I scooted off the bed. I needed to move. “She’s not threatening. She’s loving. That was the most extreme I can remember seeing her. Not that I remember much. I don’t. Just a sense of she loved us. She cried when she told me it was time to go. She wished us well. I don’t think she’d hurt anyone.”
I let the three of them hold me together. All would be well. It had to be.
Ren stumbled up the stairs when we were in the middle of breakfast. It turned out that Javier cooked, too. Every time I finished eating, he refilled my plate. “I’m absolutely stuffed.”
He shook his head. “Gordon, your wife has to eat more. She does important work.”
Wife. I stopped at the word and looked at my plate. The other Sisters with Anne who had guards called their guards husbands. But I didn’t know how or why that had happened. They loved me, and we were forever. That much I knew.
Gordon took my hand in his. “It’s that and then some, Dad. But you might want to give me the chance to propose before you have us married.”
Ren poured himself some hot tea. “Wait till Wayne gets up. Looks like you two co-joined while I was asleep. Then we’ll ask.”
They were going to ask? I sat straighter in my chair. “Really?”
Neil sat forward. “Maybe you should eat more.”
The girls came chattering down the stairs. Had there ever been a more perfect morning? Neil’s parents arrived and visited for a while. They were quiet but kind. His mother hugged me tightly when she left, and his father shook my hand, not once but twice. Unlike Lennon’s parents, they were kind. Wayne eventually made his way upstairs and collapsed in a chair in the living room. He looked a little dazed.
“Did you get up too soon?”
He raised his head. “I hate lying around.”
“He really does.” Ren nudged my foot, and I looked back over at Wayne who had fallen right back to sleep in the chair. Ren laughed. “Wayne thinks he can fight magical sleep? Looks like it’s divinity, one, Wayne, zero.”
By mid-afternoon, everyone was awake. I wanted to see the tree, but I’d promised Wayne we’d go see his mother’s grave. That was the most important thing for me to do. When it came down to it, there was nothing more important than how I cared for my loved ones. That tree had been standing there for thousands of years. It would wait a bit more for my visit.
The girls opened their books to study demons, which seemed out of place on Peter’s. I hadn’t been there a full day, and yet somehow, demons felt far away, like I’d stepped out of time, as though they sort of didn’t exist. I shook my head. It was a weird feeling, like a fog settled over the rest of the world. The girls weren’t affected by it, or at least they made no indication that they had been.
Gordon offered to stay behind. He wanted to help his father catch up on work while we were around, and he’d guard the girls while he did. Not that there was really anything to protect them from. Unless Lennon’s parents showed up and said horrible things to them.
I doubted that would happen.
Wayne wanted to bring me alone, so we agreed to all meet up later at the tree. Gordon would bring the girls. I didn’t know what I expected to happen at the tree. Probably nothing. It might all be a giant let down. All this fuss to get me here so I could view a tree. Even if it was magical, and I thought it likely, that didn’t mean my seeing it was going to elicit any change in the universe.
Still, I’d come to see it, and see it I would.
“This whole place is called Peachtree.” The area was enough of a distance from Gordon’s father’s home that we could have taken the carriage. I’d wanted to walk, and since the weather was mild, Wayne had agreed. If I wasn’t careful, I’d spend my whole visit to Peter’s holed up in Gordon’s home letting his father make me feel more welcome than I ever had before.
Wayne held my hand. Every so often, he’d bring it to his mouth and kiss my fingers. Each time he did it, a sigh escaped from inside of me. He’d smile. We’d do it again. There were worse things than being adored.
I’d never be used to it. I’d never take it for granted.
“Because this is where the peach trees are?” I pointed at the massive amount of growing fruit trees in the area.
“I didn’t say it was terribly creative, just that it was the name.”
I laughed, a loud, hard sound, then covered my mouth with my hand. He stopped and stared at me before he burst out laughing, too. When had anything been so funny? I so rarely really cracked up.
“And she likes my sense of humor, too.” He kissed my cheek. “This way.”
I followed him into a quiet graveyard. I’d never been in one before. In my world—in any existence outside of this place—graveyards were a thing of the past. Bodies were gotten rid of so as to not be stolen by people who wanted to rip their teeth out or remove their limbs for nefarious purposes. That is if the body hadn’t been possessed. If they were that was a whole other issue. That dead body could be walking around for months then just fall over when the demon left it. There were body removal people who got paid, sometimes, to get rid of the bodies. Or maybe they did something nefarious with it, too. Then there were the pits. I shuddered at my memory of seeing them.
Mostly, the dead were burned, and it was better that way.
But here on Peter’s, there was this lovely graveyard where Wayne could visit his mother. We stopped at her gravestone, which was well kept. I ran my fingers over her name. Zoe. That was a lovely name.
“Mom, I told you I’d bring my wife to see you one day, and I’ve done it. I mean, she’s not my wife. I guess we’re going to ask her later today.” A surge of pleasure moved through me at his words. They were really serious about this. “I’m hoping she says yes. She’s a Sister. You used to tell me stories about them. She’s even more magical than you said they were. I love her. You’d have loved her, too. Everything is going to be okay. Somehow it is. Because Mika is in the world.”
