“Just one of the mysteries of the world.” He turned his attention to the window in the living room. “Hey! It’s snowing!”
“Let’s hope it sticks. Then maybe you could help me make a snow family?”
“I haven’t done that in years,” Justin said.
“Then it’s settled. You’re making a snow family with me. Besides, I haven’t done it since my brother disappeared.”
Justin’s eyes turned to mine. A flicker of sadness crossed in front of them. His energy shifted then righted itself. I opened my mouth to ask him about it, but he beat me to it. “You’re not remembering much, are you?”
“I’m remembering more each day. It’s just an incredible, slow process. Why?”
“I just thought you would’ve remembered me by now,” he muttered low, under his breath, hinting to some clue that nagged at the back of my mind.
My brow pinched, and I cocked my head to the side. “What do you mean? I remember you.”
He shook his head. “Not everything. Think, Elsa. Think about it. Think about everything I’ve said to you and everything that you can remember. Please. I want to be able to talk like we used to.”
“Justin, you’re scaring me.” Though I meant it as a joke, a smile playing on my lips, I did worry. What was he talking about? My mysterious life from before the accident that took my memories made less sense each time I remembered something new. The more pieces I found, the more holes the puzzle seemed to have.
“Just remember, okay?”
“I’ll try.”
“Dinner is ready, you two. Come eat,” Mom said, setting dishes on the table. Their clanks sounded heavy for biscuits and gravy. “Oh and this is soy sausage. Thought you’d like it.”
Mom’s voice echoed from the kitchen as Justin and I stood up and made our way to the table, taking our seats and waiting for Mom to come in. Meanwhile, Justin reached for a biscuit. I slapped his hand.
“Ouwah!” he said and chuckled then reached for another with his other hand.
I smacked that one as well.
We continued back and forth until I wasn’t able to smack his hands anymore because he moved too fast and we were both full of giggles. Mom walked in with the pot of soy sausage gravy. She smiled at our play as her eyes settled on us, glittering with a rare light.
“I haven’t seen you playing like that since …” She let the rest fall silent.
“Since when, Mom?” I asked, though I had an idea of what she was referring to. There wasn’t a point in time my brother wasn’t somewhere in her thoughts. I couldn’t imagine having a child, much less having them go missing, never to be heard of or seen again. I only knew what it was like through my mom and my own experience at losing a brother.
She shook her head. “Nothing. Never mind. It was just a treasured memory lost in time.”
“Really, Mom, tell me.”
“Do you remember, back before Robert left for the Academy, you two would play like that almost every night at dinner time? You were so close. You had a hard time getting over his loss. I always thought you joined up in an effort to avenge him or feel closer to him somehow …”
A shift in Justin’s energy caught my attention. Glancing at him sideways, he watched my mom, listening intently, a slight crease in his brow and a near unnoticeable down turn of his lips.
That’s it!
Mom continued on, unaware of my discovery or the shift in Justin’s energy. “But then you met Noah, and he became your focus. He filled that void for you.” She paused to sigh. “You fell so head over heels for him so quickly.”
“I miss him,” I said. “So much so that I swear I’m seeing him everywhere. That’s why I left the memorial. I thought I saw him at the doors of the temple. I followed him to a dead end alley off Main.”
Mom shook her head. “When your father started doing business trips, the same thing happened to me. He was everywhere.” She dished herself some gravy. Justin and I followed suit. Before taking her first bite, she stopped and stared at Justin. “You know … you could almost pass for him …”
Justin stiffened.
Mom shook her head then finished taking her first bite. Justin and I exchanged glances before digging in ourselves.
The rest of the dinner was spent reminiscing about my dad and our fondest memories of him. Justin laughed at appropriate places.
“What does your father do, Justin?” Mom asked.
“I’m afraid he passed away.”
“Oh! I’m sorry to hear that, dear. I guess that makes you two bond on another level, doesn’t it?” She gestured between Justin and me.
