“We are raised with the ram. With the fire,” Mason added as he looked at the one watch that was not working, the one Wilder had given me.
“Wilder. Where is Wilder?” I said, trying to breathe.
“He’s not getting near you until he is tested,” Mason said brashly.
“Did you do something to him?” I scorned him.
“Me? No. But Skylynn said to test him. She said any natural fire would show the wings, that we could see them because we were in the veil. She left us to look for him and we woke up here.”
“What if Phoenix is the fire? He has to be,” I said, hoping against all hope in this twisted turn of events that I had found some way for Phoenix to be in my life, found a way for time and circumstance never to divide us again, with or without the threat of this ‘seventh sister’ business carrying any truth at all.
Not to mention if Phoenix was needed to stand with me, one of the seven, that meant the others were meant to stand with who shared their souls. That meant Guardian would stand with the girl I saw him fight so hard to reach long ago.
“When he died and was risen as a phoenix, when was that?” Gavin asked as his sky blue eyes seemed to fill with hope. “For that to be true, at least one of his births has to be under Aries.”
“After we left, apparently…his birthday then was in April. There is a fearless Aries somewhere in him.”
“We left with the snow. That was your power: the cold,” Mason said.
My hope was not gone. I’d seen many cold Aprils. Either way, I was going to make this work. If Wilder were the fire, so be it. I would still not have to move on. “I guess we’ll just have to ask him, right after we show him this. Where is he, dammit?”
“We have a timeline to fight now. Whether they are back before then or not, we have to act. We need to find those daggers, and I would bet those clocks are under that floor,” Gavin stated with a bit of urgency.
“She is nuts. I’ll give you that. But hiding three little clocks under a floor is a little overboard,” I argued.
Gavin shook his head from side to side in an attempt to tell me he was right. “When I tapped into the security feed of this manor, the only room that had more cameras in it than yours was the dome room. She is waiting to see if you will go in that room. Not only that—I never found any evidence of the clocks being moved out, but I did find evidence stating that several clocks had been delivered here. She is storing them somewhere. It’s under that floor. That or the memorial garden.”
“Why the memorial garden?”
“She didn’t want us in there. I doubt this state has any salt left in it. For all we know, that floor leads to the memorial garden. You said yourself this house has more passages than you will ever discover.”
That was true. My darkroom was an example of the little hidden rooms, and others would connect one side of the manor with the other. It was almost like this manor was a manor inside of another; one elegant, one lined with stone.
“OK. Fine. What do the daggers that we need look like? There are more than a few within these walls.”
My father had owned a rather odd collection of knives, ones that he’d said were handed down to him.
“They connect. Silver, heavy, and this pattern of the triangle breaking free into a standing girl is on one side; the wings of the bird are on the other side,” Mason said as he stared forward and his fist clenched, as if he could remember holding one in some distant past.
“They connect at the tip,” I said in a haunted tone as I thought of knives that could very well be those.
“Yeah,” Gavin said, leaning forward as if he were waiting on direction.
“My father’s office, the ceiling...they mock part of an ‘F.’”
“The one by the dome?” Gavin asked.
“The one on the fifth floor that has a spiral stairway that leads to the dome beside it,” I answered as I thought of my dream, the spot I could not move from. “Why are you so sure about the time?”
“Midnight,” Gavin said. “The death of one day and the birth of a new. That is when we must rise. Skylynn said we would have to transition within the next few hours. This is our last midnight, our last chance this go around. If we fail, we’ll have to hope that Skylynn’s magic sticks with us, that we remember all of this.”
“I’m not living through what I have been through again,” I declared as if they were my last words. Silence immersed us for precious seconds. “You know what I don’t get? What is Rasure waiting for? I mean, we know we will end her. We know she has my family. But we didn’t know who or what we were until, like, now. Why would she not have taken us out the first chance she got? What is with the game, with having Cadence toy with us?”
“She must have thought we knew more than we did,” Mason said. “I mean, in a way we were playing with her. You sent those clocks out, made sure she would know you did, and we kept the key. All three of us are side by side. She may think we have already transitioned and were building up to an ultimate showdown. That or she knew we were blind and has something wicked waiting for us. There is no telling what her next play is.”
“I’ll tell you what my next move is: we are going to end this,” I asserted.
Chapter Fifteen
Before we left, we secured the journal in the stone wall. Gavin insisted that we act like we knew nothing about this if we came across anyone, that we play the part of weak souls letting go.
I thought it was a pointless warning. I mean, whom would we see besides Wilder anyway? But Gavin was proven ever the wise when we opened the darkroom door and found Cadence waiting on us.
She looked horrible: her mascara was running down her face, her eyes were red and swollen, and her lightly freckled cheeks were bright red. She was still in the dress she’d worn last night.
She looked past me at Gavin, then back to me as tears welled in her eyes. “I’m so sorry,” she said as she struggled to hold back gasping tears.
“For?” I asked.
