Page 51 of Destined Dawn

And yet there’s another part of me that doesn’t think that’s crazy at all.

Those words made my skin prickle, made my magic buzz, made the beast stir, like it was awakening something inside me, an awareness. As if I was hearing some crucial truth – a truth I’d always known – for the very first time.

“I’m not some queen reincarnated. A few months ago, the magic I knew was limited to growing vegetables, feeding chickens and fighting scumbags.”

“Wasn’t Queen Æðelflæd just some girl from a backwater village?” Tristan whispers. “You’re powerful, Rhi, we all know that and we all feel it too, and when we’re together that power seems to amplify. Look what we did just now out on the water! You’ve seen how my dad is terrorizing the republic – and that’s just the stuff we know about. Imagine all the shit he’s getting away with in secret. That’s the darkness and you are the one who is meant to end it.”

“You truly believe that?” Rhi asks him.

“Yes. I believe it. I believe that is why fate has brought us together.”

To my surprise, Rhi turns to me next. Not to the man in black, or the professor or even the assassin. Me. Perhapsbecause I am the most skeptical. Being locked and tortured in a dungeon will make you damned cynical.

“What do you think, Spencer?”

I’m leaning against the wall, and I shift my weight from one foot to another.

“I think you’re the girl in that prophecy, Rhi. Something in my blood tells me you are. I just wish it was damn clearer, that’s all.”

She smiles at me. “That would make things a hell of a lot easier, wouldn’t it? But what I’m learning is that nothing is easy. Ever.”

“No,” I say, “it isn’t. Not when it comes to you, anyway. I’d say my life has gotten a lot more complicated since you showed up.” I smirk at her.

“You ever had dreams about this?” Barone asks her. “When you were young, little rabbit. You ever dream about us? About being powerful?”

She screws up her forehead thinking. “I think I did. I think I did dream of you. I remember this strange sense of déjà vu when I met each of you. Like I’d met you someplace else before.”

“That would be the bond,” Tristan says assuredly.

“And how about the prophecy? Did you dream about that?” I ask. I’ve heard about the dreams she had just a few days ago – about needing to heal a beast and a monster. The dragon was that beast. And that monster? No one’s said it out loud but I know we’re all thinking it was Barone. “Did you dream about being a leader, a queen, someone in charge?”

“No,” she says, disbelief in her voice as she shakes her head.

“One of those dreams of yours would be helpful right now, little rabbit.”

She chews on her thumb and am I imagining that or is she keeping something back from us?

“Let’s go,” Azlan says finally. “We’ve learned all we can from this place. Let’s get somewhere safer.”

Nobody disputes that idea and we walk the route we’ve just come, closing the sacristy door behind us and making our way back through the chapel and down into the stairwell. Below us is the green light of the cave and it provides a dim sort of beacon, edging us onward. Stone’s the first to climb back into the boat, followed one by one by the rest of us. Then we untie the rope and push away, propelling the vessel back out into the open water.

We’re ready for the mist the second time, holding our magic alert and ready, not succumbing to the temptation of the call from the dead.

As the boat emerges from the mist, and the violent surf hurtles us back towards the beach, Rhi swings her gaze around in alarm.

“Someone’s here,” she hisses as the bow of the boat hits the sand.

“Yes,” a voice calls out, “someone is here.”

A cold, emotionless voice I’ve come to know so well by now.

Christopher Kennedy.

20

Rhi

Almost on instinct,I reach for the cloaker around my neck. It isn’t there. The ghouls snatched it from me out there in the mist and it’s lost forever now under the water.