When I looked down, my body was still lying there in a pool of my own blood, and I quickly realized that my time in that room, and in Zoe’s life, was coming to an end.
Chapter 33
Well, that was unexpected, I thought as I looked down at my beaten and bloody body.
Voices started echoing down the corridor outside the room. The man without a face swung his head back and forth between the door and Zoe. I couldn’t see his facial expressions, but I could tell he was starting to panic. He crouched, pushed past Zoe’s screams to claw at the Opalescence around her neck. He turned, just as the voices breached the hallway behind the door, and then his body rapidly evaporated into ripples of light. A short breeze followed and he was completely gone, with the Opalescence.
At least she’s alright, I thought.
My body and everything around it was starting to shift out of focus. Cooper and Liv, the voices from the hallway, ran into the room. Liv held my crying niece in her arms and Cooper looked around for the man without a face. They were saying something, but I couldn’t hear them as they slowly drifted away and became nothing more than silhouettes of my past.
So much for destiny.
Or, maybe, dying then and there was my destiny. Maybe the rest of the story was meant to play out without me. Everything was becoming so blurry, and I was overcome with the greatest sense of calm.
“That didn’t really work out, did it?” Kevin said, appearing next to me.
“I tried,” I said, hardly able to make out anything in the room anymore.
He came up beside me and wrapped his arm around my shoulder. “I know you did,” he said.
“Am I dead?”
“No, not yet at least. Death itself can be easy. The pain leading up to death, well, that can be less easy sometimes. I think when the body is dealt more pain than it can handle, you disconnect from it, and you end up here.”
“Where is here?” I asked.
“I don’t know exactly, but it’s sort of a spiritual crossroads. A fold in between the physical and spiritual planes. Most people are only here for the briefest of moments—hardly long enough to notice. They either go back into their bodies or move on. I think staying here is just one more thing our connection to the Opalescence changes.”
“So, what now? Do we just wait here until I die?”
“That’s really up to you. This won’t end with tonight, Hat. He still has the Opalescence, and it’s only a matter of time before he figures out how to use it. And when he does, it’s going to be a shit storm of problems. We can stand here and wait for you to die, if that’s what you want, or you can go back and end this.”
“How exactly? You just said I’m practically dead over here. It’s over,” I yelled. I realized I felt more fear for what I had left behind than what was in front of me. I could welcome death, gladly almost, but I couldn’t welcome the havoc the Opalescence could wreak on my family.
“It’s not over yet. People can say whatever they want about the Walkers, but there are some things that are core to who we are, and they can’t understand it. We’re born with this insane tenacity, a way of pulling ourselves up out of the ashes, despite everything and everyone, to keep on fighting. We do it even when we have every right in the world to lie down and give up. Your mother was like that, and so are you.”
“I used to think I was a lot like her, but I don’t know anymore. I don’t think I even knew who she was.”
“Secrets have an unfair way of making you feel disconnected from the person who keeps them from you, especially after they die. You may not understand the choices she made, but she was still the mother you knew and loved. Magic was only a small part of her, and not even the best part. You’re strong like she was, and you have to believe me that you’re enough like her to be able to rise up out of these ashes and end this.”
A door appeared in the blurred background as Kevin spoke. “Where does that go?” I asked.
“To some unfinished business. If you are going to end this, you’re going to need all the help you can get.” The door opened slowly by itself. “That door will lead you back to The Trials of Truth.”
“No,” I yelled. “I can’t. Last time I went there it almost ripped me apart and . . . I won’t.”
“Maybe you weren’t ready the last time you went there, but you still have the same problem—the man without a face. You’re not going to be able to stop him with dumb luck, and the fact that you’re almost dead right now proves that.”
“No,” I said flatly. “I almost didn’t survive the last time, and . . .”
“Hat, listen to me,” my uncle put his large hand on my shoulder. “You’re running out of time. It won’t be long before he figures out how to use the Opalescence and when he does . . . you won’t stand a chance at stopping him. You have the strength to go back there, and find out who he is, and how you’re going to stop him. There are answers waiting for you on the other side of this, you just have to be strong enough to get there.”
My uncle’s love for me was real, but I don’t think he had any idea of what he was asking of me, of what it would take to complete the Trials of Truth. If I did have the strength to walk through that door, it didn’t mean I would survive what was waiting for me on the other side of it.
On the brink of death, I could choose to walk away or walk forward. I knew I wouldn’t have a firm place in my future until I could shake off all the things that pulled on me from my past. Choice—our real power—was waiting to be wielded.
“Okay. We’ll just hang out here until you finish dying. It’s a pity for Zoe though, isn’t it? She shouldn’t have to watch her uncle bleed out in front of her. And I wonder what will happen to her, and the rest of the family, once someone else has the Opalescence, I think . . .”
“Stop,” I said in a whiney voice. “Fine. Let’s do this.”
You’ve got this Hat. You’ve got this.
