear him or not in her catatonic state, but he needed to reassure her nonetheless that he would not leave her.
Tony stood up straight. He moved away from the bed. If anything happened now, he wanted Maggie out of range. He turned to face this specter from his past that had now inserted herself to become part of his present.
“Enough with the games. Tell me what you want.”
She stared at him with those blazing eyes. Tony had never seen anything like it before in his life, and it caused tendrils of fear to grow in his core. He felt as if she was trying to stare into his soul. If he didn’t know any better, he would have said that she was studying him because she was fascinated by him. He gave a start as Jillian’s head suddenly moved from right to left in a jerking slow motion that reminded him of stiff cadavers.
Tony still didn’t know if he was dealing with something that was alive or dead. That thought practically drove him mad. His wolf howled inside of him, anxious to be let out so it could face their foe as well. Tony considered it as an option, but it wasn’t the right time. Yet.
He put up his hands toward her with his palms facing out. “I think there has been a misunderstanding, Jillian. I would like to talk to you if you would be open to it.”
“Going to psychoanalyze me too?” The words were loud and reverberated through his mind. It caused him to wince.
“It would be preferable to me if we can speak out loud,” he said as if he talked to people in his head all the time. It was important to him that they try and establish some semblance of boundaries in the physical world.
“You said forever.” She repeated the phrase again, this time out loud. Clearly, this was important to her. It was as if everything hinged on it.
“What does that mean? I don’t understand. I’ve never even met you before.”
Jillian shook her head slowly as if she didn’t believe him. She brought her finger up and waggled it at him. “You said forever.” She repeated the phrase again as if that would help him remember. Tony felt the heat of his anger rising. The wolf growled. It was ready to attack. He needed to do something to move them past their impasse.
“I don’t know what you want from me, but I’m sorry for whatever happened to you to, Jillian.” He saw her wince when he said her name. This was good. He was tying her back to his reality. He kept going, hoping that he could find the right words.
“I want to help you, Jillian. But I can’t do that unless you tell me what it is that you want. Clearly, you have been trying to communicate with me. I’m sorry I didn’t understand that, but I’m here now, and I’m listening.” It took everything inside of him to take a step closer to her.
She hissed then, but he didn’t retreat. That was one thing he couldn’t do because that would show weakness. That was when Tony was struck by a detail that he knew he had to have buried deep inside his mind. He had no idea how he knew it with such certainty, but Jillian was a shifter.
The hiss that had erupted from her lips had been the clue that locked it into place. Jillian was a snake shifter. There was a clan of rattlesnake shifters in Arizona that had originated from one of the four legacy bloodlines. The clan was very small, and many believed that all of them had been killed off years ago. If that wasn’t true, it would’ve made sense for any remaining descendants of that clan to send their children to St. Ignacious to ensure their full protection.
But, since Jillian was a shifter, that changed the dynamic even more, because not only did she appear to have mystical talents, her telepathic ability marked her as an alpha. Tony needed answers, and the girl in front of him might have them all.
“Jillian, can you tell me what happened that night at the quarry? You were there with us, weren’t you?”
“Independence,” she said. She raised her chin.
Tony desperately wanted to remember. He wanted to go back to that night and see what he had forgotten. “I wish I could remember what happened,” he said. “But I don’t. You can’t hold me accountable for something I can’t remember.”
Jillian seemed to consider his words. Then a small, cruel smile crossed her lips. She covered the distance between them in a flash and locked her fingers around Tony’s face. He tried to struggle, but found he couldn’t move. He stared into the burning pupils of her eyes and felt the strength of her will bearing down on him. He couldn’t resist her.
“Remember,” she hissed.
Then Tony was fall falling into a pit of blackness.
As Tony came to, he was confronted by a scene that he knew immediately was his past, but it was as if he was looking in on it from the outside. The light was fading in the sky above his head. He saw the younger version of himself running on the pebbled beach of the quarry. He and Eric were throwing a football back and forth and laughing. Kyle sat next to the bonfire. He was roasting a rabbit over a makeshift bonfire. Looking at it from the outside, it appeared that the boys were having the time of their lives.
When the headlights came over the ridge, the three of them turned. The boys recognized the vehicle, and he and Eric began to wave wildly. As the Jeep came to a stop next to their car, three girls piled out, giggling and calling out to them.
Tony recognized them. Of course, it was Jillian, Allison, and Tiffany. His memories were s
tarting to surface and blossom in his mind, and as they did, his consciousness merged with the younger version of himself in front of him. They became one.
“Sorry that took so long.” Jillian laughed as she pulled a cooler out of the back of the car. “The guy at the liquor store was giving me a hard time about my fake ID.”
“Yeah, and they totally figured out mine wasn’t real,” Allison said. She rolled her eyes. “What a waste of a hundred bucks.” The six of them laughed.
“Did you get the other thing?” Tony asked her.
“Believe it or not, that was even harder than the liquor store,” Jillian said. She cocked her head toward Allison, who reached into the back seat of the Jeep and emerged with a heavy book whose pages were made out of parchment. “Leave it to the women to provide all the entertainment for the evening.”
“As if you couldn’t handle it,” Eric said as he slung his arm around Jillian’s shoulders. She stuck her tongue out at him.
Allison brought the book to Tony, and he felt a rise of excitement flare in his chest. “I can’t believe you guys got it. Professor North never lets it out of his sight.” Professor North taught history at St. Ignacious. The book was the centerpiece of his collection of mystical objects from the nineteenth century.
“It’s amazing what showing a little cleavage can do,” Jillian called out over her shoulder. “Although the sleeping pill helped too.”
“That was my idea,” Allison confided to him.
She walked with him over to the bonfire. Tony sat down and carefully opened the book’s pages. Allison looked over his shoulder, and he enjoyed the smell of her perfume and felt the whisper of her hair tickle his cheek. Tony was a little sweet on Allison, but he hadn’t decided if he wanted to pursue it yet or not.
Eric and Jillian had a thing going already. Kyle and Tiffany were clearly the quieter ones in their respective trios, but seemed to get along when they all hung out together.