I glanced back to the dark passageway. I felt like I was waking up from a dream. My life as Indie was only a few steps away, but my past was calling me home.
“Indie?” Gavin said carefully.
I raked my fingers through my short blonde hair before turning to face him. I had a fear I was going to have to break it to all of them, to Mason for the second time, that we were dead. Phoenix was right. I wasn’t going to be able to handle this cycle.
I turned to see all of them staring at me with wide eyes.
The room began to freeze over. Unconsciously, I reached for the falcon that was now on my wrist. Warmth came then, not only to me, but also to the room.
“Death looks good on you,” Wilder said with an odd disdain as the scent of lilies he always carried seemed to hover over me.
I furrowed my brow. “You know?” I whispered.
He nodded once.
“Why are you guys looking at me like that?” I asked timidly, unable to handle all of their attention at once.
“We’ve never seen you blush…you look more alive in death than you ever did before,” Mason said with a curious smirk. He was the one that could always read me like a book. In truth, he knew me better than all of them combined.
His words made me blush even more as the thought of Phoenix came to mind. “Where’s Cadence?”
They all looked at each other, agreeing not to answer me. “Did…did she move on?” I asked as tears encased my throat. I assumed that Mason had told them what happened to us, that they knew we were barely holding on to life at this moment.
“She’s at school, or at least trying to go,” Gavin answered in a nonchalant way.
“She knows we’re dead, and she went to school?”
“We didn’t tell her,” Gavin said, focusing on what he was reading. By his obvious lack of concern, I could tell he was furious with her.
I glanced at Mason, and he quickly looked away.
“She deserves to know…even if you guys are mad at her,” I mumbled.
Gavin smirked. “We figured it out on our own. Why can’t she?”
“Mason didn’t tell you?” I countered, glancing between Gavin and Wilder.
“I knew at the bar. That’s why I sent Paula away, hoping we wouldn’t crash this time.”
“Is that your girl’s name?” I said with a sneer. “I disapprove. Her diet has me bothered.” I could not get the images of her sucking the energy out of us on that bank out of my head.
That snide remark made Mason and Gavin grin.
“I was well aware of her diet long before that night,” Wilder assured me.
“What? You knew?”
He crossed his arms and let his steel blue eyes fall onto me. “Gavin emailed me. I headed back here, she followed.” Wilder’s eyes echoed a desire that had never been this intense before. “I thought you knew I was seeing her.”
“How would I know? You didn’t say.”
“Cadence set us up, told me this girl had been at a few charity events here and was new in the town I was in.” He let his stare linger for a second before he spoke again. “Cadence even sent a few emails, making sure we were getting along okay.”
If I didn’t know any better, I would swear he was trying to make me mad. But I wasn’t going there with him.
“I’m sure I forgot she told me.”
His eyes slowly raked over me. I couldn’t figure out what emotion was hiding behind them, what he was trying to say without a word. All I knew was that I felt a burning guilt when I stared at him. He was dead because of me. They all were dead because of me.
“I suppose death can mess with your head, make you forget things, even create things. Feels like a dream to me.” Wilder focused his eyes. “We need to hold on to each other and not let illusions convince us that something beyond death is happening here.” He crossed his arms. “I don’t think you going off and hiding behind a locked library door is a wise thing to do alone.”
Coded conversation, which was typical for Wilder and me. He had a way of making random remarks that would call out what my mind was struggling with. Right now, he was telling me that because we were dead my mind had fabricated Skylynn and Phoenix and I needed to steer clear of anything that wasn’t firmly grounded in my reality or mind before I died.
“I’ve never been alone, Wilder. Not once.” I heard the ice cracking as it formed against the walls. “I’m lucid and determined in this dream of death. I’m not hiding from anyone or anything.”
“Lucid enough to make you blush,” Wilder said as he raised his brow. “Your mind is creating a life you wanted but never had. Maybe you should ask yourself what is fueling the illusions you are seeing. Maybe the real deal has been in front of you the whole time and you were just too preoccupied to notice.”
This is what happens when you do not resolve arguments, when you act as if they never happened. I’d always acted like our last fight never happened and let a few text messages hold on to the friendship I thought we could have. I felt a repelling sensation in my gut. I wanted away from him, and I hate to say it, but I regretted letting him get as close to me as I did. I knew it would never work, but I pretended it could for far too long. I suppose it was because I knew he was holding back, too, and I wanted to know for sure what I was throwing away before I did.
After finding Phoenix, after having a rich past consume me to the point where I felt like I lived it yesterday, I knew this almost lover, Wilder, wasn’t even close to what I was looking for. And because of my foolishness, Wilder was now here with me for God knows how long. I’d imprisoned him and was bound to pay the price for that act.
“Back off, Wilder,” Gavin said as he waved me over to him. Thankful for the escape, I collapsed next to him on the floor.
Gavin glanced over me once more. “You good? Too much too fast?”
“If you only knew what was going on in my head, I bet you’d have enough ideas for ten books to back it up.”
