Chapter 2
Carter
Marcus:
She’s gone from the Archives, but I’m not letting her move back in with you.
Carter:
Why not?
Marcus:
Because she’s spiraling, and fighting is the last thing she needs right now. Leave her alone for a while.
Carter:
You can’t tell me to stay away from my mate.
Marcus:
I fucking can and I fucking am. She’s my friend. As far as I’m concerned, you wanted her as far away from you as you possibly could for weeks. If you wanted to change your mind, you had a whole week where you could have come and grabbed her from the damn Archives.
Carter:
Whatever. Don’t come haunting me when I’ll kill you for not being able to control yourself near her pheromones.
Fucking moron.
I slid my phone in my back pocket with a muttered curse and pushed on the Archive’s door handle that had been locked for me for the whole past week.
It opened.
That ghost was unbelievable.
“Seriously?” I asked as I closed it behind me and walked inside the spacious room. “You were deliberately keeping me away from her?”
Not sure why I expected her to, but Maggie didn’t grace me with an answer.
“Whatever.”
I made my way to the farthest shelves, the ones no one except Arc or I visited. The ones he hid his visions and prophecies in.
From a young age, he was taught to write every vision down to ensure he would not forget. After all, he sometimes saw things years or decades before it happened.
Centuries, even.
Maybe there was something that could help me understand what the fuck happened. Why he forbade us to come after them? Who was the strange Warlock who called him by his full name? Because what I saw? It didn’t make sense.
Arc had stood by and watched as they all attacked Dimitri. He remained unthreatened, and it felt like he knew that he himself wasn’t going to get harmed. And this whole event led to an explanation I didn’t want to believe.
My whole body locked and vision darkened as my hand touched the first storage box.
Fuck, no, not again.
The room was dark, only lit by a flickering white neon light overhead that illuminated a dirty dark green tile covering the walls and the floors.
I—Arc—was sitting on a chair in a corner.
Once again, there was no sign he even realized I was there and I could not feel or hear what was happening in his mind or if he was hurt in any way.
I hated being pulled in his head when I was able to, but this was even worse. It felt like I was merely a bystander, only here to listen and see, to try and make out what was really happening without all the facts.
Arc’s head turned to the side, to where Dimitri was sitting in his own corner, hands bound at his back and battered head falling forward.
Red stained his clothes and his face was covered in dark purple bruises and cuts.
“He’s an old Warlock,” Arc said, incredibly calm given their current situation.
“No shit,” Dimitri groaned, his voice strained. “Corrupted Warlocks and Witches with mixed powers have been extinct for over a millennium. This one should have been long dead.”
“He should, yes.”
Arc seemed to ponder on this for a little while. He knew the Warlock. Could it be the one who looked after him after he was born? Warlocks didn’t live that long. Four to five hundred years, maybe, but not millennia.
The image seemed to glitch for a moment. Weird, it’s never done that before. “What do you mean, corrupted?” Arc asked then, apparently not ready to think about the lifespan of his friend.
Dimitri let out a dry chuckle, lifting his head just enough for me to see the extent of his injuries. If he weren’t as powerful, he’d be dead.
“Come on, I thought you were old,” he said. “Don’t you know who first blessed a bunch of humans, turning them into Warlocks and shifters? They were sacred beings, blessed to look after the earth and its people. What the Divines and Hellrisers made when they corrupted them is a tragedy.”
I felt Arc’s face turn into a frown. “They evolved on their own.”
The Nephilim’s laugh was cold, empty of all real amusement. Was Arc wrong? Was all the history wrong? Maybe Dimitri was just delirious from the blood loss and the pain.
“No, they didn’t. If it weren’t for the Astrals, there wouldn’t be any Witches or shifters.”
The Astrals again. Maybe looking through the prophecies was a waste of time. I still had the old book in my room and didn’t bother going through it except for the tear-stained couple of pages.
“Of course, Hellrisers and Divines had to put their stupid noses in Astral business and corrupt a few until there were no Original left. Well, at least for the Warlock and Witches…”
“Astrals are a myth.”
Arc seemed so sure that I felt stupid for even thinking about it. About the damn book and that it could be something more than just made up folklore.
“That’s what Hellrisers and Divines want you to believe.
Wait until a thirty feet long Dragon comes and tries to rip your head from your shoulders with its teeth.
Or until a Phoenix fries you from the inside out and the whole city surrounding you.
Or even a Chimera makes the earth split under your feet and buries you miles under the surface. They won’t feel like myths anymore.”
Dimitri coughed, spitting blood at his feet on the floor. How I wish I could feel Arc’s emotions right now, because my own were all over the place.
The book mentioned Dragons…Why didn’t I turn the pages? Why didn’t I read the whole damn thing? Phoenixes and Chimeras? What?
“You’re talking nonsense,” Arc said, shaking his head.
Dimitri let out a dry scoff. “Maybe. Or perhaps you should ask Lola about it. She was the Maiden after all.”
