Page 100 of The Last De Loughrey Dynasty

Mairead’s eyes met mine and she gasped. “Dottie.” She stood up in a hurry, caressing my face with trembling hands. Even in her old age, she looked so much like her granddaughter.

“I saw you die,” she gasped. “We buried you.”

I placed my hand on her arm and she sighed sadly before I could answer. “But you’re not my best friend. You’re the Doe.”

The blood in my veins froze, but I nodded. “Dottie was my great-aunt. I’m the girl you saw in your vision. I’mThe Star.”

“The Star,” Mairead breathed, still in a state of shock. “I never thought I’d ever meet you. Not before he takes you.”

My eyebrows creased in confusion and I looked at Maisie before I gently led Mairead back to her chair where she could sit down.

My friend and I joined her and took the seats opposite her on the couch.

“Nana, can you tell us what happened to Dottie and James on the seventh of July in nineteen seventy?” she asked, taking her grandmother’s hand in her own, brushing her thumb soothingly over the back of it.

Mairead sighed and looked outside the window, where the snow had started falling again, covering nature in a blanket of ice.

“We were children, raised in asylums we called our home. Each one of us dreamed of being someone because being nobody was difficult to grasp when you’re born to be heirs to important families. Being sent to Aquila Hall was our blessing. We discovered the secrets hidden within the walls of the school. The Umbra Society. A legacy built by our ancestors in the hopes that someday a generation would come that would fulfil the prophecy and break the curse that lies upon all of us.”

“The Hecate curse?” I asked, but Mairead rolled her eyes with a sigh. “That’s a tale the boys clung to, but we never found any evidence that proved any of it to be the truth. Do not get mewrong, I dearly believe in the Triple Moon Goddess, and frankly, I know she must have been the one to give us our abilities. But history loves to paint women as the villain.”

I brushed my hair behind my ears and frowned. “So you don’t believe she’s the one to curse the Kingstone’s and De Loughrey’s to fall in love only to end in doom?”

Her eyes softened as she took me in. “Oh, my dear child, you’re already falling, aren’t you?”

Her question caught me off guard and I swallowed the truth, feeling blood rush into my cheeks as Maisie’s eyes met mine, sadness written in her gaze.

I cleared my throat. “No, he and I are friends, and we know the possibilities… we’re just trying to find answers to what happened that night because you kept writing that history will repeat itself if we don’t find the Book of Shadows.”

My heart suddenly felt terribly heavy, but I tried to ignore that feeling and focus on the importance of talking to someone who was there all those years ago.

Mairead looked confused for several seconds before she continued to speak without needing us to ask another question. “We weren’t aware of the consequences of bending the theory of nature to our will. The Book of Shadows condemned vague warnings that challenging the laws of humanity could lead to insanity and sickness. But we were stupid and naive… we were just children who were handed something so powerful, it flew over our heads. One thing you have to always remember, my child. Sorcery demands sacrifices. The power to do so runs in our blood, so we earned the control over nature by letting it taste the power that pumps through our veins.” Mairead went silent and narrowed her eyes at the window, her mind most likely buried in memories. “Some of us were far more responsible than others when we first started noticing the night terrors and drained feelings. Henry and James were the ones who couldn’tstop. We grew angry and concerned for them, but deep down we could understand their desire for more. All our lives, we’ve been the misfits and then suddenly, we could play God.”

“Was it an accident that Dottie died? Did something go wrong, and she assumed that something bad would happen that night?” The questions blurted out of me because I was impatient. And it wasn’t that I didn’t want to hear the story down to the last detail, but I needed to know what happened to Dottie and James that night so we had a chance to stop it.

Her eyes watered as she looked over at me, still pained from losing her friends with no preparation for the grief that awaited her.

“I saw her death, but it was so vague that we could not stop it. If I had known that Dottie knew exactly what would happen to her that night, I would have pressured her more to tell us the truth.” She reached out to stroke her hand through my hair, her gaze full of emotion. “She was always so selfless that she accepted her death, knowing that this was what it took to stop him. He grew power-thirsty, and until this day, I’m sure it wasn’t really him. It was the power that corrupted him. We figured out what he would do to her too late. It was supposed to be a merry night.” Tears rolled down her cheeks and despite the event having happened decades ago, the wound in her heart must still be there, and I felt terrible for ripping it open again. “I remember the scene as if it were yesterday. He held the Dagger of Asteria, piercing it through her heart. The betrayal in her eyes, even when she knew what was coming. Even as Henry tried to stop him at the last second, it was too late–”

“Wait, Henry? I thought he was the one who betrayed you.”

Her eyebrows creased and she shook her head. “No, my love, it was James who took Dottie’s life that night.”

I know there was a possibility that that would be the case, but I believed that Henry must have been the one who was at faultbecause his part of the picture had been burned and all evidence of him scraped.

“But James loved her, was it only a play?”

“Oh no, James Kingstone loved Dottie more than anything in life. He allowed the dark side of our gifts to consume him, and whatever monster it was that killed our friend that night, it wasn’t the James we once knew. He was a feral creature, he tried to unlock something long forgotten by killing Dottie. Henry and he were fighting on the ground, and when he closed his fist around Henry’s throat, he had no other choice but to reach for the dagger on the ground and fight back. It all happened so fast. The others had tried to pull him off Henry, but he was so much stronger… We should have thought harder, told him more sternly to stop playing with the laws of nature–” Mairead’s voice broke and Maisie kneeled on the floor before her grandmother, embracing her firmly.

“It wasn’t your fault,” she mumbled against her shoulder.

“No, it wasn’t. The Kingstone’s are stubborn men, even if you’d tried harder, I’m sure that James would have fallen for the darkness just the same,” I agreed, fear crawling against the shield I had put up in my mind to keep my sanity.

“The Kingstone’s paid the De Loughrey’s and the police off, the same as my father did when Alessandra passed, so they’d print that my sister’s death was an accident. The world of the rich is undoubtedly built on the dead bodies of lies. From that day on, we swore to never talk about the world of the dead and whatever power runs in our veins ever again. We agreed to go separate ways. The next few days were a blur of grief. And for the last year at Aquila Hall, we acted as if we never knew each other.” Mairead cupped her hands right above her heart and sighed heavily. “I wish we could have grown old together. But as a family, we were too dangerous.”

“But you kept in contact with the Kingstone’s?” Maisie asked. She grew up with Archer, so there must have been a reason why that was.

Her grandmother nodded. “James was like a brother to me. His family had lost little George, his baby brother, he fell through a window as a child and passed from his injuries. His father took his own life shortly after. All that was left from the Kingstone’s were his mother and his twin Matthew. From my own loss, I knew James would have wanted someone to look out for his brother. So I made sure our families stayed close.”

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