Tears flooded my eyes, and I pushed them away. His words were so sweet. I wished I could roll around in them. But even as I felt all the beauty in what he said, a cold washed over me. Not from Wayne. He was so incredibly touching. The chill was because I had so readily accepted this, because Peter’s was a place where people stood and spoke to gravestones. No one here would ever be dragged to a mine. Oh sure, someone had taken a Sister here once. And then they’d banned visitors like that from coming.
This place had been manufactured somehow to keep demons away. That was beautiful. It was also fake. Wayne was real. His love was true. My guys were all they claimed to be. Their families were as they seemed. It was like those peach trees. Eventually, the fruit would fall off Peter’s Isle, and as sweet as the juice tasted, left too long, it would eventually rot on the ground.
Nothing this sweet lasted forever.
Wayne lifted his gaze to look at me. “Are you okay?”
“You’re beautiful. Your mom must have been extraordinary. I wish I had known her.”
He smiled at me. “You do. That’s true. I love you for it. That’s not all you’re thinking.”
“No.” I relaced our fingers. “It can wait. I love you. What was your favorite thing about her?”
I’d stay in this moment, present in it. But I wouldn’t forget what I always should have known.
22
I stared at the large, brown tree. Someone, sometime, had built a white fence around it. It stood in the center of the largest town on Peter’s that the guys simply called The Town, emphasis on The when they said it. As though everywhere else was secondary to this location. I wondered if the town had come first or the tree. Had they built the town around the tree or vice versa? Did it matter? No. But I wondered just the same.
I walked forward and climbed onto the fence. Behind me, Gordon made a noise like he was going to stop me. Even if he’d finished with that thought, which he didn’t, I was going over the fence anyway. Maybe it was illegal to touch the tree. The authorities could come arrest me. Or they could try. I doubted they??
?d get past the five guys behind me.
I needed to put my hand on that tree.
Mika…
I stopped moving. “Did you guys hear that?”
“I didn’t hear anything, beautiful,” Gordon answered. “Jump off that fence before you fall.” He was controlling his nerves, but I could feel them.
I shook my head. “Really? You didn’t hear anything? Something said ‘Mika.’ I heard it. And I’m a good climber.”
Still, to ease his nerves I jumped down to the other side and strode the small distance to the tree.
Mika… you came home.
It was the tree. It was speaking to me. I outright turned around. “The tree is speaking to me.”
“Wait… what?” Lennon asked the question, but I’d already put my hand on the tree. The need to do so had been overwhelming, and like it had been waiting forever to share secrets with me, the tree showed me what I needed to know.
It had been planted here hundreds of years ago. Those who claimed to remember when that happened were lying. It was one of those problems with folklore and verbal history. Sometimes things went astray in the telling of the story, although the fundamentals remained the same.
A man in a black jacket had shown up and stuck a stick in the ground. The vision of that man moved through me. It was Reed. From my own recollection, I knew one thing—he’d broken many rules in doing this. The tree grew, and as it did, the power from that stick spread throughout the island. The magic roots kept the demons away. They couldn’t come here, couldn’t even see it.
But the tree was far older than its planting. As a seedling, it had lived where the sky was purple and divinity wept for humanity. It had listened, it had watched. It had learned. It wasn’t the right pronoun for what this tree was, but since gender wasn’t a reality for the tree, I couldn’t do better in how I thought of it. It would have to do.
There had always been demons, and there had always been women who could defeat them. Most people went their lives without stepping a foot into that world, without knowing anything about it. There hadn’t been a need for a Sisterhood. Mothers taught daughters. Whispers in the night. True creatures of the dark fed off souls and went back to their existences, watching us, destroying only a few lives at a time.
Beelzebub and other Originals controlled them all. There was a balance. Lives were destroyed in small numbers. Divinity wept, but life continued.
Until it didn’t.
I’d always wondered—how had the apocalypse happened? What had changed? What had taken place that all the demons came and weren’t stopped?
The tree wept. Inside of me, I felt the weeping. It remembered. It saw. One demon. A dark looming presence, like a shadow on the wall. A shadow could be missed even by those who should know better. The women who’d fought hadn’t noticed.
But then a young girl did. She saw the shadow, and instead of fighting it, she invited it inside.
That was all it took. One girl. One invitation to possess her. Power. The creature got a taste of it. For hundreds of years, it moved from one girl to the next, a person who should be destroying it, embracing it instead.
The shadow grew. It invited more demons to this world. The girls who took the shadow as their own read books, they learned how to bring them here. The demons multiplied. Even the old ones—the Originals—didn’t know what to do with this. They didn’t want apocalypse. What would they do when there were no more humans here?
Divinity fought back. Sister after Sister was born, it seemed for a while that we might win, and then Katrina betrayed them. She was the next girl to take the shadow. And she held it close to her heart while she took over the Sisterhood.
There were few left who could be totally trusted. I was sent to Peter’s to be born. Reed’s overstepping might prove helpful yet. If I could be kept away, if the tree could protect me here, then they knew one soul would stand against Katrina. Anne might not make it. Teagan could be destroyed. Nothing could be counted on anymore. There was hope—so much hope—but if the women who fought the demons could take one instead, then what assurances were there anymore?