Gavin nudged me as Candace wiped away her tears. The look in his eye was calm, but alert. He tilted his head slightly. It was a gesture he had given me a million times before, when I was trying to remember my lines, my role when I stepped on stage. It was the look that was supposed to remind me to play my part, so that was exactly what I prepared to do. Instead of ripping her into a thousand pieces and telling her to go hell like I wanted to, I acted like I was in the fog of death, confused, unaware that she had betrayed me on a sacred level.
“Indie, you died…all of you did…and I had no choice. I either became who she wanted me to be, or I would be next.”
I let fake sympathy fill my expression as I reached my arms out for her to come closer. As I held her, I said, “It’s okay. It doesn’t matter anymore…I have to let go. We all do.”
Cadence jerked her head up in shock. “You can’t! I need you.”
“No, you don’t. You have her favor. You always have.”
“You can’t, though. She has Wilder!” she tearfully insisted.
“What!” Mason and Gavin said in a disbelieving tone as the room we were in turned to ice from the fear in my emotions. For a second, I thought I saw a glimmer of happiness in Cadence’s eyes, like she was enjoying the cold, but that quickly went away as she stepped back. “She was right. You won’t save him, save our family.”
Fire boiled through my soul, and the ice vanished instantly. I forgot the part I was playing. I became who I was meant to be: a fearless girl who would bring destruction to anyone who harmed one of my own.
Fear. That was what echoed for a brief second in Cadence’s eyes. “All right, so maybe you will try,” she muttered.
“I’ll do more than that. Where is she? Where is she keeping them—all of them?”
“You need the key. It goes into the floor, more stairs will open. She’s under there.”
Before I could say or think another word, heat absorbed me. It was so thick, so dense that I couldn’t even gasp. The next beat, I was standing i
n my father’s old office on the top floor.
I quickly looked around for Skylynn and Phoenix, but they were nowhere in sight. Instead, I found Mason and Gavin giving each other a proud nod, laced with awe.
“You two. You did that?”
“Skylynn taught us...well, we asked how she did it. She said you focus, and you move.”
“And just like that, you got it?” I said with an exhausted wonder in my tone. Everything was becoming too real for me to comprehend.
“Wasn’t just like that. I was trying from the second we laid eyes on her,” Gavin said with disdain.
“We have to hurry. Is this the right room?” Mason said, glancing to my watches. We had just over a half-hour left if their timetable was right.
I looked up to the arched ceiling that was laced in gold and had paintings of angels at war. In the center, there were two that had their daggers connected in the shape of an ‘F.’ The only reason I knew it wasn’t part of the painting was that I used to hide in one of the corners of this ceiling and watch my father work. From that height, you could see that the daggers were raised from the painting, but I had no idea how we would reach them. There were no beams near that point, and the ceiling was at least thirty feet high.
Gavin and Mason tried to move my father’s desk over to the center of the room, but it was too heavy.
“So you guys can zap me into another room, but a ceiling is too hard for you? What is the plan—build a tower or something? If so, we are already out of time,” I said to them.
They looked at each other as they stopped their struggle with moving the desk, which weighed well over four hundred pounds.
The next instant, they vanished.
I looked up when I heard them laughing. Their backs were against the slightly arched ceiling. Mason was the one whose laugh was the most dominant. “We can’t die, man—this is too much freaking fun,” he said to Gavin.
Becoming more serious, they both reached for the daggers at the same time, and when they did fire came from the handles, moved up their arms, across their bodies, and absorbed into their skin. It happened so fast, I didn’t even have time to freak out. Then, as if they were laced with feathers, they floated down, both staring at the blades.
“Wrong ones?” I said with heavy sarcasm.
Gavin held his out. On one side of the blade I saw an extremely detailed wing. He then turned the blade, showing me the image of the girl in the triangle breaking free, the woman before one bird with two at each side, the seven stars offering a halo.
Mason was breaking into one of the cases on the wall so he could get a sheath for the blades they had. I didn’t blame him; they looked dangerously sharp.
“Here’s the thing,” I said to Gavin, “she’s got Wilder. She has one of us, the one the triangle needs. We have to set him free before we can kill her. That’s why she took him.”
“We are setting the seven free first. Your uncle, too. They bind you with grief, they bind your power. Even if we saved Wilder first, we would still die without that power to raise us.” Gavin put his hands on my shoulders so I would have to look at the intensity in his eyes. “You have to commit a selfless act in order to sacrifice your mortality to become immortal. We shield your power, but we are not your power. You are. Your soul. Your empathy. Your compassion. You have to set our seven demons free so you can move on to save others. No action can come from us without your demand, and it has to be one that we both agree on. I remember that clearly. You need to focus. Play this the right way, or not at all.”
I felt anxiety building in my gut. I felt sick. I didn’t know if I could do this. I had been so bold, so focused on this moment, and now that it was here I almost wished I would have let go, but then I remembered the images of my family that I saw in the hall, the flames around them, the agony in their eyes. No matter what, I had to set them free. After that point, I could debate if I was the girl they all thought I was.
Gavin shook my shoulders, trying to get me out of my obvious stage fright. “Listen to me: when you were weak a second ago, I saw hope in Cadence’s eyes. I know you did, too, and when you were strong she let fear emerge for a second. There is no doubt they know what you are, what you will be. Own it. Become it. Play the part like it is the last role you will ever play.”
