Chapter 27
Carter
I’d never run that fast in my damn life, going from the house to the Archives in less than two minutes.
I pushed the door open, praying that Lola was still with Dimitri at the hospital. Hoping that no one would be here and that I’d get to speak to Margaret. Hoping I understood the last lines of this damn journal wrong.
I closed the heavy door behind me and strolled to the desk, catching my breath. My mind was a mess, blood thumping loudly in my ears.
“Margaret?”
Silence. My fingers drummed on the edge of the desk, impatient. She better not play with me now…
“I finished the journal,” I continued.
Still nothing. For fuck’s sake. I strained my ear, trying to catch even the most quiet sign of her presence. She was always around. Always pestering me and stuffing her ghost nose in business that didn’t concern her. She had to be here somewhere.
“Margaret, please,” I pleaded, letting myself fall on the desk chair in defeat. “I—you can’t leave me hanging now. I need—” I gasped as the computer turned on, straightening on my chair. “Thank god, can you—”
My words died in my throat again as I saw the letters slowly appear.
“Aisle 78.d.”
“Aisle seventy-eight D?”
What was in that aisle? I tried to think of all the boxes I went through over the years. It was definitely one of the faraway rows; one we rarely went to. My brain was interrupted as my chair was pulled back from the desk and shoved a couple of times toward the corridor.
“Okay, okay, I’m going. Jeez…”
I walked in between the rows of bookshelves, reading the numbers as I went, counting under my breath.
“There,” I said, turning into the right one.
All the shelves were arranged in arc circles around the desk area, with four main corridors between each sector, one larger leading to the door. Seventy-eight was nearly at the very end of the eighty-two rows. And, since the room was just a large circle, the farthest were the largest fucking ones.
It would take me hours to go through each book, file, and boxes in that damn aisle.
At least Margaret mentioned it was sector D… Three less huge ass rows to search.
I groaned as I crouched, starting to go through the volumes. What was I even looking for? Was Margaret really not going to help me more than this? I was looking for fucking answers and she only brought me more questions.
“What a—”
Something rattled a few shelves farther down. My brows lowered as I stood, walking toward the source of the noise.
A box was slowly shaking its way out of its place. I crouched again and pulled it out, placing it on the floor to rummage through it.
Various electrical items—mostly power strips and extension cords that we used during events—were overflowing from the plastic box. Would Maragaret feel insulted if I just emptied it on the floor?
Probably. The damn ghost felt insulted by every fucking thing I did.
So I carefully moved everything around, searching for—What the Heavens was I even searching for? Certainly not a damn extension cord.
“You’re not even going to give me a hint there?” I asked with barely concealed annoyance. “You could have at least let me ask a question before sending me on a treasure hunt.”
My muscles stiffened when an eerie laugh traveled to my ears. Damn creepy ghost.
“I don’t understand what’s going on! Is Lola…Is she an Astral? Was she? Before she sold her soul or something?”
The box rattled again on the floor. I groaned as I kept searching through it, not bothering about the potential mess now as I placed everything on the ground around me.
And then I saw it. What Margaret wanted me to find.
“What the—”
What was it?
I took the familiar device and turned it on with the side switch. It lit up, the light blinking a couple of times before stopping, waiting for me to point it at someone.
A fucking tracker. Was that where they stashed the few others they found?
I set it down before putting everything else back into the box and pushing it back on its shelf. If Margaret decided to refuse to give me the answers I seeked because “I made a mess,” I’d throw myself out the damn window.
With the tracker back in my hand, I walked back to the desk and sat on the chair, inspecting it. It said the same thing it did the last time when I pointed it at me, so I assumed it worked fine…
“I don’t understand,” I muttered. “What am I supposed to do with that? Point it at Lola? It didn’t work on her last time.”
The keyboard clicked softly and I waited, moving the tracker distractedly in my hands, making sure not to press it too hard.
“Didn’t it?”
I frowned. What did she mean?
“No, it didn’t. It didn’t show anything, like she wasn’t even an Immortal at all.”
Or…I turned the thing off and pointed it at me again.
No…She didn’t? Were we stupid enough to not even check if it was still on? Well, I did. But…
“I broke it,” I whispered. “Must have held it too tight, and it broke in my hand. What if—”
The keyboard clicks again. “But, did you really?”
Fuck. Didn’t I? Did she tamper with it? To somehow conceal her real origin? To hide even more things from us? From her mates?
Anger bubbled up in my chest, sizzling in my veins. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how patient I was, she kept lying. Hiding things from me.
Dimitri had known her forever. He was always going to be the one she chose. Arc too. I was the last to fucking know about anything. And only because I found out on my own, not because she told me.
I placed the tracker on the desk, feeling the need to close my hands in fists. The last thing I needed was to break another, even if I wasn’t the one to actually break the damn thing in the first place.
But then who did?
“I don’t understand what’s going on,” I said, burying my head in my hands.
“I need more books. I need to understand what the fuck she is, why it wasn’t mentioned that Maidens were actually Astrals and not humans like it’s been said in a few of the other books.
I need to understand why I’ve never even heard of Astrals as being more than a myth before, and why they’ve been basically erased from Immortal’s history. I—”
My head shot up as books appeared next to me. First, a pretty big one, then a small, and finally another journal-looking one.
I looked at the leather bound cover.
“Come on, more translation?”
My eyes narrowed, inspecting the old Egyptian hieroglyphs on the cover.
