Deception of the Magician (Waldgrave Book 2) (34 page)

“You’re 
sure
, Griffin? Absolutely sure?” Lena placed another foot-thick stack of papers into a box, and looked over at Griffin, who was resting in a chair with his arm propped up.

He sighed; in a frustrated tone, for perhaps the tenth time, he reasserted exactly how sure he was. “He would have been incensed at losing it, Lena! There’s no way he didn’t record it somewhere. He recorded everything. He even recorded things like…like exactly how many books were lost in the fire, your exact age at the time you came to live here, every conversation he had with you. He would have written this down somewhere, because this portal was his life. This was his legacy, and he charged me with finishing it, and we’re going to find it.”

The search went on for several more days before they had run out of papers to sort through. No personal diaries. No clues as to where to look. Griffin had made her search Daray’s bedroom when he was too tired to do it, and though she was thoroughly uncomfortable being in that room again, she made sure to do a thorough search. Finally, the day came when they sat in Daray’s office together, and Lena had to explain that she really was ready to let go, even though Griffin wasn’t.

“It’s here, Lena. We can’t stop looking.”

“He obviously didn’t want us to know. We’re never going to find it! He lived his whole life in lies and keeping secrets, and he did it very well. I’m starting to wonder if he didn’t destroy the diaries before he died, because he knew I would find out what he did.” Lena said glumly.

Griffin brought a hand to his mouth and leaned back in his chair. It just wasn’t possible; the portal had been every waking moment of Pyrallis Daray’s life. He was obsessed with its safety and the fulfillment of the prophecy surrounding it—he wouldn’t have let it slip away. He would have left a clue, some way for Griffin to complete his life’s work. Lena’s eyes wandered around the office, Griffin watched as she looked from bookcase to bookcase, and then finally settled her gaze onto giant cat’s skeleton in the corner.

“What is that thing, anyways?” She asked.

Griffin looked over at it. “It’s a portal cat. Like him.” He nodded toward the cat that was exploring an empty box in the corner. “Of course, they need hundreds of years to get that big. In all of the old texts, they're hailed as guardians of the Silenti, and especially the Darays. It always upset him that the purebred cats had nearly died out.”

Lena frowned. “How would you ever get a skeleton that big into this room? Even if you took it apart, some of it is still too big to get through the door.”

Griffin stared at it for a long moment. “Maybe they built the room around it. He did custom design the new Waldgrave after the other one burned down, remember.”

Lena got up and wandered over to the skeleton; something didn’t feel right about it. That skeleton had never sat right with her; she walked around it, exploring it fully for the first time. Griffin watched as she circled it several times, wedging her way between the narrow space between the base and the wall, and then reached out to touch it. He opened his mouth to protest; Daray had never liked her touching the artifacts. But then a strange thing happened—as she placed her hand on the hip of the large skeleton, she pushed. And the whole skeleton, and the base that it was mounted on, moved.

It was only a few inches, but it was astounding. Griffin rose from his chair as Lena reached out and pushed the skeleton again, harder, and it swung away from the wall as if on a hinge. When Griffin had joined her at her side, they looked down on the most unexpected thing—stairs. A spiral staircase that went straight down.

Slowly they descended down several flights to a place that was dark and crowded with bookshelves and boxes. It was a veritable labyrinth. Lena searched the wall next to her, and then her hand caught on a switch. The lights went on. They were in a room with no windows, that smelled heavily of charring and smoke, and judging from the amount of stairs they had just descended, it was a basement. The foundations of the first house on the Waldgrave property. She looked over at Griffin.

He was smirking. “I told you so.”

He pushed past her and walked over to a bookcase. He pulled out a volume, opened it, and quickly became absorbed in his reading. Lena wandered past him and to the left, running her hand over the hundreds of books that Daray had secreted away so that the Council would never know he had them. There were all manner of relics and collections of broken pots and weavings, clothing, bones, musical instruments, eating sets, hunting tools, jewelry, children’s toys, and everything else imaginable. Ben had probably contributed a great deal to this collection.

Despite the decrepit appearance everything had, Lena could not help but remark that everything looked so clean. There was no dust—not anywhere. Even across the loads and loads of boxes and books, nothing had accumulated any dust. Daray had been keeping it all up nicely; almost obsessively.

Then she came to an opening in the maze, and there was a kind of shrine that he had put together. In the middle of the stone floor, there was a single marble headstone. It was written in Latito, but what with all the lessons Daray had forced on her, she understood it perfectly.

