She reached for my hand across the table and squeezed.
“Oh,” she said, jumping up. “I almost forgot.”
She disappeared into the hallway and came back a few seconds later with a small box wrapped in gold paper.
“Happy birthday,” she said with a smile. She sat down in the chair next to me and put the box on the table in front of me.
I bit my lower lip to hide a smile. “You didn’t have to get me anything.”
“Open it,” she said. She placed a hand over her heart, a sweet expression in her eyes.
I tore the side of the pretty gold wrapping paper and lifted the top off a beautiful white satin box.
Inside, nestled in tissue paper, was a wedding veil attached to a diamond tiara.
Tears welled in my eyes, and I brought a hand to my mouth. “Was this yours?”
“Yes.” She fingered the delicate lace, a dreamy look in her eyes. “Edward and I were married twenty years ago this December. It’s hard to believe how fast the time flies.”
She swiped a finger under her lashes.
“You’ve become like one of my own daughters, Harper,” she said. “I know your mother never got to have a wedding of her own, but if she had, I’m sure she would have wanted you to have something to remember her by. It doesn’t make up for what you’ve lost, but hopefully it will remind you that you are greatly loved.”
Tears fell freely down my cheeks, and I stood to hug her with both arms.
“This means so much to me,” I said. “Thank you.”
“I wasn’t sure if you’d be wearing a crown by then or if there were other demon traditions you’d want to honor, but—”
“It’s perfect,” I said. “We haven’t even thought about preparations for the wedding, and if there really is an attack coming soon, I think it might be awhile before we can even think about it, but I’m sure that when the time comes, I’ll want to honor both the human and demon sides of my heritage.”
We held each other for a long time before we parted, both of us crying like babies.
“This means more to me than you can know,” I said.
“I love you, Harper. You deserve so much happiness,” she said.
“Someday, when all this is over and the Order is defeated, we will celebrate with a wedding,” I said.
“Oh, my sweet girl, don’t delay your own joy for them,” she said. “No matter how hard you fight, there will always be suffering in this world. That’s part of the balance of life. If you focus too much on the sorrow, what are you really fighting for, anyway?”
I smiled and ran my fingers across the lace of the veil.
“And you’re sure Caroline and Meredith won’t mind?” I asked. “I can give it back to them if they want to wear it at their own weddings, someday.”
“Trust me, I don’t plan on getting married anytime soon,” Caroline said from the doorway of the kitchen.
I threw my arms open and she came running toward me, nearly knocking me over.
“I’ve been dying to see you,” she said. “Did you really get engaged? Let me see the ring.”
She pulled my hands toward her and then frowned, touching the only ring I’d ever worn, a sapphire I’d taken from the hunters in the Shadow World.
I laughed and showed her the locket, instead. “In Shadow Demon tradition, they don’t exchange diamond rings like we do,” I said. “They give something called a heart stone.”
“Can I see it?” she asked, touching her fingers to the locket.
“It’s locked inside and can only be seen by the person you’re engaged to.”
“How does it work?”
“Well, in their tradition, they take a clear stone similar to a diamond and place it near their heart. When they think of the person they’re going to marry, their true feelings for them are transferred into the stone as pure light. The brighter the light, the more pure and true the love that shines from it.”
Caroline sighed. “That’s incredibly romantic,” she said.
“Yeah, as long as you see a bright light.” A young girl about Caroline’s age came around from behind her and leaned against the doorframe. “Was yours bright?”
“Hi, Sophie,” I said. “How are things going for you here in Cypress?”
She shrugged and rolled her eyes. “As good as can be expected,” she said, a slight French accent coloring her words. “School is boring and all the boys are stupid, but other than that, I guess I can’t complain.”
I glanced at Eloise and she shook her head and turned away.
Sophie was sort of a refugee here in Cypress. She was the daughter of a Prima in a sapphire demon gate town in a small city in France. When we went over there to perform our ritual, a battle had broken out between some of the demons who had gone free and the witches who didn’t want to let them go.
Nearly everyone in Sophie’s coven had died, including her mother and two sisters.
We had found her alone in her mother’s house, crying and covered in blood. It was horrifying. I had wanted to take her home to Brighton Manor with us, but Eloise offered to take her instead, promising me that Sophie would have a much more normal life here with her.
I had meant to come by and check on her more often, but life had been so busy. Between managing school, trying to help demons and witches from the freed sapphire gates find their place in the new world, and researching anything we could find on the remaining priestesses of the Order, I’d only been by twice since she moved in with Eloise.
“I’m sure the heart stone Jackson gave Harper was the brightest one ever,” Caroline said. “I’ve never seen two people more in love.”
I smiled and hugged Caroline again. “It was bright,” I whispered.
“I knew it,” she said. “But I still think he should have to get you a ring.”
“We’ll see.” I grabbed my backpack off the floor and placed the box with the veil inside. “I’m sorry to have to leave already, but it’s a long drive home, and I still have to be up for school in the morning.”
“I’ll see you out,” Eloise said.