“I don’t...” I said with a gasp as I felt my gut clench and the nausea come back. “I don’t think I can.”
The intensity in Gavin’s eyes grew. “You are going to act like you can. That is our advantage. You are going to play this role. You are going to hold your head high and make them think you have already transitioned, that you are already everything they fear.”
“When I see them, my family, I’m going to be destroyed. I will freeze us into the next Ice Age. No acting can cover that up.”
“You’ve made it go away twice since we have been awake. I know you can do it again. Whatever you thought of, hold that image in your mind. Use it as a weapon. You’re right. If they see the ice, they will know you have no control, they will know you are still weak. The transformation gives you control. They’re desperately trying to stop that.”
“They know we are weak because they have Wilder,” I argued.
“For all they know, he’s playing the part, too,” Mason said as he walked over and handed Gavin a sheath for his blade. “Listen, we know each other all too well. We don’t even need words. You just look us in the eye when you get weak, when you need direction. We have to trust each other. You’re going to have to trust us. Gavin is right, we have to follow your demands, and we all have to agree. You will not be alone for one second. I swear.”
Mason tucked his blade behind him as Gavin did the same.
“We are going on stage, Indie,” Gavin said as calmly as he could. “Play this part, and at the very least, we’ll give them something to fear when we return.”
I swallowed my nerves and tried to find adrenaline to hide behind once I thought I was close enough. I turned and went to the doorway. Just outside of it, I was standing where I was in my dream, looking down on the elegant dome room.
“I was there,” Gavin said, nodding to the other staircase.
“I was there,” Mason said, pointing to the opposite one.
“When?” I asked as I struggled with my nerves.
“When we moved the house. This room spun at the speed of light with our energy, and the floor opened and grasped our roots,” Gavin said as he clenched the rail—you’d have thought he was holding on, like the memories were too real to him right now.
“I really think someone would have noticed a house appearing two hundred years ago,” I said, almost to myself. I think I had decided to see this all as some big dream. That soon I would wake up, move through my day, my arguments with Rasure, school, walking through the North Wing, hanging out at the bar, and dream of my two beats.
“It was here before then. I have no doubt. I remember…” Mason said in a whisper that seemed painful. “You had a vision or something. We started plotting to leave as soon as…as soon as Sebastian and Guardian left.”
I looked up at him sharply. As far as I knew, I had never told him Phoenix’s real name, never told him about Guardian.
“We followed them,” Mason said. “We have been here a while. We landed here long before this country was even discovered.”
“One thing is for sure: Sebastian sure knows how to build a house,” I joked darkly. I couldn’t take in anymore of what they were saying. It was too much, and they were making it seem real. The only way I was going to get through this was by thinking it was a dream, or a really extravagant play.
“God, I wish Skylynn had opened our minds before last night,” Gavin said as he stared forward, clearly agreeing with Mason.
“Where have we been all this time?” I asked timidly.
“Trapped, lost. Something stopped us before,” Mason said as anger consumed him, as I felt fire come from his side. “And I’ll be damned if I let it stop us again.”
“Game face
on, Indie,” Gavin said to me as we saw Cadence standing at one of the thresholds that led into this room floors below us. It was salted, as were the others. One thing was for sure, Rasure didn’t want us in here. In obvious anger, Cadence kicked the salt line as she rushed past it, still gasping with tears, a wrought iron bar in her hand. I couldn’t tell whether the tears were an act or not, she was just too good at playing roles.
I started to descend the spiral staircase with Mason and Gavin just behind me.
Cadence began to pry out the marble in the center of the floor, and for some reason that made me furious, like I knew she was stabbing a living, breathing thing.
“Cadence,” I said with all the dominance my role called for.
She looked up in shock, maybe relief. “You are going to help him,” she said with a tearful gasp.
“Tell me why the well-being of Wilder has brought so many tears to you?” I said as I continued my elegant descent. I mean, she wasn’t even making eye contact with Gavin, the one boy she did have a relationship with.
“She made me fool him,” she said as she moved her head from side to side in despair. She sucked in a deep breath. “She had me serve him up on a platter to be feasted on and did that because I was terrified, and now they will feast on him for an eternity if you do not stop this. It’s not his fault that he fell for you, that our family drama sucked him in. This is my demon. I killed him.”
“You killed us,” Mason said with scorn.
“Not in the same way. If I had, I would be fighting for you, too.” Her eyes moved to Gavin. “I tried to tell you I was sorry in my own way, to hold you once more, let you know that I was a victim, that she played me from the moment she arrived. She told me she knew my file had been moved, that I was really a runaway and that I had a family that was searching for me.” She locked eyes with me. “I couldn’t go back, Indie, not to that house, not after what my family did to me. I chose the lesser of two fears. The fact that Rasure was less scary than my family has to tell you that I had no choice. I was scared, and now I’m fighting back. I can’t save you, but I can set you free, all of you.”
Dangerous Lovers Page 52
