Chapter 27 #2
“I know they are. Look.” I pull a chart from a stack of printed sources.
“This shows the dates and times of each event over the last month. See how they’re going up in frequency?
Well, when we get here,” I point at the date—two nights ago.
“This time is about seven minutes after I lost comms contact with Caelan. There’s a huge spike.
Out of seventy-two unexplained phenomena worldwide, 62% of them happened here,” I tap my pen on the first date and time.
“And here.” I point to the second date and time.
Riv turns the paper around, and his brow furrows. “Okay? So what’s the significance of the second marker?”
I hesitate.
Riven raises a brow. “Dax?”
“I’m not really sure,” I lie.
“Don’t bullshit me.” He snaps, always a nosey fucker. “What went down at the second date and time?”
My shoulders sag. “I decided to check on Lenora. She was doing a routine med check on the Omega. While I was in there, the female said something about Caelan’s gunshot wound. I reacted… poorly.”
I raise my hand to the back of my neck, trying to rub away the heat building under my skin.
“Poorly,” Riven echoes flatly.
I wince. He’s not going to let this shit go. I’m just wasting time dragging it out.
“I went for the Omega’s throat.”
Saying it out loud sounds so much worse than it did in my head.
The temperature in the room drops. Riven sets down the chart and faces me. Times like this remind me that just because he isn’t a Bastard, doesn’t mean he’s not a predator in his own right.
His eyes are cold when he asks, “You did what now?”
I groan, falling back into my seat. Why do I feel worse about this now than I did when it happened?
“I lunged at her. Got in her face. It took Vae, Silas, and Calder together to pull me out of the room. Gav essentially put me in an Omega time-out. I’m not allowed around her without supervision.”
I can’t even look at my friend. I can’t stand to see the disgust I know I
I’ll see looking back.
“She said something about Caelan’s gunshot wound, and I just—” My hands clench. I search for the words to explain, but can’t find them. I hang my head and mutter, “I lost it.”
“Dax,” Riven’s voice is soft, like he’s comforting an injured animal. Which is laughable. If I’m an animal in this situation, it’s a fucking velociraptor.
It makes the guilt a thousand times worse.
“I know, okay? I know what you’re going to say. That I’m better than that. That I’m not the kind of male who goes after defenseless Omegas.”
I finally look up and meet his eyes. “Except you don’t know her, Riven. She’s not defenseless. She tricked Caelan. She got him hurt—nearly killed. I can’t trust her.”
Please leave it alone. Please don’t push this.
I don’t want to have a moral discussion tonight. Not after what happened at HQ. I stare at my friend, begging him without words to have mercy.
A long moment passes, then he hums in agreement. “Alright.”
I can hear what he’s not saying. That wasn’t an ‘Alright, we’ll forget it.’ That was an ‘Alright, I’ll drop it for now, but we’re going to talk about this later.’
Riven’s expression turns thoughtful.
“So this is the list,” he snatches a printout. “And this is the map that correlates,” he grabs one of the larger maps, then uses pins to hang it on the wall.
He spins and plucks a marker off the table, yanking the cap off with his teeth and spitting it onto the floor. Then, with no explanation, he starts drawing lines across the map, like he’s playing a fucked up game of connect the dots. Except he’s the only one who can see the godsdamned dots.
I lunge for him, determined to pull him back before he ruins the whole damn map. I mean, it’s not like I can’t get more, but for fucks sake.
“What do you think you’re doing, you Fates-damned idiot?”
His arm whips out, preventing me from coming closer. “Chill out, Captain Constipated, I’m making a fucking point here.”
He glances over his shoulder, making shooing moments with his hand away like he’s dealing with an annoying child.
Throwing my hands up in defeat, I fall into my seat and wait for him to finish doing… whatever the fuck he’s doing.
I chew absently on my thumbnail, listening to his marker scratch over paper while he hums an unfamiliar tune. When he’s finished, he’s successfully turned my carefully calibrated data into a map that looks like a toddler found a box of Sharpies and tried to teach himself how to draw lines.
Poorly.
Bold slashes intersect in no discernible pattern, some curving up while others curve down or to the side. It looks like a lousy attempt at Baby’s First Cartography.
