Page 42 of The Last De Loughrey Dynasty

Next to them, a little further away, stood another boy in a brown suit, but where his face had been, there was a hole burned into the picture. I assumed that friendship didn’t last…?

In front of the two boys stood a small girl with wild white-blonde hair. She had her pinky entwined with a boy who stood diagonally behind her. He looked similar to Nathaniel, with a few differences in his features and the fact that he had light-brown hair instead of dirty blonde.

Next to him stood another boy with midnight-black hair and a face that screamed mischief and chaos. He had his armsaround a girl who stood in front of him. My mouth fell open in shock when I looked closely at the girl with red hair who wore my face. It wasn’t just the similarities we shared. She was my mirror image.

Perhaps I was hers.

I had seen her before in my room a couple of weeks ago.

“You look exactly like her. Even the birthmark on your neck is the same, just mirrored,” Archer told me. I noticed that the bottom of the page contained a date: nineteen seventy.

That was impossible. It had to be. Or else…

“My grandmother has blonde hair, just like my mother, and she was only twelve in the seventies.”

An image flashed before my eyes of two children running through the woods. A girl with vivid red hair ran away from me to our hideaway at the lake.

Dottie.

When I relived Gwyneth’s death, I saw her. The image of a girl who looked exactly like me.

“I once had a friend whose name was Dorothee,”Gwyn had said the day I’d met her at church.

She had always called me Dottie because it was her nickname for the girl in the picture.

Oh my God.

“She’s your grandmother’s oldest sister. Dorothee Odette De Loughrey the first.”

“She’s the woman I’m named after,” I concluded. My grandmother had always loved to tell me tales about her sisters. There was Peggy, her older sister, who bought her a sweet treat every day on her way home from school. Peggy adored the thought of freedom and decided to travel once she finished her education. Our family had enough money to give her this chance, but her father hadn’t been happy about his second-oldest’s decision. He wanted her to live the life their mother had:staying home to raise the children and look pretty in pictures. So Peggy ran. She took the money and disappeared, leaving her family behind.

Margaret “Peggy” De Loughrey died two years after I was born, leaving nothing behind. No husband, no children, but a fulfilled life she’d lived in happiness.

Then there was my grandmother’s oldest sister. She had always told me stories about the woman I’m named after, but I had never seen a picture of her before. Dottie was the miserable sister with too much fantasy, which ended up getting her into trouble. My mother had always used her story to try and scare me. She’d even gone so far as to tell me that my psychosis might be genetic.

That’s why I never understood why she named me after her, if she was so afraid I might turn out to be as mentally ill as her aunt was.

“She died a few weeks before her eighteenth birthday in an accident. It must have been only months after this photo was taken.” My grandmother had told me about her pain of losing both of her sisters and how she’d been so alone after Dottie’s death because she’d always looked up to her eldest sister.

Archer leaned forward and pointed his index finger at the black-haired boy who had his arms around my grandmother’s sister. “That’s James Kingstone. He was my grandfather’s twin brother and died the same day she did. It had allegedly been a car accident.”

I looked into his hazel eyes and saw that he was already gazing at me. “Allegedly?” I realised his choice of words. “That means you don’t believe it.”

“No, there’s so much more to their story.” Archer stood up and pulled something out of a drawer, laying it down on the table.

It was a portrait of Dottie. Her hair was pulled back in a low bun, and she’d cut bangs in this picture. Her smile was honest and full of happiness. My eyes fell to the stone around her neck.

Black tourmaline.

“She saw them too?” I wondered in a whisper, drawing my index finger over her face. My face.

“You inherited the sight from her. We all inherited the gifts passed along our bloodline. Including their legacy. Their secret little society living in the eclipse of the shadows.” He was talking about this. About Umbra.

“Our gifts are unique, but at Aquila Hall, they allow us to look past the veil between the living and the dead. Why that is, we don’t know,” Naomi told me. With graceful movements, she removed her gloves from her hands and neatly folded them before placing them in front of her.

“Outside this building, I feel them. Their pain and sorrow. I feel how they felt the moment they died. My touch is a curse to no one but me. The gloves helped me growing up. Because what I couldn’t touch, I couldn’t feel,” she elaborated, and if I wasn’t mistaken, I could hear the pain of what came with her ability in her voice.

I remembered the day after my arrival when she had asked me why I was here, and when I hadn’t answered, she told me her story. That day, I’d believed she’d been mocking me.

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