Breaker (Ondine Quartet Book 4) (55 page)

“Is there something you hope to find?” he asked delicately.

“The truth.”

The corners of his mouth tilted up in a sad smile. Wrinkles had deepened around his eyes, creases that hadn’t been there a year ago.

He bowed, that funny formal bow he’d given the first day he met me. “Once you find it, I will be here waiting.”

The pressure in my chest eased slightly. “Thanks.”

The hushed silence of the halls pressed against me. Patrice had also refused to take residence in the Governor’s quarters. She’d remained in her LeVeq residence almost as if she knew she’d never replace Rhian.

I padded down the east corridor to the soft rectangular splash of light emanating beneath the library doors.

The key burned in my sweaty palm. My hand clenched tighter.

The library’s magic cocooned me, intertwining with the energy in my hand.

A brief tingle against my palm.

There
.

One thread of vibration guided me forward, pulling me directly to the familiar bookcase marked History.

How much easier it was now with the full use of my Virtue. It was as if I’d slipped into a river of magic and drifted along, the currents easily navigating my way.
 

I scanned the shelf of leather bound books until I located the specific spine I searched for on the third row.

The blue cover glowed.
The History of Ondine Prophecies : Book 1.
 

I pulled the spine forward with a soft click.

The bookshelf slid to the right, revealing an iron door with a rusty lock. I used the key and pushed hard.

The door swung open into darkness and the scent of musty books assaulted my nose.
 

My Virtue had developed dramatically since the last time I was here and I now almost choked on the energy contained in the space. It pressed in, powerful and insistent, whispering, muttering, demanding to be heard.

Hundreds of years of history, flooded with the voices of the ondines before me, grated against my skin.

It itched, digging under my skin, and prickling in the same way Jourdain’s magic crawled over my bones.

I scratched my arm in a futile attempt to relieve the phantom itch.

It didn’t do anything. This wasn’t a physical discomfort; it was a magical overload.
 

Rubbing my arms against my sides, I took in the space. Curved shelves lined the windowless, circular room filled with volumes of prophecies told and forgotten. Some of the bindings were sturdy and new. Others had faded over the years, the once bright colors muted and subdued.

The book waited for me on the bottom row of the shelf closest to the door. The edges were tattered, the letters long gone from the spine.

I carefully removed the large volume and opened it on the table in the center of the room.
 

Prophecies: Volume 1
.

I took a deep breath and opened the book.

The words were faded but seemed as if they were engraved into the yellowed, brittle page. I had the impression that even if the silvery ink were to completely fade with time, the words would continue to linger, eternal and immutable.

The script was slanted and sharp, the edges and curves angular and pragmatic. There was no floral scroll, no ornamentation of the letters.
 

Only a clear, practical penmanship, as if the very first Genevieve who’d written it had felt no need for preamble.

Every two stanzas, the handwriting changed, written by a different Clairvoyant over the years, each adding a section to to the prophecy.

Near the end of the page, I recognized the precise slants and curves of my mother. And after that, the round, elegant script of Brigette at the very bottom.

The last is found in the first.

The last prophecy was found in the first.

Words flowed and ebbed, the verses containing their own rhythm, vibrating with the magic enveloping the room.

They leaked off the page and streamed into me.

We rose from sea.

We stand on land.

We inherit a battle.

We bear a curse.

From the roots of our legacy,

War blooms and flourishes.

It drinks the blood of our children,

Feeding on greed and blindness

For generations to come.

In the final hours of our despair,
 

A warrior runs forth,
 

Her life bound to War,

Her magic bound to Life.

The loss of one,
 

Leads to the loss of innocents.

When the impenetrable is violated,
 

And the rot from within exposed,

she rises to rule a nation, only

To turn her back on it.

Forsaking power for loyalty,
 

she seeks truth within lies,
 

unmasking the past and present
 

For a future she does not know.

Until the day arrives

When the long light stretches strong,
 

And the first and last stands alone,
 

bearing the nightmare of all.

When two become one,
 

When silence blooms from the shadows,

She shall wield death by her hand

of all she holds dear.

The fuel of magic,
 

determined by bindings,
 

The greater the sacrifice,

The hotter the flames.

Power shall arise
 

From the essence of mortal life,

Magic defined by the weight of intent

And the truth above all.

For the end of this eternal battle

Lies only in the ending,

Final and true words

Written by her own hand.
 

The rest of the page was blank.

So was the next. And the one after that.
 

The prophecy was incomplete.

Ghosts of the past drenched my mind, memories tangling with the phrases.

My mother had written the fourth and fifth stanzas.
 

She shall wield death by her hand

of all she holds dear.

The fuel of magic,
 

determined by bindings,
 

The greater the sacrifice,

The hotter the flames.

The past reared up. Her four rules. Why I couldn’t have what others had. Why my sacrifice had to be greater.

She’d known.
 

Final and true words / Written by her own hand.
 

Brigette’s last words gave me instructions on what I needed to do next.
 

But I wasn’t a Clairvoyant. How could I finish a prophecy?
 

Magic sizzled, writhing in my veins.

I studied the words again until each section of the prophecy fit together like a puzzle.

Words danced off the page, the lines telling the story of my journey.
 

The loss of one…

Ryder.

