The Chronicles of Kerrigan Box Set Books # 1 - 6: Paranormal Fantasy Young Adult/New Adult Romance

by W. J. May

  Only a few seconds later, the entire transaction was complete. She and Molly skipped out the door arm in arm, brand new residents of a posh London penthouse.

  “To our soon-to-be home!” Molly raised her mini-espresso in cheers and they clinked over a plate of sashimi and rolls. “May it prove less hazardous than our last home, but just as fun!”

  “I’ll drink to that!”

  They downed their coffees in one shot, and Rae was quick to order two more.

  “And speaking of fun…” Molly looked at her with a sly twinkle, battling a piece of salmon with her chopstick. “You never did say what you thought about Devon moving in basically next door.”

  Rae flushed and dropped her eyes to the table, letting her dark curls spill between them like a shield. “Well, I actually…um, I think it will, um…” She smothered a grin. “Yeah, that’ll rock—I mean that’ll work.”

  Both girls burst out giggling as their new drinks arrived. The steam didn’t do anything to help cool Rae’s cheeks as she took another scalding gulp.

  “Not that it matters much anyway,” Molly said in the same mischievous tone, “you and Devon are practically living together as it is.”

  “What?” Rae tossed a napkin at her. “That’s so not true!”

  “Oh come on!” Molly giggled. “You don’t think I’ve noticed how your guys’ late night work sessions, turn into…all night sessions? You just better be careful that Madame Elpis doesn’t see him sneaking out every morning. I think she’d have a stroke.”

  Rae chuckled a little nervously and poked at her food. Were they being that obvious? Carter and their closest friends might know about their relationship, but that did not mean that it was in any way sanctioned by either the school, the PC, or even the tatù community at large. There were centuries’ worth of traditional and precedent they were flouting, and who knew how serious the consequences might prove if they were caught? If Devon’s own father’s reaction was any indicator, they would be dire indeed…

  “You’re right,” Rae murmured, “we should be more careful.”

  Molly’s eyes softened sympathetically. “Only for a little while. And then,” she said as she tossed her hair back casually, “you know, we’re moving into this amazing penthouse.”

  Both girls kept up the cool façade for only a moment before they erupted once more in little shrieks of joy. The waiter placed their check on the table with a judgmental eye roll, and they stifled their giggles behind their hands as Rae set down some cash.

  “So, how about it Molls?” she asked as they walked back to the car. “Time to get back to the grindstone?”

  There was a pause in Molly’s step and she faltered. “Um, actually…I kind of…”

  Rae stopped walking at once and rubbed her arms to keep warm. “What is it? Why are you being so weird?”

  Molly seemed to be having trouble keeping eye contact. “I actually have a date. With Luke.”

  An ill-timed gust of icy wind swept down between them and Rae took a step back. “Oh!” she said softy, blinking in surprise. “I see.”

  Molly’s pale skin flushed as pink as her scarf. “Are you mad? Rae, please don’t be mad. I thought that since you and Devon are such a firmly established couple, and nothing really ever went anywhere with Luke, that it would be okay.”

  Rae took a deep breath, but her friend cut her off before she could start talking.

  “Oh, I knew it! You are mad. That’s fine. You have every right to be. I don’t even know what I was thinking. I’ll just call him right now and cancel. You’re my best friend. I don’t want anything to come between—”

  “Molly!” Rae took her by the shoulders and grinned. “It’s all right. I’m cool with it.”

  Molly stopped mid-sentence, looking like someone had knocked the wind right out of her sails. “You are? I mean, are you really? Or is this one of those things where in fifty years you’ll kill my dog and be like, ‘What did you expect? You dated Luke’.”

  Rae threw back her head and laughed. She was willing to bet that in fifty years she still wouldn’t even be close to understanding how Molly’s mind worked. “I’m seriously okay with it,” she assured her. “Better than okay. Why wouldn’t I be? You’re my best friend in the whole world, and Luke’s one of the best guys I’ve ever met. You guys would make an awesome pair.”

