Avelina: The Cult of Anick: Book One

15. Chapter Fifteen

Linorra could smell the delicious aroma of rabbit stew hanging within the witch’s hearth. This warm, inviting cottage was not what she expected at all. It felt like home.

I feared that when we opened the front door, the smell of decay would hit us in the face, but the house smelled stale, like it had been empty for months. We crept into the front entryway, closing the heavy wooden door behind us. It made a woomf as it closed, muffling a chorus of chirping night creatures. The floors creaked under our feet, but otherwise, all was silent and still.

I glanced back at the front door and noticed there was no way to bar it from within. I knowthese people have metalworkers,I thought. Hasn’t anyone ever heard of a door lock?

Ward saw me staring at the door in confusion and whispered, “Door locks are outlawed here. The magisters—the men who enforce Ministry law—are allowed to enter your home at any time without notice. If they find a locked door, they are authorized to burn your house down.”

I looked at him, stunned. “Crazy freaking cult,” I mumbled. “That is so messed up.”

“It gets worse,” he said. “They’re allowed to come into your bedroom while you’re sleeping and watch you. And if they come upon you having sex with your spouse, they are supposed to ask you for your permit.”

“What happens if you don’t have one?” I asked.

“They hang you in the pit,” he said.

Nothing about that sentence sounded fun. I knew it was bad here, but this was completely out of control. I shook my head. These people had to be stopped.

“Aaron, is he serious?” I asked. Aaron had had multiple locks on his cottage. Then again, he was sort of an outlaw.

“Completely,” Aaron murmured. “Let me listen.”

We stood in the foyer in the dark while Aaron listened to the house. It opened to what appeared to be one big room, though it was hard for me to see with so little light coming in through the windows. As my eyes adjusted, however, I could make out seating just beyond the foyer to the right, including a green couch with comfortable-looking cushions. I gazed at it longingly.

“I don’t hear anything,” Ward said after a while.

“Neither do I,” said Aaron. “I’ll check upstairs.”

“Let me do it,” said Ward.

I heard no response from Aaron, but after a moment, Ward walked past him, so he must have nodded. I smiled appreciatively. If there were any bodies, it would be better if Ward found them first. I supposed volunteering to take that on was a peace offering of sorts.

Ward walked directly toward the back, all but disappearing into the dark. I heard him climbing what I presumed to be the stairs. I crouched and put my hand on the floor to see if I could feel anything. Apparently, wood flooring doesn’t transmit Connection. I stood back up and walked forward until I was next to Aaron.

“What if we don’t find anything at all?” I asked.

“My uncle rarely leaves the property, but I suppose it’s possible. We could wait, but it might be dangerous. I assume Seleca knew we were headed here. If we find nothing, we’ll sleep in the attic in case someone comes in the middle of the night.”

I groaned, longing to plop down on that green couch.

“There’s a bed up there,” Aaron said, smirking.

“Oh, yeah? How big?” I asked, taking his hand to connect. I still felt awkward from our fight, but a little innuendo could be a quick way to get back on track.

Aaron laughed softly. “Big enough,” he said. It hadn’t exactly been a proposition, but I had vocalized a definite intention to sleep in the same bed with him. Connection let me feel him echo that intention back vehemently.

He was a ball of emotions now. The clearest to my senses was dread at the possibility of finding corpses in the house. Almost as loud was the fear about what might have befallen his family if we didn’t find any bodies. Hovering just underneath was the excitement about sleeping next to me and the guilt about letting himself be distracted by it when his family could be dead or in danger.

“So, your uncle lives here with your cousin?” I asked. I let go of his hand, doing a little turn to look around.

“Yes,” he said. “There are two rooms upstairs. He’s in one; my cousin, Terik, and his bondmate, Farrah, are in the other. They haven’t gotten permission to have children yet.”

“How long have they been married—bonded—I mean?” I asked.

“Ten years,” he said. “And they get frequent nighttime visits.”

“Is that normal? Or are they searching for you?”

“A bit of both,” said Aaron. “They have been looking for me for quite some time, but Farrah is a sore subject as well.”

