“I know you will. We will. But I have somewhere I have to be just now. When it’s over, we’ll hunt your clocks down, or whatever else.”
“You wouldn’t happen to know how to raise the water the way Phoenix did, do you? I see a long night of diving for the missing part of my key in the future.”
“I have a few things up my sleeve, and demanding that Phoenix give me one good reason why he won’t change you is one of them,” she said with a wink just before she vanished.
I slid across the beam to where it met the wall and there was a bigger ledge. This was one of my hiding spots, a place I went to think. It almost made sense that I kept climbing up here in that night terror. I liked finding a bird’s-eye view in various rooms of my home. I never thought of it as spying when I did it in the other rooms. I saw it as a way of being everywhere and nowhere at once, a way of finding a cozy spot in this enormous home that at times felt more like a museum.
I’d stopped climbing up here years back when the beams seemed to get tinier, when my hiding place became too small.
As I pushed myself into the corner, I glanced up. When I did, I saw a bird carved out in the beam. I remembered doing that. It took me days, but what was so odd was that it looked just like the one on my wrist now: a falcon in flight.
I reached to trace the grain in the wood. Oddly, it looked like flames swirling around the bird and that it was escaping just in time. The images I’d just seen of my family flashed before my eyes as a sick feeling consumed me.
When I carved that image, I’d noticed the flames the wood grain mocked, but then I imagined a much sweeter image; warmth, fire, setting this Falcon free.
Just as I was about to climb down, my bedroom door opened. Panic consumed me and I held my breath, not wanting to feel or let the ice show itself. As I moved back into the shadows of the beams, I gripped my wrist, the bird, and felt a flame ripple through me.
I sighed when I saw Mason. His eyes moved to the corner I was in, as if he could feel me there. I went to climb down, but he held his hand up, telling me to stay.
Like the skilled rock climber he was, he made his way up the bookcases until he was able to reach the beam and pull himself up. He slid down the beam to the shadowed corner I was in.
“You know, if we’re ghosts or whatever shouldn’t we be able to zap around or something?” he said in his familiar spirited tone.
As always, he made me smile. “I’m sure all of that is a state of mind. Shouldn’t you be in a lake right now?”
“Shouldn’t you?” he asked as he perched himself beside me and stared out at the beams of the room like he was looking for something.
“House arrest.”
He grinned as he threw a quick glance at me. “Someone told you to do something, and you listened.”
“Picking my battles. Where is everyone else?”
“Not sure. We all had a plan for how we were going to leave the bar the next time. I was supposed to come to you. I appeared at your door.”
“The others?”
“Dealing with their girls.” He glanced at me. Noticing my confused expression, he stopped searching for whatever he was looking for.
“What’s up, Indie?”
I moved my head from side to side, holding his gaze and fighting the tears I felt clouding my vision.
“Talk to me,” he pleaded in a deep whisper.
“My head is spinning. I mean, I always knew I was odd with the ice, the weird way I would dream or see images when I touched stuff but this is insane.”
“Death?”
“What death allowed me to remember, or rather embrace.” I briefly closed my eyes, seeing Phoenix’s image lingering there. “Mason, I can remember a past life in detail, and it’s not a normal one. It wasn’t even in this world, or reality rather. Wilder got to me before, when he said my mind was fabricating what I wanted. I don’t want to lose what I’ve found, but I keep pulling and forcing myself to focus on who I was in life, on Indie. I want those lives to mesh, but one is close to normal and the other is straight out of a paranormal movie.
His shoulders fell a little as he held my stare. “Indie, you are not losing your mind, and you are not fabricating anything.”
“Are you saying that because you have seen Skylynn and Phoenix?”
“No,” he breathed out. “Look, I—we’ve kept something from you.”
My eyes grew wide.
“It’s not bad,” he said, raising his hand. “It just makes sense now.”
“What makes sense?”
“This manor. You. The first time I came here, I felt like I was walking into my house. I felt like I had come home. Yeah, maybe it could have been because you made sure everyone here felt like that, but still I would have dreams of this place, wild dreams that were, like you said, far from normal. In those dreams, I knew I was missing something, that this house, you, maybe even us were off, like, hidden or out of place.”
“Why didn’t you tell me any of that?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t want you to see it as a claim on you. Remember way back when we first started hooking up and Gavin showed up and it was odd at first?”
All too clearly. They didn’t know each other before then. Gavin and I had reached the ‘we can only be friends’ conclusion months before that. It felt odd introducing him to someone that was so vastly different than him.
“Well, you crashed that night in the middle of the movie, and Gavin and I talked for hours. At that point, I’d already had dreams of this place. They were like a heavy fog I was trying to uncover. He saw the way I was looking around and trying to match the room we were in with my dream, and he told me he had the same dreams, felt the same pull. We became fast friends that night.”
“Because of a few dreams? This manor?”
“It was more than that. They were lucid dreams. The fact that you could do what you could do with the ice and stuff made those unreal dreams seem more like repressed memories. We have been researching this for years, trying to figure out the connection, and death has just made those dreams turn to memories. We are getting close to figuring it out.”
