Chapter 1
SEAN
Twenty years later
Sean Archer was no stranger to headaches, but this one was next level.
It bloomed from the innermost parts of his brain to spread its throbbing tentacles into his teeth and down his neck.
With his face still smashed into his pillow, Sean blindly rummaged his bedside-table drawer in search of ibuprofen.
He jerked his hand back when his finger met something sharp.
With a groan, he sat up. A thin cut along his fingertip wept blood, and he glared at the exposed box knife that Past Sean had carelessly thrown in there.
Past Sean was a jackass.
Snatching it from the drawer to retract the blade, he paused at the forgotten note lying beneath it. His heart thumped hard at the familiar paper, worsening his headache as guilt warred with relief that he’d managed to put it out of his mind for so many years.
Though it didn’t really matter that he hadn’t looked at it.
Its contents haunted his subconscious mind, no matter how hard he tried to forget.
He sensed a heavy weight hiding in these words, clawing against some instinct in his head, some force that made him feel distinctly other.
He took the note from its resting place, careful not to stain it with blood, and unfolded its well-worn creases.
Caden,
If this letter finds you, then just know that I have loved you every second of your existence.
I’ve thought of nothing but your well-being since you came into this world.
Stay with your aunt. She will keep you safe.
And when the time comes, please know that everything I did was for you.
You are the Light we look toward. Don’t ever forget it. Be strong. I love you, my son.
Sean had read this note hundreds of times.
He’d memorized the shape of the letters, the small ink splotch beside the word safe, even the mysteriously capitalized L.
His mother’s last words to him. A familiar chill, merciless in its intensity, settled deep in his chest, same as it always did when thoughts of his mother surfaced.
Seven years hadn’t warmed it in the slightest.
The ice of loneliness.
He had his aunt, yes. Loved her dearly. Still lived with her like a child, thanks to some strange paranoia she’d shared with his mother, one that made her want him close by, never to stray.
Stay with your aunt. She will keep you safe.
Safe from what?
He’d asked that question a million times and still had yet to receive an adequate answer.
Despite that, he loved Aunt Blaire. Sometimes, though, the reminder that he was an orphan would sucker punch him right in the soul.
His headache roared.
After replacing the note, Sean stared down at his bleeding finger, remembering the way his mother’s blood had caked in the crevices of his hands and stained beneath his nails.
It had taken multiple washes to clean it away, and when the last swirl of red had spiraled down the shower drain, he’d suddenly panicked.
That blood, the diluted streams of pink, were all that was left of his mother.
Her body had been taken, and he never wanted to see it again—not with her damaged face and slit throat—yet he’d just washed the last bits of his mother down the drain like she didn’t matter.
He recalled the jolting pain in his kneecaps when he’d fallen to the porcelain, scrambling to plug the drain so the blood couldn’t escape.
But it was too late.
He was too late.
“Sean!” Aunt Blaire called up the stairs, jolting him from his thoughts. “You up? I made you birthday muffins!”
Ah. Yes. His birthday. He’d forgotten, since twenty-one looked about the same as twenty.
Nothing had changed since yesterday. He was still there, living in his aunt’s house in Middle Of Nowhere, California.
Still working the same job at a tiny fitness center in the closest town—with a population of less than a thousand people.
Still bound by a promise he’d made his dead mother’s memory when he’d been too young to know better.
Sean assured Aunt Blaire he’d be right down, then winced at a particularly sharp twinge of his headache. He found the ibuprofen without shedding any more blood. A birthday miracle.
Downstairs, the scent of blueberries grew thick, making his stomach growl.
Aunt Blaire accepted a kiss on the cheek as she blended her jasmine tea.
The woman called herself a healer, but Sean and Cole—Blaire’s son—liked to tease that she was a witch, selling her tinctures and lotions to the local townsfolk as if they actually did anything.
She did have a knack for treating ailments though.
Sean settled at the kitchen table, three muffins in hand. “Where’s Cole?”
“I needed some green tea leaves.”
So he’d be gone awhile, then, given Aunt Blaire’s preferred tea shop was over an hour away.
“Long drive,” Sean said. He had always hated how far they lived from everything, hidden in the trees without neighbors.