We didn’t respond. Instead, we exchanged nervous glances and shoved more dinner into our mouths.
“Well, I think I’m about as full as I can be,” Mom said. “I’ll just get this cleaned up, and as soon as I’m done, I’ll bring us all a bottle of root beer from the basement.”
“Let us get that for you, Livian.”
“Justin’s right, Mom. You should go take a nice long, hot bubble bath. We can clean up.”
With a nod of her head, she removed herself from the table and left the room. I listened for her steps on the stairs before I remembered she didn’t go up there anymore. A door slid closed with a dull rush.
I turned to Justin. “You lied to me.” It came out flat, accusing, and at the same time, happy.
He smiled, leaning back in his seat. “You finally remember.”
“If you don’t give me some answers, I’ll kill you for real,” I said and went to stab him with my fork.
He chuckled. “In my defense, I had to lie to you. Noah didn’t want you to remember anything. It was too dangerous. And when you remembered him, you were supposed to regain all your memories. But when you didn’t, I wasn’t sure how much to tell you. I was worried about how you’d react. You didn’t react so well when you found out the first time.”
I believed him. It was hard enough to not to be pissed at him for hiding the whole thing from Mom and acting like he wasn’t my brother in the first place. The whole secret was hard to swallow, but I was also very excited to have remembered something as huge as this. I gained more of my memories. “What happened?”
“Same thing that happened to you without the loss of memory or the accident. I left willingly. But the mission I was asked to do involved me getting a new face and name once it was completed. I made a lot of enemies, Elsa. And coming here, even now, is a risk. It took a lot of prodding and begging to allow you on the same team as me. Noah wouldn’t have it any other way. Neither could I.”
I smiled then punched his arm. Hard.
We shared a few more laughs while Justin answered more of my questions and even told me some stories I remembered little of. We were just about ready to start on the dishes when his communicator jingled. He picked it up and pressed the small button on the side. The bottom part slid out.
“Yes?” Justin said.
I started to clear the table until a dark cloud crossed his eyes. His gaze met mine.
“All right. Calm him down. We’ll be there as soon as we can.” He paused to listen to the response on the other side. “I don’t know. An hour, maybe.” Justin closed the communicator then sighed. “We better get the dinner cleaned up. They found Noah.”
“What do you mean found him? What’s wrong?”
“He showed up on Avalon’s grounds, mumbling to himself and …”
“And?” I asked.
“He doesn’t look good.”
“We need to go. Now. I’ll go tell Mom—”
“You still don’t know if you’re being followed. And you don’t want to see him like this. We’ll take care of the dishes, give the team time to calm him down, then we’ll go.”
He was right. If I was still being watched, rushing out of the house would look suspicious. Fighting the urge to run out the door and straight to Noah, I continued on to the kitchen.
THIRTEEN
MY HEART REMAINED IN my throat, almost choking me with each beat
as we rushed to get the dishes done and the table wiped down. As soon as my mom discovered Noah was back—having put off taking a bath for a good long cry—she forced us out the door, insisting that she could take a long relaxing bath after she cleaned the kitchen. She just wanted us to make sure Noah was okay. I did too.
But, as I watched him on the screen from the surveillance room, I wasn’t sure he would ever be okay. He paced the room, looking over his shoulder with each step. He seemed manic. The monitor showed his elevated heart rate and high temperature. No, that wasn’t Noah. That wasn’t the man my heart belonged to. Captain Morrigan was right. He changed.
“I have to go in,” I said.
“He ordered no visitors,” Captain Morrigan said.
“I don’t care what he ordered. I’m his compar, his partner, his wife. I don’t have to follow his orders. Besides, I’m not going in as Vanguard.” I turned and slipped out the door without further argument and went toward the basement where our safe rooms were.
Hidden behind a soundproof, locked door was a hall filled with small rooms designed to make the person occupying them feel safe and unthreatened. We’d housed victims in these rooms as well as prisoners. We kept the rooms locked with separate codes for the protection of everyone involved, and each room was digitally monitored. The temperature was much cooler than the rest of Avalon to better provoke a lasting calmness to the mind.