I hugged Caroline one last time and made her promise to text her older sister Meredith a hello from me. She and Sophie said goodnight and bounded back up the stairs to finish their homework.
At the door, Eloise paused. “One more thing,” she said. “You never told me who you think the woman in the cloak is. The one from your dream.”
I put my sweatshirt back on and pulled the hood over my head to hide my face.
“I have no idea,” I said. I didn’t tell her about Jackson’s visions of the same woman. I didn’t want to have to explain what else I’d seen in those drawings. “But whoever she is, I think she’s trying to help.”
“I hope you’re right,” she said. “Just be careful, Harper. Don’t trust anyone completely.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s a lesson I’ve had to learn the hard way.”
“Once your eyes are opened to the true world around us, trust is the hardest thing to come by,” she said.
“That’s why I’m so glad I found you.”
She smiled and hugged me close. “I love you,” she said. “Don’t stay away too long.”
I nodded and slipped out into the cool evening air, hoping the next time I came to see her, we would be closer to finding a way to free her from the Order.
What We’d Been Afraid Of
I walked through the front door of Brighton Manor well after midnight. I thought of the delicate white box in my bag, and held back tears of gratitude. I may not have gotten a chance to know my real mother, but the relationship I had with Eloise was strong, and I was grateful every day for her presence in my life.
Jackson and I hadn’t had a chance to talk about wedding plans, but holding the first piece of my wedding attire in my arms made me giddy.
I had never been the kind of girl who dreamed about her wedding, and I was never naive enough to believe I’d have a father who would walk me down the aisle or be able to look down from the ste
ps of some chapel at my mother, dabbing a tissue at her eyes. That was the kind of fantasy reserved for romance novels and romantic movies. It was never going to be my reality, and I had come to terms with that a long time ago.
But making this promise to the man I loved and building a family of our own together was the greatest dream of my life.
Maybe Eloise was right. Maybe we shouldn’t wait for this war to be over to start thinking about the ceremony. Maybe it would be better to start planning something right away. It might be good to focus on something happy for a change.
Part of me wanted to go to the living room and get on one of the old laptops to start looking at wedding gowns, but there was still so much work to be done. I needed to read through Eloise’s grandmother’s journal for any clues about the real emerald priestess.
With Priestess Winter, we had at least known who she was and where she lived. Her other sisters had not been as easy to find.
Zara knew more information than anyone. As a third daughter, she’d been trained in magic and battle, groomed to take over as her mother’s guardian when she got older. That’s how I had first met her, actually. When my life as the future Prima of Peachville was threatened by an outside group, she had been sent here to protect me.
And when she’d learned the truth of her mother’s nature, she had joined our side, fighting with us against her own family.
The information she’d learned as a child was extremely valuable to us now. She had been able to tell us that the citrine priestess in control of the European gates was Priestess Alexandra, the youngest of the five sisters. She lived in Italy and Zara had even visited her a couple of times, though they used the Hall of Doorways to get there, so she wasn’t exactly sure how to get there without the doors. Still, the fact that she even knew which door to use was valuable to us since we still had a working hallway in our house.
But Zara’s knowledge of the other three sisters was limited. She had met them a few times, but it was so easy for the priestesses to change their appearance that we couldn’t rely on that to find them.
All we did know for certain was that four out of the five original sisters who created the Order two hundred years ago were still alive and ruling the Order today, and that a mysterious High Priestess seemed to rule over them all in some way.
Beyond a few details, though, we knew almost nothing.
I paused outside a room on the right. This used to be Mrs. Shadowford’s living quarters. She used to run the girls’ home here.
Now that Mrs. Shadowford was gone, we had turned these rooms into our battle headquarters. All the information we’d gathered about the various gates and priestesses was in these two rooms.
I stared at a large map of the world we’d put up on the wall. We’d used color-coded pushpins to mark demon gates in each of the five gemstone colors: sapphire, emerald, citrine, amethyst, and ruby. We had some knowledge that there might also be diamond gates somewhere, ruled by the High Priestess herself, but if they existed, we had yet to find them.
My eyes sought out the green pins, studying their locations and trying to find some type of pattern. There had to be a reason why one gate was chosen as an emerald gate and another was more suited to sapphire. But what? And did it really matter?
These were the types of questions that kept me up at night. Sometimes I thought that if I could unravel the secrets of the Order’s creation and discover their methods for choosing one place over another or one stone over another, it might unlock all kinds of opportunities for us to understand and hunt them down.
Like sapphire, the majority of emerald gates were here in the United States. I felt certain the emerald priestess’s home portal had to be somewhere nearby, as well. We just had to find it. Once we knew where to find her, we could finally begin piecing together a plan to kill her and free the emerald gates, just as we had done for the sapphire ones.
If we could just attack her before she had the chance—
“Harper?”
I jumped slightly at Mary Anne’s voice. “You scared me,” I said, laughing. “I thought everyone would be asleep by now.”
“Essex and I were up playing video games,” she said. “He just went up to bed, and I was about to grab a snack in the kitchen. Wanna join me?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’m starving.”
