by Cora May
Her heart caught in her throat. She nearly tumbled toward him the rest of the way. Luckily, she managed to catch herself and sit next to him on the floor with at least a little bit of grace.
“Chanta,” he greeted her. “What a pleasant surprise! What brings you down here?”
“I need you,” she said. Her cheeks reddened, and she quickly edited her words. “Your help.”
“Of course,” he said, “anything you need!” He shut his book. “What is it?”
“Um,” she started. She looked around the room. Most of the students had indeed stopped their reading to watch her. She cared about it a little now, given the sensitive matter she had at hand. “Can we discuss this somewhere else? Somewhere with a little less… ears?”
It took Fenneck all of a heartbeat to make his decision. He was standing up before Chanta could even understand how he had stood. He extended a hand toward her.
She gratefully accepted it.
His hand was warm to the touch. It was a welcoming feeling. She wanted to intertwine her fingers in his, to walk out of the room hand in hand.
But she didn’t. She resisted the urge. She used his hand for exactly what he had offered it up as—an aid to get off the floor.
Focus, she reminded herself.
She let Fenneck lead her out of the common room and into one of the adjoining studies. It was clearly meant for the Keepers as well. The room was lined with bookshelves of various books, and nothing else but a tall, bright lamp in the center of the room. This was where they chose their books. She didn’t have time to look around, though—she wasn’t here to sightsee around the castle again.
“There are a lot of mysteries in this castle,” Chanta began. She let the statement sit, let Fenneck chew on it for a moment.
“I suppose there are,” he admitted. “Like its size. No matter how many places I’ve been, or how long I’ve been here, I always feel like I’m constantly discovering more.”
Chanta nodded. She already had that feeling, though it wasn’t her main concern.
“What other mysteries do you know of?”
He chuckled.
“Well, there’s you.”
Chanta grimaced.
“I think I’m starting to solve that mystery. That’s actually kind of what I need your help with.”
She waited, gauging his reaction to that. He seemed hesitant. Probably because he knew she was about to ask a lot of him.
“I need to figure out who I am. Where I came from. My family tree, really, in a way.”
He eased a little bit and smiled at her.
“That’s some pretty complicated research, I suppose,” he allowed. “You need me because you don’t know where to begin?”
She breathed in slowly through her nose, focusing on the ground as she thought through her next words. She had to be careful what she said to him. Revealing too much could be a mistake.
“I have reason to believe that my family is directly tied to this place. Or, at least, to the stones somehow. And I believe… I believe they aren’t entirely good people.”
She let that last statement sit for a minute as well. Fenneck was slowly nodding, looking at her like he was taking a little bit of pity on her. She couldn’t tell if he believed her, or if he thought her to be crazy. She was sure, though, that pity was not what she wanted.
“There are other mysteries in this castle,” she pointed out. “Darker things. Like Brin’s disappearance? Have you heard about that? That could easily have been caused by someone with my ability.” She didn’t admit that it was.
“How could that have been your family, though?” he asked. “Do you believe them to still be around?”
Yes, if Donlarr was really related to her.
“I’m not saying it was or wasn’t someone in my family,” she said. “I’m saying it’s a possibility. Like you said, I’m a mystery, and so is my ability. In fact, I’ve been told that it’s possible my ability isn’t really a Blessing at all, but more of an inheritance. A trait passed down through my father.”
Fenneck cocked his head. She knew that statement was going to be hard for him to swallow. Everyone in the castle based their entire belief system on the fact that these Blessings were a gift to them.
She went on.
“There are many, many other mysteries, too. Do you know what they keep in the basement?”
She paused this time, letting him fill in the blank. She wanted to know what was believed by the majority of the students in the castle.
“Right now? I don’t think there’s anyone down there. I know they keep the students who haven’t been tested down there. That’s for our safety, of course, but once they’re given their proper stone, they’re introduced to the school. You know that.”
“Right, because I was down there for longer than I’ve been up here, right?” she pointed out, saying the words that he wasn’t going to. “So you can understand that I started to get more and more curious about what was beyond my door. You can’t blame me for checking behind the other bedroom doors, can you?”
Fenneck looked a little bit nervous as he asked, “What did you find?”
The question, the way it was phrased, was enough for Chanta. She could tell now that he had questioned enough about this place. He had started to form his own thoughts and opinions about the faculty.
“I found Douglass.”
Fenneck’s beautiful tanned skin paled a little bit.
“I’m asking you to help me find out who I am,” she told him, “because I don’t think I’m being told the truth. I think there’s something deeper going on in this school, and I think I was brought here to be contained, not to be trained. I think they’re afraid of me, of what I can do. I know what my real stone is.”
She decided she could tell him that part, at least. She wouldn’t tell him she knew where Brin was, but she had to offer him a little bit of information to gain his trust in this.
“You’re not a Communicator,” Fenneck stated simply. It was something he had already known, of course.
“No,” she said. “My stone isn’t one you’ve likely heard of. It’s not one that’s been studied very much, and definitely not one that the school is going to offer up any kind of information on. My stone is Obsidian.”
