by Jamie Magee
Mason remembered bringing every one of those books to the manor.
Phoenix was right, River was the key to all of this, she had every answer before the war ever commenced.
Gazing down at her now, Mason couldn’t figure out how to explain what he knew to her.
“You’re the author.”
“I know,” she breathed. Her gaze moved up to his. “Mason I fell in love with you eternities ago.”
He her to his chest and held her tight. All at once the issues they had in this short life seemed mild, losing his brother, the fight with his mom, moving there, those were problems you could run from, at least avoid, those were problems they would have killed to have in that past existence, the existence that said they were the ultimate sinners, a life that they could never openly love one another in.
Perspective, it’s a tricky little notion that launch’s a million different truths.
Mason’s truth was, this girl was his. One soul. The question now was what to do with all of this.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Hours, endless hours had passed, and River had barely understood what was before her. When the library opened, so did her mind. She didn’t know every detail, but she knew enough. She knew that in some past her soul saw her standing there. Saw the path of everyone around her.
She also knew that she had to stop Camlin. That Lord hunted her on the other side. He hunted others as well, only she saw what he was doing, She countered everything he did. Every time he tried to stop someone from coming to the dark reality, pulled them back before their time, or forced them to go, she countered.
River didn’t recognize all the souls she had directed to come here or protected, but she recognized Skylynn.
Not long after the extended library was found Phoenix, Indie, and Gavin came down.
River kept her distance. Not to avoid them, but to keep herself in the zone. She had figured out so far that there were eight main sections. Those sections told the stories of the born supremacy, but those royal couples had several subsections, and those subsections intertwined with the other royal couples. It broke down even further from there, but without a doubt there was a web of hearts and souls written and amongst these texts. Every deceit was seen before it occurred.
River’s only issue was that the text had been spelled. She had come across things like this when she read her coven’s family history. It all goes back to that fate aspect. If the path is seen, the passion for living said path shall perish. So right now, River could only see what had happened thus far, and what immediate outcome justified what would happen.
That wasn’t a loss, though. If you know where you have been then you know where you are going, and most importantly, if you know what spells were set, then you know how to counter them.
River was pulled to the section that Skylynn dominated. It seemed endless, and that made sense. She had lived straight through on this side, meaning she never died and only had that pause before rebirth She just kept going and she seemed to touch several royal lines in some way.
Indie and Phoenix both seemed at a loss when River pointed out their section. She knew words would be hard for them to translate, but there were enough symbols for them to grasp the idea. They were going to live through what was in front of them, so she had left that story for another day.
Gavin kept moving between Skylynn’s text and another section River hadn’t gotten to yet. Mason was at River’s side. Looking for books she told him to find when she came across a passage.
In the echo of the room River heard Gavin say, “We would have doomed her if we set her free, we made the right choice.”
River knew he had a text from Skylynn’s row, and she cringed knowing that they had already decided what Lord to take down. She also recoiled because Skylynn was a part of her family. She was not someone to be put on a waiting list, and obviously she knew that or she would not have put a dream with spell components in her mother’s head in the first place.
River charged around the row of books she was in front of and stomped right up to Gavin, Phoenix, and Indie. “You need to forgive me for insulting you because that’s what I’m about to do.” She narrowed her eyes at Gavin. “Do you honestly think you’re qualified to read this text? To decipher it and pick and choose who should be unchained, and who should not? Do you think there are not consequences for your choice? That you may or may not be hindering a form of evolution?”
River felt Mason’s warm arms go around her, a pulsing fiery energy moved through her. He may have been trying to tell her to chill out, or help her chill out, but that was not going to happen.
“Nope,” Gavin said evenly.
“What is it, little bit? Why are you up in arms?” Phoenix asked her.
She turned to glare at him. “Umbra, you have a bullseye on him because you want your basement back. Did it cross your mind that he is the Lord of Grief? That he twists those souls until they can barely grasp sanity long before he locks them up and lets them fester. Not only that, he’s not picky. He has both good and bad souls. Did it click for any one of you that if he sandbagged Camlin, that bad mama jama, there is no telling who else he has? More than likely your clocks that you fear have poor innocent souls in them just might have a few land mines in them? Or how about the fact that his numbers make Camlin’s look like a joke and that there is some risk that you’re just putting these precious souls out there for vultures to pick off?”
“All of that has been considered,” Indie said. River couldn’t even look at her. She was too close to the point of pressing her own agenda set off by her emotions.
“Why did you say that about Skylynn?” Indie asked Gavin.
“This text, and please,” he said looking at River, “Correct me if I read it wrong, but it says that her impatience took her window of one moon away, that where other shadowed souls would have a month, she would only have a night, a few hours,” he handed River the book to check him.
“So she would lose him forever,” Indie said to them. River didn’t know who ‘he’ was. Her objective was to get Skylynn free, but she was going to figure out who ‘he’ was before she went in guns blazing, unlike her fiery buddies.