One place left that the tree would protect.
And then they’d taken me.
All hope had been lost. The tree held out. It was almost out of magic. The demons would come to Peter’s. Like everywhere else, this place would fall.
The Oracle hadn’t been allowed to grow here, hadn’t spent her formative years in love and protection, hadn’t met her soul mates under a protective hand.
“It’s okay,” I put my head against the bark of the tree. “Anne didn’t fall. Teagan wasn’t destroyed. They hoped we would be enough, and we are. And I’m…” It was hard for me to admit this, but I would. “I’m so much stronger than they thought I could be. I don’t need protection. They do. From me.”
The tree’s happiness flowed into me. I pulled back just a little. “Let me warn them, the people of this place who you have cared for. Let me see if I can get them ready. Hold on that long.”
It would.
I stepped back, dizziness forcing me to my knees. I’d never expected to converse with a tree, let alone have a history lesson from it. Those were details I’d never known before. Gordon was suddenly by my side. “Mika?”
“Sister Mika, are you okay?” Jayne called out from the other side of the fence. “The tree glowed.”
I touched the tree one more time. “Yes, it does.” I met Gordon’s gaze. “We all have to talk. The girls, too. This is their life as much as it is mine. Turns out that one bad decision, one truly poor moment, repeated over and over, can really destroy the world.”
Gordon scrunched up his face. “What?”
“Mika,” Neil called out, “there’s something else.”
What could it be? Gordon gave me his hand, and I got to my feet. Near my guards stood a woman. She had blonde hair and blue eyes. Her face was long, thin, and her body on the slender side.
I walked toward the fence, and this time I let Gordon help me over.
“You look just like him.” The woman might have fallen over except that Neil grabbed her shoulders keeping her upright. “I heard there was a Sister here, and I had to see.”
The truth of this moment hit me hard. I’d been so focused on my loves’ families that I’d not stopped to consider, not once, that we’d determined I’d been born her. Which meant I had a family here, too.
I didn’t look much like this woman in front of me except that I shared her body type. We were both slender, exactly the same height. My face was shaped the same as hers.
“You look just like your father did. He passed away trying to save you.”
I had never, in my entire existence, expected to meet my mother.
Lennon was speaking to her. “We understand so much more now what happened. We’re so sorry this happened to all of you…”
I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do in this moment, how I was supposed to feel. I gave in to the need that was both terrifying and overwhelming at the same time. I threw my arms around her, and I held on.
This was the person divinity had picked out to raise me in this place. I was supposed to have been kept safe, the Oracle, who could see the babies and call their families here. Only I hadn’t seen one since I’d arrived. Maybe divinity had paused their births to give me a break. It didn’t matter. She would have kept me safe until I could do this job.
On this island outside of reality. She was my mother, and they’d taken her from me and me from her.
I didn’t know how long we stood there, but I tried my best to bask in this gift I’d not expected, because tomorrow I would leave her again. And when the tree died, everything she knew as true would change.
“Hi, Mom.”
I was spent. So tired from the emotions of the day that my need for rest went beyond sleeping. I stared at the ceiling of the basement. I’d told the guys I’d come down to bathe, which I had done, and now they waited for me upstairs. I wasn’t moving so fast.
; I’d not had a vision since I got here, but I could feel one coming. I’d gotten used to the sensation in the cursed place. A baby had been born, and I needed to see it.
Clara was here. Katrina couldn’t get into my head to see this baby. The longer I held out doing this, the worse it would be when it happened. The beginnings of a headache had formed, and it was only going to get worse.
Five sets of footsteps pounded down the stairs. I hadn’t thought to block them from this. They must have felt this happening to me, and it was the first time since we’d co-joined.
“Mika? Status?” Neil was at my side first. “What hurts?”
I met his gaze. “I’m going to have a vision. These magical gifts don’t come without a price. Everything is two-sided, good and bad. I’m rambling. Sorry.”
Neil sat down on the bed next to me, his hand on my forehead. “You feel like you have a fever. Can you just get this over with? Endure it? I’m sorry, but if you have to, rip off the bandage. I know it’s easy for me to say.”
I teared up. “It’s not that, Neil. I’ve never had one of these visions and not gotten trapped in Katrina’s cursed road. I don’t want to go back there again.”
“I get that.” He smoothed my hair off my forehead. “Clara’s power won’t let that happen to you. She’s upstairs. My father made the girls brownies. She’s chatting away. No one is getting in your head to do anything to you.”
I nodded. I had to be brave. This was ridiculous. I’d suffered through worse. What was any of this if I couldn’t find a little faith? I let my power move through me. One second I was in the room with my guys, and the next I was somewhere else, but it wasn’t a dark road.
Sunlight shone through a small house, and a woman rocked a crying infant.
“Mika.” Neil stood next to me. What was he doing here with me? “Looks like you took me along.”
“I…” I hugged him tightly. “Thank you for coming.”
He grinned. “My pleasure. Glad to do it. What is this place?”