Icarus stopped and turned to look at her, a question in his eye. “What is it?”
Oh Icarus, for someone so smart you really can be an idiot,she wanted to spit as the pain swelled within her chest. But she bit it back, the feeling and the words both, to even out her expression as she whispered, thinking back to the drawing she’d found in that book.
“I think I know where the stone could be.”
Chapter twenty-eight
Arabella Marudas
Cal’shandwasalifeline, her center always gravitating towards the feeling of it laced in hers. One second she was in the ballroom at Calami and the next she was on foreign land. Stretched out before her was a sprawling manor with endless windows and a plethora of vines crawling up them as if they were slowly consuming the haunted space. The landscape surrounding the manor was overgrown and despondent. Weeping willows, hedges that forgot they were meant to be manicured. At the center stood a luxurious three-layered fountain that held stagnant green-black water.
“Home sweet home,” Cal said as the portal behind them winked out of existence.
The sounds of the ballroom dissipated until there was only an eerie whisper of wind blowing past them. Ara didn’t scare easily and yet her skin crawled with the wrongness of the place before her. Maybe it was what Cal had told her happened here or maybe it was that the air was charged with otherness.
“Ara?” Cal twisted his body, blocking her view of the manor.
“There’s something wrong with this place,” Ara whispered as a tear trailed down her cheek. “Terrible things have happened here.”
The sensation of Cal wiping away her tears grounded her in reality.
“I can do this alone. I’ll bring you back—”
Ara lifted her arm, gripping his wrist where his hand still lingered on her cheek. “Where you go, I go. Remember?”
“Ara–”
Knowing he needed her just as much as she needed him, she pulled up on her toes, pressing her lips to his. He didn’t hesitate. He never did. He moved his mouth against hers as if they were the only thing that mattered in all the world. His tongue brushed against her begging her to deepen the kiss. She doubted she would ever deny him anything he asked of her. A low groan slipped from him that had heat pulling low in her body. If they were anywhere else, she would have loved to see where a kiss like this would lead, but the air seemed to meld around them, breaking the spell.
Pulling away, she smiled at the sound of protest Cal managed.
“To be continued.” Ara pressed a kiss to his cheek, their combined scent of jasmine and eucalyptus lingering.
“I damn well hope so.” Cal’s voice was still thick with lust.
The laugh that broke from her felt impossible in such a terrible place, but then she supposed nothing was impossible with Cal.
“Nothing like a trip home to serve as an ice shower,” Cal said as he turned to face the manor once more. “All right. Let’s get this over with.”
The closer they got to the manor the more Ara fought the urge to run. Whatever had happened here was dark magic. Magic she had yet to experience and hoped she never would. She had thought Seren’s magic was darkness incarnate, but this was something entirely different that made her sister’s magic look like child’s play.
“What exactly happened here?” She hated that she asked him. Hated the way his hand tightened in hers at the pain of the memories that swarmed him.
Like every Calami witch, she knew the basics of the Darkmore history. Cal’s father’s search for the grimoire launched a flurry of chaos and fear that resulted in the Trinity War. It only ended when Professor Atwood turned in their father which ended in his execution. By then the humans and wizards had formed an alliance and witches were forced deeper into the recesses of society. Their stipulations on schooling and placements were heavily legislated.
“I’m sure you’ve been fed the twisted version where my brother is some sort of hero, but the truth is much more sinister. They say my father was mad and that he was a villain, but he wasn’t. When he wasn’t at the battlefront, he was with our family. He loved my mother. They had the sort of love that you only read in story books. Whenever they thought the other wasn’t watching, I would catch them smiling at the other as if no one else existed. As if there was a song playing they were only privy to.”
Ara could feel the swell of emotion building in him as if it were her own. As if she were seeing the same memories he was.
The door to the manor creaked open with an ominous burst of stale air. It was easy to imagine this place abandoned, but Ara could feel the remnants of recent life. Her mind crawled with the need to follow the call that had driven her here. Cal held her hand as they walked through into an entryway that held portraits and unlit candles, a grand staircase laced with red carpet sprawling above them.
Cal turned them right, but Ara was already prepared as if she knew the way.
“Father doted on Icarus. I used to watch them pouring over history books and their games and think how someday that would be me. The face my father would make when Icarus would do something annoyingly clever was one of the purest things to ever have existed. And Icarus killed him. Maybe not by his hand, but just as well.”
Ara squeezed his hand hoping it conveyed her understanding. They walked through a long hallway that was illuminated only by moonlight pouring through the windows. She fought the urge to turn around and see if something or someone was following them. She couldn’t shake the feeling that they were being followed, whether by ghosts or something more real she couldn’t have said.
“I was away the night they came for him, but I always imagine that it was like all the other nights we spent together in the library. My father and Icarus playingcanasta, my mother curled up in her chair with the same romance novel she had read a hundred times. My father used to tease her about it saying she probably wished she could find a spell to crawl into the story. She always told him that no story was as perfect as theirs.”