“Why?” I asked.

“She’s a powerful fragmentor, a greater producer, like Jorin, which makes her valuable to bond. She’s also . . . quite beautiful,” he said, eyeing me. I had let go of his hand too soon. There was more to that story. “Magister Axel wanted her, but she refused to bond to him. She was sixteen and he would have forced her, but Jorin spoke on her behalf. He has influence with the Ministry Council because he produces so many valuable goods. He said that he needed her help with the farm.”

“What is a producer exactly?” I asked.

“A grower. Jorin can make anything grow, including livestock. He provides more than half the food in Neesee, no matter what the weather does. Without him, food prices would skyrocket, and people would go hungry. That is also why they leave him alone even though they know he’s my uncle. Farrah agreed to bond to my cousin since he will eventually inherit the farm, but Axel has blocked all their birth permit requests and sends his minions to harass them on a monthly basis.”

I shook my head again. “We have to stop these people, Aaron. We can’t just run away to Earth and leave your family to their fate. The cult that runs this place is ruining lives, killing people. This isn’t right.”

“It isn’t just Eve and Seleca,” he said. “Even if we manage to get rid of those two, we’d have to overcome the entire Ministry Council, the magisters, the guild masters, and everyone else who benefits from the system, which includes all those with greater reservoirs to some degree. What could we do against that?”

“We can teach. We can resist. We can fight. If we could figure out how to come and go across the bridge, we could use that as a launching point. People will reject us at first out of fear, but they will be convinced once they see what you have seen.”

“And what I’ve seen,” said Ward, appearing out of the dark. Aaron had heard and probably seen him coming, but I hadn’t. He still didn’t trust Ward but would make an effort at civility for my benefit.

“There’s nothing to see up there as far as I can tell,” Ward said. “I don’t smell a residue either. Whatever the reason your family is missing, it isn’t because they were killed. At least not in this house.”

Aaron relaxed, but I knew that he would have to see for himself to be sure.

“Thanks, Ward,” I said. “Aaron, any chance for me to get cleaned up before we sleep?” I looked down at myself. I was covered in mud and blood again.

“Follow me,” Aaron said. “I’ll show you.”

Aaron lit the oil lamp, then showed me where the bath was. Fortunately, the house had a tiny bathroom on the second floor with archaic but usable plumbing. A footed metal bathtub sat beneath a spigot coming from the ceiling. The tub drained down to a holding tank near a vegetable garden on the side of the house.

The room was barely big enough to fit the tub, and there was no sink or toilet, only a small tiled area in the corner with a grated hole. An empty bucket sat in the tiled area. Aaron explained that the hole was for urine and that you were supposed to fill the bucket with water to help drain it out to the back of the house where the outhouse was located.

I felt very sorry for Farrah. This was not a very female-friendly system. I imagined myself squatting over that hole, stepping on the urine that had splashed from the men. Yikes. Maybe we could bring the young couple back with us. If we found them, that is.

Aaron gave me a dress of Farrah’s to wear, heated up my water, then left me to it. The soap smelled like jarring weed, which made for the most relaxing bath I’ve ever had, but I also worried that my previous use of jarring weed had contributed to my unintentional astral projection. I didn’t want to repeat that experience, nor did I wish to pass out and drown.

I finished washing myself and my clothes, then dried off with what could only loosely be called a towel. It was slightly bigger than a washcloth, thin, and smelled like vinegar. Farrah’s dress had clearly been ripped through time out of the Victorian era, navy blue with long sleeves, a high neck, and buttons all the way up the front. It was far too big, scratchy, and completely incongruent with the strange Greek tunic the men wore. It was stupid and I hated it, but I agreed to wear it until my regular clothes finished drying.

While I gallantly risked my life in a hot bath, Aaron carried the dragon corpse to some kind of hut outside the house, butchered it, and created a meal using the meat from that animal, a few jarred and pickled items that he found in the house, and a purple root vegetable from the garden that tasted like spicy parsnips. Maybe it was just that we were all ravenous, but he surprised me again with his ability to create a meal out of thin air.

