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Moonlit

Page 24

by Jadie Jones


  A purple streak of lightning blazes down from the clear morning sky and crashes against the crystal ceiling, sending up a shower of sparks. The clear barrier begins to fracture in places as another bolt of lightning strikes the stone.

  “I know you. I alone know your heart.” His hand slides through my hair and claims my throat. He traces my pulse to the hollow above his mark. The rings beg him closer, a warmth spreading along my collar. His eyes close with pleasure the moment the heat reaches his fingers. He flexes his palm above the brand, releasing me from his touch. The places left behind shiver with exposure and relief.

  Surges of want crash down from all sides. The want to wrap my hands around his arm and snap it from his body. To wrap them around his wrist instead and beg him to reach inside the void beneath my ribs and fill it. To feel the sizzle of his skin on mine again. To twist his neck until it breaks.

  A splintering crescendo blows the thoughts away like wind to smoke, their scent still lingering in my brain. My hands instinctively lift to protect my head as a chunk of the crystal ceiling tumbles to the soft earth. The wall feeding into the pond collapses, and fire erupts from the rubble. My eyes dart back to Asher. Even though the world around us crumbles, his gaze on my face is steady and calm.

  “I will always find you.” His promise cuts through the deafening roar as the garden dissolves into an empty black, my Origin finally, horribly complete.

  I can feel this new place before I can see it, bitterly cold and thick. My skin feels like its waking back up after going numb. All at once my lungs begin to burn, begging for oxygen. Instinctively, I draw in a breath, but icy water shoots down my nose and floods into my open mouth. Frantic, I try to right myself but I can’t tell which way is up. I kick out blindly. My toes scrape against a sandy bottom. I draw my legs underneath me and burst through the surface.

  The air is so cold that each breath feels like swallowing a knife. Freezing rain pelts my face. Walls of earth and rock climb up each side of the river. Runoff pours over the high ledges, which tower at least forty feet above me. I have to get out of here. Dizzy and bewildered, I swim to the closest side.

  “This feels familiar,” I whisper, hazarding another glance up as soon as I can plant a hand on the muddy wall. The hardwood trees. The reddish clay. I swear I smell manure. Everything about my environment reminds me of Wildwood, but I don’t recognize this place and I’ve been over every inch of that pasture.

  Is this real or is it still part of the Origin? I strain for any sign of my guide but the driving rain makes focusing impossible. I begin to shake as a deep chill sets in. A scream of frustration escapes my clenched teeth. I have to find a way up.

  “Think, Tanzy!” I berate myself.

  Don’t think. Just listen. Spera’s raspy voice resonates within my reeling brain.

  “Listen to what?” I call out. But she doesn’t respond. I will her to come back, but all I can hear is the steady hammer of my heart. One-two, one-two, one-two. Everything else falls away as I lock into the rhythm. Fear and indecision evaporate, leaving pure instinct.

  Climb.

  I move one hand at a time up the slippery cliff. And finally, my hand reaches forward instead of up. I dig my fingers into the solid ground and heave myself over the lip of the ravine. The rain pelting my bare skin is an afterthought to the hard-won ascent. I am nearly delirious with exhaustion and relief. The prickly sensation of unwanted familiarity skitters across my skin like a spider.

  I do know this place. I sit up, closing and opening my eyes over and over in hopes that the picture will change. You will wake up where this life began. Maris’s words echo in my frozen, disbelieving mind. The bottom of the ravine, my father’s true grave. My life began when his ended.

  “Spera.” Lucas’s voice spins me around. He emerges from the trees a little ways down the overgrown trail. I look back down the ravine and then to his beautiful, scarred face. I let out a grief-stricken sob and drop to my knees.

  “Spera,” he repeats and sprints in my direction.

  I must still be in the Origin.

  I close my eyes against the sight of him. I can’t take any more. I want to go back home. But I blindly reach out for him; perhaps by some miracle I might feel him as he runs past me in search of Spera. My heart weighs too much. What I’ve lost weighs too much. Together, they blot out Lucas’s face as I collapse to the rain-soaked earth.