I reach for the whiskey and pour myself another drink, raising the glass in a mocking toast. “Great. That looks terrible. Mind telling me why you took your feelings out on my map?”
“These,” Riv motions to the lines with his marker, “are ley lines.”
I scrub a tired hand down my face. “Ley lines. Fairy-tale bullshit. That’s just…perfect.”
“Not fairy-tale bullshit. Ancient lines of energy. Energy that the blood remembers when your mind and books forget.” He taps on the map again, as if I can look away from it.
“The world is a living entity, Dax. And like all living things, it has veins. Arteries. Pathways older than anything you or I could conceive of. They transmit power from one part of the world to another. Like currents.”
He takes a seat, but his focus stays on the map.
“Every ancient culture on this floating rock has mapped them. The Egyptians, the Mayans, the Celts, the Chinese. They built temples, pyramids, and shrines on top of these lines. They call them Dragon Paths in China. Australians call them Dream Paths.” He smirks, “In Ireland, they call them Fae Chords.”
I scowl. “That tracks. Considering Fae are also fairy-tale bullshit. That entire country believes find a circle of mushrooms means a nymph will appear and whisper Gaelic riddles until you trip into an alternate reality ruled by independent kingdoms where the seasons never change.”
Riven ignores me. “They’re lines of energy that run beneath the surface, connecting sites of sacred burial, worship, magnetic and polar anomalies. And also,” His expression turns impossibly smug. “The exact coordinates where your anomalies have been popping up the last few days.”
I scoff. “There’s no way.”
Riven’s smile falls. He unpins the map and lays it on the table in front of me. Then he pulls up an online map that mirrors the exact lines he drew on the data. I compare the two and realize…
He’s right.
Every single event took place at, or near, a major intersection of one or more of these fucking ley lines. Or on the line itself.
“That’s…” I trail off, hesitating as I meet Riven’s eyes. I swallow down the word ‘coincidence’ before it can escape.
“Every weird disturbance. Every unexplained event. Every dead cow or screaming deer or flight path that goes dark.” He points at the map. “They’re all happening right along these lines. Perfectly, Dax. That’s not a coincidence.”
I gesture at the paper lying in front of me like a taunt. “So you think these lines of energy are… what? Facilitating the strange shit going on?”
Riven slides his hands in his pockets and rocks back on his heels.
“I think,” He levels me with one of those no-bullshit looks, and I just know whatever he’s about to say is going to ruin my evening.
“‘She is the light. The light is the Gate. The Gate is awake.’”
“The Gate,” I mutter, shivering when a cold chill runs down my spine.
Riven’s fingers hover above the ley lines.
“What I think is that these are seams. Paths, sure, but paths that correlate perfectly with the stitching between one layer of reality and the next. Most of the time, they hold. I think they’ve been holding pretty well for thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years.
You might get a little something that presses through.
Cold spots in a forest, fog where there shouldn’t be any, that kind of thing… ”
He arches a brow meaningfully, and I’m reminded of the story he told us last time we were here.
“If you ask me, something is pulling on the threads. Stretching them. Allowing more of whatever’s on the other side through. And I think whatever’s there is affecting things here in a way that makes no sense to us, but does in that reality.”
He isn’t whispering or making it sound more dramatic than it is, and somehow that makes his words even more ominous.
“I don’t know what it means, but I think every time whatever’s there lashes out, it’s slipping through.
Fucks with physics, or gravity, or what the fuck ever you want to blame it on.
That’s why none of this makes sense to you.
” His eyes soften. “It’s breaking laws in a way you can’t explain because it’s not backed by science.
Because there’s no science to explain it, Daxen. At least, none that we know of.”
What he’s saying makes a sick kind of sense. And while he speaks, the words the Omegas whispered like warnings spin through my mind. “She” and the “gate” and the “threads.”
I wrack my brain for any explanation that makes sense without refuting Riven’s words. Literally any explanation besides “magic doesn’t exist.”
Because even that’s bullshit, isn’t it?
Everyone knows magic exists; we just dress it up in different definitions: Mutation. Evolution. Variation. Lots of pretty words to hide the fact that the scientific community knows fuck all about most things.
Thousands of years on this planet, and science still doesn’t have an explanation for where wolven and vampires came from. They don’t even have an evidence-based hypothesis that could explain why we’re so different from humans.
