Spirit Ascendancy (30 page)

“Your family was one of the most influential, one of the most powerful old Council clans. It was, quite frankly, unheard of to encounter anything amongst its members but utter submission and acceptance of all aspects of Durupinen life. Your mother’s resistance was so jarring that it made me stop and take notice, for the first time, of this inherent flaw in the system; if we were to continue to protect our Gateways and ensure our continued existence, shouldn’t we be encouraging our young members to question, to test, to improve? Traditions turn to shackles when they prevent the evolution necessary for survival. Just look at the situation in which we find ourselves now, at the mercy of the Necromancers once again.

“And who was this girl, so young but so intuitive, making me question everything I’d taken for granted about the world I defended? I could not stop thinking about her, though I told myself it was her defiance, her ideas, that had captured my attention. I did not realize what was happening, the attachment I was forming, or I would have put a stop to it at once, but it had taken root before I could defend myself.

“Still oblivious to what had sprung up between us, I watched her drive away at the end of her training, a strange emptiness inside me and, I must admit, a sense of relief that I would most likely never see her again, never again wrestle with the strange, powerful feelings she had ignited in me. I threw myself into my work, training the Novitiates and protecting Narissa and Finvarra, who was being groomed to become the next High Priestess as Calista’s health continued to fade. She would need my protection more than ever when her time came to take the helm of the Council. But then, less than a year later, I got a panicked phone call from Liam.

“The girls’ father had stumbled upon them in the middle of a Crossing, and the aftereffects were devastating. Liam, as a new Caomhnóir, did not know what to do, or how to handle the fall out. He blamed himself, having been absent during the time of the Crossing, though there were no extraordinary circumstances that made either him or the girls feel his presence would be necessary. It was just one of those terrible things that could not be predicted. I was hand-picked by the new High Priestess as one of those who would fly to Boston to assess and control the situation.”

“You didn’t want to go,” Finvarra said. I jumped, having all but forgotten she was there. She was staring at Carrick with a sad new understanding in her eyes. “You fought me on it, and I couldn’t understand why.”

“I’m not sure I knew myself,” Carrick said. “All I knew was that something inside me was fighting against the possibility of seeing Elizabeth again. I must have known, subconsciously, what seeing her again would mean. I tried every argument I could think of to stay behind.”

“And I, convinced this was the first test of my authority, would not listen to you,” Finvarra said, shaking her head, an ironic smile on her lips. “I ordered you to go, determined to quash dissention in my ranks, lest chaos break out under my nose.”

Carrick nodded. “So of course, I went, and what I found was so much worse than I could have prepared for. John Ballard had suffered irreparable damage from the incident, but I only had eyes for Elizabeth’s devastation. I found her, alone and sobbing, and I found I could not let her cry. I could not let her suffer, even for a moment, if it was within my power to comfort her. And in her grief, we came together.”

I couldn’t find a single emotion to expend on anything he was saying. All I could feel was a blank, buzzing astonishment and a vague frustration that my mind could not seem to absorb what he was saying as quickly as I needed it to. I was scrambling to keep my head above a rising tide of information that threatened to drown me at any moment.

“At first, I was only blissfully happy, but by the next day, I was consumed by horror at what I had done. You must realize,” he said, and here he met my eye for the first time, a note of true desperation in his voice, “that all my life I had been taught that nothing could have been more abhorrent than what I had just done. I had been weak, conquered at last by the temptation that had threatened to swallow up the Caomhnóir since the dawn of our brotherhood. Without even saying goodbye to her, without offering even the weakest of explanations for my cowardice, I fled back to Fairhaven, determined never to see her again.”

“You just abandoned her?” I asked flatly. “That was probably the most horrible moment of her life, when that happened to my grandfather. And you’re telling me that you slept with her and then just left her there, in that hellhole of a situation?”

“Yes.” He said it baldly, no note of pleading in his voice, no tone of apology now. It was as though he knew I wouldn’t accept it, that he did not deserve to be forgiven.