Nefertari.
I’ve seen this name before. In Tedregon—Amyntas’ journal.
“Lola’s mother,” I breathed out, turning the pages slowly before setting it aside to look at the second one.
Astral’s customs. Nothing about individual species, but lots about the Maidens and their power system.
They called the strongest the Shard Carriers.
The ones who held the original power of their respective Astral species.
Dragons, Phoenixes, and Chimeras. One Shard Carrier of each, passed down from heir to heir.
The heir was always the strongest of their children and their first. The one and only they got from their Maiden before they went to their other human wives for weaker descendents.
They couldn’t reproduce within their own species, and only the Maidens were Astrals while their other wives were humans…
Which explained why Amyntas was facing only two options; as a Dragon, he could only take a Phoenix or Chimera.
But why not offer him more options within each of the two species?
And why not pick another one once Lola had escaped?
I set it aside with a sigh before going for the last, bigger one. It was divided into three parts, one for each of the Astral Species.
“Damn, why not give me these ones from the start?” I muttered as I flipped the page to the second part, where it read Phoenixes.
“Because you probably weren’t ready yet,” a voice said from the side, where the corridor leading to the front door was.
My head snapped in the man’s direction, only for my brows to pull down in annoyance. Electricity started to slither under my skin, down my arms, anticipating his hostility.
“What are you doing here? You don’t have clearance.”
Vladimir only smirked, uncrossing his arms as he started to stroll comfortably toward me, casting curious, reverent glances around.
“I’m glad all these books finally found eyes to read them. Although, I’m a bit disappointed it found you worthy. Maybe it doesn’t have the good judgment I thought it had.”
I shut the book close and stood up. “Margaret might be a pain in my ass, but—”
“Margaret?” He scoffed, sliding his fingers along the backrest of one of the armchairs. “You gave it a name?”
“Not me, personally,” I seethed. “The ghost apparently enjoys it.”
Which I never understood. It could write…Why not give her—its real name?
Vladimir’s eyes widened before he burst out in laughter, letting himself fall graciously in the cushioned armchair.
“You think it’s a ghost?” He laughed again at my perplexed face. “Oh, dear. That’s not a ghost.”
I froze, looking around me for any sign of her—it. If that wasn’t a ghost, what was it?
“It’s an elemental spiritual core, you dumbass.”
I blinked a couple of times. “A what?”
Vladimir sighed, looking at me like I was the stupidest being in existence. “The spirits of many of the first Witches, blessed by Astrals, and acting as one. That particular one must be about two-thousand years old. Powerful.”
My eyes widened in shock. Margaret was a—fucking what? Another thing I’ve never even heard about before? And with the time I spent reading during my life on earth, how did I not stumble upon any of the information I’d gathered in the last fucking week?
“I guess it is some kind of ghost,” Vladimir mused. “Just—yeah, not your average one. Definitely not one whose name was Margaret.”
I pushed the information aside, shaking my head in disbelief. “Wait, how do you even know about these books? About how they got here?”
He shrugged. “I placed them there, of course.”
“How?”
“Well, it’s not my first time in your lovely little town,” he drawled. “Kai and I are old friends. I visit a lot. I feed this library with more old books everytime. This spiritual core took it upon itself to protect it, so it’s the perfect spot to store old forgotten knowledge.”
My teeth gritted in the back of my mouth. “Why has it been forgotten in the first place?”
His eyes softened and he leaned forward, his elbows resting on his thighs and his chin in his hands. He looked over the three books, stopping at the small journal.
“I see you got my mother’s journal.”
“Not what I asked you,” I answered, growing impatient. “Why don’t people remember Astrals? Why—”
“Did you happen to get another journal before this one?” he interrupted, his strange orange eyes flecked with gold shining eerily.
I sighed, reaching for the small leather bound journal in my back pocket, dropping it on the desk between us. His eyes lit up, hands reaching for it before he caught himself, closing his hand and retreating it to place his closed fist on his knee, eyes darting away and jaw clenching.
“Have you read it?”
I nodded. “I did.”
“Then you know a lot, already.”
“It doesn’t explain why no one remembers you—the Astrals,” I accused.
“I’m not an Astral,” he corrected coldly.
“Not anymore. And it’s because of this.” He pointed at Amyntas journal.
“Because he was stubborn enough to choose Anastasia as his Maiden when I told him not to. Because I didn’t want to be the next Shard Carrier and tried to reason with our father.
Because she”—he slammed his finger on Nefertari’s journal—“was too much of a bitter bitch to let it go.”
My eyes lowered to his mother’s journal. The little I knew about her was that it was her who pushed Lola—Anastasia—into this position. She, who wanted her to be Amyntas’ Maiden.
“What happened?” I asked, tired of unanswered questions, of reading about it when I had the perfect person to tell me exactly what went down.
“It’s not my place to tell you,” he replied and I clenched my fists at my sides. “I fucked up. Anastasia did too. But mostly, our mother fucked us all over and our father let her walk all over him.”
I hit the desk, anger rising again inexplicably.
I needed to read these books, and then confront her. For lying, for hiding everything from me. For keeping me in the fucking dark about all of this.
Vladimir stood up, readying himself to leave only to stop and cast me a hard glare. “Once you’ve had your talk with my sister, tell her we need to have a chat as well. Oh, and next time you strike me? I’ll leave you a broken mess.”