Authors: David James
“No,” I lied, frowning. “So what is Lake Iris, exactly?”
Lake Iris
, I thought. Whenever Kate mentioned Lake Iris, I felt a rush of panic run through my veins like a fire trying to burn.
Like fire burning too quickly-
faster and faster until it died.
Too fast.
Always too fast.
Kate cracked her neck from side to side, and when she spoke it was as if her voice had cracked too; it was as dark as the night, as deeply filled with mystery as her eyes. “Lake Iris is my home. It’s the Order’s training complex and coven headquarters; the biggest one in North America.” She gritted her teeth. “We’re still second to the one in the Atlantic Ocean, but they’re pretty reclusive. Lake Iris is home to Warriors, lesser Order members, and the Elder Council for this location. It’s where, as Warriors, we train, and where the Elder members can watch over any Orieno attacks in this area.”
Kate spoke of her world in fear and respect, an icy undertone always present in her voice. Her world, to me, seemed as luminous in its magic as it was terrifying in its power to unravel what I’d always known. And I wasn’t even sure I believed.
She paused, as if she wanted to say more but the words stuck in her throat. It was then that I noticed the way her eyes flashed, sad as if she were always remembering someone she missed.
Her family
, I thought, because when I looked in the mirror earlier that’s what I saw in myself; that same sadness was in my eyes because of family.
“Stop looking at me like that,” she snapped.
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like you know me.” She stomped on the brakes and shoved the Jeep in park; it squealed, metal against metal, in protest. “Now get out. We can’t let Marcus wait too long. He’ll already know we’re here.”
My eyes searched. “And
where
are we?”
Kate grabbed the steering wheel with both hands and let her head fall between them. Waves of curled brown made her eyes invisible; I didn’t know why, but in that moment I missed them. She sighed. “We. Are. At. Lake. Iris. Seriously, I feel like I’m speaking to a child.”
“Funny, I feel like I just got kidnapped by a lunatic.”
“Funny, I feel like I saved your life.”
I turned away, and then back and said, “Funny, it feels like you took it away.”
Then, in the ghostly light that the moon cast as it rained in through the Jeep’s windows, light and dark filled Kate’s eyes: Shades of purple and sadness and cold, cold anger.
As if made of only bone and shadow, hollow and dark as night, she said, “Get out.”
I didn’t argue.
I didn’t say anything.
We had stopped in a field circled by tall trees, their tops hitting the sky like a halo of ominous hands clapping together. In front of us, beyond the field, the mountain reached a peak, its caps snowy and white a mile above just visible over the trees. A brown owl hooted, jumped from a covered place and flew into the moonlight. The glinting silver of the light reflected off its feathers, and in the night I could see its black eyes looking like pieces of a broken blue moon.
For a moment I felt peaceful. Normal, like I once thought I was. Familiar in the black and blue moment.
Then the owl flew to a tiny pond at the edge of the clearing near a thick grove of trees and landed on a jagged rock beside it. The scene was simple and pretty and filled with far too many shades of gray.
“Get out, Calum!” Kate said again as she slammed her door closed. She swore. “You don’t want to know what will happen if Marcus thinks we kept him waiting too long.”
I wasn’t used to seeing Kate look so shaken, nervous. Somehow it made everything worse. Real and not real at the same time. If Kate, the girl that had a tattoo to show the number of people she killed, was afraid of Marcus, what did that mean for me?
My heart wouldn’t stop thumping wildly in my chest, and I wondered if a person could die from that: A heart beating so fast it just stops.
I pushed open the door and stepped out into the field. A rush of mountain air hit my face. It hugged me, swirling a cool breeze from my feet to my hair. The thin air made my head light and, just for a second, I forgot who I was and smiled.
I said, “I can’t believe I’ve never come up here before.” I looked up at the stars. They were so close that, as I raised my hand above me, it felt like I could almost touch them. The moon was a giant. I brushed a finger over my birthmark and sighed.
Would I ever find answers?
