Page 43 of The Last De Loughrey Dynasty

Jesse laid his hand on her shoulder, but Naomi shrugged him off. He looked hurt, but he overplayed it by leaning forward in his chair and looking at me. “I can see shadows. In my opinion, it’s the fanciest version of the sight—”

“You cried yourself to sleep during your first month at Aquila because of them,” Nathaniel reminded him coolly.

“Yeah, uh, well, but when I say I’m haunted by shadows it makes some people think I’m some sort of half-god and Hades’ son. It’s pretty cool to play into their fantasies. Anyway,Aquila helped me see the spirit who the shadow belonged to. This scared me—like a lot—but it made me feel less insane.” There was something about Jesse’s way of speaking that made everything sound like life was a joke to him. Even right now.

It was honestly pretty interesting. I had never met a person like him before. The world I grew up in was always so serious and dull.

I turned my head to look at Archer, who was playing with his crystal ring. His hands were made to wear jewellery. Slender, rough, and attractive. It appeared I had nothing better to do right now than appreciate the hands of a boy who didn’t even like me.

If I just knew what it was with him.

“What’s your ability outside these walls?”

CHAPTER TWENTY

ARCHER

The stars drawingme towards the girl sitting in front of me was officially the worst thing they had ever done to me. They wanted the narrative they had already crafted for us to become reality, whatever the cost. I don’t think I’ve ever felt an emotion as torturous as longing.

Bloody fate.

Dorothee had gone through more than most people could endure without truly going mad, and all of this happened in the span of one night. But all the girl did was look at the world with curiosity. When one of my friends spoke, her eyes grew twice their size, and nothing else seemed to exist around her anymore. She seemed to starve for knowledge and took every crumb the universe offered her. Her reaction made me wonder if her parents had kept her locked up in a room, depriving her of freedom her entire life. It appeared as though she had made countless mental notes, observing each and every comment.

She gazed at me intently with her icy eyes as she waited for an answer.

I cleared my throat. “I hear the voices of the dead. My entire life I’ve listened to their cries of pain, their prayers for help. Mostspirits don’t even realise they’ve passed away, you know? It’s terrifying to hear a child’s voice asking you to find their mummy or begging you to play with them because they’re so alone. I hold the belief that hearing them without seeing a body or a shadow was my personal hellfire.”

Dorothee narrowed her gaze, pity flickering in her expression. I knew she understood our pain. I’d read her medical records. We hadn’t been sure whether she had inherited the sight too, even though it had been rather obvious after she almost hurled herself off that balcony in her trance. It was necessary for us to be absolutely certain.

Dorothee De Loughrey saw the faces of the dead.

She’d been to five different therapists over the past ten years and stayed at a psych ward for two weeks at the age of fourteen. She had been prescribed several medications in an attempt to manage her psychosis. However, for obvious reasons, none of them had any effect other than causing her discomfort and fatigue.

Doe was seven when she first visited a psychologist. Too young for schizophrenia, but the signs were practically clear. She claimed to see people no one else could see—more terrifyingly, people covered in blood, describing wounds a seven-year-old shouldn’t even know about. At some point, she started to become more and more mute, and when she spoke, her words were often considered confusing.

They performed all forms of testing on her: no physical abnormalities, nothing of concern. However, her great aunt had a history of mental illness as well, so when there was no concrete evidence to fully diagnose Dorothee, and they grew desperate, they blamed it on a genetic disorder.

Every word describing her mind, except perhaps the fact that she had developed anxiety over the past years, wasn’t true. While these mental illnesses did exist, and people suffered fromthem each day, Doe didn’t have a single one of them. The hallucinations were simply spirits trying to plead for her help.

“But what is it about this place that makes us able to hear, see, and feel them when we weren’t born with the ability to do it all at once?” Dorothee asked, brushing her damp hair behind her ears. Most gingers I had seen were covered in countless freckles, but she had only six on her entire face. Odd in its own astronomical way.

Two under her left eye. One right under her left eyebrow. One on the bridge of her nose. Another two with more distance on her right cheek.

I wasn’t some sort of creep. It had simply been my responsibility to observe every detail about this girl for the past month. No one could hold me accountable for noticing her closely. Her beauty was undeniable. I wasn’t blind or ignorant enough not to see it.

Jesse shrugged, pushing his golden glasses into the correct position. “We haven’t found answers yet, but we reckon everything might have started here. Maybe with our grandparents… Perhaps centuries ago.”

Dorothee frowned, her gaze darkening slightly. I knew she wasn’t satisfied with that answer. “Have you ever tried asking your grandparents if they knew something? I mean, they certainly must have,” she said, nodding towards the diary of Naomi’s grandmother in front of her.

Naomi scoffed. “Go on, read through the pages. Half of them talk about how they had such a joyful life with one another, and the other half talks about how strange things started to happen that no one could explain. The rest of the pages are ripped out.”

For the past year, we had been trying to find these pages, with no success. We had concluded that they might have been destroyed completely after all. Something had happened in theyear of seventy, and either our grandparents, or someone else, had been desperate to hide every detail of the events.

“When I was just a child, my grandmother tried to tell me about this place in bedtime stories. She taught me how to live with the sight.” Mai’s lips twitched to a little, hope-filled smile as she floated in her thoughts, her eyes unfocused for a moment. “Your great-aunt was like a sister to my grandma. She told me a lot about how they grew up together at Aquila Hall.”

Dorothee’s eyes lit up. “Did she tell you anything about why she died in that accident? I mean, if you’re all so sure that whatever happened to her and James wasn’t an accident, you need to at least know something.”

Against my will, my heart started to beat faster in my chest. I wanted to avoid this topic at all costs, but deep down, I knew I couldn’t. Fate always played into my cards. But I wasn’t fate’s puppet. If I had to participate in the awful destiny they had planned for me, I could at least play it my way.

---