“If he doesn’t have a clue who she is, then yeah. I mean we can always gamble on love at first sight, not sure I believe in that,” Gavin said.
The boy was right, River apparently had seen how impatient her cousin was, recorded the path, what he read was the last line, in this volume. River didn’t know what was before it or after it.
“Does it say that?” Indie asked River as gently as she could.
“It does say she has one moonrise.”
Indie glanced at Phoenix, then to Gavin telling him to go to another section. She put her hand on River’s shoulder trying to get her to look up at her, “I’m getting her free, we’re just going to have to find a new angle now. We need to make sure she is remembered by who she shares her soul with.”
River nodded slightly before she walked away, engrossed in the text in her hand.
She fell asleep reading text. She only vaguely remembered Mason moving her to her room. Her dreams were on fire. They were not the same nightmares that Camlin starred in as the main attraction. They had Skylynn in them and some other boy who had piercing green eyes, dark hair, and was powerful. He was River’s friend in the life she had on the other side, one of her closest ones, and he was totally connected with Skylynn, that much River knew. He must be the ‘he’ Indie was so concerned about.
River wanted years and years to go through the text downstairs, but time did not afford her that luxury. Not only was Dagen going to do what he had to do, so were the Falcon’s, and River’s gut was telling her the time for all of this to go down was now. Something had to happen now or it never would, and if it didn’t, a chain reaction would bring this whole web down in a bad way.
She shot out of her bed right as the fading words of a spell eased back to her subconscious.
“Shh,” Mason said as he pulled her
closer, her room was dim. She assumed it was dawn, but when the clock chimed it was almost seven she knew something was off.
“I slept all day?”
“You slept for seven hours after staying up all night.”
“I have to go back to the library.”
“Can you wait until after the party tonight to do that?”
“The what?” she asked in a sleepy haze.
“There is a massive party here tonight. The dome room is going to be filled with people and such.”
“Mason this is serious stuff, a party. Really?”
He looked a bit discomfited, but River couldn’t figure out why.
“Can you just whisk me down there, let me do my thing?”
“River, if you told me what you thought was in those clocks from day one I would have never wanted you down there alone.”
“I’m not a child.”
“I didn’t say you were, I’m just asking that you take a break for a few hours, then we’ll spend forever down there finding out what we need to get Skylynn free.”
“I don’t have a few hours.”
“Why not?”
River was at an impasse. She gave that valiant speech trashing Umbra yesterday. Now, when she finally came out and said, ‘you Falcon’s don’t have a choice in whether or not Camlin was taken down first because he was someone else’s mark already’, she was going to lose any and all creditability when it came to this manor and that library that was so clearly hers.
The thing was, Dagen was going to do his thing tonight. Indie led River to believe they were considering all option’s which meant they were at a current lull, so the risk of too many dead being set free, or a dimension of living souls being overrun by haunts was not on the table. At least not yet, as far as River knew.
She either had to convince Dagen to find another way, that put her in a tight spot with karma with a risk that something could happen to Raven down the road hanging over her head. Or River had to track down Skylynn and get her to direct River to the right text to free her. Skylynn needed to tell River who ‘he’ was so she could find his books.
“I don’t think Skylynn has the time to wait for you guys to figure out how to set her free or make whoever remember her. I think she might die if I don’t do something soon.”
“And if we act out of turn what will she have to live for?” he asked in a reverent tone.
“I need to get down there, Mason.”
“Can you not look over those volumes for now, give me a few hours, then let us go down.” Mason nodded toward the texts she had carried to bed with them.
River followed his gaze to see the books she was cramming in her head the night before on the end table.
She looked down, then nodded in agreement. If she opened those books, a few hours would seem like five minutes to her.
“Thanks,” she breathed. He must have known she was going to flip out and that in some way she’d be locked out of her library.
“I’m always going to be here for you.”
She smiled up at him. He rose from the bed and pulled her into his arms. “I have to be a part of this deal downstairs. I really want you to be with me, so I know you’re safe, but I get it. You want to stay here.”
“What deal?”
“A life party, the theme is the roaring twenties,” he let out a sharp sigh. “There are a few other symbolic points to it too, but that’s why the people will be here tonight.”
“The roaring twenties.”
“Yeah, don’t worry about the theme. I rarely dress the part of this kind of party.”
River felt a sinking feeling in her stomach. Obviously, Skylynn thought she needed to be at that party. The downer was River still didn’t have all her party favors in line. No spell to help her.
“I have something to wear that will work. If I can break away, I’ll come down.”
He stole a deep, slow kiss from River, and whispered ‘I love you’, as he vanished.
River may have had seven hours of sleep, but it felt like seven minutes. She needed to jump-start her mind, so she hopped in the shower as she plotted her next move.