“Mason, you have a family that has already lost one son. Fight for your life right now, not some connection to this house.”
“I feel it too, Indie. I know what you mean when you said you felt like you were stuck between the past and the present. Our theory is if we figure out the present, the past will make sense. At that point, we can have a future.”
“Why are you more sane about this than I am?”
He grinned. “Because I’m not struggling to grasp the one my soul has always called me to while we face this crossroad in life.”
I turned crimson. “You haven’t even officially met him yet. Those are big words.”
“We’ve met, though. I don’t think he recognizes me. Honestly, I don’t think he can see past you,” he said with a wink.
I raised my brow to question him.
“The dreams.”
I heard the echo of footsteps from the hallway, that irritating, authoritarian click that could only belong to Rasure.
Mason pushed me into the dark corner and pulled me to my feet so he could shield me behind him. You would have to be looking for us to see us up here, and even then it would be hard with the shadows.
When the door opened it wasn’t Rasure, it was Cadence. She was dressed in a black formal dress. My first thought was that she had moved on, that this was her glancing back one last time in the death shrouds her body was surely wearing now, but that thought made no sense when Rasure followed her into the room. The click of her heels amplified the anger I could see on her stone cold expression.
She reached for Cadence’s arm and spun her around. “Why did you walk away from me?”
“I walked away from Ben,” Cadence said, pulling her arm away. “He has always made me uncomfortable.”
That shocked me. I knew she and Ben were not close, but uncomfortable? That made no sense. And obviously, Ben could not see
her in the first place.
“Niece. We have no choice. Either we play this role, or we are out on the streets.”
“Your master plan has failed. I’m not a fool. You have lost control. Indie has outsmarted you.”
I smirked when I heard that. Maybe death had finally afforded Cadence the tenacity she needed to stand up to Rasure. She’d always left that up to me in the past, saying it was my war and that she was just along for the ride.
Rasure’s cold expression vanished as she reached to caress Cadence’s long strawberry blonde hair. “I promised you that I would vindicate you. I never break a promise. One way or another, Benjamin will halt his fight.”
“He is a true Falcon. They never quit.”
“And you are a Cambridge. We never die.”
I felt like the wind was sucked out of my soul. The Cambridge family was very prestigious, close friends of Rasure’s. Why would she tell Cadence she belonged to that family? That she did?
“Everyone dies.”
“Do they?” Rasure said ruefully.
Cadence looked down in shame or fear, I couldn’t figure out which. “When their purpose is fulfilled.”
“Well, then,” Rasure said, smoothing out her dress, a tell of hers that said she was furious and beyond frustrated. “If that is the case, then I am sure you and I have a very long life before us, for we have barely begun.” She extended her arm, suggesting that Cadence lead the way back downstairs.
Cadence’s chest swelled with pride as she smiled slightly and then walked out of the room. Rasure’s glance surveyed the room once, then looked up, but not in our direction. She let out a sigh as a stern look of determination came across her emotionless face just before she briskly turned to leave the room, all but slamming the door behind her.
“What the hell?” I said as my chest rose and fell rapidly. I was pushing into my wrist so hard that it should have caused me to bleed. I guess dead people can’t do that.
Mason didn’t bother to answer me. Instead, he held the ceiling with his long arms as he walked across the beam to the direction that Rasure had glanced. He moved with ease and skill. I’d seen him do far more dangerous maneuvers on our epic hiking adventures.
When he reached a cross point in the beams, he reached down to the beam he was standing on and felt around. A second later, he pulled out what looked like a small black ink pen. The top of it looked like wood, something that easily blended in.
He broke the pen into several pieces, letting it fall to my bed below before he moved on to another point in the room.
I started to climb down, wanting to see what it was. By the time I reached my bed, he had thrown down four more, all broken. A second later, he fell onto my bed, causing it to move violently to the side.
“What are these?” I asked, seeing that there were wires at the core of each one.
“Cameras.”
“She was filming me! How did you know?”
“Gavin hacked into the manor’s security, found a coded file. In that file was this room, the playroom, every room you hang out in except the North Wing, darkroom, and library.”
“I’m going to kill her! Why would she do that?”
“Besides trying to see your plots against her, not sure,” he said sarcastically as he stated the obvious.
“Taking them down now is not doing us much good,” I muttered as I crossed my arms, finally figuring out how Rasure seemed to know my every move.
“Actually,” he said, raising his eyebrows and letting his warning of a smile echo on the corners of his lips surface, “you can see us, well, not all of us. It looks like a ripple across the screen. There is no sound or anything, but she can tell what room we are in, and how many of us.”
“You’re joking.”
“Nope, and guess what? When you look at older ones, you can see Skylynn. She looks like a halo of light around you, always there when you were pushed against a wall.”
“She’s always been at my side.”
He nodded once. “Gavin thinks Rasure is looking for more than that key. Those bodyguards—we saw them going into the darkroom. They were down there forever, and when they came out Rasure was waiting on them. They told her they didn’t find anything. After slapping one of them and calling them every name in the book, she sent them back down. Hours later, and still nothing.” He bit his bottom lip as his eyes moved over me. “You must have one hell of a hiding spot. Are you sure the rest of the key is not down there?”