The door opened before Arc could answer and the voice tsked softly.
“Now, Dimitri. What did we say about talking too much?” Arc looked in the voice’s direction and his eyes landed on the mysterious Warlock as he strolled in, his hands buried in his pockets. “We both know that some things are better left forgotten.”
His gold-flecked hazel gaze landed on Arc as he nodded in acknowledgment. “Archelaus. I hope he hasn’t bored you to death?”
“Can you explain the meaning of all this?” Arc asked, crossing his arms over his chest. He wasn’t tied up. Why wasn’t he tied up like Dimitri?
A weird glint shone in the Warlock’s eyes, the golden flecks turning red for a second.
“It’s the madness talking,” he simply answered, taking slow steps toward a faraway table, where knives and dirty bottles were placed. “You know how Nephilims are. You’ve been studying them for a while now.”
The room blurred, the image distorting before getting back to focus with Dimitri screams echoing around, dark smoke infiltrating his nostrils, mouth, ears, and all the small cuts over his body.
The red of his eyes swirled and shone bright in the dimly lit room.
I felt sick at the sight. Sick at Arc’s stillness.
“Nomin,” my friend said. “Is it really necessary?”
The Warlock—Nomin—dropped his outstretched arm and slowly turned to Arc, the golden flecks briefly flashing red one more time as Dimitri kept screaming and cursing.
His face contorted for a second before it transformed back into a neutral expression and he turned back to the suffering Nephilim.
“I’m only following your orders.”
I fell on my knees, panting. The box opened, and its contents spilled on the floor around me.
“What the fuck?”
That couldn’t be true. I must have misheard that.
No, my friend couldn’t be—if he was responsible for their capture…
No. No, it would mean that he had something to do with the prison too, and that wasn’t possible.
He cared for our people, and I’ve seen how it affected him over the past few years.
I’ve seen his face every time one of them was left on our perimeter for us to find. Every time a scout disappeared.
There had to be something I was missing. Something I didn’t see.
The Warlock—Nomin. Dimitri called him corrupted.
Said he had mixed powers. That he was old, and should have been extinct.
He looked like a shadow or a blood Warlock, using his own blood to control the smoke that attacked Dimitri.
Both these types of Earthwalkers had Hellrisers origin…
Was that what Dimitri meant by “corrupted”?
But every Warlock had either Divine or Hellriser’s origins…
I grabbed my hair, too many thoughts swirling in my mind. It didn’t make any sense!
A laugh a couple of rows away made me flinch before I groaned, fumbling with the loose pages on the floor to get them back inside their fallen box.
“Yeah, I’ll clean up. No need to get your panties in a twist, you creepy ghost.”
As I placed the box back on its shelf, she laughed again. For fuck’s sakes.
I looked toward the sound. It was between the rows I found Lola crying barely over a week ago.
“Do you have something to tell me?” I asked. She did not answer, but a cold breeze hit my arms, sending goosebumps up my spine. I don’t like this. Whatever Margaret was, she gave me the creeps. “Do you want me to leave?”
I heard the door lock in the distance. Okay, that’s a no, then.
“What do you want?” My patience was wearing thin. I was exhausted from that little visit in Arc’s mind and it felt like someone was playing drums inside my head.
Another sound, this time like someone was tapping on the wooden shelves, back where I first heard her laugh. Where Lola cried over the book I’ve never seen before, no matter how many times I’ve been skimming the place in the past decades.
I reluctantly made my way toward the echoing sound, unease prickling at my skin. Damn, how I hated the ghost.
“Okay? I’m here. What did you want to show me?”
How dumb did I sound talking to the damn thing? Especially when I stood still for two full minutes in silence, waiting for some kind of response. She was probably just fucking with my head, like she enjoyed doing every fucking day.
As I sighed and turned around to leave, something moved behind me, making me snap to attention.
“This book?” I asked, looking at the slightly unaligned small leather volume.
It moved again, getting closer to the edge. I grabbed it before it could fall and looked at the simple cover.
Nothing was written on it except for what looked like mostly erased old asian symbols. I moved it around, studying the old carvings on the leather with the light.
Thank god every Divine spoke all languages, because finding someone able to transcribe old Korean would be an impossible task.
“Tedregon,” I whispered, reading the unfamiliar symbols. “Okay…What does it mean?” Silence. If I could kill her, I would. “What am I supposed to do with this?”
The book opened and the pages turned on their own, unnaturally fast until the book closed again.
Her answer was clear. “Read it, dumbass.”
“Well, fuck you too,” I grumbled, turning around sharply to leave, only for two more books to fall behind me. “Come on, really? How many books have you hidden here?”
I grabbed them anyway before making my way to the door on the other side of the room, walking past Lola’s desk and ignoring the mess she’d left behind.
The door unlocked and opened just as I placed my hand on the handle.
Looked like I had some reading to do.