Page 92 of The Last De Loughrey Dynasty

I let the heavy door fall closed behind me. “Well… which emotion causes you to blush when you look at me?”

She opened her mouth to answer but closed it again. We made our way to the shelves located in the far corners of the library, where no one really went. Birth charts, bills and other stuff from random people who lived in Owley years way before we were born were boring to most teenagers.

“I can’t decide which emotions you trigger inside my heart. Sometimes I feel annoyance, anger towards you because you’re mean and unreadable, and I hate when I can’t figure people out. Something inside me wants this control over who’s in front of me, so I know how to act around them,” she started. “But for some odd reason, all I want to be around you is me. So I feel comfort and admiration towards you because you manage to make me feel that way.”

Her honesty surprised me. “I pegged you to lie or tell my pretty lips to shut up again,” I said, trying to hide how my heart squeezed at her answer. I imagined that she perhaps felt similar towards me, because of how I felt around her, but hearing the truth made my head spin.

Doe angled theAsteriabook and looked around before she pushed the door to the storage room open, and we slipped inside within a moment passing between us.

She hit the wall with her back by the way she hurried inside, and I caught her around the waist before she stumbled against the stack of books and caused any damage to them. They weren’t relevant, but it didn’t mean they needed to be destroyed.

“Humanity grew fond of lies when the truth seemed too hard to tell and the lies too pretty. I too found comfort in lies because they used to protect my peace, but now, peace looks so irrelevant when you’re a breath away from death. Remember me by thetruth of who I am. Not the lies to make me look pretty.” Her lips turned into a smile, and she turned to activate the mechanism in the bookshelf.

“You know, if you die, I die. So how could you expect me to be able to remember you in the afterlife?” I asked, pushing past her to jog down the ancient stairs, taking the key from the long necklace I hid underneath my jumper to unlock the final door.

I held the door open for her, and she rushed inside our hideaway, turning to face me, her eyes softening as she said the next words, “I guess the afterlife won’t be an eternal loneliness if you join me. And if I’m destined to stay infinitely there, I want your soul to know mine before that time comes.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

DOROTHEE

We are blessedwith limited control over the elements.

“How is that even possible?” I gaped at the page of my great aunt’s diary, where she wrote about the day they discovered that nature was giving to people blessed by the Gods. Or, in our case, by the mother of witchcraft. Hecate.

“How is it possible that we’re able to see the dead?” Archer returned my question, and I narrowed my eyes in concentration at him.

“But this is different. It goes against the laws of nature. You can’t just light a bush on fire because you beg it to ignite.”

We had moved onto the floor with a few blankets from the drawer, where he had taken out clothes for me the night of Samhain. It was almost ten-thirty, and after dinner, we had come back down here to continue reading the next pages in Dottie’s diary.

The others will surely be pissed at us for not waiting, but the faster we get things going, the better. Besides, I was dying of curiosity after I had left the book in the hideaway during the holidays, in case someone went through my things at home.

Archer pushed himself up on his elbows. “Technically, you can’t just see ghosts because you want to,” he mocked me, and I let out a small chuckle.

“Stop mimicking me and be serious. This is quite literally insane.”

He shook his head. “No, it’s not. Dottie says that nature demands a sacrifice for the power it provides you with. In their case, they poured their own blood as a form of payment towards Hecate, and she repaid them with control over the wish element.”

I snorted and looked at the note on our Hecate blackboard of sacrificial magic. “Still sounds insane to me.”

“Calm your nerves. They’ve only managed to light candles so far.”

“Yeah, so far…”

He laughed at me. “You think they go from lighting candles to creating a hurricane within the next few pages?”

I flipped the page and leaned back against the wall of pillows Jesse had stored in the library during his nightly research sessions. “Let’s find out, shall we?”

Archer lay back down and crossed his arms over his chest as his eyes focused on the ceiling, ready to listen to me reading the next pages to him.

March 8th 1970

Dear Diary,

I’m starting to believe that our knowledge is so negligible that we as humans didn’t even consider the possibility of truth behind legends and folklore. It is difficult to believe that certain things are not fantasy but may be more real than the dream of a normal life in today’s society. How odd that children sometimes tend to see beyond the veil andhear the voices of nature calling them, but adults are too stubborn to believe in such ‘nonsense’.

It makes me question if the witches that have been burned at the stake were truly able to perform rituals and the craft of spells. Now, it seems almost unthinkable that we are the only ones hearing the shadows whisper.

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