His remarkable culinary skills made me think of my mother. Was she somewhere crying, worrying about me? I had to get back. I had to, but I also needed to help these people. Plus, they were the key to helping me. The bridge was the answer. If I could only learn how to make one, I could go back to Earth, talk to my parents, and bring back what I needed to support a revolution.

Revolution, I thought. How do you start a revolution? I laughed to myself. I should have studied for that stupid history test.

After we ate, I insisted on cleaning the dishes and sent Aaron to the bath. He used the same bathwater I had. Ward refused the bath, saying that he didn’t need it when he was a dog, so why would he need it now? It made me realize that I probably could have done a little better job taking care of him. Poor Ward would be sleeping alone tonight anyway, so what did it matter?

I would never tell Aaron, but I would miss my co-sleeping arrangement with Rogue. It had been such a staple of my nighttime routine that if Aaron hadn’t been there, I might have continued it with Ward. It was probably better not to think about that in case Aaron plucked the thought from my brain.

The attic was accessible by a ladder from a closet in Jorin’s room. The closet door hid behind the false back of a wardrobe, and the wardrobe itself was in the back of another closet. The ladder folded up into the attic through a trapdoor.

Aaron carefully brought the oil lamp up the ladder, then stood at the top to help me. I didn’t need it, but I let him help me anyway. Once we were up through the trapdoor, I saw that it had a lock on it. Ward wouldn’t come up the ladder and insisted on sleeping on the floor of the closet, so Aaron tossed a bedroll down to him, then closed—and locked—the trapdoor. I didn’t blame Ward. I wouldn’t want to sleep in the same room with a brand-new couple either—if that’s what we were.

The attic was chilly, but not uncomfortable. It had no obvious windows that could be seen from the outside, but there were small viewing panels in the middle of each wall that could be lifted by a latch to peek outside. Aaron peeked out each of the panels while I searched for a place to hang my wet clothes.

Dimly lit by the oil lamp, the well-used space had a vaulted ceiling that sloped low enough on the sides that even I had to crouch near the walls where the trapdoor opened. In one corner of the room, there were two shelves overflowing with books, positioned on either side of a reading chair. I recognized them as the banned books from Aaron’s memory.

A wooden counter and a chest much like the one from Aaron’s cottage occupied another corner of the attic. I draped my wet clothes over the counter, then continued snooping. The bed, an oardoo-feather mattress on a low platform, was big enough for two very tall people. A little half-sized door that looked like it should lead Alice straight to Wonderland was on the opposite wall, rising to the low end of the vaulted ceiling.

At the peak of the ceiling, a piece of art even more magnificent than the two moons of Monash twisted seamlessly into a dome. A pattern of colorful veneer depicted four jarring weed trees rising from the bottom of the dome to join in a gorgeous violet canopy. Perched on one of those trees, gazing down from near the top of the dome, was a crimson dragon. Bathed in shadows, it looked so real that I did a double take and my heart jumped into my throat before my brain recognized that it was a part of the ceiling. A round window framed by a circle of white marble was set into the dome at the apex.

An oculus,I thought. I’d learned the word during my visit to the Pantheon in Rome a few years ago. I stared in awe.

“My grandfather’s work,” Aaron said, closing the last viewing panel. “He was a master craftsman in the Woodworkers Guild. He built this house.”

“What is this room, Aaron?” I asked.

Aaron glanced around, debating. “It’s the guest room,” he said. I gave him the look, and he smirked. “It’s a place to hide people,” he said. “Mainly me. And books. Especially these books.” He pointed a thumb at the bookshelves.

“I see,” I said. In other words, it was his bedroom. “Wouldn’t someone be able to see this fancy dome from the outside?”

“Once upon a time, yes. But now it’s camouflaged by the rain collection cistern and a false roof, and there’s another attic we could take them to if they asked to see why the roof is so high, but that’s not generally what the magister is searching for.”

“Who are these magisters you keep talking about?”