Here Lies

Edward Daray

Beloved Father

And His Wife

Melinda Daray, nee Baker

Lena could only stare at the names. Those were her great-grandparents; they had died in the fire. He had buried them in the foundations of the house; her shock was compounded when she finally tore her eyes away and looked beyond the headstone to see a line of urns stacked neatly on a shelf. She walked to them; many of the names she did not recognize. But there was one that she did, written in gilt letters on a sapphire blue urn and placed off to one side atop a squat bookcase of several apparently random volumes.

Avalon Daray

Lena grabbed the bookcase to steady herself. Then her eyes fell on the books below her mother’s urn. The one in the top right hand corner was written by L.C.—Lenore Cassius. She pulled it out and realized that the book had been one of those damaged in the fire; the lower right hand corner was burned away.

The corner diary, as Ben had said, by Lenore Cassius.     

She opened it, and saw what she had only ever seen before in Lenore’s diaries—sketches. Except that someone, a childish hand, had gone through and traced over all of the pictures in a sloppy scribble. Lena turned the pages, and there it was again; Ava must have thought it was a game. From the way her overwritten artwork had been burned away with the rest of the book, she would have been very young indeed, maybe just three or four, when she had gotten into it. Master Daray would have been furious; the thought made Lena smile.

But then she turned the page and saw something unexpected. Lenore had drawn a detailed map of somewhere, and she had labeled all of the streets and stores. It was so different from the pictures of horses, cats, and dogs on all the other pages that Lena had to take note. The funny thing was that Ava had outlined that page, too. Why would a three-year-old have wanted to trace a map? Cute animals, sure. But a map? And all of the words, too?

“Griffin!” Lena called over her shoulder, pulling another book off the shelves. This one sounded like Silas Cassius; Ava must have been a little older by that point, because her penmanship had improved. As Griffin walked up behind her, Lena dropped to her knees to study the rest of the books more closely. She passed the ones she was holding over her shoulder.

“What?” Griffin asked nonchalantly, clearly still riding a wave of confidence since finding Daray’s secret stash.

“Look at these.” Lena handed him some books.

She systematically pulled each remaining book off the self, checking each as she went. Loads of writers, ancient writers, that she had never heard of, and every word traced out in childish scrawl. She looked over her shoulder at Griffin, who was pouring over the Silas Cassius volume that she had just given him.

“This is amazing…”

“Yes, but why? Why would she have done this?” Lena blurted.

Griffin didn’t answer her, and Lena turned back to the books scattered around her on the floor. She picked up the nearest one, a diary by Edward Daray, and cracked it open. She read a little of the first page, amazed that Ava had taken so much care to outline, however uncertainly, every single letter, and then flipped through the pages to the end. Every one of them, recopied out. She flipped back through, and a diagram caught her eye. It was a family tree, but when Lena read over the names nearest the bottom, she felt something heavy drop in the pit of her stomach.

She looked back up at Griffin, so anxiously reading over the pages that he had never been able to read—or even to see—before. “He couldn’t read them. That’s why he made her copy them out. Why he made 
me
 copy them out.”

Griffin paused, and looked down at her. “I’m sorry?”

“He wasn’t a Daray, Griffin.”

Griffin smiled. He gave a short laugh. “What are you talking about?”

Lena turned the book she was holding to Griffin so that he could see the family tree. “According to this, he wasn’t even my grandfather. My grandfather’s name was Jack Durand.”

Griffin reached out and took the book. She watched as his brow furrowed, and there was a spark of anger in his voice again. “No. No, this has to be wrong!”

But as Lena got to her feet, she saw just around the bend of the next hallway of boxes, books, and other recovered artifacts. There, sitting at the far edge of the basement, was the portal. Lena pushed past Griffin and ran over to it.

It was completely intact, and it looked just as she had seen it in the hotel room in Kansas. The wood etchings, the weight of it, and though she pushed as hard as she could to open the lid, it wouldn’t budge. Ava was right—the wording across the arched top was everything. In plain Latito, over and over again, it read “Enter only the heir.”

She sat back on the ground, her head reeling. That’s why he had never opened it; he couldn’t! Pyrallis Daray wasn’t a Daray at all, and though he had been flexing his political might all of these years, a religious icon to so many, he was no threat at all. He was a fraud. A master magician, whose illusions had finally been put to rest with reasonable explanations. Lena turned and looked over her shoulder at Griffin, who was standing perhaps fifteen feet behind her, holding Edward Daray’s diary limply in his good hand and looking dumbstruck.

“It’s been here the whole time!” Lena exclaimed stupidly.

Griffin dropped the book and disappeared from her sight. She heard his footsteps echoing as he walked away. Lena got up to follow him, grabbing the abandoned diary as she went.