Kate stood next to me. “I meant what I said early, Calum. We’re not exactly close to Lakewood Hollow anymore. That place is gone. Dead. Forget everything you left there if you can.” She pointed to the end of the clearing just over the pond. “Below us is the town of Ashfall where a lot of the lesser Order members used to live. It’s far, a few hours away, but close enough that we used to call it home. The Woman of Prophecy, who keeps the ancient scrolls of legends and psalms lives there, too. Ashfall was founded by Order members so that we would have a safe haven. Well, before the Orieno.”
I didn’t believe.
“There’s no town called Ashfall in Colorado. I’ve never heard of it.”
“You wouldn’t have. It’s protected by the Elder Council and is warded to be invisible and unchartable. No one knows it exists except members of the Order, or unless a member of the Order reveals its location.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Like you just did?”
She frowned. “Yes.”
“What other secrets do you have?”
“Everyone has secrets, Calum.”
I turned to face her. “You know what I meant. What other secrets do you have about the Order? Is there anything else I should know before we go meet this Marcus guy?”
Kate’s eyes flashed. “Show Marcus respect when you speak about him! He’s an Elder, Calum!”
I stayed silent and waited.
I thought,
Tyler would have stood up for his dad like that.
A shiver ran through me and I realized this: I wouldn’t stand up for my father or my mother, but one was very different from the other. My mother I wanted to save. My father...
I wish my father had died instead of Annabelle and Jason and Chad.
I wish he was never my father.
My stomach dropped and I clung to a small sliver of hope that Tyler was still alive. When I blinked away tears I thought I saw a flash of bright white in the dark of my mind.
I was back to being lost, though this time it was different, as if the mountain air and the stars made me stronger. Since Kate had taken me away from Lakewood Hollow, that life seemed to be far away. Gone, like she said, but not forgotten. It felt like I was moving forward, and although the tears for Tyler and my Mom flowed freely, it was beginning to feel like the only way to fix the past was to look to the future.
Maybe I did believe.
Maybe, if I wanted to move forward, I didn’t have a choice.
After a while, Kate rolled her eyes, walked over to my side, grabbed my hand, and dragged me over to the side of the mountain past the edge of the clearing. Slowly, heat traced from my hand up my arm, making its way to my chest like a slow-creeping poison; Kate’s hand gripped my own as if she thought I’d run away. A faint, warm dizziness was filling my head, but I ignored it, pushing it back to nothing.
I was good at that.
“Look,” she told me, turning her head up toward the sky stained with stars.
I looked up, too. I thought of my dreams, of my skin that turned as black as the night above. The sky was bright with a million tiny suns, and a moon that shone like thousands. My hand moved again to my birthmark and for some reason the whole thing, the sky and the stars and the moon, felt familiar. I thought of the voice. If I was supposed to be Caeles, if that voice was right, I wished I knew what came next.
My hand tightened in Kate’s until she was crushing my fingers right back, until the warmth became too hot and the closeness became painful. Either she wouldn’t let go or I wouldn’t. With our tangle of fingers intertwined like they were, I couldn’t tell.
“Do you see it?” Kate asked, letting go of my hand.
I turned to her and then back to the sky. “It’s beautiful,” I said, the words stuck somewhere in my throat. I tried to pretend my hand didn’t feel cold away from hers. I tried not to think about my racing heart, or that I wanted to step closer to Kate as if she was more than the girl that stole me. I thought of the stars and the voice and Kate. I whispered, “If only it were real.”
Kate stared at me as though she were trying to read my mind, and then said, “Don’t you see it? How the stars are so much brighter here?”
“Sure, because we’re so high in the mountains like you said. I remember that whole you kidnapping me and driving for days thing pretty well.”
“No. That’s what people think, that the stars get brighter the higher you are, but the truth is that the stars are always brightest at places where the enchanters meet or have covens. And at Lake Iris the stars shine brightest of all.”
I didn’t answer. Looking up at the stars made me feel like I was closer to something. Home, maybe. Here, I felt so right that I could almost feel my body vibrating with the need to be something more. When I looked at the stars my eyes saw only them and the rest was gone. I wondered if there was any way I could climb the mountain even higher so I was closer to the world above.