“Did you ever see her again after that?” I asked.

“No, but not for lack of trying,” Carrick said. “Not even two months later your mother Bound her Gateway and ran off. News of her disappearance reached me at Fairhaven, and of course I was sure that I was the cause of her departure. I wouldn’t have lasted much longer, staying away from her. Each day, my resistance had been waning, and it was all I could do, hour by hour, not to cross the ocean to be with her, expectations be damned. But it wasn’t until I arrived in the States to help Liam search for her that I learned the whole truth of why she had run off— I learned of your impending arrival, Jessica, and I was even more determined to find her.

“We set off in Liam’s car, chasing a lead that the Trackers phoned in to us. When we found her, I told myself, I would never let her go again. I would tell her how I felt, even if it broke every rule I’d ever been trained to follow. I was utterly distracted, flying down an icy road in the dead of night, when a car sideswiped us. I never even knew it was behind us, never even saw the headlights in the rear view mirror.”

My heart was in my throat. This was the moment he died. This was the moment my father had died, and I was listening to him describe it. It might have been the singular strangest thing that had ever happened to me, and that was saying something.

“In the moment we were crashing, there was an instant of clarity. I’m sure it only lasted a second or two, but it seemed I had a long time to think about it just the same. I knew that I was about to die, as surely as I had ever known anything. And I also knew that I couldn’t leave without making sure that Elizabeth, and any child we might have together, was safe and free of the far-reaching claws of the prophecy. I would not leave them in this mess. I thought fleetingly, for a mere fraction of a second, of binding myself to Elizabeth, but in the instant that it mattered, and I chose to stay behind, I bound myself to Finvarra.”

He did not look at her as he said it, but kept his eyes averted, not out of shame or embarrassment, but out of respect. Finvarra, on the other hand, was looking directly at him as though she had never really seen him before.

“It was a strategic decision, and one that made perfect sense for what I felt I needed to do,” he said, eyes still downcast. “Finvarra was the one I was assigned to protect in the first place, and whatever else I may have been feeling, I did not take that duty lightly. But there was more to it, I admit. She was the High Priestess. She would be the one who made any decisions regarding Elizabeth; any tips or leads on her whereabouts would surely be brought directly to her. She would also be the one trusted to interpret the prophecy, which I admit I was then terrified would come to pass as a result of our tryst. Therefore, the most crucial place to be, in order to keep an eye on Elizabeth, and on you, was with Finvarra.”

“You Bound yourself to me because of her,” Finvarra said slowly, as though she were just testing the words, to see what they sounded like out loud.

“I did. I am deeply sorry,” Carrick said, still looking at the ground.

But Finvarra was moving beyond her shock now, and began to regain some of her usual commanding tone. “So many times I consulted you regarding the prophecy. So many times I sought your opinion, trusting you as implicitly as I always have done, in everything. And now I discover that your true goal was never to protect the Durupinen from the prophecy, but to mask your own secret shame.”

“I never intended to deceive you, and I would never intentionally cause you any pain, High Priestess. I didn’t—”

“How am I ever to trust you again, when the entirety of our Bound relationship has been built on a foundation of lies?” Finvarra asked. “What am I supposed to think?”

Carrick raised both hands in front of him, a pleading, supplicating gesture. I think, if he’d been able, he would have dropped to his knees, prepared to grovel. But I suppose that sort of thing loses some of its effectiveness when the groveler in question could simply sink through the floor at will.

“I never stopped protecting you,” he said, and in his upset, his form wavered and flickered fitfully, like a candle in the wind. “I may have loved Elizabeth, but that did not mean that I could not also protect you!”

“And if you had had to choose?” Finvarra demanded. “If you could only have protected one of us with your actions? What then?”

Carrick’s silence spoke volumes. Finvarra stood up, turning her back and staring at the sliver of the grounds visible through the window. Twilight had deepened to velvety blackness, and the stars revealed themselves, one by one, in a glittering mass above her.