  27 The calm before the storm

  Stale smoke taints the air and makes me wince. The smell triggers a memory like an electric shock and suddenly Spera’s face, twisted in agony, writhes in my groggy mind. I bolt upright and gasp for air. The soft something I’m sitting on shifts beneath my movement. A solid hand steadies my body and prevents me from toppling over. But the world around me keeps spinning. Where am I? Who’s here with me? Why am I all wet?

  My dimly lit surroundings come into focus a little at a time. Pressed pine walls. Rakes and pitchforks. Loose hay on the floor. A glowing safety lantern on a nail hook. Stacks of alfalfa in the far corner. Wildwood.

  “You’re shaking, Spera,” Lucas’s smooth voice says from behind me. I jump at the sound and quickly scan the room for Spera. But his eyes are on me.

  “Is this real?” I whisper, wrapping my arms tightly around myself. The dress from my Origin is soaked through with rain water and sticks to my skin.

  “It is,” he says and kneels beside the hay bales serving as my bed.

  “Was that real? What I saw. My Origin.” I drop my eyes and shudder. The memories are foggy and distant. Each time I reach for one it slides further back into the depths. But the feeling of terrible loss lingers heavily in my chest. Without warning, flashes from Spera’s life explode in my battered mind. I press my palms onto either side of my head and grit my teeth against the onslaught of violence. The screams. The grief.

  “Spera?” Lucas asks, his voice heavy with concern.

  “I’m Tanzy. I’m not Spera.”

  “You are both,” he offers.

  “No, I’m not. She was brave and strong. She wasn’t afraid of anything. I’m—I—I don’t know what I am.”

  Lucas sits beside me and offers the support of his arm. I lean into the warmth of him. The jagged scars that mar the side of his face are visible even in the dim light. The jealousy I’d felt in Lenya’s garden fills me with guilt. I wanted to have Lucas for myself. But now I’d do anything to give him back what he lost.

  “Did you really love her?” I whisper, their last conversation playing in my mind. “Or was she right? Did you just want her for the same reason Asher did? Is that why you want me? You think I can do the same thing? I can’t.”

  “I have regretted asking you that question for a thousand years,” he says and moves away from me. “That you died unsure of my feelings for you.”

  “Stop saying that.”

  “What?”

  “Acting like Spera and I are the same. I thought we were. I wish we were. But I’m not anything like her.”

  “You may not share every attribute, but her soul is reborn in your body. Of that we are all sure. I will protect you from anything and everything, including myself. I failed you before. That won’t happen again.”

  His eyes drop from mine, and instantly I see how much guilt he has carried with him. He stares into the driving rain, no doubt reliving the moment he watched his beloved Spera die. He thinks it’s his fault. That she died never knowing if he truly loved her.

  He did, Spera. If you can hear me somehow. If you and I are really the same, Lucas loves you. And then, in her unmistakable voice, I hear within my own being: I know.

  “She knew,” I whisper to the floor, feeling at once a part of their love and yet further from it than ever before.

  “Don’t say that to me unless you’re certain.”

  “I think she just told me,” I say, the admission both comforting and unnerving. His powerful hands clutch my back and draw me to him.

  “I never stopped loving you. I never stopped searching for you
,” Lucas whispers in my ear as his hands cradle my face. His hot skin presses against mine and I move into it, any distance between us too much. “I’m sorry,” he says, pulling away.

  I reach out to stop him. “Why are you sorry?” I ask, completely lost in the feeling of his skin on mine.

  “I know that you aren’t Spera. You are, but you aren’t. I know your heart. But you do not know mine.”

  “I think I do. I saw everything. How you helped her. You tried to save her more than once.”

  “And a great shield I turned out to be then.” He turns away, unable to meet my eyes.

