Page 68 of The Coveted
I found myself sitting on a bench facing the cherry blossom tree, and soon a woman with long, straight black hair and piercing blue eyes joined me. She had cool-toned, pale skin, her lips and cheeks a rosy pink. She was stunning, somehow both impossibly delicate and strikingly fierce. She looked like a goddess of winter and snow.
“Hello, Áine. I’m Katherine, the Queen Mother. I’ve been waiting for you to finally visit me. We came close once, before your lover interrupted.”
“Daelon,” I said with a smile that quickly faded into a frown. “How did I get here? I don’t remember.”
“That’s all right,” she said with a slow grin of her own. “I always wanted to know what it felt like to be in love. The closest I got was with the birth of my son, gazing down at his full head of black hair and his blue eyes…my eyes, my mother’s eyes, and her mother’s before her. I finally knew love at first sight, over and over again, every day from then on,” she reminisced, her eyes glowing with the same dreaminess as her smile.
“You didn’t love Lucius’s father?” I asked. I tried to remember again why I was here, speaking to a woman I knew was long dead. But every time I got close to the answer I was met with a floaty feeling, like everything was okay. Like I just needed to listen and be still.
“I thought I did. When we were younger. But love is not violent, I was told too late,” she said, her face falling. “He was a cruel man, incapable of love. But my son was. Oh, how he loved his mother,” she said, a tear falling from her electric blue eyes. She pulled my hands into hers, holding my gaze deeply and urgently. “I know the trouble he has caused. The destruction. But you have to understand what lives underneath.”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry for everything you’ve been through. But your son is responsible for countless deaths, including my own mothers’. So much suffering, and all for power. Power that’s destroying the realms and all natural magick. He’s the very opposite of love,” I said. How could she defend a single part of Lucius or his actions?
She shuddered, and I could feel the deep wounds of pain embedded in her mournful blue and green aura. “I’m so sorry. I know I failed, but I can help now. I’ve been waiting for so long to give you this key. It will grant you access to what you need to see most in the Akashic Records.” Her voice was so lyrical, like the melody of a windchime in an autumn breeze. It captivated me, letting me forget my anger so easily.
“Why can’t you just tell me?”
She closed her eyes, and they started moving rapidly beneath her eyelids before she opened them once more. “I can’t remember. Or I can’t say. It’s a knowledge that’s been banished and erased. But you cannot erase anything from the Akashic, you see. It holds everything that ever was or ever will be.”
“That’s right,” I said with a frown. My head was floaty, my body a radiant, painless being of light. “I knew that.”
“You’re losing your grasp on the physical. I must send you on your way.” She let something travel from her palms into mine, and I felt the key root itself somewhere deep in my magick, just waiting for the right lock.
“Why are you helping me?” I asked. She was there in the rubble. She stole Daelon from our homeland while it crumbled into ash all around her. How could she now be on my side?
“I was so lost, then. Beaten down, or at least everyone thought. I’m helping you because you need me to, and it is the right thing to do. And,” she paused, my vision growing blindingly white around the edges. “Because I still believe in him, perhaps in a way only a mother can, but I do. The truth deserves to be seen in all its facets and rays, and the truth will deliver us all from this cold nightmare.”
It will free them from the dungeons. Free them from servitude. It will wash away the blood from each plot of charred land. It will wrap us all in the blinding divinity of quilted community, stitched smooth hand by wrinkled hand. It will bathe us in the cool water of something greater than all witches, all humans, all beings everywhere, that goes by a different name in each native tongue, that guides us through this life and the next, that dances and cascades around us in moments of transcendence, and it will sound like a great hum. We will reach our tired limbs toward it—that tiny sliver of truth bathed in darkness—and it will grow and grow, like the crest of a tall wave.
I came back to my physical body, the sound of angry voices clashing through the air.
“It’s my bloody mother, playing tricks from the dead,” I heard Lucius say from beyond my heavy, heavy eyelids.
An excruciating wave of pain erupted from my stomach and rippled throughout every part of my body, and my world became nothing but agony and darkness.
“The dagger was spelled. She’s not going to heal herself,” Daelon’s panicked voice broke through.
“I’ve got her,” Lucius murmured. “The field is down now.” And I was lifted into the air like a sack of flesh and bones. “She’ll live.”
Something like a thin wooden rope tickled and wrapped around my wrist, and Lucius cursed.
One more thing, lovely Áine, Katherine said softly in my mind.You’re ready to go to the Akashic Records. Amos knows the way, now. But only you may hear it. No one else. Especially not your lover.
“Insufferable tree,” Lucius muttered, his fingers casting aside the branch that had coiled along my skin, and my connection was lost along with my last hope of consciousness.