  Molly closed her eyes and sank down onto a bench on the sidewalk. “You have no idea how relieved I am to hear you say that.” She sighed. “I’ve been mulling it over for weeks, trying to figure out how to tell you.”

  “Weeks?!” Rae exclaimed, sitting down beside her. “You kept this from me for weeks?!”

  Molly’s eyes narrowed accusingly. “Do you really want to play who-kept-their-relationship-a-secret-the-longest?”

  “Fair point.”

  They laughed softly at the irony as Molly pulled out her car keys and began fiddling them between her fingers. “The thing is…I really like him. I mean, really like him. I was thinking of asking him to be my date to graduation.”

  Rae wrapped her arm around Molly’s tiny shoulders. “Then I’m really happy for you. Who knows? Maybe Luke will switch sides, join up with the PC, and become Julian and Devon’s third roommate.”

  “Ha!” Molly snorted. “Yeah, that wouldn’t be awkward at all. Just one big happy family.”

  Rae grinned and got to her feet. “They’ll eventually make a TV show about us. They can call it: ‘Three Guys, Two Girls…And a Whole Lot of Baggage’.”

  Molly rolled her eyes. “Occasionally guest starring the Royal Family.” She pulled out her phone to call Luke and handed Rae the car keys. “If you don’t mind driving back, I can just have him drop me off.”

  “Sounds good.” Rae tossed her purse inside and was just sliding into the driver’s seat when she suddenly paused. “Hey, Molls?”

  Molly looked up from her phone. “Yeah?”

  “I really am happy for you.”

  They beamed at each other a moment before Molly said, “I’m happy for us both.”

  * * *

  The drive back to Guilder seemed to take no time at all, and Rae was still riding the high of the apartment when she started walking up the deserted stairs of Aumbry. She’d almost made it to the top when the sound of muffled crying made her pause. Silent as a ghost, she flitted back to the front door and traced the noise to a little tuft of hair sticking up from behind one of the sofas in Aumbry House’s library.

  “Ellie?” she asked incredulously. “Is everything okay?”

  The little girl jumped and looked up at Rae with a tear-stained face. At first, she tried to shrug it off, but a gasping sob rocked her tiny body and she shook her head, burying her face in her knees. Rae sank to the ground beside her, stroking back her hair and wondering what on earth could be the matter. Had there been a death in the family? Was it just the stress of school?

  “Sweetie,” she said after a few moments, “you want to tell me what’s going on?”

  Ellie pulled in a shaky breath and peered up at her. “I d-do, but I just d-don’t know what’s going to h-happen. I d-don’t want to—” She choked on another wave of tears.

  Rae patted her soothingly on the back, the way Devon had comforted her so many, many times before. “I’m not going to repeat anything you tell me unless you want me to,” she murmured in a low voice. “I’m your friend here. Not your teacher, not campus police.”

  Ellie looked up tentatively, but again, her face crumbled and she shook her head.

  With the air of someone who had all the time in the world, Rae stretched out her legs on the ground beside her. “That’s okay, we can just sit.” Ellie nodded a little, and the two of them sat there for almost twenty minutes before Rae tried talking again. “Did you rob a bank?”

  Ellie’s head shot up with a look of shock. “Wh-what?”

  Rae held up her hands. “Hey, no judgment if you did. I’ve certainly done my share of international larceny, so trust me, I get it.”

  T
he young girl just looked on in amazement, but the corners of her lips began to twitch up into a smile.

  “Okay, so, no bank robbery.” Rae tilted back her head and tried again. “Did you…accidently blow somebody up? Because if you did, I, for one, can testify that Guilder’s chemistry lab is woefully outdated—”

  “I got my tatù.”

  All teasing stopped and Rae gazed at her in surprise. It was probably the most emotionally trying ordeal any inked teenager would ever go through. The pressures of which Rae understood intimately. She reached out and squeezed Ellie’s hand.

  “It…wasn’t the one you wanted?”

  Ellie sighed shakily and pulled up the back of her shirt.

  “That’s the problem, it’s not just one.”

  An exquisitely detailed design shone brightly against the girl’s pale skin. The detailed image of a smiling girl resting her hand on a book.