She was grateful when he didn’t look at her like she was crazy, especially seeing as she couldn’t prove it when it was buried in her wrist.
“There are two things I need your help with,” she said. “First, I need to speak to Douglass. I need you to help me get back down to the basement and to make sure no one sees us. Then, I need to find the boys who gave me my stone. They know a lot. One of them is a mind reader, and he told me a lot about who I am already. I didn’t want to believe it at the time, but I do now.”
“We can research this in other ways,” he told her, motioning to the books around him.
“No,” she told him frankly. “Books are written by people who keep information hidden. Books are written by people with secrets.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: ADDELAI
“B rin?” Addy whispered.
She wasn’t sure how to do it. She felt a little awkward, talking to an empty room, but she couldn’t leave it alone. She couldn’t walk away from the conversation she had just had with Chanta. Brin was her best friend.
“Brin, can you hear me?” she asked quietly.
Brin, please answer me, she thought in her mind.
It didn’t matter, though. No one was listening to her. No one was hearing her. She had been abandoned. By both of her roommates, if she was being honest with herself.
Okay, no. If she was being honest with herself, Chanta was the only one who abandoned her. Brin needed help, and Chanta walked away with some lie about how Brin wanted to be in the Realm of Darkness. Chanta was the one who left her, Brin was the one who just refused to talk to her. But that didn’t make sense, either. That hurt, actually. Why would she talk to Chanta, but not to her?
“Brin, please,” she said, even soft
er than before. “Please say something. Don’t leave me here. Tell me what to do! How do I help you?”
Silence. Nothing but silence answered her. She was crying now. She was glad that Chanta left because she didn’t want her to see this. At the same time, she didn’t want to be alone, either. Having Chanta there forced her to keep herself together, to lead her roommate and come up with a plan. Without her there, Addy was free to fall apart.
And fall apart she would.
“Brin, please, I don’t know what’s going on,” she confessed through tears, knowing that no one was there to hear her now. She was talking to herself, but directing it at Brin made it easier to say out loud, and she needed to say it out loud. “I don’t know how to stop the killings, Brin, but now I can see them. I can watch myself do it, but I still have no control. I can’t stop them.”
She sniffed in the cold air with a small sob. She was terrified to admit it, and her words had gotten softer and softer as she spoke before they trailed off altogether. If anyone was listening in, if anyone was hearing her words other than Brin, she would be in trouble. Actually, even if Brin was hearing them, she might be in trouble. Brin didn’t know any of it. She wasn’t allowed to know. It was probably a good thing she wasn’t listening right at that moment.
“I met others,” she told her. “Others like me. People who don’t know what they’re doing when they’re doing it. It’s funny, actually, because we’re all part of Nessi’s army. I wish you were here so I could tell you about that. I’m sorry I’ve been keeping secrets, I really am. It’s coercion, really, but it’s really good coercion, too. You’ve had secrets, right? You know what that’s like.”
She stopped for a moment.
Did Brin have secrets? Everyone she had met the past few days had big, grave secrets. Was it possible that Brin, too, had secrets? After all, even Chanta had a secret, and that secret caused Brin to be where she was now.
The tears stopped flowing down her cheeks. She was realizing just how deep this whole thing was likely to go. She had to stop blubbering like a baby, had to stop talking to someone that wasn’t listening. If what Chanta had said was true, if Brin chose to be where she was because she could get information… because of Donlarr, of all Anam… Then Addy had some work that needed to be done, too. She had to get to the bottom of what was going on if that was the only way to save Brin.
In the end, she would be saving a lot of people, both dead and alive, if she could stop the Anam hunting and whoever was behind it. Nessi might even let her go from the army. She might let everyone go if there was no more reason to fight.
She stood up and wiped the tears from her eyes. She had to start somewhere, but where was that?
She began to pace across the room. She could go back to any one of the people she had just met with. Of course they would be willing to help her, but they didn’t know much more than she did. That wasn’t a whole lot of help. She needed to find out more information. She needed to know how Donlarr was able to control the humans in this Realm.
Something suddenly dawned on her, a thought that had been tugging at her. Donlarr wasn’t working alone. The Anam could not open portals, no matter how powerful they were. If they could, Dimonis wouldn’t be trapped where he was still. The Anam Dorcha would be reigning their evil freely on the people on this world, and even the Anam Solas that didn’t want to be dead would have come back. No, there are very specific rules to the afterlife, enforced by the Reaper of Death. He was the only one who held the power to go between the Realms.
Well, him and, apparently, Chanta. But Chanta could not possibly be the one Donlarr was working with. She hadn’t been there long enough, and when she did arrive, she was so clueless that it could not have possibly been an act. Besides that, she already knew there were other people that could open a portal. Douglass was one of them, and if Douglass could, then wouldn’t it be possible that there were other people that had the ability to go between the worlds?
People. Human beings. Not Anam. There had to be someone here, in this castle, who was helping Donlarr.