“They work for the Ministry. They’re responsible for civil enforcement of Ministry law and have a leadership position in the military legion of each province. Magister Axel has been assigned to Southern Gale for the last twenty years, and he is relentless. That’s why I stay away most of the time. If he caught me here, he’d have grounds to destroy my uncle.”

“What is he trying to find?”

Aaron looked at me obliquely, then over at the undersized door. “Anything that might get him what he wants.”

I narrowed my eyes. “What does he want?”

Aaron rolled his eyes, but he couldn’t quite suppress a smile. “You really can’t let anything go, can you?”

“I told you. It’s my best feature.” I batted my eyelashes at him for effect.

Aaron raised one eyebrow at me like he was Spock analyzing an alien lifeform, a comparison that made a lot of sense if you thought about it. “He still wants Farrah,” he said, “but he can’t just take her because of Jorin’s influence.”

Ah, right. The incomparable Farrah. How could I forget?

“He’s searching for any reason to bring the hammer down on my cousin, which is why he comes so often or sends his minions. Worst case scenario, he would find a reason to execute both my uncle and cousin, and then he could take Farrah and the entire farm. Of course, he wouldn’t live long enough to enjoy it.”

He dropped his pack beside the bed, then walked over to the trapdoor and opened a small panel that looked down into the closet. Aaron observed Ward for a long moment, then shut the panel again and headed back to the bed. I watched him as he moved around the room, not sure if I should be nervous about the casual way he’d just threatened to murder his enemy. I understood the sentiment, but I’d never heard someone speak that way before. Would I be safer with someone like this?

As long as he was on my side, I decided, yes. And if he can keep his temper.

“Is it common to have this kind of place in your house?” I asked, changing the subject.

Aaron shrugged. “I don’t know for sure, but I suspect this is not the only one.” I wondered how many of these existed in Neesee. I hoped many. If we could find Jorin, I’d ask him if he knew of others who resisted in these small ways. It would be a good place to start with our own resistance.

“What’s through there?” I asked, pointing to the little door.

“The escape route. There’s a hallway leading to a removable panel with a rope, then another room like this one on the other side, accessible from Terik’s room. That’s where they go when they want actual privacy. Jorin installed the escape hatch about fifteen years ago when Axel burned down a home near the Moore farm, just southeast of here. Killed two kids.” He walked back over to his pack, sat in front of it, and pulled everything out to reorganize.

“Your family are all rebels,” I commented, not bothering to hide my admiration.

“No, I’m the only rebel. The rest are silent resisters.”

I watched him fastidiously reorganize his pack, glad that I was in his room instead of the other way around. My bedroom was always embarrassingly messy. I had a perpetual basket of clean laundry that I never folded and three years of papers on my desk that I’d been meaning to shred.

Well, that’s one problem solved, at least. My bedroom isn’t there anymore. I sighed. “I should do that too,” I said, motioning to the pack. Aaron smiled, shaking his head. “What?” I asked. “It could happen. Not tonight, though. Maybe tomorrow.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” he said, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “You should check in with Spirit before we sleep.”

“Okay. I just hope I don’t float away with her when she leaves this time.”

Aaron considered that for a minute. “Maybe you should sit next to me.” His expression remained blank as he said it, but his eyes were searching. He watched me walk toward him like a starving man watching a turkey come out of the oven. I felt a flush creep up my neck as I approached him, though that might have been Farrah’s stupid scratchy dress.

“Good idea,” I said and plopped down on the bed next to him, setting my pack next to his. “Spirit,” I called.

“I’m here,” she said. She sounded close, her voice more solid somehow. I turned to see her beside me, lounging on the bed.

“Holy crap! I can see you, Spirit.”

She directed a dazzling white smile at me. “I know,” she said. She was so stunning I couldn’t speak for a moment. She wore one of her usual boho dresses in a midnight blue that made her gray-blue eyes seem like they were glowing. It had a deep V-neck that drew the eyes down before you could stop them. Her white-blond hair was longer than I remembered and flowed around her body as if she posed for Botticelli. I wanted to get her a freaking scallop shell to stand in. I just stared, remembering the last time I had seen her sprawled out on a bed like that. I wondered if I could reach out and touch her.