I took his hand and we walked through the door together. It returned us to the library, just as we had left it, with me strung up against the wall and Kevin holding a lantern on the outskirts of the hideous scene. I tightened all my muscles, the way you do right before you know someone is about to punch you in the stomach.
The boy’s shirt was already neatly folded, with his tie on the table. His face showed me that he had long checked out of that moment and he was nothing more than a breathing mannequin. At the same time, I found a certain respect and understanding for him that I didn’t have for myself when I was him—he did the only thing he could do, he survived.
You can do this, I told myself.
The monster of the scene, the tall priest in his drab clothing, was already looking at me against the wall. Like he expected I would crack as quickly as the last time, he strangled me with his leering eyes. Slowly, and without taking his eyes off me, he continued his premeditated invasion of the boy.
I turned my face into the darkness to avoid what I knew he’d do next, forgetting that I could see it there too.
Ahhhh!
“What’s the matter?” the priest taunted me. “Scared?”
That’s not how this happened, I kept telling myself.
“There’s nothing you can do,” he said, his treacherous voice booming toward me as he played with the boy’s hair. “I have all the power, and you have none. Just like before. Just like when you were him.”
The boy’s clothes were gone again, and the bent knuckle of the man’s finger ran over the boy’s arm. The quicksand of memories of what was to come pulled at me from the inside. There would be pain. There would be emptiness. There would be agony. All over again.
“Stop,” I yelled, snapping my head back toward him and lifting the side of my lip up into a seething scowl.
“Why?” his voice slithered across his grinning lips. “I don’t have to stop. We both know what happens next. There’s nothing you can do about
it.”
That man was the first thing I ever needed to run away from. He was the bringer of discord and anarchy into my life and my mind. But he was also wrong.
I finally stopped fighting the quicksand he created and let myself fall to the bottom. There, I saw that I was just looking at a moment in time, one I didn’t exist in. When I was a child, locked in that asylum-like library with him, there was no adult version of me strapped to a wall on the outskirts of the darkness. That spell existed only to scare me with the truth of my own past, a past I had lived through and survived. Realizing all that tipped control of that moment back to me.
“No,” I called viciously, pulling at my chains and snarling at the priest. “You don’t have the same power over me that you used to.”
He tugged on the boy’s face and forced him to look at me too. “It seems to me that I have all the power.”
“And I’m still standing, damn it,” I yelled, rattling my chains. “Despite you, I’m still standing. You can force me to watch this over and over and I’ll still be standing, because I’ve already survived this.”
The chains that held me to the wall released and I shook my bonds off easily. The boy’s spirit collapsed into a single ball of light and disappeared from the scene, joining my soul and giving me a sense of wholeness I hadn’t felt since the priest entered my life. He was the personification of the bleakest point in my life, but it was still my life. If I wanted to own my moments, I had to own all my moments, even the ones as dark as this.
“I can’t change the past.” I walked closer to the priest, he didn’t seem nearly as giant-like as he once did, and said, “but you won’t stop my future.”
“Where’s all your power now?” I asked, grabbing his throat and making him look directly at me. Fear filled his eyes before he too disappeared, dissolved in defeat, and returned to whatever torturous crevice of the Universe’s bowels he had first germinated in.
“What now?” I asked Kevin.
He nodded at the floor, where a small hole had opened up between us.
“You’re serious? Where’s the white rabbit?”
“Just jump in,” he said. “The hard part’s over.”
There wasn’t anything The Trials of Truth could throw at me that could be worse than what I had already seen. I sat on the floor and let my legs dangle in the hole. It was just big enough to fit me, and with one large breath in, I slid into it.
When I landed, the ground was unnaturally soft, cushioning my feet from the impact. I was in a cavern of sorts, and other than the hole I had just jumped through, there were no apparent entrances or exits. White flowers of every species covered the ground and all along the base of the walls. I started walking toward a bright light at the end of the cavern.
A sweet melody of soft, operatic voices flowed through the cavern eloquently. An aquatic glow warmed the walls around me. When I touched them, the colors of the iridescent rock billowed beneath my fingertips, creating tiny waves to match the path of my fingers. I followed the path of white flowers until it reached a hearty stone archway, the source of the light, beyond which I could not see.
One more step and I was through the archway into another destination unknown. The light disappeared behind me, and with it the archway.
It landed me in another new cavern. The white flowers exploded around my feet, covering every inch of the ground. From above, all I could see was water, as if I walked in a cavernous garden below the ocean’s translucent bottom. I reached up and touched it. Cold water dripped down my hand, but the magic that kept the water at bay above me was otherwise unaffected by my touch.
“Welcome,” a voice said from the other side of the cavern.
A woman sat majestically, and with bizarrely perfect posture, on a large granite bench in the corner of the cavern. She was dressed from head to toe in white satin robes, a gold braided rope tying them together at her waist. She was barefoot, and her skin was as luminous as the cavern around us.
