Page 29 of The Last De Loughrey Dynasty (The Legacy of Aquila Hall #1)

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

ARCHER

I watched as the clock ticked, each second passing, waiting for the minute hand to hit ten. Usually, I don’t care if I’m on time. I come and go whenever I please. But this was different.

And as much as I hated to face Dorothee yesterday at dinner or this morning, I longed to look at her magnificent features tonight.

She painted her own story of why my disliking towards her might have been valid, and honestly, it was a relief. Knowing that she believed, for one second, that I saw her like everyone in her life always had—a liability—had me loathing myself even more than I already did. Even though she hadn’t worded it like that, it was easy to look right into her heart. At least, it was for me.

Seeing people has never been my strength. I simply saw right through them. They didn’t interest me enough because there was too much going on in my head. Emptiness had claimed my being by the time I turned ten, and the world started to darken around the edges a little more with every year that passed.

My sister had a happy nature. A bundle full of joy. I only ever saw her on holidays, but she didn’t stop chatting the second she saw me again. How school had been, about her friends, her grades, and her cat.

I love my sister. I loved her the day she was born, and I will love her until I’m six feet under. But I never found myself being the same boy who once told her bedtime stories until my eyes were falling shut.

Elsie called me mean when she was nine, and I was thirteen because I slipped and told her to shut up during one of her chatty moments. She didn’t know that a dozen voices haunted my head and started crying and yelling that I was a mean boy, and that she missed her older brother until Mum came in.

My mother is a lovely woman. The kind of Mum who lived for her children.

Until I got too much.

She explained in a calm and soothing voice that Elsie couldn’t talk to me like that, and that her older brother had… issues, and sometimes needed to be left alone. She had tried to explain it to her daughter as easily and best as possible for a child to process.

The following night, my mother had come to my room and snuggled into bed with me, soothing my hair until I was a goner and off to dreamland. I never knew if she believed I had been asleep when she whispered these words, but I also never acknowledged them.

“I wish I could take this pain away from you, that I could have my sweet little boy back. You’re so lifeless, it pains me every time I look at you.”

Maybe that had been the reason why she agreed with Father to send me away a year before that night came to pass. So she wouldn’t have to look at me.

My mum’s words had stuck with me, and I tried to see the people in front of me. I tried so hard to feel connected to someone— anyone , to prove that the boy my mother and sister grieved was still within me.

But there was nothing.

I loved my friends, but I barely ever saw them the way they were.

Do I love the idea of them?

Do I just want to feel better by acting like feeling was easy for me?

Questions over questions and the only thing I knew was that I cared for them and I didn’t want to be left behind while they moved on.

I could never tell them how distant I felt being around them, when all I wanted was to feel connected.

What friend was I to feel that way?

When I first met Dorothee, I couldn’t look away from her. Not only her appearance but her soul that lay on display behind her eyes. It had been so strange to feel alive for the first time in almost eight years. To have a random girl make me feel something at all.

But she wasn’t a random girl.

She has been fated to cross my path since the day she’d been born.

Weeks passed, and my gaze never slipped from her. Like she had been made for me. Her soul in harmony with mine, causing her heart to be the only light I saw in this world.

The stars must terribly hate me to cause such torture as my destiny.

When I watched Nathaniel and Mai, I felt cursed, knowing the only person who I could see wasn’t allowed to have a place by my side.

I didn’t know her all too well, but I’m almost certain that I met her soul the day it was made from starlight. Icy eyes had watched my every step through my dreams for eternity. And for the longest time, I believed the ethereal being who captured my heart in its light existed only in fantasy… until I saw her that day on the balcony.

The clock hit ten, and I shook off the grief I felt about something that wasn’t destined to be mine. If it wouldn’t hurt her, I’d be selfish.

I’d be selfish and make her mine, going against fate to write our story the way we wanted to. But at the current time, I couldn’t challenge the stars or whoever is in charge like that.

As my hand hovered above the door handle, I heard a whisper echoing through my mind.

“You,” it said, the voice sounding more male than female. I waited, taking a deep breath, not pushing on the door handle for a moment.

“Look in the mirror, kid.”

I spun around, going for the bathroom, where a giant mirror hung above the sink. It was the only mirror I had since I found myself going mad at searching for life in my eyes while looking into one for too long.

The only thing that I saw was my reflection looking back at me. A tall boy with dark shadows beneath his eyes, making them almost look hollow. Knowing I was tired was one thing, but seeing how much my appearance suffered from my lack of sleep was harsh.

Deathly pale, which the black clothes I wore brought out even more. I looked exactly how I felt.

A shadow of myself.

Suddenly, my features shifted, and the reflection developed its own soul. A boy who shared several similarities with me blinked, while my eyes didn’t move.

His features weren’t as sharp as mine, and he looked rather boyish, and from the look of his ruffled black hair and chaotic choice of clothes, he had something rebellious about him.

I knew the boy in front of me.

“James,” I breathed, and he seemed to just notice me now, nodding fast, brushing his hand through his curls.

“You’re Matthew’s son, am I right?” he asked, and I shook my head slowly.