“I thought you were eating at Eloise’s?”
We walked to the kitchen and Mary Anne grabbed a bowl of grapes from the fridge.
“She made spaghetti,” I said. “But we got to talking and I just kind of lost my appetite.”
“Ooh, you should have told her to wrap it up for you,” she said. “I love her spaghetti.”
“Me, too.”
I made myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and joined Mary Anne at the table. I put my backpack on the chair next to me and smiled at the thought of the white box inside.
“What are you smiling about?” she asked. “You look like the cat who ate the canary.”
I put my sandwich down and opened the backpack. I carefully removed the white box and slid it toward her.
“What’s this?”
I smiled again, my cheeks warming at the thought. “Open it,” I said. “Just be careful. Get grape juice on it and I’ll kill you.”
She narrowed her eyes at me, but played along. She pulled the box toward her and lifted the lid. Her mouth fell open and she looked over at me, excitement sparkling in her bright blue eyes. “Is this what I think it is?”
I nodded. “Can you believe she gave it to me?”
“Take it out. I want to see,” she said.
I lifted the wedding veil from the box and placed the tiara on my head, pushing the cathedral-length lace veil behind me. I stood up and turned so she could see the pearls woven into the delicate fabric. “Isn’t it gorgeous?”
“Wow,” she said. “It’s perfect. I mean, for a white veil, I guess. When I get married, I’m going to wear all black.”
I giggled and reached up to remove it when the back door opened.
Lea stepped halfway inside, and then froze.
Her face turned to stone, and when our eyes met, my stomach twisted. Dammit. The smile faded from my lips and I dropped my eyes to my feet.
“Sorry, we were just—”
“Forget it,” she muttered.
I turned and wrapped the lace around the tiara and placed it back inside the box. I couldn’t get that look on her face out of my mind. I hated knowing something that brought me so much joy could bring an equal amount of pain to someone else.
It was going to be awkward around here for a while, and I made a mental note to be a lot more careful about making any references to the wedding here in the main rooms of the house.
I closed the top of the box and placed it back inside my bag so she didn’t have to look at it.
“We missed you at school today, by the way,” I said.
The muscles in Lea’s jaw tightened and she took a deep breath. Without a single word, she blew past me and disappeared into the hallway.
I dropped my shoulders and ran a hand over my forehead. “Man, that sucked.”
“The veil is beautiful,” Mary Anne said. “You shouldn’t let her keep you from enjoying this.”
“I feel like an asshole,” I said, slumping back down in my chair. “How am I going to plan an entire wedding with us both living in the same house? I feel like I’m torturing her.”
“She’ll get over it,” Mary Anne said with a shrug. “You have to live your life.”
“Put yourself in her position,” I said. I touched the satin edge of the box peeking out of the bag and shook my head. “I never meant to hurt her.”
“You have the biggest heart of anyone I’ve ever met, “ Mary Anne said. “If she doesn’t know that, that’s on her.”
“I’m going to put this away for now.” I stood and lifted the backpack onto my shoulder.
The back door opened again, and I spun around, expecting to see another one of my friends.
Instead, Tuli, my handmaiden from the castle, stood in the doorway, her face pale and full of fear. She could barely catch her breath.
Fear gripped me, and I dropped the bag to the floor.
“Tuli, what is it?” I asked. All I could see in my mind were the drawings Jackson had shown me of my father’s domed city in the Southern Kingdom, the streets running with blood.
“Hunters,” she said between breaths. “We need help.”
I ran into the hallway, my heart beating wildly. “Lea,” I shouted. She was making her way up the stairs, but stopped and turned, her eyes wide. “Grab anyone who’s still here. My father’s castle is being attacked.”
Mary Anne ran past me and up the stairs, calling for Essex. Jackson and Aerden came to stand on the landing above the staircase. My eyes met Jackson’s across the distance.
“It’s happening,” I said.
I shifted to white smoke, taking my faster demon form and flying through the hall and out the back door. I reached the lake in seconds.
White roses covered the banks of the small lake, their perfect blooms still bright even in the nearly freezing November air. I stepped among the flowers and let my body pass from the human world to the Shadow World, knowing this was what we had been waiting for. This is what we’d been afraid of for months.
The war with the Order of Shadows had finally found us again.
Out Of Time
I stepped through the portal and entered a war zone.
Magic of every type collided with the invisible dome that protected the city, going off like multi-colored fireworks, blossoming as sparks flew in every direction. The dome absorbed the attacks, but I knew the magic wouldn’t hold forever.
Above the madness of color and explosions, dark shadowy figures flew past like ghosts, their rotting faces illuminated with each of the blasts.
Hunters.
More of them than I’d ever seen or imagined.
My heart tightened, and I had to force back the wild feeling of panic that threatened to unravel me.
A group of guards had gathered on the steps of my father’s castle, and I quickly shifted and flew toward them. The head of the guards, Gregory, my father’s most trusted second-in-command, grabbed my arm when I shifted back to my human form.
Emerald Darkness Page 5