Isolated, like they were hiding something.
“I still don’t understand why you and Mom never considered moving closer to town. ”
She laughed. “Why would we? We’re nature people. You know that.”
He thought of the note upstairs. The blood on his hands.
“Why do you ask?” Aunt Blaire asked, yanking him from his memories.
Sean shrugged without looking at her. “Just thinking about her. If we’d lived closer, maybe people would have heard her screams.”
He sensed her sudden stillness. The night his mother was killed, Aunt Blaire had been visiting a sick man from town. Cole had stayed after soccer practice to chill with a girl. Sean was the first to return home.
His mother had been alone when the intruders came. Vulnerable.
After a moment, Blaire circled the kitchen island and sank into the chair beside him, her long skirts settling around his feet as she took his hand.
Why don’t you ever wear pants? he’d asked once, back when he was barely taller than her thighs.
Pants are for males or for pixies, she’d replied. Whatever that meant.
“You can’t think like that, Sean,” she said now. “The what-ifs will drive a person mad.”
He sighed because he’d been down this thought path hundreds of times, but he couldn’t stop himself from reaching the same conclusion. “If she hadn’t been hiding from the world, she wouldn’t have died.”
Blaire squeezed his hand. “You don’t know that. Sometimes the Mother has bigger plans for us.”
Sean gritted his teeth. Blaire’s bohemian religious beliefs often snuck into these conversations.
It was one thing for her to seed an ivy plant in tribute to life or dance around a fire to celebrate the balance of all things.
It was something entirely different to believe her deity had a hand in his mother’s death.
Lana Archer had been murdered in cold blood. What kind of plan could that serve?
Sean lifted his gaze to meet Aunt Blaire’s.
She and Cole looked so alike. Cole had inherited her messy auburn curls, but her eyes weren’t quite as dark.
More like cinnamon than coffee. Normally Sean could play off her comments with a smile and a subject change, but he didn’t want to.
He wanted to dig in and find the treasure she hid.
“What plan does the Mother have for me?” he asked.
Her eyes shuttered, and she pulled her hand back.
“Other than to orphan me,” he added, prodding at her tender parts. “To strand me in this place, handcuffed by a promise I made when I was just a kid?”
“Your mother had her reasons, Sean, as you well know.”
Sean studied her expression, but it revealed little. “I know there are reasons. I still don’t know what those reasons are. Isn’t it time you told me?”
She stood abruptly and went back to her dried jasmine blossoms. “What has you thinking of this today?” Her tone lightened, but he could hear the strain behind it. “You should be celebrating your birthday. Not thinking of sad times.”
“I ran across her note,” Sean admitted. “In my nightstand this morning.”
Blaire’s mouth tightened, but she said nothing.
“Everything I did was for you. That’s what she said.”
“And it was true.”
“Everything I did. What did she do, Blaire?” Sean asked, point blank.
He’d never done this, never cornered her like this.
But the festering questions had turned rotten in the last few months, and he had to know.
Why was he moldering in this tiny existence?
Why was it so important that he not go to college?
That he keep close to home? Was it simple paranoia or something bigger?
For so many years, he’d counted on the latter.
He’d believed, deep in his gut where nothing but instinct lived, that something massive hovered just out of reach, and his mother and aunt had kept him safe from it.
Since he was a small boy, images had flashed in his head that made no sense.
Pictures of a world that didn’t exist, of people he’d never known, a girl who haunted his heart.
Dozens of times, he’d watched a broadsword pierce his chest.
But perhaps it was all deep-seated paranoia. Maybe he was sick in his head, and the images were nothing but a manifestation of that.
Aunt Blaire huffed at his question. “Sean.” His name on her lips was an argument and a plea all in one.
“Blaire—”
“I have to go,” she said suddenly. “I told Mr. Henderson I’d bring him some of my special joint cream. I can’t talk about this now.”
Sean raised a nonplussed brow. “You have to go? Right now?”
“Yes.”
With that, she abandoned the kitchen, leaving him to stare at the doorway. “What? Are you walking?” he yelled after her. “Cole has the car.”
His answer was the smack of the front door as it closed.