Something was wrong.
Bowen brought out the small dagger he always kept hidden on him, while his brother’s fists were raised, ready for the oncoming threat. That was when they saw her. Jade was standing just a length away, feet stuck to the ground as she bent over in pain, and a second later she fell unconscious.
“It’s started!” Finch’s hands fell to his sides and ran to check her pulse. “Jade! Jade! Wake up!”
“Get away from her!” Bowen brought the tip of the dagger to his throat.
“This is not the time! It’s not me threatening her but the Witches Sting. I went through it, you went through it, but we were so much younger. Imagine the pain she’s in…”
Bowen could barely remember the first time he had felt that hell-fire numbness. “Her magic has manifested,” he simply stated as he flicked the tip of his blade away from Finch and placed the knife back in its scabbard.
This was the closest he had been to her since arranging her adoption with Janet and Dave; the past couple of weeks like torture in how close he could get.
He knelt on the other side of her, stroking the hair out of her face. “How innocent she looks here…” he mused.
“Bowen,” Finch cautioned. “You can’t mess with time. She needs to go back. She needs to face the past.”
“I know,” he bit out, the truth of the matter breaking his heart. He had grappled with himself over the centuries that maybe there was another way for history to play out without Jade’s influence, but his research turned up empty. The common factor was Jade, and even if they still had any magic, that wasn’t going to change anything.
“Come… we should move her before–” Finch’s sentence was cut short as Bowen grabbed his shirt and pulled him back to the fallen tree, a woman running towards them.
It was Jackie.
Bowen and Finch waited until Jade was on her feet and then slowly made their way unseen through the thicket of the forest and back onto the beach.
Bowen whipped his head at Finch, anger once again hot on the surface. “Get in the car,” he snapped.
Finch did so, resigned to follow his brother’s command.
VIII.
Panic rose as I went screaming down the hall, my string of curses bringing everyone out of their rooms to see what was happening. Emma was still half asleep, her purple pajamas imprinted with bed creases.
“What?” she asked, rubbing sleep and mascara from her eyes.
“My Human Evolution essay! It’s due in a week!” I grabbed for my heart. “I think I’m gonna have a panic attack…” I had been putting it off for so long, and so many things had happened in between, that I had completely forgotten about it.
Lucy grabbed her phone out of her pocket. “Jade, it’s only November 11th. That’s more than enough time.” She was trying her best to be helpful, but with my freak-out mode set to blast, her comments fell short of what I needed to hear. “I’ve written an essay the night before and gotten high marks on it. It’s not that hard.”
It was easy for her to say, she was majoring in English, where referencing and texts were plainly laid out. I, on the other hand, had to crawl through vague manuscripts and interpret what I thought the people of the medieval era were trying to symbolize in their drawings and compare it to today’s brilliant artists.
“Go check out the archive section in the library, they should have what you’re looking for,” Melissa interjected. At least we were on the same wavelength, her eyes bulging at my predicament.
“That’s where I’m headed now.” Grabbing my phone, laptop, and papers, I shoved them all into my bag, dressed and shot out of the building.
The simple layout of the university would have gotten me to the library in two minutes flat; the hard part was the incessant rain that spontaneously transformed into hail that hammered me all the way there.
Shaking off the small ice balls, I entered and headed straight for the stairs, remembering vaguely that the archives were on the lower level. I hadn’t stepped in the places for months.
Was the library always this big?
Sweat collected at my back as I made my way through the zigzag of aisles, trying to find Paul’s office. I had seen him once or twice around campus, nice enough to stop for a ‘hello’, but never anything beyond that.
My panic rose as precious seconds ticked by and looked for someone to help me. The students who were around were sat in cubicles, books piled around them and their eyes fixed to their screens as they tried to decipher their own papers. The only person I could see who wasn’t looking as panic stricken as everyone else was a man on his phone. It would have been rude to interrupt him, but it was even ruder that he thought it was okay to use his phone while in a library, so I sauntered up to him, desperate.
“Sorry, excuse me,” I half whispered, his mouth hanging open slightly. “Do you know where I can find the archives down here?”
It took him a couple seconds, as if shocked anyone would deem themselves worthy of a conversation with him, but he seemed to collect himself enough to say: “Straight, all the way to the end of the room, and then make a right.”
His voice was soft, the music of it almost nostalgic.
“Thank you,” I said in all honesty, and made a b-line to the other side of the building.
I found Paul’s door—must have passed it at least four times walking through here, my anxiety playing unwanted tricks with my mind—and knocked lightly, cracking it open enough to see inside. Paul’s office had even more books than last time, boxes of them piled as if a new shipment had just come in.
“Hello?” I took a tentative step further when something jumped out from behind one of the piles, a box sliding down in tandem. I let a small shriek escape my lips, only for my heart to calm when I heard Paul’s voice.
“Hello.” He still had his shirt untucked on one side, but it seemed someone had pointed out his broken glasses, their surface now mended.