  Rae leaned forward in amazement. Her fingers itched to reach out and touch Ellie’s skin so she could take the ability and find out what it was. Rae hadn’t seen one like it before. It was beautiful, unique and slightly larger than other people’s tatùs. Kind of like hers. Rae blinked and sat back.

  Ellie’s voice fell to a whisper, “It’s two.”

  Five minutes later, Ellie was sitting on Rae’s bed, holding a cup of steaming hot chocolate to her lips. She’d looked around in wonder at her mentor’s messy, top-story room, and was now quietly recovering from her emotional outburst as Rae sat patiently at the desk.

  “How long have you known?” she asked quietly. Ellie looked up and she smiled without judgment or blame. “When Ethan asked you how you were able to remember those things in the library…you knew then, didn’t you?”

  Ellie set the mug down and sighed. “I turned sixteen about two months ago.”

  Rae’s mouth fell open. “Two months?”

  “I’ve been hiding it.” Ellie stared down at her hands. “I lied on the forms about my birthdate.”

  Rae’s heart swelled protectively as she looked at the young girl. When she’d first started at Guilder, she’d done the exact same thing. Not for two months, but still…

  “It’s why I was so eager to meet you,” Ellie continued. “You were the only other person I’d ever met who had two different sets of ink. I thought…I don’t know. I thought maybe I could talk to you about it but—”

  “But I snapped at you and shut you down,” Rae finished.

  She remembered quite clearly how little Ellie had come bounding up to her in the library her first day back at school. The girl had been practically begging to get to know her. But that was the same day Rae got her mom back and fought Jennifer. She was in no state to be meeting strangers.

  “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I didn’t know.”

  Ellie shrugged dismissively. “Of course not, how could you? Anyway, the longer I kept up the lie, the harder it got to hide it.” Her shoulders shook as she sighed again. “All our teachers were always going on about the dangers of mixing powers.” Her eyes flickered up to Rae’s. “Your name came up a few times. And I don’t know, I panicked. I didn’t want them to look at me…”

  “The way you saw them looking at me.”

  Ellie nodded and dropped her eyes, afraid she’d offended her.

  “It’s all right,” Rae assured her, flashing her a sad but practical smile. “It is what it is.” She decided to turn the conversation on a lighter path. “So, have you figured out what you can do?”

  For the first time, Ellie’s face lit up with uncontainable excitement. She lifted her shirt again so that Rae could see the ink. It was actually quite beautiful. The girl resting her hand on a book, gazed up, almost as if she was looking at Rae, with a wise smile.

  “I think…it lets me understand things,” she said slowly. “At first, I thought I was just sharpening up, you know? I mean, I’ve always been a good student. But the more I learned, the more I realized I was retaining every single thing.” She straightened up proudly. “These days, I can read a six hundred-page book start to finish in about five minutes and recite every word.”

  Rae shook her head slowly. “That’s incredible. We have a guy here, Nicholas, we call him MacGyver. He knows how things work, too. But his seems a bit more hands on, technical. Not as book oriented as yours. But who knows? Maybe there’s a connection.”

  “That’s not all.” Ellie wound her finger up behind her and pointed not at the book, but at the picture of the girl. There was a sparkle in her eyes like she knew more than she was telling. “I know when people are telling the truth.”

  This time, Rae actually scoffed. “Like a human lie detector?”

  Ellie laughed. “I guess so. But it’s more like…I know the intention behind things. If I read you a passage from a book, I could tell you what the author was trying to get across, what was going through their head when they wrote it. It applies to people as well, only it’s not quite as strong. But I can still pick up on things.” She leaned forward conspiratorially. “Like two days ago in class, one of the teachers said that all we’d be doing tomorrow was finishing a movie on the creation of Rome. But she was lying, she’s going to make some kind of pop quiz.”

  Rae leaned back against her chair with a grin. “That’s sure handy.”

  It was like the floodgates had opened. Ellie was over-animated now. Gushing on and on about the different things she was learning how to do. But maybe her gifts were even more useful than she realized. As they were talking, Rae’s eyes kept flickering over to the stack of her mother’s files, half hidden under a book.

