45. Chapter 44
She didn’t return to the dream when she fell asleep again. It was probably for the best. She didn’t need to dwell on something unlikely to happen. Or how Silas was suddenly wearing a mask. Her mind was playing tricks on her.
But after bringing her things to her room earlier in the night, she took her car to the craft store.
Outside of tending to plants as a hobby, she also crocheted to keep her hands busy while she watched a show.
She still had nearly a boxful of hooks, though not enough yarn to do much with, and given his love of sweaters, she wanted to make one for Ezra as a Christmas gift.
By the time she’d fallen asleep, she had completed a fourth of the sweater in the soft cornflower-blue yarn she’d picked.
Since the mornings were a little easier for her to move around the house, she had breakfast with her parents, Betsy, and Ross the next day. Her heart twisted when her parents barely ate the food they were given as their empty stares lingered on the wall.
“How was the semester for you, dear?” Betsy asked, pulling Ivy’s attention.
Intense. Disturbing. “It was busy,” she said simply, glancing back at her parents for any sort of reaction. But there was nothing. She bit the inside of her cheek and looked at her plate. “I’ve made some friends, at least.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful,” Betsy said, her face lighting up. “What are they like?”
She spent the rest of their breakfast talking about each of them, and despite her trying to play down how she felt about Ezra, Betsy caught on to it anyway.
It didn’t escape her notice that through her talking, Ross was helping her parents with their meals.
She needed to find a way to get their magic back before it was too late.
“I think I’m all finished for now,” she said, even though she still had half her plate left. She got up from the table, taking her dishes to the kitchen to clean them. Once she placed them in the sink, Ross and Betsy guided her parents to the living room.
She twisted the knob, watching the water pool in the shallow depth of the plate.
Christmas was only a couple of days away.
You’d barely know it by the decor—or lack thereof—around the house.
While there was a warmly lit tree in the living room, none of the ornaments she remembered from her childhood were hung, and few presents sat beneath it.
A few electric candles sat on the windowsills, but no lights were strung on the eaves.
And, last, all the family photos her mother would place on the mantel when she was a kid were still packed in boxes. Like they had been for years.
Ivy paused, blinking away her tears as she shut the faucet off.
There were pictures in the attic. Not only the Christmas pictures, but the ones she’d found before leaving for Arcania.
Maybe there were more? The dull noise of a sitcom rerun came from the living room.
Betsy’s quick steps padded against the creaky floor into the kitchen.
“Thank you for grabbing those,” she said, coming over to the sink. “They should be settled until lunch if you want to sit with them.”
“So about my parents…”
Betsy leaned against the counter as she looked over at Ivy.
“Right. I’ll preface this by saying I don’t think this is a sign of decline,” Betsy said, her lips pursing as she took in a heavy breath.
“But they’ve been restless. Their episodes of delirium have become more frequent.
I’ve had to call in Ross to help full-time until we can calm them again, and we’ve had to increase their dosage to help when we get them to bed. ”
“When did this start?”
“On Halloween.”
The same night Briar was taken. She gripped the hem of her shirt as she tried to keep her breathing even. It would be too much of a coincidence for her parents to suddenly be unwell. How could the events at Arcania be affecting them here?
It was then Ivy noticed the dark purple lining her eyes and hair becoming more salt than pepper, like it was back in August. “I’m not sure what could’ve caused it.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
Betsy shook her head. “In addition to their medication, we’re sticking to a strict routine to help regulate them.”
“Okay. I’m going to go to the attic while there’s still some daylight left then.” She nodded, trying her best to smile. But judging by the sympathy stretched across Betsy’s face, it clearly didn’t work.
“You could sit with them an—”
“No, it’s okay. I don’t want to upset them.” She tapped her hand against the sink before stepping away. “And I have some things there to bring back to school anyway.”
Before Betsy could say anything else, Ivy left.
When she got upstairs, she pulled the string for the attic, and the ladder clattered despite her best attempt at keeping it quiet.
Luckily, the rug muffled the thud against the floor.