The rules of the floor were no black, no uniforms or weapons, and no shoes. A closet of plain meditation robes, all in white, was stationed at the bottom of the stairs, near the door that leads to the hall. White evokes an air of peace and comfort. Purity. Calm.
I exchanged my clothing for the appropriate attire then stepped inside the hall on the other side of the door, greeted by soft, muted light. It always reminded me of candlelight. Romantic and serene.
A thud echoed through the hall. I jumped and tried to swallow the lump in my throat. My hands felt moist, so I rubbed them along the fabric of my pants and stalled in front of the door that Noah stood behind. Taking in a deep breath, I placed my hand on the scanner next to the door frame and waited as the lights flickered from red to green, and the door slid open.
Noah stopped his pacing and slowly lifted his gaze to mine. His eyes grew wide with alarm. I couldn’t read his energy. “No. Go. I don’t want you near me.” He scrunched himself into the nearest corner and slid to the floor. He covered his face with his hands and muttered under his breath.
The air left my lungs in a rush as my heart broke watching him suffer. I stepped inside, against his wishes, and inched toward him. “Noah,” I said just above a whisper. “Please, let me help you.”
He shook his head. “It’s too dangerous! I’m not right, Elsa. I’m not! Something is wrong with me! Oh, Gaia! Help me, please!”
A tear slipped down my cheek as I knelt in front of him, lowering myself farther to sit on my knees. “Mea lux, cor meum. Sum vestrum semper. I cannot go where you are not. We are bound by the anulum de lux. Your trials are my trials. Remember?”
As I spoke, his shaking stopped, and his breathing slowed. I slid my hands along his and wove my fingers through his. He took in my gaze. The deepest ocean blue swallowed by black. No colorful specks, no beautiful gold or silver. Just a black abyss that stared back at me. His eyelids were red and raw. His skin lacked the color it once had. Even his hair seemed duller than it should’ve been. His veins stuck out of his neck and forehead in blue-green.
“I’m a monster now,” he whispered. “I feel it.”
I shook my head and shushed him. “I love you still.”
“You should be afraid.”
“I am afraid. Can you not feel my energy? I’m afraid of what happened to you and being away from you. Please don’t turn me away.”
“I’m dangerous.”
“You always were dangerous, Noah. You were trained to kill. We can get through this. I know it.”
He shook his head and started shaking again. But his legs straightened out on either side of me. Our clasped hands lowered to the floor in between his legs. His eyes drew mine in. I tried to close in on his energy, but I couldn’t get a read on him.
“I still can’t read you …”
His gaze dropped from mine.
“Noah, what happened to you? What made you like this?”
“I don’t know!” The rest of what he said was in Latin. A garbled, slurred, mixed-up Latin I couldn’t follow or comprehend.
I sat against the wall next to him. He pulled me into his arms and pressed his lips to my head. His shaking eased. He calmed more the longer he held onto me. As much as I wanted to take joy in the way he held me, there was something off about it. It wasn’t his arms that were holding me. It was something else. Someone else. Not my Noah.
My mind raced with possibilities of what was going on with him. I recalled what the doctor said on Tartarus about pathogens in Noah’s system changing him on a cellular level. I remembered that Alexander said he gave everyone I loved a complex poison, of which Jenna had the only antidote.
Jenna … that conniving little bitch …
“I’m so sorry, Elsa …”
“Don’t apologize. You didn’t do this to yourself. I should apologize for putting you in that position. I’m not the only one, though. I think I know who else is to blame.”
I started to move, but Noah’s arms tightened around me. In a whispered hiss, he said, “Don’t leave me.”
“I have to. Just for a little while. I’ll be back. I promise.”
“Where are you going?”
“To get answers and something that I hope will make you better.”
“Elsa, please don’t do anything rash. Don’t get yourself killed or taken from me. Please.”