  “You found me. I don’t know where we were during my Origin, but it definitely didn’t feel like Virginia.”

  “Near Egypt. An island off the east coast,” he whispers. His dark eyes go blank as his mind takes him somewhere else, undoubtedly back to that barren place. His eyes. They were white before. Like Asher’s.

  “Why aren’t your eyes white?” I ask, tempted to touch them.

  The corners of his lips pull back a little at my question. “A Contego is considered dangerous because we hold a Seen creature’s safety above our own. They color our eyes like yours as a warning,” he says and locks his gaze with mine. I watch his scarred face, spellbound into silence.

  “You are shaking again,” he says and moves to my side. He shrugs out of his jacket and slips it around my shoulders.

  I rest against his chest and tuck my head under his chin. The sudden heat and the droning rain on the roof act as an elixir to my jumbled brain. I relax into his firm hold and slip a hand around his waist. He presses his cheek against the top of my head. For the first time in years, I fall asleep feeling like I’m right where I belong.

  28 Red in the morning

  The hay shed is less magical in the gray light of dawn than it was in the moonlight. But Lucas is breathtaking as he stands guard at the slanted doorway. He watches steadfastly through the crooked gap. I silently push up from the bale of hay, reluctant to break the spell.

  “You didn’t sleep?” I ask softly, trying not to startle him.

  His eyes find me and a smile warms his tense face. “No. I couldn’t leave you unprotected.”

  Words both amazing and terrifying. That he wants to protect me. And that I need it. I climb to my feet and inspect myself. My dress is wrinkled but dry. And so is my hair, which is coal black and as unruly as a yearling colt. I reach up to pluck a few strands of hay from the dark tangles. Vanessa’s ring gleams on my finger. I’m glad to have it back. To have her back.

  I can’t wait to tell her what I saw. My eyes move back to Lucas. Well, maybe I can wait a little while. I twist the ring upside down and push her from my mind. Vanessa, of all people, would understand.

  “It’s a beautiful morning. Come see,” Lucas says. I tiptoe across the blanket of hay and take his hand in mine. Surprise softens the lines on his face.

  “It is beautiful.” Above us, the early sky is streaked with burgundy. “Storm sky.” I point to the horizon.

  “Another one is coming.”

  “Is Asher?” The question slips out before I can stop it.

  “I don’t sense him,” he begins, his voice grave. “But that doesn’t mean he’s not coming. I can’t predict him the way I once could. We have not come face to face in hundreds of years.”

  I shudder at the last memory of my Origin.

  “He saw me. In the Origin, he saw me. He talked to me. He said I would destroy everything, that I was the end of all endings. What did he mean?” I stammer.

  Lucas’s eyes turn away from my face and wander aimlessly over the pasture. “Are you sure you’re ready?” he asks without turning back to me.

  “Yes! I have to know. It’s my fault that he found me. If I hadn’t been so stupid—”

  Lucas lets out a little chuckle.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “That decision you made in the garden, that was Spera through and through,” he says, his eyes softening at the memory.

  “You saw that? But you disappeared. What happened to you?”

  “I went behind the veil one last time to take the Contego oath. Since then I have searched for you.”

  “The whole time?”

  “The whole time,” he repeats. “You see, you showed your face to Asher, but you also showed me.”

  “So you were on the other side of the veil but you could still see what was happening in the garden?”

  “Yes. The veil works like a one-sided mirror. We can see through, but you can’t. Mortals can’t,” he corrects.

  “I can?” I ask, quickly pouncing on what he didn’t say.

  “Soon,” he answers gravely. “Things will soon be set in motion that can’t be undone.”

  He steps out of the shed and moves toward the empty pasture. I follow silently beside him as we walk deep into the barren field. His stony face does not change with each glance that I steal of him. He reaches the edge of the tree line where the winter grass is still high in tufts and sits down cross-legged. I sit next to him and watch him pluck a couple of brittle strands from the ground. He starts to braid them together and I let out a gasp.