Some noise downstairs came from her parents; they settled only a few seconds later.
She sighed as she grabbed the first rung above her head and hauled herself up the ladder carefully.
The attic was in the same state as it had been when she was here back in August, but everything was covered with an additional layer of dust. The particles floated lazily in the stream of morning sun filtering through the small window.
She wandered through the stacks of boxes and cloaked furniture, trying to find the crates of decorations and pictures, until she found the old disturbance in the dust from last time when she knocked over the old shoebox.
She almost passed it, then remembered the picture of the child she’d found last time. Maybe there were more so she could figure out who it was. Perhaps it was the child of a family friend, someone who knew her parents before she had the chance.
She picked it up, taking the lid off and placing the box in front of her as she sat on the floor.
She carefully laid the pictures of her parents off to the side until she found the one of the baby again, lying in its crib with its eyes closed and a yellow binky.
The next were her parents, sitting on the couch they had downstairs in the living room, holding the baby. Still nothing written on the back.
After that, the picture was of the same child at their birthday. They sat in front of a blue cake with a truck design and three lit candles. She flipped it over and it read, Gabriel August 1950. Ivy paused, trying to remember if she’d ever heard the name before, but she hadn’t.
She flipped to the next picture. It was the boy again, holding a medal and a half-grin on his face while her parents stood beaming next to him.
His hair was bright red, like Ivy’s, like her mother’s.
She continued flipping through, faster and faster as if she were watching a time lapse of this stranger’s life play out before her.
Her breathing increased with each picture as it became harder to convince herself this boy could be a friend of the family.
When she reached the last picture in the box, she stilled at the familiar gates in the background.
Her hand trembled as she peeled it off the bottom, and brought it closer to her face.
There was Gabriel, barely a smile on his face, with her parents on either side of him standing in front of the gate to Arcania Academy.
In the corner of the picture was the date September 1st 1973. She would’ve been two years old.
Her heart sank into her stomach. Clearly, Gabriel was more than just a family friend.
Who was he exactly? Why did she know nothing about him?
She looked around the room at the stacks of boxes.
There had to be something more hidden in here.
She tossed the picture to the side and tore into the next box, rummaging around until she had searched through it all.
She continued searching as many boxes as she could. There had to be more.
By the time the orange hue of sunset painted the attic, she’d gone through ten different boxes.
Each of them held years of memories stored away like a secret: baby photos, birthday cards made out to Gabriel, old clothes, toys, disturbing drawings, report cards, tarnished academic medals.
It wasn’t until she reached the bottom of the last box that she found a yellowed, folded piece of paper.
When she opened it, the name Gabriel Heartwell was written in faded ink on a birth certificate, with her parents’ names, Miriam and Charles, below it.
She had a brother.
What happened to him? Why were these hidden here?
Why had nobody said anything? Her jaw clenched as the questions stirred anger deep within her.
Tears welled in her eyes. She wished she could go back to when all these secrets were still a mystery, instead of closing in on her until she suffocated beneath their weight.
Tears streamed down her face as she crumpled the certificate in her hand.
She pushed herself off the ground, snatching the picture of him in front of Arcania before tramping down the ladder.
She didn’t bother closing the latch before marching down the stairs, the old wood beneath the carpet creaking.
Betsy came around the corner from the kitchen. “Dinner’s nearly ready if yo—”
“I’m not hungry,” she muttered, making a beeline for the living room where her parents sat.
Betsy’s hurried footsteps came after her, but Ivy couldn’t stop.
She wanted answers. She needed them. When she rounded the corner, they were sitting together in front of the TV.
She moved around the furniture, every muscle in her body stiff as her anger fought to escape.
But when she saw their faces, staring blankly ahead, she froze.
Her hands clenched into fists, and fresh tears stung her cheeks.
“Ivy, what are you doing?” Betsy asked, rushing into the living room.
Ivy snapped her attention away from her parents. Whatever words were building in the back of her throat died. “I…” she choked. She stumbled back and ran out of the living room.
