Page 14 of The Last De Loughrey Dynasty (The Legacy of Aquila Hall #1)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

ARCHER

Midnight was the time when the darkness was closest to your soul. Its claws scratched at the surface of your mind, guiding you through the fog of shadows to its pitch-black heart. But the darkness had never scared me when I awoke in the dead of night to the bawling of spirits who hadn’t yet made their way into the light–light being a vague term for what awaited them after death had struck. No one knew where we’d go, because there wasn’t a single soul that had outlived death yet.

Midnight had become a time I looked forward to, a time when I could be the version of myself my family had suppressed over the years in Kingstone Manor, where the doors had always needed to stay closed.

I walked down the icy stone steps leading from the boys’ dorms to the corridors that connected each of the rooms in Aquila Hall. There wasn’t a single room you needed to walk through to find your destination in another. No rooms were connected by doors. If you wanted to get anywhere, you were forced to cross the corridors, which wasn’t something the youngest were looking forward to when they first arrived. This whole place was built like a bloody labyrinth. It wouldn’t surprise me if the actual maze on the backside of the school had been inspired by the layout of Aquila.

Fall made itself known by the howling of the wind against the old, grimy windows as I passed them, heading towards the library to meet up with my friends, who would no doubt scowl at me again for being almost fifteen minutes late. It wasn’t my fault, though–it was Elsie’s, who had called me about an hour ago, asking if I was joining them for Christmas this year. She was more begging than asking, because she missed me and wanted me to talk to Father, who’d been furious with Elsie when she’d asked to transfer from her current boarding school to mine.

It had taken me almost an hour to convince my little sister that Aquila Hall wasn’t made for her. Sure, I appreciated the thought of her wanting to spend more time with her older brother, but there was no chance in hell I was going to be the reason she’d transfer here. In the end, it was my argument that Aquila wasn’t built for children with talented hands on instruments, and we didn’t have the teachers who could truly nurture the kind of talent Elsie had. She’d always loved music, and in her words, the piano had called to her one morning, telling her it was her fate to learn and play it. She was seven and told Mum a fairy had shared it with her. Mum had laughed in delight at her daughter’s fantasy and almost immediately got her a teacher.

With the torch of my phone, I made it to the library and slipped into our hideaway, hidden from the eyes of those who weren’t meant to see beneath the grounds of the school.

I casually walked down the stairs, feeling the chill from the stone walls through my sweatpants and the thin layer of my long-sleeved shirt. I wasn’t in a hurry. They could either wait for me, or they’d catch me up on what they’d discussed while I’d been absent.

I finally made it through the long archway, and my friends let out a collective sigh.

“I almost won,” Jesse mumbled, disappointment lacing his voice as he turned his head to look at Naomi. His feet were stretched out lazily on the table, which was probably worth four figures. He wore green socks with tiny golden dragons on them, like a five-year-old.

Naomi shot him a triumphant smile. “Almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades,” she replied, brushing her long black hair behind her ears. Her attention was now on me as I pulled out the chair next to my first friend I’d made at this school almost five years ago, Nathaniel McConnell. He was the only one who looked genuinely annoyed by my late arrival, as usual. His girlfriend, who had her legs splayed out across his lap, greeted me with an amiable smile.

Mai was the most compassionate incarnation of sunshine I’d ever met. Since we were raised together like family, I often called her my cousin instead of the simple term friend . Something about her grandmother owing my grandfather had made their children become close friends, who then proceeded to often forcing us to play together as children as well.

“Why are you so late?” She asked with a yawn. It was almost one in the morning, and our education the following day would certainly suffer from the lack of sleep, but this was the only time we had to meet up and ensure no unwanted ears were listening.

“Elsie called. She’s unhappy at Beaumont, and Father won’t allow her to transfer back home to a private school or to another boarding school,” I explained. Mai gave me a sympathetic look. Her own sisters studied at Beaumont Academy. The school wasn’t like ours. Beaumont was located near London, where the press attended events and festivals to write their ridiculous articles about the heirs of family names.

Griffin Kingstone had sent his daughter there for one reason and one reason only: to represent our family in a light of sanity and pride after I had stained our house, and its foundation had started to crumble beneath our feet.

I could rot away at Aquila, while she turned slowly into the true heir to Father’s inheritance.

“I’ll call her tomorrow,” Mai offered, and I nodded in appreciation.

“Can we now talk about Samhain? I need my beauty sleep for theatre class tomorrow, because there’s this pretty lass I want to impress,” Jesse said, ripping the plaster off before anyone could steer the conversation towards why we were actually here… as we did every year.

While most students were excited to celebrate Halloween in the great ballroom of our school, filled with music, snacks, and their friends dancing and laughing, it was Samhain that shook us to our core, and we barely survived the night each year. From the thirty-first of October to the first of November, the veil between the dead and the living is thinnest. Everyone notices strange things happen on Halloween, but no one laughs when half of the people you see wandering these corridors are dead.

Aquila Hall was the worst place you could possibly spend Samhain. These walls contained secrets that were beyond our comprehension. Darkness crossed our paths each day we were forced to stay here, but this night was a completely different story.