“You can’t,” she said.

“Can’t what?” I asked.

“Touch me. Or do anything else to me,” she said, sitting up. She appeared to sit on the bed, but there was no indentation. The shift in posture drew my attention to the slit in her dress. It was right in the front, went up to mid-thigh, and opened up to show her gorgeously smooth legs.

“Um, wow. That’s too bad,” I said, glancing at Aaron a little guiltily. Though I knew he couldn’t hear Spirit because we weren’t connected, he looked at me with that same expression he’d had when Ward appeared. This time, it was probably warranted.

I was glad to see her, but leering was not the best idea. Instead, I leaned my head on Aaron’s shoulder to distract myself and hooked my arm in his. Resting my hand on his forearm, our shared mental space opened, and I discovered that he was jealous again, but he didn’t understand why he needed to be. The man was so perceptive that I knew I would have a hard time hiding my feelings from him the way I had done with everyone since Drew. I tended to keep friends and lovers alike at arm’s length, but that might not be possible with Aaron. That fact made me even more nervous than his willingness to kill someone.

I gazed into his eyes and inhaled his amazing scent, which now, after his bath, was a mix of clean soap and a tangy musk. I pulled him into the deeper Connection link so he could hear Spirit. “Any news?” I asked her, not looking away from his eyes.

“Seleca went to the last place she knew Aaron’s family to be,” Spirit said, “which was an apartment in Seattle, but there was no one there.”

Aaron winced at hearing Spirit’s voice through Connection. He forced himself to relax then said, “And now there’s no one here either.”

I sat up straight, my libido momentarily forgotten. “Oh shit. What if your mother knew where Seleca would be ahead of time and evacuated people?”

“Then Seleca might be coming here next,” he said, finishing my thought.

“But why would your mother write us a note encouraging us to come here if she knew Seleca might show up?”

He shook his head. “Maybe the two aren’t related, or maybe we misread. How would my mother even get here?”

“And wouldn’t she have wanted to see you if she had been here?” I asked. One would hope.

We stared at each other for a second, then Aaron jumped up to peer through the viewing panels again. “Spirit, can you check again if anyone else is in or around the house?”

She disappeared. When she reappeared a second later, she stood on the other side of the room. “There’s no one within ten miles in any direction,” she said. Her instantaneous movement across the room was creepy, and I had to look away.

“You were just with Seleca, right?” I asked. “Did you get an idea of what her next move would be?”

“She stole my Precognition reservoir when she murdered me,” she said. “I believe she’s planning to try to use it, but she’ll need to come back to Monash to do that. Earth is blocking her. Even when she gets here, it’s going to be harder than she thinks.”

I relayed what Spirit said to Aaron. “She’ll probably go back to the palace so she can practice in peace,” he said.

“Palace? That sounds nice,” I said.

“It is,” Aaron said. “Eve controls all of the guilds and has hundreds of years’ worth of forced labor and theft stored in that palace, including my grandfather’s staff.”

“Staff?”

“Yes, my mother said it’s some kind of focus staff that gives you greater control over a fragment, but she never saw him use it. Now I’ll probably never get to see what it does.”

“How did Eve and Anick gain so much power?” I asked.

“Projection, seduction, and murder. They’ve been stealing reservoirs since before my grandfather’s time. The history is handwritten in one of those books. It goes all the way back to the pre-Anick era.” He pointed to the bookshelf. I looked over, thinking I knew exactly what I would be doing for the next few days.

“Even so,” he continued, “some reservoirs are so rare that it took until now for them to be found. The story passed down in our family is that Anick originally had Absorption and Projection. Projection lets you force your own thoughts or perceptions onto others, so he simply convinced people to let him absorb their reservoirs without resisting.”

“You can resist?”

“To a degree. You can build a resistance over time and make it harder, but you can’t stop it altogether without Protection. Projection can even be used to place a person in a trance, making them act like a puppet with no will of their own. They’ll just sit down and starve to death unless they’re told to eat. Seleca likes to do that for fun, but I think she finds it easier to just kill people outright, especially if she wants to absorb their reservoir.”