“We should have expected that the next person to make it here would be a Walker,” she said. Her voice seemed to echo, like it was being repeated as it came out of her mouth.
From above, I watched as things started falling from the water. They could have been copper pennies, except that as they broke the barrier of water, they floated aimlessly down to the ground like snow. I reached out to catch one, and it hovered in the palm of my hand for the briefest of moments. In my head, I heard “I wish to find love.” Then, just as quickly, the penny drifted off my palm like dust in the wind, falling to the ground and disappearing in the beds of the white flowers.
“Where are we?” I asked.
The woman crossed her legs, folded her hands in her lap, and looked up at the sky of water above us. “Someplace warm and beautiful. It is one of our favorite places to create and sit in. You can watch as the coins fall from the top of the wishing well, the hopes and dreams of the lost and lonely falling down and landing at our feet, unanswered. It is an . . . interesting perspective, even for us.”
“Who are you?”
“We are carriers of truth,” she said, the echo in her voice stronger than before. “Nothing more. People across the ages have called us many things: goddess, spirit, angel, and we are none of those things, but we are all of those things. To many, we are known collectively as Aletheia.”
Each time she said “we,” I looked around the cavern nervously to see who else might be there.
“The truth is rarely understood from one perspective alone,” she said, answering a question I had yet to ask. “We are many voices, speaking as one and telling the story of truth from each of those perspectives collectively.”
“Do you know why I’m here?”
“Mortals have such a short life, it makes you rush through everything you do, but time for you stands still right now. It is not easy to pass The Trials of Truth, so sometimes we can go a hundred years without enjoying the company of someone who needs air and water to survive. Let us just enjoy that for a moment.”
I sat down on another bench across from her, the stems of little white flowers tickling my ankles as I walked. “Can you tell me who the man without a face is?”
All echoes of Aletheia’s voice moaned loudly. “A moment to us must seem like an eternity to you. Why do you ask us questions when you already know the answers?”
“If you’re talking about that vision I had, all it told me was that he was a Walker. But that’s about as helpful as telling me he’s white. I can’t just run around my family asking every guy if he happens to own a mask . . . and be a murderer. I need to know who is behind the mask so I can find him.”
“We wonder why you ask for daylight when you can already see in the dark,” she said, sighing.
“What does that mean?”
Aletheia plucked a flower from her feet and handed it to me. “Is this flower white?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“And you know that to be true?”
“Yeah?”
“Then ask that flower to show you other things and believe them to be true as well.”
The sublime simplicity of the white flower absorbed me as I let myself sink into the depths of its petals with my gaze. The textures lining each petal wrapped around me as I fell deeper and deeper into it. Like it was speaking to me through my touch, I knew what I had to do next. When I had finally given myself up to it completely, I whispered, “Show me,” and the flower carried me softly to my place of weightlessness and serenity.
A red-headed woman I didn’t know sat in a lonely hospital room at dusk. In her arms was a tiny newborn, swaddled in a blue striped blanket. Both were crying, but the mother’s tears seemed filled with more anger than joy.
“He’s beautiful,” a nurse said to the woman as she looked over her shoulder to the baby. “Do you want me to get his father for you?”
“Not unless you ca
n summon the dead,” the woman said to the nurse.
The nurse’s eyes grew big and she stuttered a few words of apology before backing out of the room awkwardly.
The woman then began to rock the baby gently in her arms. “It’s okay, isn’t it little boy? It’s okay. My little forgotten Walker. We don’t need any of them, do we?”
My return from the vision was peaceful, soft even, as the petals guided me gently back into the cavern. Then the petals dissolved in my hands until they were nothing more than opulent white grains of sand. Aletheia looked at me and smiled.
“Who was that?” I asked, letting the sand fall from my hands to the ground.
“You asked to see who the man behind the mask was, and you were shown. He is the son of Kevin Walker.”
Chapter 34
“My uncle didn’t have any children,” I said.
“That is what you believe to be true, not what we know to be true,” Aletheia said. “Your uncle was taken from your world before he could know his son. But the boy you saw is his nonetheless.”
“How do I find him?”
“That truth is perhaps the easiest we have to offer you,” she said. “Look up.”
The pennies stopped falling and as I looked up into the water above us it turned black, reflecting our image back at us. Then the water rippled, and our reflections dissipated. In their place, the Mask of Apate in a man’s hand. As he lifted it to his face, I saw who he really was.
“No,” I said aloud.
“Do you not believe the truth?” she asked.
“Not Graham. It couldn’t be Graham. I know him, and he wouldn’t do all this. Lie. Kill. Steal. No, not him.”
“All mortals lie. It’s part of who you are and what you do to survive in the world you live in. Your lives are compilations of truths, many of which you cannot see or refuse to accept. The full truth is complex, and with it comes enlightenment and understanding, but also confusion and pain.”
Secrets The Walkers Keep: A New Adult Urban Fantasy (Casters of Magic Series Book 1) Page 27