“It’s only going to get weirder, Indie. Mason and I are having wicked flashbacks, too.”
I glanced up at Mason, who was lying across the bed looking over our shoulders. He gave me a nod to confirm.
“What kind of flashbacks?”
“Ones that are here, but not here,” Gavin said, catching my gaze again as he kept his voice down.
“Dual reality?” I asked.
Both he and Mason nodded.
“You guys have lost it,” Wilder bit out. “Dual what? We’re dead. Simple as that. Your minds are just on some wicked trip. We need to figure out how to get undead or move on, one or the other. We can’t stay like this.”
Ignoring him, Gavin went on. “I never told you this, but around Halloween these paranormal hunters showed up, wanting to film your house, the grounds around it. Rasure blocked them from even asking you. I only knew about it because I was at the bar and they were asking if anyone heard of any wicked stories about your property. A few people sent them to my table. I figured they were full of B.S. and were just looking for gossip on your family.”
“This house wasn’t haunted until we died,” I said as I rolled my eyes. I remembered seeing a few images when I was younger, but they never made themselves known. I figured it was just the flashes of memories that were producing them.
“Right. Well, anyway,” Gavin said, shaking off the fact that he’d seen his sister’s ghost here one night. “I asked them why they were focused on your house, and it turns out that one of them had a brother or brother-in-law, something, that was on the crew that built Rasure’s wing a few years back. He said every time they went to plow down one of the oak trees in the way, one of the guys would get hurt or sick. They even had machinery break down. They were set to burn it when a court order caused them to redraw their plans and move a hundred feet to the east. They were relieved that they didn’t have to deal with the tree anymore and shrugged it off like it was nothing.”
“That was my court order,” I stated with disdain. If Rasure had gone through with the
original plans she’d had, the library, along with the North Wing, would’ve had to have been rebuilt. Not only that, but the grounds around the family’s memorial plot would have been reduced by almost half. It took an act of Congress, but I stopped her from invading my parent’s eternal rest.
“Yeah, I know,” Gavin said under his breath as he reached to squeeze my knee. He was the one that had always kept me calm when Rasure got the best of me, when I was just a girl. “Anyway, the weirdness didn’t stop there. Later, when they were building the foundation, they thought they came across some logs that were buried or something. Turned out they weren’t logs, but roots; roots that came, at least in part, from that oak tree. They had a ton of specialists come out and survey the land, and the entire crew threatened to bail if they were told to cut into that tree. Long story short, they figured out that the roots connected to four other trees as well. They estimated that the trees were well over two hundred years old, which stopped them from taking them down, even if it was from the ground up. They managed to lay the foundation higher than they first planned.”
“They wanted to check out my trees? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“That, and other things. They said they picked up on rumors or whatever saying to never go to Falcon Manor if you were an artist, that it would drain you and you would never create again.”
I threw a nasty, unbelieving glare at him, which caused him to laugh. I was a magnet for artists. Mason wrote most of his songs here, Gavin’s short stories always reminded me of my house, and Wilder’s paintings of this place would take anyone’s breath away.
“Yeah, I told them they were insane, too, then they started giving me all these new definitions of vampires, saying they took energy, not blood, and that creativity was their delicacy. Anyway, I told them they were nuts and sent them on their way, but I was curious so I asked Mason if he ever hit a wall around you or your house. Then we called Wilder.”
I glanced up at him.
“I hit a wall the day that girl came into my life,” he said with a smirk.
“You guys knew about Escorts and didn’t tell me?” I asked with wide, disbelieving eyes.
“About what?” Wilder asked in dismay.
I heard a whoosh of wind, and my stomach caved in. I didn’t want to be in the same room with Phoenix and them.
“She listens,” I heard Skylynn say. With a sigh of relief, I looked over my shoulder to see her lying on her stomach beside Mason. “Escorts, they take energy.”
“And what do you take?” Mason asked as his chocolate eyes melted over her.
“Cool it, drummer boy. Not my type.”
“What is your type?” he asked with a boyish grin.
She ignored him as she pointed her finger to the screen. “Slide your magic box down so I can see that.”
“My magic what?” Gavin said with a smirk. I elbowed him, and finally he listened.
“What do you want to see?” he asked her as he scrolled through the images he was looking at before.
“What was that drawing thing?” she asked.
“A 3D version of what they think is under the house. Cutting one tree would have killed four others.”
I felt my body tense. That 3D image looked a lot like the one I’d seen in the North Wing, the one that the necklace and fire had brought to life. It wasn’t as detailed, but there was no doubt what this image was imitating: twin realities.
On the screen, you could see a blueprint of the manor, the five trees in question. When he tilted the image, you could see the roots. They looked like a giant sphere underground. It was really beautiful the way nature had connected beneath the surface.
“Holy Hell,” Skylynn said under her breath. She reached for a pen and started to draw on the screen, but Gavin jerked it away.
“This is not a magic box. You can’t draw on it.”
She vanished from where she was and appeared at Wilder’s side with paper and marker in hand. “You. Draw that.”
