I went to question him, but Gavin spoke up first. “Skylynn was trying to make it easier for us to remember who we are next go around,” Gavin said. “Last night, she put us in a ring of fire, covered us with some kind of water and herbs, and spoke words over us. She said it was because when we are reborn we may not have time to grow up before we are needed, that we might have to fight as children—she wanted to make that as easy on us as she could. She said whatever she did to us was meant to awaken the soul, to ensure that this life lesson was carried on to the next. All it did was make the dreams we’d had since we stepped foot in this house more real. I’m having a hard time seeing this point, though. When I try, I just see light, spinning stars.”
“It’s having a reverse effect on me, man,” Mason said as he pointed to the dome. “We moved the freaking house.” He locked eyes with me. “We had to. We had to come to help our own. We had to die—seven sacrifices. Seven that bind us until our immortality was born with our death.”
“Seven sacrifices, or seven sisters?” I questioned, gaining hope with each word they spoke.
“To get here, sacrifices. Once you were here, you would rise as one of the seven. The spell was symbolic. It was designed to get you to reach the point we knew you were meant to be at.”
“Is that why the number seven is haunting me?” It truly was. I lost seven souls I loved. I was told that because I was one of the seven sisters, I could not hold the one boy I could not stop thinking about. I could swear he was in my veins at this moment, and now I was looking at an image that had seven stars around a girl.
“No doubt,” Mason nearly fumed. He thought, like I did, that I had been destined to lose my family, that somehow it was planned for me to live through the grief I had endured. And just like me, he could not grasp a reason for anyone to live through that much pain. Something went really wrong long ago.
“There is no way I would have asked seven people to die to get me here.”
“You didn’t. It’s not the same on that side,” Gavin offered. “Time is not the same. You could move through that fall, live a full lives here, died and return, and only a few days would have passed.”
I had every reason to believe what they were saying now. Not only were they using the same words I heard in the North Wing, but they also had the same outlook on how time was perceived in this reality. I heard Guardian say that every minute he stood there, years passed on this side.
Those seven sacrifices could have helped us move here, died, and been back before dinner. Knowing that it didn’t happen that way sent a chill of foreboding down my spine.
“Right,” I breathed, letting them know my memories were catching up to them.
“We did this,” Gavin said. “Our spell,” he said as he pulled the book closer. “I wrote this on the other side.”
“The bright universe, or rather reality,” I acknowledged.
He moved the page and pointed to the roots made to look like four rings, his finger landing on the center. “This divides two realities. This is a wall now, and it should not be. Darkness wants its own rule, as does light…but there must be both, so chosen crested souls were sent to bring balance. We followed to ensure that if they had fallen that they could return home, that our home would know to send more warriors when we did send someone home.”
“You realize this is real, right?” I questioned. “This is not some book,” I glanced at Mason, “some song.” I looked down. “This is our life. Two realities. Phoenix’s. Shadowed souls. Escorts. Light. Dark. Death.” I stood up straighter. “I could never dream up anything this wicked. We need to figure out what went wrong, then. What else do you remember?”
“It’s all about that freaking number: seven,” Mason said. “Seven souls carried us here. They shielded us so the darkness would not know we had come. They were supposed to be set free to go home with our death. Our power was to be dormant until it reached its peak, then our death came, their freedom came. That should have happened forever ago.”
“But it didn’t. Something had to have gone wrong,” Gavin said as his eyes rapidly moved across the page on the journal.
“What if our shield was taken before we gained power? What do you do when you lose seven souls without warning?” I said with a tremble.
They both glanced at me. They knew my wild emotions had moved to the loss of my five sisters and parents. The ice around us was so thick that the journal had been buried. I didn’t reach to squeeze my wrist like I had a million times before. Instead, I thought of Phoenix, my Sebastian, the fire he was, the power he was. The ice vanished at that instant.
Out of habit, Mason looked to my wrist. He lifted the one that had my three watches on it.
“Count down,” he said in a ghost of a whisper.
I looked down to see two of my watches now working. According to them, it was eleven PM.
“How long have they been working?” Gavin asked in a hollow tone.
“They weren’t working just before I knew I was dead. Honestly, I haven’t looked since then.” I mean, why would I look at a watch that had never worked? Checking the time was not even in my vocabulary.
“Midnight. One hour to find the clocks, our daggers, set your seven devils free, and defeat Rasure. One hour to become who we are meant to be,” Mason declared.
“Are you telling me we never needed Phoenix or Skylynn? Is that what you’re saying? If we set my family free—which basically comes with ending Rasure—we are risen?”
“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 memori
al 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 in 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.
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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.”