She flung open the front door, not caring that it was freezing outside, or that she wasn’t wearing shoes.
She needed air. Otherwise, all the anger roiling inside her would make her entire body crumble into dust. She sat on the first step, her head falling into her lap as a sob wracked through her so hard her body convulsed.
The door closed behind her, the old planks of the porch creaked, and from the corner of her eye, Betsy sat next to her and draped a jacket over her shoulders.
“What happened in there?”
Ivy couldn’t form words. Her mind could barely think. Instead, she handed Betsy the crumpled certificate and the photo. Ivy watched through her tears as Betsy straightened them out, and as soon as she read the paper, she gasped.
“What is this?” Betsy whispered.
“I apparently have a brother,” Ivy croaked, rubbing the back of her hand against her cheeks to wipe away the tears. It was hardly of any use, since new ones fell in their place. “You didn’t know?”
“No,” Betsy mumbled, shifting on the stairs to face Ivy directly. “I didn’t.”
“There are entire boxes of old drawings, birthday cards, and pictures. Pictures where they were so…happy and he was miserable.” She let her head hang for a moment, trying to keep her sobs in her chest, but they burst out anyway.
“I don’t understand why he got those memories.
I don’t even know him, and I hate him all over something neither of us could control.
He got their smiles, their laughs, their hugs, their cooking, their love…
and he couldn’t even act happy in these fucking pictures. ”
She turned to Betsy, snatching them back from her and glaring at the photo with gritted teeth. “Why couldn’t I have that? Why couldn’t I be the one in these pictures? Why can’t I—” but her words turned into a garbled mess as her sobs took over.
Betsy wrapped her arms around Ivy tightly. “I’m not sure why, dear. I wish I did.”
Ivy wept, letting all of her pain and grief out.
The worst part was she couldn’t ask her parents about Gabriel.
She had no idea whether he was alive. If he were, wouldn’t she have been told about him, at least?
Was he the reason they lost their magic?
So many questions she wouldn’t get answers to.
The only clue she had to where he could’ve gone was Arcania so maybe she could find traces of him there.
“We should go back in before you get too cold,” Betsy said once Ivy’s crying calmed. “I have dinner nearly ready an—”
“I’m going to my room for the rest of the night,” Ivy said as she pulled herself out of Betsy’s hug.
She kept to herself for the rest of the time she was there.
She’d eat her meals either in the kitchen or in her bedroom while filling the hours with old movies on the small TV she had, with the bulky VCR sitting on top of it.
The other hours of her day were spent either finishing Ezra’s sweater, going into town for some last-minute gifts for her friends, or staring at the cipher until her eyes crossed.
Ivy wasn’t sure how much time she had left until Maeve’s vision became a reality. If it became a reality, she corrected herself. Ezra was insistent that even though Maeve had foresight, the future could still change. But she wasn’t sure.
And she still wasn’t sure what to think about the revelations from the Hall of Mirrors the magic beneath the school pulled them into.
She thought back on her time with Briar and maybe there had been a bit of a mean streak.
Maybe she ignored it since she used to be treated poorly by everyone else.
Growing up as the only kid whose parents didn’t have magic meant being the odd one out.
The black sheep. The loner. All the superlatives that came with it.
So, perhaps her brain overlooked when Briar would do something as cruel as Rhea had described.
Being a little older and having found new friends, she couldn’t look past it anymore.
Was Briar’s kindness genuine? Or did she only become friends with Ivy to garner more secrets as future weapons?
A sharp pain pinched at her palm where her scar was.
And it was clear, even from her fragmented memories, that the blood ritual wasn’t as innocent as Briar had led her to believe.
She paused and doubled back to a part of the cipher she’d just moved past.
BLOOD.
She snatched the paper lying in front of her crossed legs on the bed.
That was one of the words in the cipher.
Blood. She scrambled through the drawer in her nightstand for a pencil and scribbled in the missing letters.
The same symbols existed in a few of the other words in the message, so she filled those in.
Slowly, the puzzle they’d been working on for months revealed itself.