“Griffin! Griffin, wait! We found it, isn’t this…” But when she grabbed his shoulder to stop him, and he turned to face her, she could see he was upset. “What’s wrong?”

He starred at her for a moment, unsure of what to say. “None of it was real.”

Lena smiled. “What are you talking about? Of course it was real! It’s right here! I mean, this is your moment, right? You always said that it was real, and I always said that—“

“None of it was real, Lena! He was a fake and a liar.” He whispered. He reached out and used his knuckle to thump the diary in Lena’s hand. “This proves it. None of it was ever real to begin with.”

He turned and started walking again.

“But—but—the portal, Griffin! And all of these books, and…I’m real, right? I’m real?” She stammered.

Griffin turned and looked over his shoulder. “I don’t know. Maybe you’re just someone with a gift for deciphering old books. All I know is that an old man fooled us all, and he gained a lot by it.”

Lena rolled her eyes. “You really believe that 
I
 have a gift. 
Me?
 Are you ill? No—wait, Griffin! You can’t just go! I mean…all of this stuff—it’s yours! He left it to you, remember?”     

Griffin didn’t stop walking. “It wasn’t his to give. The name, the spot on the Council, or any of this. None of it was his to give. I need to go. I just need to go now.” And then he was gone.

Lena stood in the silence, trying to figure out what she was supposed to do next. She cracked Edward’s diary open again to look at the family tree. The Daray line had actually been passed down through her grandmother, Olesia Daray, Edward and Melinda’s daughter. All these years, Pyrallis had been claiming to be their son. No wonder he didn’t talk about his wife much.

Lena turned and looked at the collection of urns again; he had an impressive array going back several generations. The Darays, the Dobrys, the Bakers, and the Cassius’ were there, along with several names she didn’t know. But the odd thing was, Olesia Daray, who Pyrallis claimed had died in the fire, wasn’t among them.

Olesia Daray was missing.

End of Waldgrave Part 2

*****

Secrets of the Guardian

Waldgrave Part 3

Available Now!

*****

CHAPTER 1

Lena spent most of the rest of that day collecting books and diaries written by Edward Daray; they were numerous and varied. Edward seemed to be quite the politician, and she found manifesto after manifesto, books containing detailed analyses of political events and movements of the past and his present; he wasn’t an optimist, either. Over and over again, he predicted that the Silenti world would tear itself apart as a culture because the political climate was becoming so polarized; he feared for his life and those of his family. He feared the revolution that Lena had recently been living.

His diaries were few and far between, and the ones that Lena perused were not much different from the books he had written on political perspective. She collected the diaries she could find amongst the masses of unorganized literature, and then walked back up the spiral staircase; it looked as though Griffin had closed the skeleton back over the opening, but when Lena tried to slide it with her hand, it easily gave way. She climbed out and into the office, and then replaced the skeleton over the secret staircase.

She took the diaries back to her room and threw them on her bed. She stretched, her back aching after so much time searching through books, and walked over to the window. Summer was just coming into focus; the grass was a deep green, and the waxy new leaves of spring were growing and filling out the branches on the trees. Only the early blooming flowers were open, and the sky was just beginning to turn to dusk.

She wasn’t sure what she was going to do about Griffin; maybe he was right. Pyrallis had been a master of lies, and it was possible—and even probable—that the woman she had known as Ava wasn’t the child referenced in Edward’s diary. The whole family could have burned in the fire, and then Pyrallis could have claimed that any child was Avalon Daray.

But then, how had Pyrallis come to power? Surely people would have known him, and who he was. Someone had to know about the family and Olesia. Lena went to the diaries spread out on her bed and started flipping through them, trying to find the diagram of the family tree that had caught her interest earlier that day. She thought she had found it, but then did a double take when she looked closer.

It wasn’t the family tree from earlier. In contrast, this one listed the only child of Edward and Melinda as Pyrallis Daray—and his wife’s name was Olesia. Confused, Lena continued to look through the remaining diaries until she found the earlier diagram and then compared the two. One of them claimed that Olesia was a Daray. The other claimed it was Pyrallis. She read the pages immediately before and after the diagrams, and was surprised to see that they contained roughly the same material, and in the same handwriting.

In one, Edward spoke of his daughter Olesia, and someone named Jack Durand, who he had apparently known for some years as he spoke fervently about his talents. In the other, Edward spoke about his son Pyrallis, his wife Olesia, and their daughter, Ava. Lena stared back and forth between the two accounts; they couldn’t both be true. And annoyingly, though Lena had never noticed before, there wasn’t a word in Latito to describe an in-law; in both accounts, the spouse of the child was referred simply as being either ‘daughter’ or ‘son.’     