I asked, “Why are the stars so bright wherever the Order is? It’s like a whole world up there, with the moon shining like a white sun on everything dark.”
“Yeah,” she said. “It is.” I could hear her breathing in the quiet night, and I turned to look at her so the stars disappeared and it was only her. “Look at the North Star. Do you see that it’s the brightest of them all?”
I tore my gaze away from Kate and looked up again to see the star she pointed at, bright and wild. I sounded like a child, so bewildered by the vastness of the sky, when I whispered, “Yes.”
“Here, the stars shine like beacons because they feed off the energy the Order emits. Remember how I told you that each member of the Elder council has control over one element? In order to keep their powers focused, they have spells woven by the Woman of Prophecy deep into bloodstones sewn on their bodies. You’ll see them. All of the Elders in each coven have them on their foreheads. Because the spells focus their energy so much, the stars feed off the excess life energy that the Elders don’t use. Think of it like a cosmic form of photosynthesis; when the Elders use their elemental powers, they only use a fraction of the energy needed to control their element so the leftover energy is dissipated into the air, feeding the stars, making them glow. Marcus told me it’s life and death, what they can do. It’s give and take.
And
legend has it that because the Orieno are so much like living death, once the last demon is killed the stars will glow their brightest and shine new life on a world once dark.”
“Incredible,” I whispered.
Beside me, her voice steady as the mountain, dark and dangerous as the night around us, Kate said, “I know. I can’t wait for them to die.”
My eyes broke from the sky. Kate’s fists were white, balled tightly at her sides. In the mountains, where night was a dark void lit by moonlight, Kate’s eyes shone like daggers reflecting the burning stars. Once violet, they were now black as night. As death.
My mind screamed,
It’s my fault! I am responsible.
But then,
No. The Orieno and the Bloodletter are the ones who spilt the most blood. I can’t wait for them to die, either.
Kate breathed, “They all deserve death.”
I understood.
But death can’t be the answer to everything.
We would be no better than them.
I wanted to.
I wanted to believe so badly I could feel the want stick and burn in my chest like fire unwilling to die, felt it kindle in my heart until it dripped down my face in a single tear.
Kate’s voice echoed in my mind:
You’re the key in this war we’re fighting, the one pawn everyone wants.
I didn’t trust myself to speak.
I want to believe I’m something more than this.
I didn’t trust myself to do anything.
“Follow me,” she barked.
I didn’t trust Kate either, but I didn’t have a choice.
She led me through an entrance, a small opening in the mountainside, and into shadows darker than night. Here, there were no stars to guide the way. No moon. Nothing but my hand in Kate’s and the shivery feeling that I was walking toward something treacherous.
I couldn’t see her anymore, and for some reason I felt the desperate need to remember what she looked like. I saw her eyes in my mind and, for now, it was enough.
Slowly, as Kate and I walked through a maze of hollow tunnels, my eyes adjusted to the darkness. The smell of rich earth filled my nostrils; it was the kind of earth you could taste. I could hear water dripping down from rocks above, sliding down the stone tunnel walls as tears had down my face. The slight
drip drip drip
was continuous. After a moment it was all I could hear.
As sounds from the outside world faded, and the tunnel air became so thick it choked, dread seeped into my heart. We had come to an end, a tunnel with no exit. It was either back the way we came, or nothing at all. “Kate, is this a joke? Really. Is this just the place you took me to kill me? Are you working for the Orieno?”
She stayed silent, but her hand gripped mine until I felt the blood slow in my veins. I thought of her
leviti
and knew she wanted to mark me in red.
She let go of my hand. I pushed myself against the stone wall and tried to blend into the shadows. I heard nothing but the thumping of my heart and the rapid, raspy breaths I stole.
I waited for her to attack, kill.
I waited to die.
But even before she moved, I realized it wasn’t Kate I was afraid of, not in this moment. Not really. She I understood. She was torn, broken like so many people were. Like me.
I was afraid of death.
I didn’t want to die. Not like this, pushed against a wet wall in a dark tunnel. Alone.