The Curse of Blood (Love Lines Book 4)

by Diana Nixon

  “It’s not your fault things have changed,” Eileen said. “I’m sure Lucas will understand.”

  “But I will still feel like a traitor,” I mumbled, sitting on the couch.

  “We will all be there for you, to help you get through whatever comes next.”

  “I know. I just don’t know how to live and enjoy my life, knowing that I ruined some else’s.”

  “Oh, Dear.” Eileen sat next to me, wrapping one arm around my shoulders. “It all happens for a reason, you know?”

  “Really? I wish I knew that reason. Because it feels like everything that happens brings even more tears and misery to our lives.”

  Eileen laughed quietly. “I know the feeling. That is how I feel every single day. I wake up in the morning and I realize that today won’t be any easier than yesterday.”

  “What did Evan say about Lucas and me?”

  “Not much, actually. He only said that he never expected his karma to stop being a bitch.”

  “That makes two of us,” I smiled, wiping a tear that was rolling down my cheek.

  “Trust me, Amanda, true love overcomes everything.”

  Chapter 19

  Eileen

  It was around six in the evening when William, Christian and I got to the gates. According to the plan, Will was supposed to make the guards believe that Christian and I were leaving together. They knew that I was not allowed to leave campus alone, so I really hoped that our plan would work.

  “Just try to play it cool,” Will said to me. “They will immediately feel your fear, so do your best to not mess anything up.”

  “Well, thanks for your concern,” I said, giving him a meaningful glance. “But I know what I’m doing.”

  “God knows you don’t have a damn clue,” he mumbled, knocking at the door of the guard post. “Why on earth do they have to have Keepers do this job?”

  “My father thought it was better to change Vero guards to Keepers, since their guarding skills are much more effective,” Christian said.

  The door opened with a loud creak.

  “Yes?” One of the Keepers said, looking at the three of us suspiciously.

  “We are sorry for bothering you at such a late hour, but we need your help,” I said.

  “Who’s there?” The other Keeper asked, standing behind the first one. We knew there would be only two of them, which I hoped, would make Will’s masterminding job easier.

  “These kids have some problem they say they need our help with.”

  Will rolled his eyes at the word ‘kids’.

  “What happened?”

  I could feel that the more time we wasted on explanations, the harder it would be to make them believe us. After all, they were too damn good at sensing lies.

  Will spoke, “My friends need to leave. It’s an emergency that can’t wait.” I knew his powers were already working. His gaze was focused, his voice sounded a little harsh.

  The Keepers shared a glance, as if they knew they would let us out, but couldn’t understand why would they do that. “Of course,” one of them said after a short pause. “Be careful.” He pushed the red button on the control board and the gates opened.

  For a second, I couldn’t believe my eyes. We were free now.

  “Don’t forget to come back by dawn,” Will said, giving me a hug. There was such a thing as temporary masterminding, which meant that all the things that he made the Keepers think would disappear with the first rays of the sun. I knew Will was a little afraid of fooling them, that’s why I agreed to a temporary ‘spell’, hoping it would help us deal with the consequences of whatever we were doing.

  Christian and I went through the gates, and went to the road where Tara had already been waiting for me. We didn’t know who else to ask to drive me to London, where I was going to take a flight to Ashburn, a place where I hoped I would find Elizabeth. Tara was ,one of Dever’s teachers now, so she was allowed to leave campus whenever she wanted.

  “Call me when you land,” Christian said.

  I nodded wordlessly and leaned into his embrace. I knew he was worried about me, he didn’t even try to hide his feelings, but I couldn’t blame him for that. I myself could barely control my own emotions right now.

  “I’ll be fine,” I said before I gave him a kiss.

  “You’d better.” He smiled slightly and took a step back. “Now, go. Remember, you have less than twelve hours to come back.”

  “I know.” I turned to the waiting car, mentally praying for everything to go well.

  “Nervous?” Tara asked, starting the engine.

  “That doesn’t even begin to cover it.”

  She smiled encouragingly. “You can do this, Eileen. We’ve been through worse situations than this.”

  “Have we?”

  “Well, I’m sure that facing Elizabeth will be one hell of a meeting, but I still hope that she won’t try to hurt you. I had a vision, you know?”

  “Really? Did it show me coming back to Dever?”

  “Yes, but you were not alone there. I also saw a man coming with you.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “I wish I did.”

  “Did you see anything else?” We all knew how good Tara was at seeing into the future. And her visions had always been true.

  “He will ask you to take him through the gates, and you will obey. But I can feel that he’s a bad man. So please, if you see someone you don’t know, or someone you feel like you need to stay away from, don’t look into his eyes.”

  “Um, what? Are you saying I’m going to see another Lord tonight?”

  “Anything is possible.”

  I took a deep breath, feeling my heart pound in my chest.

  “Maybe the idea of traveling alone was not as brilliant as I thought after all.”

  “We all know that you don’t have a choice,” Tara said.

  “Do you think Evan will get angry?”

  “I don’t see him getting angry actually. I tried to foresee his reaction, but the weirdest thing, I didn’t see anything. As if he wouldn’t let me.”