Saige was going to be her first call. She could give direction on where River could find Skylynn. River was going to figure out how to call Dagen, a new way because she was not going to put out the vibe she had before. She needed Ash, too; she was her research buddy.
When she was towel drying her hair, she heard giggling in her room. What kind of party was this? The kind where couples all found spare rooms right as the crowd got big enough to vanish from.
River tore open the bathroom door ready to put someone in their place but stopped short. Her sisters and Soren were in her suite. The giggling was coming from Raven; she found the dirty dancing DVD and was trying to get Soren to dance with her. He clearly wasn’t in the mood. The boy had been downright stoic all of a sudden and more than likely because Ash had pushed his buttons or was about to. No one ever could figure out if they had ‘a thing’ or not. It honestly depended on the day of the week.
Raven had her long dark hair in a finger wave, a nod to the twenties theme. The white streak in her hair was striking and matched her flapper dress, the same one River had. River’s twin was dressed the same way.
Soren had on a tux that added years to him. He resembled Mason in the slightest way, the eyes were different, but the build and hairstyle was the same.
They looked solid, but River knew better. “The Veil overtook the manor?”
“On the contrary,” Ash said without looking up from the text she was reading. “The manor overtook the Veil. The two merged, so you have a nice little combination of guests with you now.”
“Mom should have flown you guys up here yesterday. I’m screwed and tattooed.”
“Spill it,” Raven said right after she finished a chorus of ‘Hungry Eyes’, that she was humming to Soren.
“It’s not about Mason, that worked out,” as soon as River said that all eyes were on her.
“Focus. There is a massive library downstairs. I think I’m the author only I have no idea what I wrote. I have to get Skylynn out now.”
“What’s the rush?” Raven asked.
River tried to get the words out, but she had too many secrets to know what was safe to say. She was stuck now. “Dagen is slaying a Lord of Death tonight. His death frees shadowed souls.” There, that was safe. No need for Raven to know that by the end of the night Rydell might be her dance partner.
Ash waved her hand to tell River to go on.
“Annnd, Skylynn only has one night to claim her past life, and I don’t think that is Aunt Saige or us, I think it has to do with her soul mate. Oh yeah, and I have everything I need for the spell but the words.”
That got a few eyebrows to pop.
“Where is the stuff?” Ash asked.
River nodded to her bag. She was there in a flash. It was starting to click why they came through the Veil and not the normal way. It was so they would be able to move and react at a supernatural speed. River was stuck in human form. Awesome.
“Did you cross reference the ingredients with the words?”
“It’s not a computer.”
“No but the text has an old fashion index, author chick,” Ash said.
“Okay, fine, I missed that, but you don’t get how many books are down there.”
Ash nodded to Raven, “Get her dressed, Soren look in this index, you’re looking for the components or something about unblinding.”
Mother of all fates, I missed my peeps!
River avoided Raven’s eyes when she helped her with her hair and makeup, that is until she figured out she was avoiding hers.
“What’s up with you?” River asked as she pulled on her dress.
She shook her head and tried to smile.
“I’m serious.”
Raven leaned against the vanity, “I just don’t know what to hope for.”
“What happened to your bliss bubble?”
“A bit
crowded.”
“Is it the dreams? The haunt hanging around you? You see him here?”
“Yeah, but right now lets focus on getting Skylynn lose.”
River went to tell her that she would be a part of that chain reaction, but she heard Ash yell, “Eureka!”
She ran out of the bedroom as fast as she could. Apparently, Ash had found her way to that library because she had at least ten books now.
“Are you serious?”
“Yep, with only four hours spare,” Ash declared.
“It’s that specific. How did I miss that?”
“You were looking in Skylynn’s books.”
“Um, yeah.”
“The answer was in Aden’s.”
That named slammed into River like a tidal wave. That was the boy in my dream last night, my friend from the other side.
“How did you know he was hers?”
“It was in the last moment that was recorded of Skylynn being on the other side. You told her he would bear the same name. Only your A’s always look like E’s for some reason.” River rolled her eyes at that. “We found an entire section on Aden. Imagine that. The boy is dying.” She looked at her watch. “Right about now.”
“Do what?”
“The spell un-blinds his fate, not hers, and the trigger is his death.”
“Freaking A. If he’s dead, what is the point?” My family seriously needed to get over its attraction to dead boys.
“He’s going to be saved but by an inhibited healer,” Ash said.
“So. If Camlin is taken down, she will be seen, and he will be saved?”
“Never that easy in this family. You have to spell her so that when he sees her his mind is open.”
“Then I should spell him—where is he?”
“You already did, when you sent him to this reality.”
River’s head was going to explode. This was too twisted, but simple at the same time.
She rushed to the text Ash was reading over. She was writing down the spell and River was reading the pages in front of the same book, so they looked ridiculous.