Lena tried to find some sort of thread that she could follow back to an answer, but the harder she pulled the more tangled the situation became. Ava and Lena could read the manuscripts, which Silas Cassius had clearly stated was an attribute of the royal line, but Pyrallis couldn’t. Griffin could be right that Pyrallis had somehow found a child with a special gift, someone that could read the manuscripts for him, but it made no sense with the story about the fire—unless Pyrallis had lit the fire to begin with. But then, how had he managed to fall in as Daray’s heir?

But that in itself made no sense, because Pyrallis had been obsessed with the religion, and he wouldn’t have killed the entire family only to make it his life’s mission to find the portal. If Pyrallis wasn’t Edward’s son, then why had so many people so readily accepted him as the Daray heir? And if he 
was
 Daray’s heir, then why couldn’t he read all the manuscripts? And where, for God’s sake, was Olesia? Who was Olesia?

Olesia and Jack were the only people she could cling to, because they weren’t in urns in the basement. If they were dead, with the extensive collection that Pyrallis had been stashing away, she was sure he would have had them. So where were they? And more importantly, what was she going to tell the Council to let her go looking for them?

Rubbing her head, Lena got up and went back to the window. What to do about Griffin…

Something had changed on the lawn. Lena squinted to see across the grounds. There was a group of people standing off in the distance.

Howard!
 She screamed. 
Howard, they’re here!

She watched as someone, a figure wearing a dark hood, was pushed to the front, a tall, blond young man walked up behind him. It was Rollin.

The back of the house! They’re on the property!

Lena watched as Rollin pushed the hooded figure to his knees, and with a sickening realization in the pit of her stomach, she watched as he pulled a gun out of his waistband, aimed it, and shot the hostage twice, sending twin jets of blood spraying out of his back before the figure fell face first and onto the grass. Rollin raised his gun and fired several shots randomly at the house, causing Lena to dive onto the carpet, though none of his shots found her window; she listened to the bullets embedding themselves into Waldgrave’s exterior like so many pieces of hail on a cloudless eve. When the firing stopped, she looked up and out the window again; the group turned and started to walk away. Frozen in place, Lena watched as the hooded figure laid there, a lump on the ground. She could feel her heart pounding as Rollin and his small entourage disappeared over the hill. And then, the hooded figure moved.

Panic rushing through her veins, she shot out of her room and down the stairs, out through the greenhouse—there was a group of armed men, standing at guard, just in front of her as she sprinted toward the fallen hostage; emboldened Council Representatives and their sons who had come to stay at Waldgrave “until the situation resolved itself.”

She was brushing past them. People everywhere were yelling, and she thought there might have even been some gunfire, but she didn’t hear any of it. Someone tried to grab her arm, to stop her from running toward the danger.

Lena!

He’s still alive! I saw him move!

It didn’t occur to her that it could have been a trap. She didn’t think about the fact that once she was passed the line of Waldgrave’s armed militia, she would easily be caught in the crossfire that could ensue. As she neared the body, she felt her whole being suddenly sink; she didn’t need to see his face to recognize him. He was wearing the same shirt he had the night that he had helped her escape.

It was Devin.

Someone get the doctor!

Lena crouched down next to the body, afraid to move him. He was still breathing, just ever so slightly. His chest expanded and contracted every few seconds as blood oozed out of two wounds on his back, soaking his clothing and running into the grass. Rollin had done it deliberately; he wanted him to suffer before he died.

Oh God, oh God, Devin…Devin, I’m here, just hold on, you’re going to be okay.

He didn’t respond, and Lena reached down and pulled the hood off of his head and the turned his face to the side so that he could breathe. His face was pale and clammy, and his eyes were only slightly open, staring off into space—but there was nothing else in them. Lena tried to breathe a sigh of relief as her pulse continued to race. He was losing a lot of blood.

Breathe, Devin, just keep breathing…

She looked over her shoulder. The Council Representative had continued on past her, still in search of Rollin; she watched as Lyle Evans and a handful of others rushed across the lawn toward her. She turned back to Devin. His eyes were closed.

Devin! Devin, open your eyes!

But he didn’t respond. He didn’t give so much as a twitch to say that he’d heard her. She looked back in Doctor Evans’ direction. He was only fifteen feet away, but he wasn’t running anymore. He had slowed to a walk, and his assistants were slowing behind him. Lena looked up at him, confused, but he was staring at Devin. When he regarded her, there was a pained look in his eyes.