  “That’s strange, isn’t it?”

  “It is strange. I’ve never failed when trying to foresee Evan’s actions.”

  “Why would he try to hide them from you?”

  “I don’t know. But something tells me that it was done unintentionally.”

  Hmm…

  I frowned, trying to understand what Tara’s words meant. “You don’t see him trying to find his mother, do you?”

  “I’m sure he won’t try to do that without you.”

  At least it was a little good news. I knew that Evan wanted to go with me, but my sixth sense was telling me that taking him out of Dever was a bad idea.

  We travelled for about two hours, talking about the wedding and trying really hard to not switch to the numerous problems that we had at home. We both realized that there was nothing more important than helping Evan now.

  “Text me if you have any more visions that are different from what you have already seen,” I said to Tara, waiting for my turn to get on board. There were about two dozen people flying with me, but I still felt like I was already in a trap that I didn’t know how to get out of.

  “I will,” she said, hugging me. “Be careful, Eileen. Even if you have to sacrifice something very important, do it to save yourself.”

  I didn’t know what she meant by that, but I still thanked her for giving me a lift and promised to call her as soon as I landed in Ashburn, which was south of Britain.

  I had always been a little afraid of flying. Especially after all those nightmares I saw while flying from my hometown Norfield to Dever. I could always understand what the wind was saying when there was a windstorm, so every time I went on a plane, it was like stepping right in the middle of a hurricane filled with bad news.

  This time it was different, I didn’t hear the song of the wind and I was alone with my fears. I was terrified, and all I could feel was my heart beating like a thunderstorm
in my chest, blood pounding in my ears, and the blood that wasn’t pounding in my ears was running like an icy river through my body.

  As promised, I called Christian and Tara as soon as my feet touched the ground again. My assumption was that Elizabeth would be surprised to see me today. I was sure she thought I would need more time to figure out the password to her secret hideaway.

  Peter said that his son’s farm was on the west side of Ashburn, so I took a bus where I happened to be the only passenger and went to the outskirts of the town.

  The night was uncharacteristically windy. It looked like the wind didn’t want to help me this time, because I couldn’t understand a word that it was singing. I came to a wooden fence, spreading out both ways along the side of the road, took the horseshoe that I had been keeping in my pocket out and put it against the wood. Nothing happened.

  “The spells break,” I said aloud. And again, I didn’t see any changes around me.

  Was I wrong about the password? Was my trip pointless? Ugh, I couldn’t believe it was all for nothing.

  I put my hands on the fence and looked around again. I didn’t see any houses, or other buildings that the fence would be separating from the road.

  It should be here, I thought to myself. What other password could I use to break the spell of invisibility? I started thinking back to everything that had happened before the moment I came to Ashburn. There should be something that I could use as a key to finding Evan’s mother. There should be something that was the key to everything that had been happening to us lately…

  I looked at the horseshoe again and remembered the one drawn on my old bedroom door. This one didn’t have any flowers or patterns on it, but…

  “That’s it,” I whispered, still staring at the metal piece. “The rose.”

  The moment the words left my mouth, everything around me started to change. The wind didn’t seem to be so wild anymore. The surroundings didn’t seem to be so scary anymore. And finally, I saw the image of a house forming in front of my eyes. I took out a bottle with Marion’s elixir and poured a few drops of it to the ground to make the image clearer.

  Finally, I saw an old house made of red bricks, with wooden shutters and a half-ruined roof. Age-old oaks spread all over the farm’s land. They looked so majestic, even magical. I opened the gate and took a few steps towards the house when something caught my eye.

  There was movement behind the trees. But it was so fast, for a moment I thought I was seeing things.

  “Don’t make a sound,” the voice behind me said. My heart dropped to my feet. I knew the owner of the voice.

  Slowly, I turned around and saw Elizabeth standing just a few feet away from me. She wasn’t smiling or talking. She was simply watching me; I couldn’t read anything she was thinking by looking at her face.

  Then she nodded to the house and walked to the entrance, not even turning around to make sure that I followed her.

  It’s a good sign that I’m still alive, isn’t it?

  My knees were trembling badly, but I kept going, hoping she didn’t just want to entrap me or kill me, or worse — torture me inside the damn house.

  Only when I was about to enter it, I turned around and saw nothing, nothing at all. The fence and the trees were all gone, as if they had never been there at all. And I finally realized that there was no way out of whatever I had gotten myself into.

  “Close the door,” Elizabeth said quietly. I complied and quietly shut the door behind me after I entered the house.

  She went to what I assumed was a living room, with only an old dark-red couch and a fireplace. It was burning, enlightening the room and making it look somehow less cold and frightening.

  “You’ve exceeded my expectations, Eileen.” Elizabeth turned around and looked at me. Her face was still unreadable, but I could feel that she wasn’t going to attack me. She even allowed me to see the colours of her aura, and I was sure they were all real, she wasn’t masking the actual shades her aura contained.

  “You say it with so much irony,” I said, smirking. “Didn’t you want me to find you?”