The only thing I had hidden down there was a stack of old journals, ones I found in the floor of the sunroom by pure accident. I’d moved a rug that was not mine and saw an outline in the wood that looked like a trap door or something. The journals were in there. I flipped through all the pages, trying to understand the drawings and words. There was no key in there. I was sure of it. I was also sure that I had hidden those books days before I died, days before I even thought to move the clocks. I even left that rug in place to cover my tracks.
“Positive. Why would she not go down there? Surely, she is not scared of the dark,” I said in a faint tone, thinking she would not come into the library before either.
“Let’s just be glad that she has the boundaries she does have.”
“What game is she playing with Cadence? Did you see her messing with her head on any of that footage? She’s obviously trying to convince Cadence that I’m going to cut her off and that crossing me is the only way for her to know that she would be safe.”
I could tell he’d seen more than he wanted to tell me. “We didn’t really have time to analyze it or anything. We were in a hurry looking for the clocks.”
I turned to go to the door, but he stopped me. “Whoa, what is the plan?”
“I’m going to tell Cadence she is dead and that she needs to move on. Then we need to go for a late night swim.”
That look of his, the one that said, ‘You don’t want to know what I know,’ gave me no choice but to listen to him. “I dodged that lake for a reason. We can’t keep going back there. It makes us too mad, reminds us that we are gone.”
He wanted to say more, I could tell, but he didn’t.
“I need that key.”
“Then we need to find the clothes Cadence had on.”
“Why?”
“Look, I’m not sure what was going on in your car that night, but it was war in ours. We were bound to crash one way or another.”
“What do you mean?” I asked as a sick feeling rose in my throat.
He sighed as his dark eyes filled with a mix of sympathy and anger. “Cadence and Gavin had been fighting for days before that, so Gavin thought that her blocking him on every site he went to, every file he opened at the bar, was her way of begging for his attention. In the truck, he told her to give him the key that she took right when his uncle came in. She started yelling, telling him he needed to stop deflecting or some bullshit, and he told her she needed to stop acting like a spoiled brat, that you were in danger. She threw all kinds of crap at him, like you never cared about us, you were playing us—which we knew was B.S.—and that made her mad because we were still focused on you. Gavin jerked the wheel to the side, trying to get it out of her pocket. I yelled at him, told him to watch the road. I finally got the key, but it wasn’t all of it. I couldn’t find the other part of it. As we struggled, finally I saw her shove it in her pants, then she screamed, ‘Come and get it, you know you want it!’ as she stood in her seat and tried to climb over the back seat to get away from me. As we went down, Gavin tried to get the other half of the key off her as I fumbled for the one part we had gotten. Then I felt Sophia thrashing behind me. I turned to give her air so I could get her out. You showed up right about then. I think you found the part that was loose. The other part is in her clothes.”
“How sure are you about this?”
“Pretty damn sure. We ended up at the bar tonight, like we should have. The two of you didn’t show, so Gavin was trying to figure out why we were there again. That was when we reme
mbered the truck, the fight.”
“Where is Sophia?” I asked in a ghost of a whisper, wishing she had not followed Mason that night. That poor, innocent girl.
“She’s gone.”
“You’re sure?”
“She didn’t show up tonight. That speaks volumes.”
I winced in an attempt to block the guilt I felt wash over me. I swallowed nervously, then said, “So we need Cadence’s clothes.”
“Yeah. So, they are either at the hospital, returned here—”
“Or in evidence. Evidence my brother would be collecting to build a case to show suffering.”
“That is what I was thinking.”
“I can figure that out if I can get to his tablet. He’s downstairs. We can get that info and give Cadence a reality check all at once.”
“You really think Rasure is playing her in death?” he said with an apprehensive echo in his voice.
It was the tone of his question that caught me off guard. It was the tone he used to tell me he didn’t think I was right but was not going to tell me that.
“I don’t know what to think. Cadence has always been broken, she could have been easily manipulated in both life and death. I don’t get why Rasure called her a Cambridge or what other crap she has obviously been feeding her.”
“Gavin is already trying to figure that out. He was going to make her face her past, so to speak…didn’t work out the way he wanted it to, though.”
“Why?” I asked as the room froze over with my dread.
Mason sighed. “He broke into the files about her adoption. There’s no issue there. The issue was that Cadence isn’t Cadence—at least, she is not the girl that was born into that abused family.”
“What?” I asked with a gasp.
“Right. He figured out that that girl died a year before your parents adopted the Cadence we know. Ironically enough, it was a car crash. Your parents were given a very real girl and a fake file.”
“How sure are you?”
“Does Cadence look Hispanic to you?”
“Um...no.”
“Right. Your parents knew something was off, too. Apparently, they investigated all the children’s families that came into their home. Gavin even dug up documents where you parents stated they would adopt her under that name but had insisted that her real family be found. It looked like they assumed it was a clerical error. They stated she was a broken child they would take in but wanted to be assured that at a later date she would not be thrust back into the system if her family came looking for her.”