I started again, my voice wavering. “Hello, I need to do some research for a paper on medieval manuscript illustrations.”
“Yes. Yes. Come in, Jade!” His own voice had a crack to it, his words sharp. He looked at me with sparkling eyes and taking my hand, shook it vigorously. “I’ve been expecting you.”
He shoved some papers off a spare chair and motioned to me to sit. I removed my bag, trying to find a place to put it and decided on my lap would be the safest place.
“You have?” My face flushed red with embarrassment, my eyes darting away from him in confusion. I hadn’t realized he even remembered my name.
Was I really that late finishing the essay?
“Well… I mean…” he paused. “Many have been down here to do their essays and you are the last to come,” his statement confirming my suspicion.
Anxiety started to creep up again and my legs bounced of their own accord. “Yes, well, I was doing… other things.”
“I imagine.” He took another pause and in no time chose a volume out for me. “Here you are.”
As I took it from him, an electric shock almost caused me to disconnect myself from the shooting pain radiating up my arm as I gripped the tome. It was the same haunting feeling I had felt at Llansteffan. I knew what could happen next, but I held on tighter, not wanting this to be my last visit to the archives. I waited, my breath coming fast, but nothing happened except the feeling in my arm returning to normal and sweat pooling on my brow.
The book was thick, as thick as any Bible would be, but the weight was off. For its many pages, almost a thousand, it weighed no more than a two hundred page novel.
Leafing through I wasn’t impressed. I turned it over in my hands, the worn leather spine cracked and falling off in places. When I opened its pages again, the scent of rosemary and dust hung in the air. Though the papers were covered in gorgeous fourteenth century calligraphy, they weren’t exactly what I had in mind, t
he only images drawn mere margin doodles.
I can’t work with something like this. I needed actual drawings or elaborate paintings…
“Monk’s blood.”
“I’m sorry?” I asked, Paul’s comment catching me off guard, tearing me from my organized thoughts.
“The pages at the back. They’re splattered with monk’s blood.” He said it with such pride, as if he were the one who had actually killed the man to get this trophy.
“Oh.” I put the book down, disgusted and disappointed by its contents. “I was actually hoping for something more… colorful.”
He seemed surprised, my callous analysis of the contents not good enough for him. Finally, he resigned, his shoulders slumping slightly as his eyes faded into a bleak sadness. “You’ll want to look in the back then.”
I grabbed my bag and slung it over my shoulder as he led me to the door we weren’t able to enter last time, his swipe card present in hand.
“Back here the books are temperature controlled so do not leave the door open.” When the door clicked and swung back I was mesmerized by the sheer size of the room. You couldn’t tell from the outside but it had to be at least five thousand square feet. Shelves—some covered with sliding glass doors, others free to breathe the cool air—lined the room, keeping the books safe.
I looked at Paul, his face jubilant again with my open-mouthed reaction. “You can stay as long as you like,” he beamed. “I just need to finish with some papers.”
“Really…? Don’t you have to supervise me?” You would think since these books were so valuable they would have more protection than a trusting fifty-something-year-old man and a security system.
“No, I think you’ll be fine. Gives you a chance to get used to them again.”
Again? Before I could question him he closed the door behind him.
It took me fifteen minutes of walking up the endless aisles to find any indication into the field I needed.
Law 1920-70… Philosophy 1790-1850… History– ah, here it is.
I found a section dated around 1130 and started there. Most of them were Books of Hours, their small dimensions making them easier to handle than some of the bigger volumes.
I took the first one I saw off the shelf and stopped, my hand hanging in the air. The wisps of a whisper floated down to me, my hair standing on end as I looked around the room in the hope that someone else was down here and I wasn’t losing my mind.
But there wasn’t anyone.
I focused my attention back on the book and tentatively pulled it from its sedentary position, opening it to hear the words ring clear: “Scientia, sicut processu temporis, necesse est quod suus–”
I quickly shut it, the voice still trying to muffle its way out of the pages as I placed it back in its spot.
The fuck?
I took another book off the shelf, hands shaking for what was to come. It also let out a phrase: “Per 550BCE regnum Persarum cecidisse…”
For the next five minutes I viciously pulled out book after book, each giving me a phrase in English, Latin, Greek, Welsh, and a couple of other languages I couldn’t even decipher.
None of it made sense.
It wasn’t until I pulled out a book titled History of the Medieval Realm did the whole library start to scream at me. No longer could I make out the words being said, each overlaid with each other and so loud I could barely think.
Disregarding every regulation of antiquities, I left the books lying in a pile on the floor and ran for the exit, the voices still following.
The harder I ran the louder they grew, my feet pounding against the cement floor. I could feel as something wet slowly crawled out of my nose and splattered to the ground, its ruby-red color catching my eye. Wooziness won me over, my head spinning at the sight of my own blood and my vision started to blur, the pitched screaming of the manuscripts clouding my mind as I felt my way for the door. Quickly, I pulled it open and stumbled into Paul’s office.