I turned enough to press my lips against his. They were feverish. “I’ll be back soon. I love you.” I pulled from him, but his hand gripped my elbow. I turned my gaze to him.
His eyes changed. A band of ocean blue bordered the black. Some color returned to his cheeks, but his skin still remained pale and pasty. I ran my fingers through his hair, leaving my hand on the back of his neck.
“I’ve failed you,” he murmured. The last word choked off.
“No.” I shook my head. “If anyone failed, it was me. I’m the reason we are here. Not you.”
He shook his head as he reached toward my face with his other hand. “I’m sorry.”
Instead of brushing my cheek with the back of his fingers, his hand lowered to my neck and wrapped around my throat. He squeezed. I tried to pull his hand from me, but his grip tightened further. A dark rim lined my vision then filled with spots. Noah’s eyes were solid black, his skin burned like fire. I gasped, struggling for air, wanting to beg him to stop, to reach my Noah that I knew was still inside him somewhere. My heartbeat pounded in my ears. I gasped for air, lungs aching, as my back pressed against the floor that seemed to fold around me.
Just when my vision haloed around Noah’s blurred face, shadowed figures rushed in and tackled Noah, knocking him from me. I sucked in gulps of air and rolled to my knees. With each agonizing breath, the swooshing in my ears dissipated, and the ache in my lungs faded. Noah’s struggles drummed through my mind until the scuffles silenced and he was sedated.
A wave of emotion crashed into me as someone lifted me up, and I barely heard, “Are you okay?”
I turned from the person, unable to answer. Instead, I ran out the door and up the stairs, not stopping until I was in my room. I leaned against the door, slid to the floor, and cried.
FOURTEEN
IT HAD TO BE late. Darkness poured in through the window and filled my room. It was cold. At some point, I was moved to my cloud-like bed. I remembered crying myself to sleep by the door but not getting up and moving to the bed. Not that I cared. The pain in my chest felt like being gutted one agonizing scoopful at a time. My only reprieve was during gracious unconsciousness. A knock woke me from my dreamless sleep, bringing that pain back to life.
I waited for the sound to happen again, but the door slid open followed by boots hitting the floor in a soft hush, leading to my cloud-like bed, and something was set on the stand next to it. Peeling my unwilling eyes open, I saw a tray with a plate and drink. My mouth filled with ash. I groaned.
The door opened, letting the light from the hall pour into the room. The figure in the doorway was the last person I wanted to see. I squeezed my eyes shut and rolled over, pulling the blankets tight around me.
“I know an apology won’t change anything, but I did warn you not to go. Of course, had I known he would attack you like that, I never would have allowed you to go.” Captain Morrigan’s voice irritated me. I rolled my eyes, not in the mood to deal with her.
“If you are going to gloat and use I-told-you-so’s, leave. Otherwise, get to your point.”
“I don’t wish to be your enemy, Ehlers. I’m your ally, believe it or not.”
I snorted. “I seem to recall you being quite the opposite.”
“You remember.” It wasn’t a question, but that didn’t stop me from responding.
“Hardly. Flashes of those memories come to mind. You and your clan pointing out—very clear, I might add—I wasn’t one of you and insisting mine and Noah’s union could never be. And that was after you tried everything in your power to keep me from him.”
Pressure pulled on the edge of the bed. Natasha had taken a seat. A soft sigh filled the space between us. I rolled my eyes.
“I’m so very sorry for my misguided efforts to keep Noah away from you. It wasn’t because I was jealous—”
“Yes, you were.”
“You’re right. I was. A little. But I was protecting Noah. I thought you would break his heart. I do care for him a great deal. That much will never change. However, I respect you and the love you have for him. You two have been through a number of trials just to be together. Your devotion to him has earned my respect and gratitude.”
I sat up and faced her. “Why are you saying this? Why now? You got your wish, didn’t you? Noah doesn’t want me. Not anymore.” I choked back the sob that burned the back of my throat.
Echoes of Memories (Nepherium Novella Series Book 2) Page 8