A scary thought was Nessi. She was in control of a lot, it seemed. She had an entire army built of silent students who were afraid to speak out against her. At least, that’s the impression she got after the meeting with the other Jasper Warriors. During the meeting with the entire army, it didn’t seem to bother anyone that they were there. It seemed like they wanted to be there, maybe. But again, maybe they were just scared.
One of the most damning pieces of evidence was the fact that she had Douglass under her control. She had clear access to a portal that could take her, or anyone else, through it, not to mention the army she could send through it. She had the means, but did she have the motive?
If she didn’t have motive, another possibility was Prisanni. After all, if Douglass was under Prisanni’s roof, didn’t that mean he was under her control, too? Addy added her to the list of suspects, too. More so because she still held a certain bit of respect for Nessi, and it was hard to let go of the esteem she held her in before.
She realized she couldn’t stop there, either. If Chanta and Douglass were both in control of portals, couldn’t there be someone else out there that could create a portal? Or multiple someones?
She took a breath.
There was someone else out there helping out Donlarr. She had to find out who it was and stop them.
With that resolve in mind, she walked out of the room.
And then she turned right back around, closing the door behind her.
It wasn’t a choice. Her feet were working on their own accord. She fought against them, but it didn’t matter. They remained disobedient to her.
Addy glanced at the clock. It was midnight. How had she not realized it had gotten so late? It was probably for the better that Chanta had already stormed out of the room. Her feet moved her to a small, yellow orb in front of her closet door. It was made up of burning light, but it wasn’t necessarily a fire. What could it have been?
When she positioned herself in front of it—or, at least, when her body positioned itself—it started to grow. Its intensity, too, was growing. It grew until it reached her size.
Her feet went forward, stepping with confidence toward the light.
Toward the portal.
She realized what it was then. She realized what was happening. She was going to the Realm of Light. They had predicted that it would happen tonight, hadn’t they? So why was she so surprised?
She was surprised because she was wholly conscious this time, from the very beginning. But, like last time, she was unable to control her own body.
She was going to have to watch every movement she made, every swipe of the blade that she wielded against the Anam.
Dread rose in her body, but it wasn’t enough that she could fight against her own feet. No matter how hard she pulled away, the best she did was slow it down.
Dread rose higher and higher in her heart. She could feel the ghost of the blade in her hand already, could see the terror in the Anam’s eyes as she took its life. She had already given up trying to take over as the portal engulfed her entire body. The yellow-white light swallowed her up, and for a moment, everything was so bright she couldn’t even see her own body, even if she had the ability to raise her hand in front of her face.
And then she hit the ground with a graceful skid.
Graceful, not because of her own actions by far. She still couldn’t see. Her eyes were still responding to the brightness of the portal. No, the gracefulness came from whatever was moving her. The gracefulness came from Donlarr’s spell, or whatever it was. She was surprised at how careful he was with his weapons.
As her eyes began to adjust, though, she realized that she was not in the Realm of Light. She had expected to see the white skies and bright atmosphere that she had seen before. It had been a clean scene, a happy one. Though she had not had her wits about her at the time to look around, she could tell that it was a place of peace.
This place
was much, much different. It was hot. That was the first thing she noted, as soon as she gathered enough wits to notice anything. She could feel a fine mist around her ankles, too. It wasn’t a clean, refreshing mist, either—it felt heavy and dirty, like a smog on the ground. When her eyes began to adjust, she could see tongues of flame nearly everywhere she looked. She wasn’t in control of her head, so she wasn’t able to turn around and take in the entire scene, but she could see enough to gather that she was in a cave. And, indeed, the smog on the ground was thick and black. She internally shuddered at knowing what was wrapping around her ankles.
Suddenly, and very militantly, her body shifted. She turned an entire ninety degrees and realized that she was, indeed, in a line of soldiers. She recognized those soldiers, too. Jace, Kameron, Liz, Chaz, and Tomas were all in front of her. She could barely see enough to make out Viktor standing to her right, and two more soldiers to the right of him. There was one other soldier she didn’t recognize in the lines ahead of her.
She tried to fight against whatever was controlling her body enough to turn her head. It was a very, very slight movement, but her head did shift a few degrees toward Viktor. He must have had the same idea, because when she locked eyes with his slightly turned head, she could see the fear in his eyes. If he could tremble, she was sure he would be.
They were in the Realm of Darkness. It was definitely a place that was worth trembling. More than that, they were fully aware of themselves but unable to control their own will. None of the ten students in the military line were able to. It was both comforting and terrifying to know that her friends were surrounding her.
What little comfort the company of her friends offered her was completely demolished when a figure stepped into her peripheral vision from behind. She couldn’t recognize it, not without turning her eyes toward it, but the dark feeling in her heart told her exactly who it was.
Donlarr.
“What a pitiful group of Warriors you must be,” he said tauntingly, “that your commander sends you straight to me, and you don’t even bother to try to slay me. ‘We mean you no harm,’ they told me.” He chuckled, his voice shifting to speak to the other side of the room.