Leads to the loss of innocents…

Marcella. Haverleau’s children.

When the impenetrable is violated…
 

The Selkie Kingdom.

And the rotted roots exposed…

Yahaira.

When two become one…

Without me, the Shadow could not be stopped. Without him, I would not exist.

Nausea rose as I worked through the rest of the prophecy.

I scratched my arm. The itchiness had strengthened. Energy prickled and poked, skittering across my bones like fiery needles come to life.

A thin, pale tendril of magic uncoiled from the corner of the book. It crawled across the page, across the words written throughout the years.

I jerked back.

The energy wound up my arm, warm and soothing, a thread linking me to the book. It sank into my skin and for one moment, I felt a sharp tremble in my veins, a crisp, clear resonance like a note ringing in the air.

Familiar.
I know this.

And then it was gone.

The entire process took place so quickly, it was almost as if I’d imagined it.

I wiggled my fingers, stretched my arms. Nothing felt different.
 

But the echo of the note hung in my body, like a dipped bed after someone had lain in it. There was no visible proof, but you felt it in the indentations of the mattress.

No trace remained of the power that had come and gone. But its imprint remained in my cells, my Virtue.

The power shall arise
 

From the essence of mortal life

Jourdain’s uncertainty, her inability to answer my questions, suddenly made sense.

The power to end this immortal war could only come from a mortal.

Me.

I had something they didn’t have.

For immortals like Jourdain or the Shadow, choice was an illusion.

They saw the entirety of time as a whole and when an infinite horizon spread before you, choice became inconsequential. Every life was simply a buoy in the eternal sea of time, floating and bumping against one another through the movement of the tides.

But being mortal meant understanding limits, understanding the boundaries that gave life value.

For mortals, choice was the sole power we had.

Once immortal faced immortal, I had to trust Jourdain would bind the Shadow and keep him contained underwater.

But I needed to control him long enough to bring him to her.

Doing so would take a tremendous amount of energy, a scale of magic beyond anything I’d ever known.

Magic defined by the weight of intent.

My Virtue amplified emotional current. I remembered a moment on a mountain slope, when Ian’s life essence, connected to me through our friendship, boomeranged back.

…wield death by her hand of all she held dear…The greater the sacrifice, the hotter the flames….

The words spun together, weaving into the final, irrevocable truth.

I’d wondered why the Shadow had targeted Ian. Torturing me was too simple of an answer. If that was the only reason for taking Ian, then why leave him behind in the GrandView?
 

The Shadow could’ve taken Ian with him, taunting me with the knowledge that my mission to retrieve him was a failure.

Instead, he’d set everything up so I would find him. He had my friend torture me, believing that I would eventually exact my revenge on the person who’d inflicted such pain on me.

Although it hadn’t gone the way he expected it to, the end result was the same.

The Shadow had set up the hell at GrandView so I would kill Ian.

Why? Because the act revealed something.

Killing someone created the ultimate magical backlash. As an Empath, that blowback, the result of someone’s life force ending and snapping back into me, created a moment of
 
extraordinary power.

Find yourself in the water.

Power resided in our bonds, the emotional connections tying us together.

The greater the difficulty in killing the person, the greater the sacrifice, the greater the power.

Enough maybe to even contain the Shadow.

The weapon I’d been looking for wasn’t a tool. It wasn’t something that could be found or invented.
 

It wasn’t a tangible object.

It was in a choice I would have to make.
 

Who would I kill to end this war?

PART III

FREEDOM

Water

Flows, Ebbs

Rises, Recedes

Trickles, Billows

Surges, Crashes

Vanishes, Falls.

Let go. Trust its return.

- Anonymous, “Inscription”,
Prophecies: Volume I
 

Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only be changed from one form to another.

- Albert Einstein

THIRTY-THREE

Hot water splashed off my shoulders and back, easing my exhausted, tight muscles. I leaned against the tiled wall, shut my eyes, and listened to its sharp staccato.

For a long time, everything I believed in could be condensed down to three things: me, my magic, and my mother.

There had only been Kendra and Naida, attached to a line of fake human names and countless apartments and homes in an endless succession of towns. A rootless, fluid life, based on lies my mother told me.

It was all I knew.

And then came a moment when a dark figure whipped around a corner in a San Aurelio alley: beautiful, powerful, mysterious.

The truth shifted, the
sondaleur
prophecy smashing open a door where there once had been nothing but a blank wall.

Other moments. A friend’s broken body falling in a moonlit warehouse. A child’s face behind a cage, beaming with hope. A gardinel fighting to the very end. A grandmother’s unmatched strength.

A friend’s eyes, brilliant as jewels, within the stillness of a mountaintop.

Each one twisted and distorted the truth I believed about myself until I no longer recognized who I was.

In one year, I’d undone everything Naida Irisavie had spent seventeen years trying to build.

Trust no one. Relationships are weaknesses. Emotional attachments are dangerous. Be responsible only for yourself.
 

Every single rule my mother had enforced throughout my childhood had systematically been destroyed. I’d grown undisciplined, uncaring about boundaries she’d enforced for a reason and it was now time to pay the price.

I turned off the water, stepped out of the shower, and hurriedly dressed.
 

Another shifting truth. For years, physical activity had been my stress management technique of choice, helping me work through unresolved emotion and energy.