If we look at only what we know to be true, all that can be said for certain is that one day there were humans, and the next, wolven and vampires existed too. But there’s no historical record of the event.
There’s also no explanation for why only certain vampires can twist their blood into something new simply by willing it.
By wanting it bad enough. Or, what about how we’re able to go longer between feedings when we drink the blood of another vampire but can only survive for a day on the blood of a deer, or a lion, or a fucking naked mole rat.
That’s the problem. The entire fucking crux of every argument I make, out loud or in my head, but especially as it pertains to the current situation.
Everything we are—everything I’ve spent my life fighting to learn and understand—is built on a mountain of bullshit we don’t have the data to explain in the first place.
Riven chuckles and hands me another glass of whiskey.
“Did I break you? I didn’t mean for you to have an existential crisis in the middle of my gym, Dax.”
“I’m not broken,” I reply drolly. “Just… considering.”
“Considering that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy?”
I look at him flatly. “Considering whether or not I’d be convicted by a jury of my peers when I tell them you were unironically quoting Shakespeare when I tore your heart out of your chest.”
“Honestly, it could go either way. Really depends on how many on the jury feel personally victimized by assholes with a pie chart fetish.”
His smile’s unrepentant, and I find myself smiling back, even though I’m screaming on the inside.
“So what now?” I ask.
“I don’t know, Dax.” He leans forward, bracing his elbows on the table. “What now? Do you want to keep beating your chest about the scientific method and ignore that there’s something real happening here? Or do you want to piece all this shit together with an open mind?”
“I don’t know how not to want answers backed by quantifiable proof,” I admit.
“It’s a good thing you have me, then. I’m great at taking shit at face value.”
He walks across the room, slips out the door, and returns a minute later carrying two huge boxes full of leather and cloth-bound books, some of which look like they’re falling apart.
“What the fuck is this?”
I didn’t even know Riven owned a book, let alone whatever paper graveyard this is.
“Stories, Daxen.” He drops both boxes on the table between us. A plume of dust explodes into the air, making me wrinkle my nose to keep from sneezing.
“Are we having show-and-tell next, or…?”
“We are going to have story-time for the foreseeable future. If you’re very good, you might get a nap and a snack later, but it’s going to depend on your behavior.” He plays along, pulling out handfuls of books and stacking them in piles.
When I stand to get a closer look, I realize he’s sorting the piles by language. Where the fuck did these come from?
“Seriously, though, did you rob a rare book dealer? Loot an estate sale?”
“They were Nana Josephine’s. She left them to me years ago in her will.”
“Of course she did,” I mutter, sitting back down.
“As I said, she always knew how much I loved information. I was a nosey little shit when I was younger, and I’m still a nosey adult centuries later.
I’ve made a damn fine empire for myself off secrets.
These,” he drops the first box on the floor—empty now—and starts unloading the second, “are chock-full of other people’s secrets. ”
I pick one, flipping it open. Then, I slam it closed and push it back to him. “This is a children’s book of Scottish folklore,” I point out.
He smirks. “I know. Lessons, fables, mediocre metaphors. All without a single citation, glossary, or footnote. It’s your own personal hell, complete with questionable illustrations.”
His smile grows. It’s clear he’s immensely pleased, like he’s waited his entire life to con me into this exact situation.
When he speaks next, his voice drops to something more serious. Gentle and nearly reverent.
“Stories, Daxen. The world won’t always lay itself out in a way you can chart or measure. When science fails, and histories rot, stories are the world’s oldest living memory.”
He holds up a small volume. Cloth-covered, fraying at the edges. It looks like it might fall apart if you breathe on it too hard.
“They slip through because they’re unassuming. No one is afraid of them, and that’s their mistake.” He sets the book down and takes his seat, selecting another and opening the cover with reverent movements.
“Stories have outlasted kings, burned through empires, and buried gods. They’ve survived fire, floods, and fools.
” He extends the book of folklore I discarded.
“These stories, like the ley lines, run under everything. You can ignore them if you want, but they’re still there.
Holding the ground together. Until something starts to pull. ”
I take the book, looking at him like he just suggested we dig up graves.
He leans back and winks.
“I think it’s time we stop guessing and start pulling.”