“I know, I know.” He pushed my hand away. “I have to stay focused.” He took a deep breath, slowly letting it out. “Zio taught me to put my feelings aside. I have a job to do.”
“I am sorry about your uncle,” Simone said.
Asher bent over and gave the old monk a small kiss on the forehead. “You’ve prepared me well, Zio,” Asher whispered. “I can do this. It’ll be fine.”
Simone and I stayed quiet until Asher was ready to face us.
“I need to get something,” he said, sidestepping me and walking out of the room. “My uncle had a plan,” he called out. “For whenever this happened. Someone I was supposed to call.”
Across the courtyard in the living room, Asher went straight to a small desk and opened the top two drawers. He rifled through them. “The number is here … somewhere.” He pointed around the room. “Look for a small red book. It has instructions in it.”
“But who are you calling?” I asked as Asher continued to search a nearby bookcase. “Can we trust him?”
Asher froze, then looked at me. “Uh, well, I don’t know. I’m not even sure who he is.”
“Seriously,” Simone whispered to me, “isn’t my mother a better option?”
“No, she’s not,” Asher answered her. His voice had a threatening edge to it. “My uncle’s orders were that no one else find out about this, and it’s my duty to make sure that no one does. Got it?”
“Fine.” Simone raised her hands in surrender. “But shouldn’t we at least get out of here? Go somewhere else?”
“The monastery is supposed to be the safest place, remember?” I paced around the room.
“Wait.” Simone backed away from me. “You expect us to stay here with … with a …” She lowered her voice. “A dead body?”
“No. Well, yeah,” I said. “But just for tonight. And shhh—that’s Asher’s uncle.”
“Found it!” Asher pulled out a red address book from beneath a folder. He flipped through it, then stopped to look at me. “Cassie, I know we don’t know this guy, but my uncle trusted him—”
“No way. Uh-uh.” I shook my head. “I’m not going on the run again in the middle of the night if it turns out that this person isn’t one of the good guys.”
“The monastery isn’t safe anymore. My uncle was the one guaranteeing us protection from the Hastati—with him gone, there’s no agreement. Nothing to stop them from coming in here and taking you.”
“See,” Simone said. “We should go.”
“But no one even knows we’ve snuck back in here,” I argued while trying to reason everything out. “This is the safest place—at least for tonight.”
Asher thought about it for a few seconds, then tossed the book on the desk. “Fine, for one night.”
Simone gave me a very hesitant nod. “One night.”
“Deal,” I said, knowing that one night was all I needed because I’d already seen tomorrow, and it was going to be everything I’d wished for.
Once we were back in our bedroom, Simone and I collapsed onto the bed. The rush of adrenaline from the entire day had been replaced by total exhaustion. Within minutes, we were both asleep.
Not that I rested much. I kept having nightmares that jarred me awake. I’d dream of dead and decaying bodies littering the sidewalks and camouflaged military trucks patrolling the streets. There were people chasing me until I was cornered on the edge of a rooftop and lost my balance. Plunging to my certain death, I’d wake up. After the fourth time this happened, I decided to go do something productive—find out what instructions Brother Gregorio had left for Asher in that red book.
I tiptoed around the dark room, making sure not to wake up Simone. Taking the unused burner phone off the night table to use its flashlight feature, I noticed an unread text message.
Simone, tell me where you are. You have to trust me. I’m your mother—I know what’s best.
I stared at the message, wondering how Simone’s mother could know this number. It was supposed to be an untraceable throwaway cell. I searched the call history and saw it: A call had been made the day before while we were in Orvieto.
Even though she knew that we weren’t supposed to use the phones, she had called her mother anyway. I wanted to shake her out of her peaceful sleep. She could’ve given away our location and put us all in danger. How could she be so stupid and selfish? I took out the phone’s battery and tossed both pieces on the bed.
“No … I can’t,” Simone mumbled, then turned over … still asleep.
Every trace of anger evaporated. I couldn’t forget that she was putting herself at risk because of me. She had probably been freaked out after being held hostage by the half-eared man and had wanted to talk to her mom. We just had to be more careful. I would talk to her about it in the morning.
Once in the breezeway, I could see the courtyard down below, bathed in a soft glow as dawn broke and the morning’s first light filtered through the skylight above.
The monastery was quiet and peaceful. I glanced over at the closed door of Brother Gregorio’s office. There might be information in there, but I couldn’t find the courage to go inside while Brother Gregorio’s body was still in that chair. The red book would have to do for now. Entering the living room, I noticed we had left all the lights on the night before and that the book was right where Asher had left it—on the desk. I picked it up and began thumbing through it when Asher bolted up from the couch behind me, a knife in his hands.
It was so unexpected that I let out a small scream and dropped the book, knocking down a folder that was on the desk in the process.
“Who? What?” Asher waved the kitchen knife in front of him, his eyes still not focusing on me.
“It’s me,” I said, catching my breath. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Oh.” Asher plopped back down on the couch. “I must’ve dozed off.”
I noticed the dark circles under his eyes. “Have you been down here all night?”