  Maybe, just maybe, she should put Ellie’s newfound abilities to the test…

  Chapter 11

  Whoever said, ‘with age comes wisdom’ had clearly never met Ellie Stratford.

  Rae showed Ellie the coded notes scribbled around the edges of the files the next day. She first asked Devon and Beth what they thought. Both were horrified by the idea. Ellie was just a child, after all. No telling what she might do with the information or whom she might tell. But as Rae so patiently reminded them, she herself was just a child when she squared off against Lanford, and through nothing but force of mind remained immune to her father’s brainwashing device.

  “Don’t underestimate a sixteen-year-old girl,” she told Devon and her mom repeatedly. “We’re stronger than you think.”

  In the end, they’d come around, but Devon insisted on one thing: all the messages were to be scrambled and out of context. Then Beth insisted that she and Devon would need to be there as well. Rae could just imagine what Ellie would think of the two of them hovering over her head, watching for any sign of trouble she might have.

  They needn’t have bothered.

  As it turned out, despite their extreme diligence, Ellie was more than a match for their cautious ways.

  “So, these are the coded messages from the secret mission files your backstabbing partner stole from you?” she asked cheerfully the first time they got together at Beth’s cottage.

  Beth and Devon both whirled around to glare at Rae, but she just held up her hands with a secret smile. “I didn’t tell her. Honest.”

  “Sorry,” Ellie flushed as she ran her hand over the papers. “I just sort of know. They were written with a mean spirit. Like a guilty conscience. By someone who had a lot to hide.”

  Beth’s mouth dropped open, but Devon was quicker to recover himself. “Actually, when Rae told us about your tatù and how the two of you were going to train in secret, we dug through the archives to come up with some old practice material for you. I hope it helps.”

  “No…” Ellie’s childlike giggling shattered his careful calm. “You’re hoping that I figure out whatever this code is for so that you and your friends can solve an active case.”

  Devon stammered half-hearted denials before turning again to Rae for help.

  “Don’t bother, Dev.” Rae chuckled. “I wouldn’t try lying to her, she’s pretty foolproof. It’s a particular set of skills I’m d
ying to get my hands on.” She winked at Ellie. In fact, she hadn’t asked Ellie for her skill, nor had the young girl offered. Rae refused to steal this one without permission, even if it meant slowing down the case. This girl would be going through what Rae had at sixteen, she of all people had to respect the ink and wait till it was offered to her. She wasn’t her father, or Lanford, or Jennifer. She was Rae. Rae Kerrigan.

  “I get where you’re coming from, and I understand the importance of this project,” Ellie assured him seriously. “I promise, you can count on me to keep quiet.” She flashed a wry grin that seemed much too old for such a young face. “After all, Rae’s keeping my secret, so, I owe her.”

  Ellie’s ‘secret’ had proved a source of much contention between her and Rae. After that first day when she’d talked in Rae’s room, Rae told Ellie her entire story, trying to impress upon her the fact that the only reason she was able to handle her hybrid status, was by sharing it with the people in her life and letting them support her. While Rae had the Kerrigan name working against her, adding extra fuel to the fire—Ellie had her own troubles. She was born into the tatù community, being fully aware of its existence. She’d grown up with the rules and knew full well what could happen to someone if they didn’t fit the norm. Then of course, there was also the obvious family tension. As far as Ellie was aware, only her father was inked. That meant that for her entire life, both parents had been lying to her. It wasn’t the sort of thing that inspired honesty in her now.

  So, considering honesty and understanding were the two new absolutes by which she was starting to live her inked life, it was surprisingly easy for Ellie to maintain the deception. She simply showed people the tatù on the day she’d said was her birthday, and pretended that—while it was certainly rare—it provided her only one ability. After a brief struggle, she’d decided to go with the ‘understanding’ part and keep the ‘human lie detector’ to herself. It’s more interesting to know when someone’s not telling you the truth, if they don’t know that you know, it gives you a lot more options.