Wilder’s steel blue eyes drank her in as he took the paper from her.
“Don’t look at me like that. You can do this.”
“I’ve got a block,” he said under his breath.
“Well, I’m not asking you to be creative. Copy it so I can connect the dots,” she demanded.
Wilder stretched out on the floor and used the screen to guide his hand.
“I don’t think they should be focusing on this…we need to help them move on,” I said to Skylynn.
She raised a single eyebrow. “I honestly assumed you would come out of that library with a different determination. Phoenix convinced you to move on?”
At the sound of his name, the guys looked at me and my skin turned beet red. Normally, by now the room would be a solid block of ice. They knew something was off about me, that someone had broken through my icy shields, that the idea of him was powerful enough to make me melt.
“I’m good with repeating my day. If they do, they will get more and more twisted. I don’t want them hurt.”
Skylynn’s blue eyes looked over me gently. She felt sorry for me, guilty for keeping Phoenix away from me, but I didn’t feel that way. If I knew who he was before, this would be harder. The old memories of him, along with last night, would keep me warm for years to come. If I’d known him longer, I wouldn’t be able to walk away, to boldly tell him to go on his way and leave me be.
“They are more involved in this than we first thought,” she said with a nod to Gavin and Mason. “They weren’t blind at their death. They knew what you were fighting before you did,” Skylynn said with sympathy.
“That’s not what you guys said before,” I argued.
“We are doing our best to piece together what happened before your death, and at first it looked to be an accident, but now it seems as though it was premeditated.”
“So they will not go off and fight their own losses?” I asked. I was ashamed of feeling grateful that I would not be alone in death.
Skylynn glanced at all of them. “Weeks before your death, where was your energy focused? Where did your thoughts wander when they had nothing else to think about?” She locked eyes with Mason. “Was it your brother?” She moved on to Gavin. “Your sister?” Then to Wilder. “Where?”
Their stares all seemed to scream, NO! at once.
“Where was it? Don’t lie to me. This is important,” I demanded.
“You,” they said one after the other.
“Don’t think we’re crazy,” Mason said, reaching for my shoulder. “We thought Rasure had you under some kind of demonic spell. That she was the reason for the ice and stuff. We’ve been really deep into this.”
“Cadence knows, too?” I asked in a ghost of a whisper.
“No,” Gavin said with derision.
I glanced back at Mason. “I told him about what she did, but he already knew.” He answered my unasked question, almost painfully.
“How?” I asked Gavin, reaching for his hand.
“Just did.”
“For how long?”
“Since before Halloween. We’ve been breaking up for a long time now. She blamed you for it. I wouldn’t tell her what Mason and me were working on and that drove us further apart. She thought it was about my sister, but it wasn’t. It was just easier to put up with her than to fight it out at the end.”
That didn’t make any sense to me. Gavin was one of those people that wanted all or nothing. If you didn’t want him, if he didn’t want you, or if there was any cheating going on, he was long gone. Cadence wasn’t the only girl he’d been with since me, so I knew his pattern. What didn’t make sense was why he put up with it for the better part of a month, why what I saw last night happened. That just wasn’t his style, to have friends with benefits.
I didn’t want to push him about it, so I just let it drop. By then, Wilder had finished the sketch of what was on the screen.
Without a doubt, it reminded me of what I saw this morning. There was even what I thought was The Fall cente
ring the sphere.
Skylynn fell to her knees and crawled across the floor toward Wilder. She took the marker and connected the trees. The way she connected them created a pentagram, one that my entire home, with the exception of Rasure’s wing, sat on.
“How freaked out should I be right now?” I said with a gasp.
“This is why she could never hurt you here. This house was protected,” Skylynn said in utter astonishment.
“Not from evil—she lives here,” I argued.
“No, she lives in a wing outside of the pentagram. I bet that is why she wanted it built there. She was also hoping someone else would break this force around the home. Maybe she’s not the big fish I thought she was,” Skylynn said, almost to herself.
Her eyes rose to meet mine, and I saw an unexpected element of respect there. It was as if she were in awe of me. That didn’t make any sense, though. She was the angel, shadowed soul, whatever—not me.
“Were you born where I found you that night?” she asked me.
I shook my head no and swallowed. I’d never advertised exactly where I was born because I didn’t want it to make me out to be more of a freak. “I was born in the memorial garden.”
Every Falcon that had died over the last two hundred years was buried in that garden, most of them inside marble walls. Beautiful artwork was in there, and it was even temperature-controlled. A marble observatory with a constant burning fire was built just before the tomb. That was a sacred place for me, a place that I would go to and just stare at the stars, watch the reflections of the stained glass window dance around me.
My parents thought my birth mother was a runaway, hiding out in there for shelter or something. When they couldn’t find her family, they had her buried in our family tomb. It was their way of saying they would watch over her and the gift she gave them forevermore.
“This garden?” she asked, pointing to the one Rasure almost destroyed. It rested at the peak of where those rings of roots connected. I nodded once. It looked like the same spot.