“Yeah.” He put the knife on the coffee table in front of him. “I couldn’t sleep. Plus, I had some stuff to think about.”
“And the knife?” I asked.
“Protection.” He yawned. “In case anybody tried to get to you. What are you doing down here so early?”
“Couldn’t sleep, either.” I bent down to pick up the book and a couple of papers that had slipped out of the folder. “Figured I could use the time to learn a little bit more about what’s going on.”
“From the instructions Zio left me?”
“You never know. There could be …” One of the papers on the floor caught my eye, and I stopped talking. It was a grainy black-and-white still shot from a security camera that showed two men pushing a stretcher into a building.
I put everything else back on the desk and studied the photograph. A date stamp on the bottom left showed that it was taken the day all of this had started.
My hand started to tremble. Could it be? It was hard to be sure, but the patient looked like my dad and the place could definitely be the one I’d seen in my vision. It had to be him.
“Asher, check this out.” I showed him the photograph. There was a name over the front doors—Casa di Cura Oreste. “Do you know this place?”
Asher studied it for a few seconds, and then shook his head. “No, but is that your dad?”
Excitement bubbled up in my chest. My father was going to be released from this place today, this very morning, and now I could be there when he got out. I was bouncing on my toes, anxious to leave and find my dad. “I have to get there before noon. We have to find this place. Where’s your laptop?”
“You had it last, remember? And why before noon?” Asher was barely reacting to our discovery. Then again, it wasn’t his father we were saving. He didn’t even know my dad.
“I … um … I just …” My thoughts were flying off in all directions, and I couldn’t think of what to say.
Asher held up his hand. “Before you lie to me again, you should know that I a
lready figured out what you did.”
“I didn’t do anything,” I said, inching away from him.
“You did. I went along with your story about your grandmother putting the spear in your bag because I didn’t want to believe you’d actually use the spear, but deep inside I knew you had.”
I stayed quiet.
Asher grabbed me by the shoulders. “Listen, Cassie. I’m not mad, but don’t keep lying about it. My uncle’s death confirmed it for me.” He stared into my eyes. “I’m okay with being bound along with you—it’s what I was born to do—but you should’ve told me.”
“Wait, what?” I pushed away his hand. “What do you mean you’re bound? I thought you didn’t have the mark.”
“No, not bound to the spear. Bound to you.”
“Me?” I had no idea what he was talking about. How could I have bound him? I’d thought only marked ones became bound to the spear. The confusion on my face must have been obvious, because Asher started shaking his head.
“Don’t you know what happened? Back in the garden,” he said. “I thought my uncle had explained everything to you.”
I stayed quiet.
“Did he even tell you about Tobias? The person that was bound to the spear before you.”
“Yeah, a little bit, but like I already said, I’m not bound to—”
“To the spear. Yeah, I got it.” He paced around the room for a moment. “So you know Tobias had some crazy plan for making the world a better place by basically killing off most of the population, right?”
I nodded.
“Did my uncle mention he was Tobias’s Guardian?”
“You mean instead of his parents?” I wasn’t sure how that affected anything except for the fact that Brother Gregorio was Asher’s guardian, too.
“No, not like a legal guardian. Guardian in the Hastati sense of the word.” He paused to watch my reaction. Seeing none, he continued. “Do you know what the Guardian does?”
“Don’t they control the spear? It’s the person with a birthmark who guards the spear, and if they become bound to it then they can change destiny. Like me … if I were to be bound to it, which I’m not.”
“Oh, wow.” Asher ran his hands through his hair and looked at me incredulously. “I can’t believe you’ve been running around without knowing all the facts.” He shook his head. “You really don’t know, do you?” he asked. “Cassie, you aren’t the Guardian … I am!”
None of what he was saying made sense. How could he be the Guardian? Wasn’t the Guardian bound to the spear?
Asher took me by the hand and sat me on the couch next to him. “Okay, I don’t know why Zio didn’t tell you everything, but here it is. The spear is made up of two things, the actual spearhead and the marked person that’s bound to it. You need both to access the power to change destiny. Make sense so far?”
“Yeah, I kinda knew that already.”
“Okay, so a bound person is necessary to use the spear and that makes this person a huge target for the Hastati. I mean, obviously we’ve seen that people will be hunted down and killed just because they have the mark and the potential of being part of the spear’s power. But the Guardian is someone who protects the person who is bound to the spear … makes sure no one harms them in this world and that they don’t get lost inside the Realm of Possibilities.”
A shiver ran down my spine at the thought of what could have happened when I used the spear to save my dad. That giant void I’d felt and the visions I’d seen must be what he was talking about. “What exactly is it? The realm … ?”
“I don’t know much about it,” Asher admitted. “It’s like another dimension or something. People who go inside can get lost in it if a Guardian doesn’t ground them to reality. That’s why every bound person basically gets a Guardian … for life.”
I clasped my neck and pulled my head back. This was a lot to absorb.
“It gets weirder,” Asher warned. “When I say for life, it’s really ‘for life.’ The Guardian will die if something happens to the marked person that’s bound to the spear. It’s like a built-in incentive to do a good job and not turn on them.”