“We can’t hide the entire night here this year,” I began, feeling their eyes burn with their own fear. Spirits couldn’t step foot into this room, which had been our saviour during the past two years since we’d discovered the secrets our ancestors had hidden here. But this year was different. She was now a part of this, too.

“Nathaniel and I could stay with her, you could just spend the night here,” Mai suggested, but Naomi shook her head in response. “You two won’t understand what she’s going through when she starts feeling like she’s going insane. No offence.”

“None taken. I understand we aren’t the best option to try and keep her safe and sane, but it’s better than each of you losing yourselves tomorrow, too,” Mai replied, a sad note in her voice, feeling helpless for us. Empathy was a cruel thing when you couldn’t help those around you.

“We’re not kids anymore. We’ve trained ourselves to tell the difference between spirits and humans as best we can. She hasn’t, and I have a feeling they’ll find it funny and use it to their amusement or advantage.” I recalled the day I’d caught her running away from the Owley police station, one of many answers in her hands.

Shit, she’d looked like us when we finally realised that nothing had been batty all these years and that we weren’t just mental kids who always got help too late. But she was full of questions, understanding only a small portion of this new world.

The only thing I could hope for was that she’d wear the tourmaline I’d gifted her.

I looked down at my own hand and pushed the black ring up and down with my middle finger, trying to find a solution to everything coming our way this year.

“What if we just told her?” Jesse asked, earning a little clap on the arm from Naomi, who scolded him.

“It’s bad enough her parents sent her here. We won’t challenge fate by dragging her down this rabbit hole. The spirits are already having fun with her, this might just make things worse.”

Naomi Minoru wasn’t the kind of person who showed much sympathy for anyone. Her gift had ruined her for good, turning her once warm heart into the ice-cold stone that now resided beneath her chest. But she wasn’t a monster. We had all read the prophecy and would do anything in our power to stop what was coming for us– for her.

Naomi tapped her gloved index finger on the table, looking across it to meet Nathaniel and Mai’s eyes. “You haven’t seen anything?”

“You know that’s not how it works,” Nathaniel muttered tiredly, speaking for the first time since I’d joined them tonight.

“I try, but it’s like the stars are keeping her fate in the shadows. I saw her the night before she arrived at the academy in a dream. She was standing at the gates with her mother, but I hadn’t thought much of it until I realised I had seen her, not Nathaniel,” Mai said, pulling something out from the oversized jersey she was wearing. I was certain it wasn’t her own, and she’d just picked up a random piece of clothing while the two of them had tumbled out of bed to be on time.

She placed three tarot cards, their backs facing up, on the table. “I tried to lay the cards for her, but their answers were wary and confusing. Maybe I should really go home over Christmas break to ask my grandmother for help with their meaning.” Mai had grown up differently than us.

Her gift ran in the family, her grandmother teaching her the good and bad sides of being gifted with the ability to see things that hadn’t happened yet. The problem was that her parents didn’t believe anything her grandmother told them, which ended up with their only daughter here as well.

She turned the first card, revealing the image of a wheel surrounded by creatures hovering on clouds.

The Wheel of Fortune.

“This card has many meanings, like karma, fate, a negative phase, and bad luck, but in this case, I’m almost sure it stands for destiny,” she said, her gaze flickering to the second card, which she turned over, continuing, “ The High Priestess .” She looked down at the image of a woman sitting on a throne, holding a book with a cross on her chest, veiled in cloth. “This card alone symbolises mystery and hidden truths, but the combination of the Wheel of Fortune and the High Priestess often indicates changes and a major shift in life.”

That wasn’t an answer that helped us at all. The cards had always been blurry about the future, which was still hidden behind the stars, but there had always been a sliver of truth in them.

Mai hesitated before turning the last card, but when she did, I felt a chill spread through my body and Jesse cursed quietly.

“ Death ,” Mai whispered, reading the last card. “I had tried to lay the cards for Dorothee four times since her arrival. They always changed, but one card stayed the same.”

“Aquila stood highest, the beat of the night painfully quiet. When morning came at the break of dawn, the last De Loughrey Dynasty had fallen,” Naomi repeated the phrase we had found scribbled on a picture the night we discovered this room.

This legacy left to us.

But she left out one phrase to keep this night hopeful.

Jesse scoffed nervously. “These prophecies could just be stupid jokes left by those who graduated, to troll us.”

I straightened in my chair and glanced at the picture of seven people sitting on the same couch that still stood in the common room, hanging above the unused chimney. This room hadn’t always been a secret. Once it must have been a normal basement, accessible to everyone. But we hadn’t been alive back then; not even our grandparents had. Now, the chimney was unusable and nothing more than decoration.

“Trust me, Jesse. I’m the one who’s most certain that all these clues, all these warnings about an unknown future, aren’t true,” I swallowed, “but we can’t risk it. Not when we’re aware of what lies behind the veil, of what they’re capable of.”

Silence covered every inch of the room before Mai spoke again.

“Death doesn’t always have to mean a person’s death. It can be a warning that something might end…that a new beginning is waiting for you.”

Nathaniel leaned forward, grasping the card with the image of a skeleton dressed in black armour, riding a white horse.

“But it doesn’t feel like a new beginning is waiting for her,” he said, his thumb tracing the black flag the skeleton held firmly in his grip.

Mai sighed in frustration. “No, it doesn’t.”