  “This is the first place I ever saw you,” he admits. “You’d just moved here. Your mother showed you how to make bracelets out of grass.” I stare on, speechless, as he finishes the bracelet and fastens it around my wrist. “I’ve made thousands of these since then.”

  “So why now? If you’ve been around all this time, why did you wait so long?”

  “If I had been successful and kept you hidden, you never would’ve had to see me. But I failed. And they found you.”

  “Asher?”

  “Yes. And those he holds close.”

  “What do they want with me? Besides the fact that they think that . . .” I pause. Am I willing to say this out loud? “Besides the fact that my soul is Spera’s, and they think I can open the veil,” I finish deliberately.

  His eyes regard me with surprise. But his face goes from light to dark inside of a single breath. “Have you felt it? The process?”

  The strength. The rage. The man I nearly killed in the alley.

  “You were there, weren’t you? In Kentucky.” Shame burns a path from my throat to my ears.

  “No, why? What happened in Kentucky?”

  “I, I hurt someone. A man. He tried to . . . so I hurt him. I didn’t mean to. I was strong. Really strong.”

  “The strength you feel now is only the beginning.”

  “You aren’t going to ask me about it?”

  “About what?”

  “The man I hurt.”

  “I know your heart Spe—Tanzy. I know you wouldn’t hurt someone unless your life depended on it. But I have not always been able to say the same for myself.”

  “My guide said . . . she seemed to think you used to be a lot different.”

  “She is right. Our true forms, what we are behind the veil, are powerful beyond anything you could imagine. Humans have made guesses as to what we might look like. They write about us in stories and fables with very little accuracy. But they do have one thing right. When humans describe monsters that can end your world, they’re talking about us,” he explains, studying my face for a reaction.

  “And that’s what you really are?”

  “That’s what I am.”

  “And this body?” I ask, motioning to him.

  “It’s like a uniform we take on your side of the veil.”

  “And Ryan?” I ask, feeling a little silly for even calling him by that name.

  “Ryan is how I hide on this side. We can recognize each other in these forms,” he says, gesturing to himself. “But any other form we take is like a mask. Unless one Unseen sees another Unseen make the transition into that form, they would just assume it was a human. But it’s very dangerous for us to take a human mask. We are the most vulnerable when we use one.”

  Immediately I think of Dr. Andrews, of his abuse of Vanessa. Could Asher be hiding as Dr. Andrews? Tying himsel
f to Lenya’s new body, having Lucas work beneath him as Ryan. And the statue of the horse, the one I was sure was safe in Vanessa’s unwitting possession. It can’t possibly be a coincidence. There’s no way Asher’s going to have access to either Vanessa or Lucas anymore. Not if I can help it.

  “What about Asher? Does he have a human mask?” I venture, feeling out whether or not Lucas suspects the same thing about Dr. Andrews.

  “I highly doubt it. He prefers his true form to anything, but is willing to assume a uniform.” Lucas sounds so certain that my plan to storm Vanessa’s house and set her free dissolves and is blown into the morning wind like a dandelion seed. I fiddle with the hem of my dress.

  “I think I’ve seen his true form,” I start nervously. “Something like a black, shimmery shadow.” That thing in the pasture. It had to be him. Which means Asher killed my father.

  “We can all do that,” he answers, trying to hide his amusement. “It’s the fastest way to travel on your side of the veil. Those forms are invisible to mortals. You can only see them because of your Origin.”

  “Oh.” I frown at the dead end, my mind filled with puzzle pieces that fit a hundred different ways.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m getting there. I just still don’t see what this has to do with me. Why Asher thinks I can open the veil, when I don’t even know what it is. Or how to open it.”

  “You are in good company there. No one is absolutely certain how to open it. The Powers hid the ritual to open the veil in six different riddles and cast them all around the world. Asher has been hunting for pieces of the ritual for thousands of years.”

  “Raffin,” I say, recalling the gray cloaked figure. Lucas nods.

 

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