“And what makes you think you’re my Guardian?” I asked.
“Didn’t you feel it? In the garden when I touched you. I tried convincing myself that it was just some weird static electricity, but it wasn’t.” He sighed. “Then when we found my uncle, I knew for sure.”
“I don’t see what your uncle has to do with it,” I said, still very confused.
“My uncle was Tobias’s Guardian; it was his job to protect him. But he knew that Tobias wasn’t going to live much longer, which meant he would die soon, too.”
“So Tobias is dead?”
“Probably. I mean, a Guardian’s death doesn’t really affect the person who’s bound to the spear … But chances are my uncle died because Tobias died.”
“Ok-a-a-a-y.”
“Which means that the spear’s power was up for grabs again. So someone”—Asher raised his eyebrows and stressed the word—“could become bound and use the spear.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And that someone would need a Guardian to bring them out of the realm.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat. It wasn’t only my life that was forever changed by the spear; I had changed Asher’s, too. Now I felt guilty.
“I … I didn’t know I was bringing you into it,” I stammered.
“Aha!” He pointed a finger at me. “You admit you touched it!”
“What! You made all that up?”
“No, no. Everything I said is true. I just wanted you to finally admit it!” He sat back against the sofa. “So now that I’m forever involved, are you going to tell me what you did and why we have to find your dad before noon?”
I hesitated. I’d convinced myself that no one would ever know what I’d done, that being bound wouldn’t change anything as long as I never used the spear again and just turned it over to the Hastati. But this was now a secret I’d have to share with Asher.
“I used it to save my dad. He was dying; I saw it!” I took a breath. “So I changed the future. Picked a path where he was alive and I even saw that I’d be with him at the hospital today at 11:58 in the morning. I had no choice. I couldn’t let him die.”
Asher simply nodded. I couldn’t forget that he’d lost both his parents and now his uncle. Maybe he would’ve done the same thing for them if given a chance.
“That’s what I figured,” he said.
“I was willing to sacrifice myself for my dad, but I didn’t mean for anything to happen to you. Maybe if I’d known, I—”
“An early morning rendezvous?” Simone called out. She had one hand on the doorframe and a smug look on her face. Her smirk quickly faded as she realized that she’d just interrupted a serious conversation. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” Asher responded, his left foot pushing against mine. “Nothing at all.”
Simone drew closer. “Cassie, what’s going on?”
She knew something was up, but I couldn’t tell her what I’d done. It was bad enough that I’d managed to suck Asher into all of this; I couldn’t do that to Simone. It wouldn’t be fair to her.
“My dad,” I said. “I think we know where he is.” I got up and took the picture from the desk to show her. “I think it’s a hospital or something.”
“Casa di Cura Oreste,” Simone read the name out loud. “Are we going there? Is that what you were talking about?”
Asher and I exchanged a brief look. “Yes,” we both said in unison.
“Uh-huh.” Simone didn’t look convinced. “And once we go there and get your dad, then what?”
“We give the spear to the Hastati and then everything goes back to normal,” I said.
“Cassie, I hate to break it to you, but the Hastati aren’t going to just let you go. And where are you going to go that they won’t find you? Even with fake passports.” Simone was pointing out some big holes in my plan. “I
think we need to make sure we have some leverage, something that leaves the Hastati with no choice but to back off.”
“Like what?” We had no leverage except the spear. Was she thinking that we should hold it hostage or hide it again? But that would just make us even bigger targets.
“I don’t know.” Simone looked away. “Something.”
“I think we should call the guy my uncle mentioned.” Asher stood up to get the red book. “He might be able to help.”
“Or he might not,” I pointed out. “Why don’t we wait and see what my dad says, okay?”
“But your dad might not be in any condition to help us.” Simone bit the edge of her fingernail. “He was in a coma.”
I wanted so badly to tell her that everything was going to be fine. It was killing me to have her worry needlessly. “I have a feeling he’ll be okay. So let’s find him first and then we can decide, all right?”
“I still think we need help,” Simone said under her breath.
I gave Asher a look, pleading with my eyes for him to back me up.
“Cassie’s right.” Asher gave me a slight nod. “Let’s see what we find before we get anyone else involved.” He stood up and went to the door. “I’ll go get my laptop so we can figure out how to get to Casa di Cura Oreste.”
“Guess I’m outnumbered.” Simone shrugged and focused on her nail again. “We’ll do it your way.”
I thought she had decided to go along with our idea, but the moment Asher was gone, Simone pulled me off the couch and dragged me to the far corner of the room. “Listen, before Asher gets back,” she whispered, “we should really talk about contacting my mom. We—you, your dad, and me—can all go to my house in Praiano. It’s like a fortress. No one will find us. Once we’re there my mom can help us figure out who should get the spear.”
“Simone, no.” I couldn’t be more definitive in my answer. “You haven’t told her anything, have you?”
“Of course not.”
“Simo-o-ne?” My eyes narrowed, and I tried reading her. “I know you called your mother when we were in Orvieto.”
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