I’m sorry, Miss, I don’t think there’s anything—

“No!” She screamed. “No! He’s still alive! You can save him!”

She turned back to Devin, frantic because his eyes were still closed, and reached a hand forward. She peeled his eyelid back, and then looked back up at Doctor Evans.

“It’s not his time! It’s not his time…You have to try.”

Doctor Evans met her gaze. For Lena, the world had stopped.

He turned his head to the side and gave a slight nod; the doctor and his assistants walked over to Devin’s unmoving form as Lena shuffled back to give them room. She brought a hand to her mouth as they started treating Devin’s wounds and then flipped him over. There weren’t any bullet holes coming out through his stomach, which meant the bullets had lodged inside; she wasn’t sure if that was better or worse. The entire front of his shirt was soaked with blood, including a piece of paper that had been pinned to chest, and the mess of blood soaked cloths, hands, grass, and the unstoppable oozing from Devin’s back, forced her to close her eyes and turn away.

He couldn’t be dead. The eyes never lied…and there hadn’t been any trace of death in them, unless he had died in the split second that she had looked away. She opened her eyes and stared out across the lawn. Could he have died that fast? Did fate turn on a second’s notice?

In the last light of the setting sun, the armed Council Representatives were coming back over the hill, treading lightly through the untrimmed grass of Waldgrave’s lawn. Some of them looked determined and angry, and some of them just looked worried. Rollin must have gotten away. But as their eyes settled on Lena and the scene unfolding behind her, she was finding it hard to face them. The intention had been to stay at the house, guarding the fortress, and they had followed her out into the unknown. Once again, her impulsive behavior had risked lives. Rollin had run away after delivering his message, but if he had chosen to stay, things would have been much bloodier.

Lena spun back around just as the assistants lifted Devin and started carrying him back towards Waldgrave; Doctor Evans was running ahead of them, and trying to get his overcoat off, which was a good sign that Devin was still alive. He was going into surgery.

As she watched them run towards the house, Devin’s body weaving uncertainly as the four men tried to carry him evenly, time seemed to stand still. A light breeze ruffled the sunset-tinted grass. A pair of hands landed on her shoulders, and she heard Howard’s voice, whispering, close to her ear.

“It’s okay. Just walk. It’s okay.”

He gently pushed her and she felt her knees bend beneath her. The walk back to the house was instantaneous, and then she was sitting in a room with Mrs. Ralston again. It was the kitchen. Rosaleen was holding a bloody kitchen rag and wiping Lena’s hands with it. She looked down and realized that her cloths and hands were splattered with red.

Her attention suddenly snapped back to Mrs. Ralston. “I need to see Devin.”

Mrs. Ralston didn’t look up. “Later. He’s in the doctor’s care now.”

And she continued to wipe the blood off of Lena. Then she walked her upstairs, forced her into taking a shower and then into pajamas. The two sat on the edge of the bed, Mrs. Ralston brushing out Lena’s wet hair as she gazed out the dark window. Rollin was still out there somewhere.

“I still need to see Devin.” Lena insisted. “And you don’t have to do this every time someone gets shot.”

Mrs. Ralston set down her brush, ignoring Lena’s snide remark. “I’d rather you didn’t see him yet. I’ll check in on him if you like, and let you know, but as I understand it, he’s going to be in surgery until tomorrow. You should get some sleep.”

Lena sighed. “I’m not going to sleep, and I don’t care what you say about it.”

She almost cringed when she heard the words come out of her mouth; they sounded so harsh. Here was Rosaleen, trying to make everything better for her in the only way she knew how, and all Lena could think about Devin and whether or not he was okay. She might have been more comforted, or at least she might have acted it for Mrs. Ralston’s sake, but she didn’t care. All she cared about was Devin and the fact that somewhere close by he was suffering on her behalf. Possibly dying on her behalf. She heard Mrs. Ralston heave a sigh and felt her move; Lena thought she was going to get up and leave.    

But Mrs. Ralston only turned her gently around to face her and smiled. She spoke very softly. “That makes me glad. It’s healthy for you to care. You scarred me earlier. You didn’t even cry this time…it’s not natural to see what you saw and not feel anything.”

Lena looked at her bare feet, just beyond the hemmed bottoms of her plaid pajama pants. She had felt…and then she had shut off. Everything from reaching Devin’s body on was a blur, like she had resorted to auto-piloting. Maybe it wasn’t healthy, but she didn’t envy any second of what she had missed. She looked back up at Mrs. Ralston. “He saved my life. He helped me get away, and this is where it got him. I really need to see him.”