So unnerving.
There was something…that always bothered me about being there. Even before my parents died. Even when Cely was there to chase the boogeymen away.
It never felt right as home.
“Let’s find the box with my mother’s stuff.” I walked toward my parents’ old bedroom and pushed the door open.
Daylight didn’t do much for the room in the back of the house. This room had always been starved for light, and I felt it now.
Roran stepped in the door, and Rilen followed, bringing up some magical light in the room.
Even after breaking the Spine, I kept forgetting I had power and magic and didn’t have to rifle in the dark.
“No furniture?” Rilen asked, moving to the windows.
“No, I got rid of almost everything when they died. I gave it to the others in the town who could use it. Their bedroom furniture was one of the first things to go.” I pulled the closet doors open. “I stored all of their personal belongings in here.”
There were only a few boxes, one labeledWillow, one labeledDixon, and one for the two of them together. They were married when they were a hundred, so the personal boxes were smaller.
I lifted my mother’s out of the closet and knelt down with it, opening the top.
The box only had a few things. Parchment from her school. A silly project from when I was young. A necklace made from pretty stone she’d found as a little girl. The small, stuffed kitten that my father had given her as a gift on their second date. The dried rose from when he proposed to her. Their Sealing ceremony certificate.
A small, ancient-looking box my mother had only let me see once before she hid it away sat in the center. I only saw it again after her death, and that was when I found the prophecy inside.
Opening the lid, I reached in and pulled out a pale blue seashell. This was old, old magic. A whisper shell. A seer could enchant it and whisper the vision into it before giving it to the focus of the vision.
This one was my mother’s with the promise of death for my birth.
I put the crystal next to the box in my palm and offered both to the twins.
It was silent a moment, then the prophecy started to fill the room. Nothing more than a breath carried the sound around.
“…a child born of unfathomable time, a whole made of two impossible halves. Destiny waits for her sword and blood, your death shall follow her birth…”
The looks on their faces were of wonder, horror, and shock. Rilen took the crystal while Roran took the small box. They studied them, turned them over, traded, and traded back.
The prophecy kept whispering from the shell.
After a long time of study, Rilen finally spoke. “Kimber, there’s no way that this belonged to your mother.”
My brows knitted. “She got so upset when I found it and opened it. She was utterly livid. Possibly the only time I ever saw her angry.”
Roran shook his head. “It’s not hers. It can’t be. This magic is ancient. It hasn’t been used since before the Spine rose. And it can’t be used anymore.”
“But—”
“Roran is right. This must be an heirloom of some sort that meant a lot to her. These whisper shells”—Rilen held it up—“are native only to the Southling Caye. Once the seer whispers their vision into it, it never stops whispering back.”
Turning the box in his hands to show me the runes, Roran traced a finger over them. “This box with these words is the only way to quiet the shell.”
“But I don’t understand why you say this isn’t used anymore.”
“Because these runes,” Roran continued, “must be carved into only one kind of wood, a hushwillow tree. And those trees grew in only one copse in all of S’Kir. It stood northeast of the vampire stronghold in East S’Kir, beyond the Twin Falls.”
I caught the past tense. “Stood?”
Rilen pursed his lips, and great creases of sorrow lined his face. “It burned to the ground the day before the Spine rose.” He stood and walked out of the room, seemingly unable to be there anymore.