“When you appeared beside me as a ghost, before the news of your death had reached anyone’s ears, I was so sure you had stayed for love,” Finvarra said, “simply because I’d never known a spirit to Bind for any other reason. I was correct in my assumption. I was quite wrong, though, about who the object of that affection was.”

Carrick still could not answer, it seemed. It was his turn to look shocked. Finvarra didn’t seem to expect an answer, however, and she stared instead at the multiplying twinkling of the stars. As the silence spiraled deeper and deeper between them, I felt increasingly that I was intruding on something terribly private, even though what Carrick had revealed could not have related more closely to me. Finally, Carrick seemed to realize his story was not yet over, and so he took a shallow breath and went on, addressing me once again.

“I never allowed myself to grieve for what could have been between your mother and me. It was a luxury that I told myself I did not deserve. Instead, I focused on my new role as a spirit Bound to the High Priestess of the Northern Clans. Here I was able to keep tabs on what was happening to your mother, for the Council was following the situation most closely. I was one of the first to know when you were born, Jessica, and I was always alerted when the Trackers had any leads on where your mother had gone next.”

“Did you know about Hannah?” I asked, before I could stop myself. I didn’t know what difference it would have made, whether he’d known about her or not, but my curiosity raged nonetheless.

“Not for many years. Your mother was able to conceal her existence even from the most skilled of our Trackers,” Carrick said. “We found no trace of your sister until last year, when Lucida stumbled upon a link in a birth record. A foster family, curious, no doubt, about Hannah’s origins, had discovered your existence, and had requested information about your whereabouts. The request was flagged immediately, and that was how we discovered Hannah’s existence.”

“And that was when you started looking for her, too?”

“Yes. But within days of that discovery, your mother…” He couldn’t even finish the sentence.

“Died. The word you’re looking for is died,” I said, almost harshly. The irony was nearly too bizarre to process, a ghost unable to speak of death, and I had a brief, wild desire to laugh out loud, though I couldn’t have found any of it less funny.

“Yes,” he said, rather shakily. “And of course that set off an entirely more pressing set of events which distracted us from searching for Hannah. But once we had located you both, and begun our investigations into your lives, the rumors began to fly.”

“About the prophecy?”

“Yes. The Council still knew nothing of my relationship with your mother, but they knew enough about the two of you to be suspicious that your father might be a Caomhnóir. The fact that you were twins, and the unusually powerful connection Hannah had to the spirit world, were enough to start the cogs turning. The most likely conclusion was that your mother must have had an affair with Liam, but with both of them gone, there was no real way to confirm or deny this theory. I did what I could to thwart the idea, but it gained momentum the more the Council discovered about you. I knew I would need to remain closer than ever to the High Priestess and all of the goings on within the Council, if I was to have any chance of protecting you, but of course…” He trailed off, and there was no need to finish the thought. He had not been able to protect us. No one had.

“Why did you wait so long to tell me?’ I asked.

He looked me in the eye again and winced, but did not turn away. “Because of the look on your face right now. I have been afraid to confront it. But I assure you, you cannot despise me more than I despise myself for the way that I treated your mother.”  He stared at me harder, as though trying to punish himself with whatever expression I had on my face. “The Caomhnóir pride ourselves on our bravery, and there was a time that I would have staked my life on my own, but when it was truly tested, I failed—I failed her, I failed you, and I failed your sister. I’ve spent every moment of my afterlife trying to atone for it.”

I had no idea what to say next, but was saved the trouble of figuring it out by the appearance of Milo by my side.

“What the hell is going on here?” he hissed.

I turned to him. “You’re supposed to be keeping watch at the entry point!” I said.

“And you’re supposed to stay in contact with me at all times, so don’t you start sassing me!” he said. “You went silent, I got worried. I’m your spirit guide, that’s my job. Now what’s going on? Did you get the casting or not?”

“I… haven’t asked him yet,” I said.

“Haven’t asked him yet? What the hell have you been doing, trading life stories?” Milo cried, and I shushed him, throwing an anxious look over my shoulder.