  “I did. And I’m more than happy to know that you’ve made it here tonight.”

  “I don’t have much time, so I would really appreciate you telling me the truth. What am I doing here?”

  “What did you come here for?” She asked in response.

  The answer came immediately. “I want to help Evan. Whatever it is that he has to face, I want to be with him when it happens.”

  “I know. That’s why I wanted you to find me.”

  “Why me?”

  “I can’t tell you everything now, Eileen. But I can tell you that your bond with Evan has always been supposed to save him.”

  “What do you mean? The bond was the decision that I had to make. No one knew we would be bound together.”

  Elizabeth smiled slightly, shaking her head. “You are so wrong, Eileen. Everything happens for a reason, right? So why do you think that what happened to you and Evan was a coincidence?”

  I thought about everything she was saying to me, but I still couldn’t understand what she was trying to tell me.

  “You two were predestined to go through all of those trials together. Not even one of them has been by accident.”

  “Are you saying that every second of our lives has been planned?”

  “Yes.”

  “You can’t be serious.” I laughed nervously.

  “I’ve never been more serious about anything. You might not be able to understand it now, but one day, you will. And then everything will take its place.”

  “What about Evan? I know he’s turning into a Lord of Mind. Is there a way to stop it?”

  Elizabeth looked at me with her eyes full of surprise. “So you have figured out that much already?”

  “Yes, I have. I also know that your husband must be one of the Lords too, because there’s no other way Evan could have possibly turned into one if his father wasn’t a Lord.”

  She still seemed to be a little shocked by my words, but I kept talking, “Will Evan be a special Lord, a Master of Lords? What exactly are you going to turn him into?”

  “Before you continue asking more questions, I want you to know that I never wanted it. All my life, I’ve been trying to stop the changes happening to my son. But it felt like no matter how hard I tried, nothing worked. And my husband still found a way to pass his gift to Evan.”

  There was only one question that I couldn’t wait to ask.

  “How much time do we have?”

  “Not much. A few days maybe.”

  I felt a lump forming in my throat. “What do you want from me?”

  “You need to help me get back to Dever.”

  “What? Are you out of your mind? I can’t do that!”

  “There’s no other way I can protect Evan. I need to be with him.”

  “The Keepers won’t let you in. Do you realize that?”

  “I do. That’s why I need your help.”

  “I won’t help you until I know the entire truth. Even if you threaten to kill me, I will never betray my friends. I won’t help you, until you tell me everything.”

  Elizabeth looked at her watch. “Then I think I need to start now.” She sat on the couch and patted the seat next to her. “Come, sit with me. You know, I’m not going to kill you.”

  I hesitated.

  “Trust me, Eileen, if I wanted to hurt you, you wouldn’t ever be able to cross the threshold of this house to leave.”

  I didn’t want to argue with that. After all, I was just a girl, and she was more experienced than I was.

  I sat on the couch and looked around carefully. “Are we alone here?” I could see at least three more doors leading to other rooms.

  “For now, yes.”

  “Is Salazar somewhere near?” There was no point in pretending. I wanted her to know that I knew so much more than she would ever imagine.

  “My God, child, how did you know about him?”

/>   I smiled curtly. “It’s not your turn to ask questions.”

  She looked at me again and then nodded. “You are right. We are running out of time.”

  “So tell me, when did it all start?”

  “First of all, I’d like to warn you that there might be a few things that you will be disgusted to hear, but please, remember that people do make mistakes. Some more than others.”

  “I don’t think I could be more shocked than I already am.”

  “Fine.” She took a deep breath and took a ring from her pocket. “Do you know what is this?”

  “Dominic’s sapphire ring, symbolizing his power over the brotherhood.”

  “Yes. But it also keeps all the powers that he has ever possessed within the sapphire. Including the power of masterminding. It can’t be destroyed, otherwise I would have gotten rid of it a long time ago.”

  “How could Dominic be a Lord if he possessed magic?”

  “He has never been a Lord in the usual meaning of the word. But I think I should tell you a few things that preceded my marriage with him.” She rose to her feet and went to a window that was half-covered with a muddy-gray torn curtain. I wondered why she didn’t do anything to the interior of the house? She surely couldn’t enjoy this view that left so much to be desired.

  “It all started in a place that you know as the rose field,” Elizabeth said. “Many centuries ago, there was a house that belonged to a magician; the woman was incredibly talented. No other gifts but magic existed at that time, and she was damn good at ruling over it. She could cast any spell, she could have anything she wanted, she could make any living creature obey her.

  But one day, she heard a conversation from some people living nearby. They were talking about her. They said was a witch, and that she needed to die. It was probably the first time that she ever realized her life was not going to last forever. That’s why she decided to do something that would change everything and turn the world into a place where only gifted people would be able to live happily. She had two sons each of which had received a very special gift. The sons’ wives and children were gifted too.

  As you may have already guessed, each of them received one of the gifts that we possess today. But only the woman possessed magic. She also had the power of masterminding. One day, she created a collection of jewelry pieces, each piece was supposed to become a symbol of each different power that her relatives got.”