The sound was no better in there.
Covering my ears I unsuccessfully tried to block out everything, my legs wobbling to the floor as the cacophony consumed me. When I looked up again, to my shock, Paul was standing in the middle of the room, seemingly untouched by what was happening. He held the manuscript he had first given me in his hands.
“What’s going on?” I screamed, trying to compete with the books.
He had obviously heard me but his answer was lost in the confusing dissonance. Tearing my hands away from my ears, he shoved the manuscript into my right hand and turned to the page with the monk’s blood. Pulling out a small knife, he grabbed my left.
IS HE INSANE?
I strained against his grip, but his hands no longer trembled. Instead, they were strong, steady fingers leaving bruises on my skin. Struggling to get away from him made the situation worse. My stomach lurched as he slit my palm from wrist to middle finger and forced it onto the page, the ink soaking up my blood. I barely noticed that the room had quieted, my ears still singing and my stomach turning at the sight of more blood. So it caught me off guard when I heard Paul’s words.
“He’s waiting for you.”
IX.
Bowen
Bowen sat in the back of the library, a volume of Early Medieval Theology positioned in his hands and his ear to his phone, disregarding library policy. He flipped through the pages with boredom, his full concentration on the creaking of the stairs in front of him, watching as student after student came down searching for their books.
He had spent half the morning there, trying to calm his mind for the coming event. Talking with Janet Morrison wasn’t helping.
“She’s not picking up her phone!” Janet screeched, trying to get in contact with her daughter to no avail. After Bowen’s reveal of what happened at Llansteffan, she was more than paranoid about what was to come.
“She’ll be here later today. She’s not supposed to show up until closing time.”
“Today’s the day, right? November 11th. You said this is the day you found her… Is she going to be alright?” Her hysterics were normal for a mother who was trying to accept the fact that her daughter was about to be taken away, whisked back to an unknown time.
“Truthfully, Janet. I don’t know.” It was all he could give her. But it wasn’t enough. Time was a tricky thing to play with. When Janet and Dave Morrison first came to Wales to adopt Jade, Bowen had been there to tell them what he knew. They had known what they were getting into. “I know you think me a monster but I love your daughter and there’s nothing in this whole universe I could do to stop this from happening.”
Janet scoffed. “Except time,” she sneered. Silence fell on the line, Janet collecting herself. “I’m sorry. That was rude.”
“It was the truth,” he stated easily. Bowen sat with the same sullen face, the lines on his forehead creased. And then he smelled it, the whiff of lavender and sage that clung to the air made his head snap up.
It was Jade.
He sat frozen in place, praying she wouldn’t see him. He hadn’t been cautious enough. The library was such a public place. Maybe he had done it on purpose? He wanted to meet her, see her. He had known she would come here, perhaps not at that precise moment, but…
She walked the opposite direction of him.
“Bowen!” he heard Janet scream down the line.
“Sorry…” He felt lightheaded, his breath coming in big waves, gulping in the air. He just needed to remember to breath… Her eyes were just the same, a shade of soft sea-green. His hands balled into fists, restraining the urge to touch her, to caress her soft skin and whisk her away so she wouldn’t have to go through the ordeal that was to come.
But he couldn’t.
“What happened?” Janet asked, her voice just as strained as Bowen’s response.
“She’s here.”
He
could hear the hitch of her breath.
“Stop this Bowen,” she reprimanded. Pleaded. “Please…”
“You know I can’t.” He wanted nothing more than to, but he wasn’t meant to intervene.
He saw Jade round the corner, their eyes locking as she came straight up to him.
“Sorry, excuse me.”
Bowen stiffened at the sound, the music of it… Even after almost seven centuries it brought back so many memories. “Do you know where I can find the archives down here?”
His voice failed him in that second, a million scenarios running through his head. But what could he do…? What could he say that would have her running for the safety of her dorm room?
“Straight, all the way to the end of the room, and then make a right.” His mouth was dry, his phone forgotten in his lap.
“Thank you,” and she walked away.
Her hair was like black silk swaying in her ponytail. He gave a small chuckle, remembering the first thought he had had at the sight of her hair up that way.
Slowly he got to his feet and made his way through the mazed library and out to the back car park. His Jeep was just in front of him, his hand pausing at the door handle.
She shouldn’t go through this alone.
The internal debate raged inside him. The mid-November air was sharp and every breath he took sent pain into his lungs, the morning’s incessant hail finally calm, leaving a fine mist now frozen to the ground.
She should’ve been allowed to see the sun before she went.
It was a strange thought. He knew she would see the sun again, but not as the person she was. She would be different now.
He finally wrenched open his car door, slamming it shut with the unfairness of the whole situation. Trying to relax, he wrapped his cashmere scarf tighter around his neck and pulled on the leather gloves he had received as a present from Laurence Olivier in 1946, the material almost threadbare from constant use.
To Those Who Never Knew (A Monksblood Bible Novel Book 1) Page 6