Spirit stared at the ground, nodding, her face neutral rather than filled with regret as I would have been. I remembered how nice it had felt when I’d drifted out of my body. I’d always thought death would be a burden, but it’s just the opposite. All burdens are lifted in death.

“Spirit, would you please follow her again and let us know if she’s coming this way?”

“Sure,” she said, her eyes bouncing between me and Aaron, then she disappeared again.

I hoped that if I lay down to sleep that I wouldn’t drift out of my body again. I wasn’t exactly sure how it worked, but at least I wasn’t high as a kite like last time. I was so exhausted now that the risk was worth it. In any case, what was I going to do? Never sleep again?

I leaned over my bag and dug out my toothbrush and water bottle while Aaron finished looking through the panels. After scrubbing my teeth, I finished off the water and pulled out Violet’s book, reading the poem again. “I think we’re supposed to wait here,” I said.

Aaron glanced over at me from the viewing panel. “Do you think that’s what the poem means?” he asked.

“That’s my guess about this one stanza,” I said. “It helps you face your enemy and searches out what seems empty, but if you wait and don’t misread, you may avoid a slaughter.” I paused to think about the “key” in the poem. “What if Linorra isn’t supposed to be me?”

“How could that be?” he asked. “The character’s name is too close to yours to be a fluke, and the plot matches. She travels to another world and finds a dragon.” He gestured to himself.

I considered that. It made sense that he would be the dragon in the poem, even though I still thought of him as Bear Guy. And I couldn’t deny that Linorra and Lina were very similar names. “Okay, maybe she is me, but what if the point of that was to trick Seleca? That’s why Seleca didn’t know about my Protection because the book keeps saying how Connection is her ‘greatest gift.’ Maybe that’s what she means by ‘don’t misread’?”

“She probably just needed to buy us time,” Aaron said. “Seleca absorbed Precognition from your unfortunate friend, so my mother’s reservoir isn’t going to help us much anymore, but it bought us time for you to learn how to use Protection.”

“But that can’t be all,” I insisted. “I learned how to make the shield only seconds before I needed it. There must be something else that we’re missing.”

Aaron closed the last viewing panel and sat down next to me, reading the poem again. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe you’re the key in the poem.” He looked up sharply, remembering something. “Yes, I remember my mother saying that you were the key to helping me find my way back to my family.”

“I was definitely covered in mud and blood,” I agreed, cringing at how gross I had been. “And I helped you face your enemy earlier today, and then I sent Spirit out to search the empty house.”

“But if you wait and don’t misread, you may avoid a slaughter,” Aaron read. “So, if we wait here, then our families will be safe?”

I reread the poem a few more times, wondering if that was the only part of the book that applied to us. We had come upon an empty house and were trying to decide what to do. I had to think Aaron’s mother would have known that.

The rest of the book seemed designed to trick Seleca into thinking I only had a Connection reservoir, but now that she had Precognition, too, I doubted it would work. I worried our previous advantage, foresight, was now a moot point. I hoped that Aaron’s mother had a plan for that, but I didn’t know how she possibly could. At best, her gift would bring us to a draw. It was up to us now.

I put the book away and lay down on the bed, groaning as I stretched out on my belly. My feet and my back were killing me.

Aaron set the oil lamp down on a little table next to the bed, then sat on the bed next to me.

“Lina,” he said.

“Hm?” I was already drifting off. I was so tired I thought I might pass out before he finished his sentence.

“Lina,” he said again, a little louder.

I lifted my head, cracking one eye open to look at him. “Yeah?”

“I don’t want you to drift out of your body again.”

“Neither do I.” I set my head down and closed my eyes again. “But I’m hoping that was partly an effect of the jarring weed.”

“That may be,” he said, “but I think I should sleep in the bed with you so I can stay connected to you and make sure you’re still in there.”

I suppressed a grin. I’m sure he really was worried about me, but I had already assumed he would sleep in the bed with me. He didn’t need an excuse. “That does make sense,” I said. “You are very wise.”