“Matthew is my grandfather. His son, Griffin, is my father,” I corrected, and James looked like someone had slapped him across the face, but he caught himself within a second.

“That is certainly a shocker.”

“What happened between you and Dottie that night?” I ignored his hesitation, taking this chance before anything could destroy it. He wasn’t a spirit. He was an illusion, a manifested memory, fuck knows what he was, but he wasn’t held back by the veil so he could talk.

James’ eyes darkened, and his hand moved to his heart. “I—I should have protected her. But there was nothing I could have done, our fate had been sealed.”

“Did you kill her?” I was sick of all that talking around. I needed straight answers.

His blue eyes snapped up to me, pure anger burning in them. “Foolish boy. Dorothee Odette De Loughrey was the love of my life, she was everything to me, and in another life we’d have been able to run away and build the life we deserved. Don’t you dare to assume such devilish nonsense ever again,” he shot at me with burning rage. “I fought so hard to be able to warn you just for you to insult me?!”

His anger didn’t affect me. I was used to it, but suddenly, I felt like I shouldn’t have asked. My gut had been right. And even though I understood why Jesse accused James of murdering Dottie, it sounded surreal from the beginning.

“I apologise. But why does the prophecy written on a picture of you and her say that the last De Loughrey dynasty will fall by Kingstone hand? Make it make sense.”

My great uncle gritted his jaw in the same stubborn way I always did. It was a Kingstone thing, and thankfully my sister inherited far more of our mother’s genes. “Because love equals ruin. There is this Latin proverb Dottie and I always used to excuse going against the stars’ will. Amantes sunt amentes.”

“Lovers are lunatics,” I translated, and he didn’t need to explain the meaning behind those words because I understood them better than anyone.

“We were stupid, that’s for sure. But we didn’t care. I wasn’t made to fall for the ways of the star, but I did. She was the owner of my heart, and God forbid I let her have it the way she liked. Dottie was everything good about me, and during our times we laughed in the face of fate and challenged it. Foolish, but I wouldn’t have done anything different because I am a selfish man… I was a selfish man. Now I’m nothing more than a shadow.” James paused, his eyes lost in memory, before he caught himself and looked back at me again. “Our families have always been the ruin that started with love. It’s a cycle, kid. And we were the first that gave in, trying to break the pattern. Love always wins, they say. Lies knitted into the constellation of the stars. The only thing that love brings is chaos to the Kingstone’s as to the De Loughrey’s.”

“Why is it that our families fight this rivalry? And what do the Goddamned stars have to do with everything?” Everything is always connected to them, and I knew there were people believing that everyone’s fate is connected to the day you’ve been born. What time and constellation of the planets and the stars foresee your future. But this goes deeper.

“Because it all started with the constellations, giving us the greatest gift of all. The rule of death. The keeper of the shadows… Until the power started to corrupt one’s mind to insanity. Craving more than possible, so we got punished. Cursed to suffer from heartache and the minimum of our abilities, haunted by the dead. Everyone believes we’re liars when they used to build altars and pray to the very first of us,” he spoke so angrily that I could feel his hatred to the bone.

“Who was the first of us?”

Many questions spun in my mind, but we needed to start somewhere, and where else than the very beginning?

James lifted his head, a dark, unsettling smile appearing on his lips. “Hecate.”

I frowned, “The goddess?”

“The one and only. Blessing the seven families with a kiss of her power. Each of them is unique alone but equal together.”

“You’re trying to say that we are the way we are because a goddess blessed our families centuries ago until we wronged her, and she decided to curse us with said gift and bring a wedge between the De Loughrey’s and Kingstone’s in the form of desire cursed with heartache?” I summarised, trying to wrap my head around the new information.

Hecate was a Greek goddess, that was all I knew about her, since it had never occurred to me that gods really did exist.

James nodded. “Exactly, and that you have to break the pattern. Find the prophecies to find the Book of Shadows before history will repeat itself.”

“Stop constantly saying history will repeat itself, just tell me what happened that night!” I yelled at the mirror because this was just as frustrating as knowing nothing.

Fine, some goddess blessed us then cursed us, whatever. I didn’t care, I just needed to know what history we’re trying to prevent here, it’s driving me to madness.

He smoothed his shirt and swallowed visibly. “One of the families has betrayal written in their name. Seven families was one too many, since six is the number of destiny and seven is not. The seventh family was known for their intrigue behaviour, wanting everything to build on the ashes of their so-called friends. Don’t let Hecate’s book fall into their hands.”

I stilled, soaking in a breath of the mist that had formed in my bathroom, surrounding me as if it were trying to make us one.

Seven families.

There were six of us.

Alderidge, McConnell, Minoru, Berkshire, De Loughrey and Kingstone.

“Who’s the seventh family?” I asked with fear creeping up from the inside of my bones as the image of James began to flicker in my mirror, he was slowly fading. Someone else was involved in this and worse, the person had been right under our noses all this time.

“Kane.” The name echoed through my mind as the mist dissolved and James with it, leaving me alone with an image of my paled frame while the name continued to haunt my mind.