Page 8 of Heir of Broken Souls (HOBF #3)
Chapter 8
Delilah
M y fighting leathers squeak as I take a seat in one of the armchairs by the study’s fire, my earlier exhaustion long forgotten as the sun begins to fade and adrenaline courses through me at the discussion still raging hours after we left the treehouse.
“Is it a dream or a vision?” Harlow asks, her gaze assessing.
Knox slides his hands into his pockets. “Delilah said it felt like a memory, a déjà vu of sorts.”
“That’s absurd. The archangels died in the battle a millennia ago against dark magic. They sacrificed themselves to save this world,” Lenox says, for once an ounce of emotion shining in his voice.
Harlow snorts. “You can’t be dead and send visions.”
Lenox ignores her, again. Harlow stares at him, as if she can climb into his mind and see everything that’s going on within.
“No, I believe they could be alive.” Knox slides into the seat behind his desk. His eyes move to mine. “The archangels were the only ones capable of manipulating time itself.”
“Then this could be a message from when they were alive,” Lenox argues. “A millennia ago, when they were fighting the battle against darkness.”
Knox straightens, facing his now second. “It would explain why they appear so young.”
“Is that even possible?”
“The archangels all possess the ability of sight within their own magic system,” Harlow explains, plopping into the armchair perpendicular to me. “They could have received a similar vision to your own of Peter ,” she spits the name, “destroying these lands.”
But if they knew what was to come, why sacrifice themselves in a smaller battle? I can’t shake the feeling that although we’re on the right path, we have all the wrong information. We’re not thinking in the right direction.
“What is it, Delilah?” Knox asks, forever the one pushing me to speak my mind.
“I don’t think we know everything when it comes to the archangels, and alive or not, they wanted me to see the vision. I say we focus on figuring out what they said before jumping to conclusions on their whereabouts.” I turn to Harlow, who’s already studying me. “You said you know their language?”
“I know it? No,” she snorts. “The old bastards were protective of their native tongue. Recognized it, however? Certainly. I’ve never heard anything like it.”
“Any chance you can translate it, Harlow?” Knox asks. Lenox stands impassive while he addresses her, but a slight frown mars his otherwise aloof features.
She groans, rolling her head on the edge of the armchair. “Why are you hellbent on giving me impossible assignments?”
“Because you told me to my face that it’s not impossible.”
A saccharine smirk curls her lips. “I did, didn’t I?”
“Can the vision be trusted?” Lenox asks all of a sudden.
Knox rubs his jaw, his fingers scratching the slight stubble. “Why couldn’t it be trusted? Delilah’s visions have been accurate before.”
Lenox’s amber eyes cut to me, an emotion there and gone in them before I can decipher. “You said this was sent to her. What if it’s a play of the mind?”
Knox’s back stiffens. “A ploy from the king?”
Peter , I correct on the bridge.
“He’s never been able to send me a false vision before. I doubt it,” I say, slightly affronted that he thinks I wouldn’t be able to tell what’s real or fake.
Lenox’s Adam’s apple bobs on a thick swallow. “It’s just that…” He sighs, twice in one night showing something other than disinterest. “Ace couldn’t tell that the bond with Hazel wasn’t real.”
Her name spoken aloud, let alone in the same sentence as Ace’s name, douses a cold bucket of ice water over us all. Tension fills the now stifling room. The flames in the firepit behind me snuff out, the dark smoke billowing out.
“That was different,” I say fiercely.
“No, it wasn’t.”
“Careful,” Harlow warns.
Lenox takes a deep breath before facing Harlow. A visible wall slams shut over him as Harlow rears back in shock that he’s finally— finally —addressing her. It’s been weeks.
“Peter will stop at nothing to get to her,” he says, pointing in my direction though keeping his eyes on her. “I don’t doubt he would do anything possible to lure her.”
At the mention of the threat against my head, Knox stands. Ice scuttles down my spine as the air changes once more, this time filling with Knox’s tension and power as it leaks from his palms.
Harlow’s voice wavers as she says, “She would know if it’s real or not, Knox as well.”
“Ace thought the bond was real, too.”
“He had never been mated before. It was a foreign feeling to him,” Knox says carefully.
But really, we don’t know what Ace was feeling, whether it felt strange or if the mind games and spells Hazel placed over him were so completely fastened, he never would have thought to guess otherwise.
We will never know the truth because Ace is dead.
The thought sucks a sharp breath from me, making all heads turn in my direction. Clearing the emotion lodged in my throat, I stand, rounding the fireplace to relight it. I need to move , to do something with my hands before the grief I have been shoving aside finally captures me in its talons and never lets me go.
“It felt different,” I admit to the room at my back, “but not fake. It was real—too real. That’s what’s strange about it.” My voice lowers. “It feels…like it already happened.”
My magic writhes with excitement, the conversation and the mention of the vision sparking it into consciousness where it screams for a release. I let a small amount leak out, if only to release some of the pressure.
A spark of golden flames flies for the warm logs in the firepit, right as a shadowy hand suddenly appears, wraps around my wrist, and pulls me through the brick wall.
The last thing I hear before I’m submerged in death and darkness is Knox’s petrified scream.