Love Between Two Worlds - Chapter 10

  

Chapter 10 — The Man Beyond the Veil

Light swallowed everything.

Amelia couldn't see the floor beneath her, couldn't see the walls of Mara's house or Adrian or Lucien or even her own hands held up in front of her face. There was only white, endless and total, and somewhere inside it the sound of her own breath coming too fast to keep count of.

Then Eleanor's voice found her.

"Run, Amelia."

She turned toward it, though there was no direction left to turn toward.

"Grandmother?"

Nothing answered. Only the echo of her own name, stretching thinner and further away with every repetition.

"Don't let him find you."

"Who?"

The answer came from somewhere behind her — everywhere behind her, all at once.

"Caelan."

The light broke apart like glass.

Amelia hit something solid and rolled hard onto cold stone, the impact driving the air out of her.

For several seconds she couldn't move. Her ears rang, her palms stung where they'd scraped the ground, and the whole world seemed to tilt sideways before settling grudgingly back into place.

"Amelia."

Adrian.

She pushed herself upright to find him kneeling beside her, one hand braced against the floor, the other already gripping her shoulder. His face had gone pale, his hair a mess, blood tracking from a cut above his eyebrow.

"Are you hurt?"

"I don't think so."

He searched her face anyway, thorough, unwilling to take her word for it.

"You're bleeding."

She touched her cheek and came away with a thin smear of red on her fingers.

"It's nothing."

"You've been spending far too much time around me," he said, and something in his voice almost managed to be light.

Despite everything, she nearly smiled.

Then she took in where they actually were, and the almost-smile died.

Not Mara's house. A vast stone chamber instead, pillars climbing up into a darkness the ceiling never resolved out of, ancient symbols crawling across every wall beneath a fine coat of dust, glowing faintly despite the years that had clearly passed since anyone last tended this place. At the far end, a circular opening had been carved directly into the stone.

No door filled it. Only dark, thick and complete.

"Where are we?"

Adrian rose slowly, testing his own balance.

"I don't know."

"You don't know?"

"No."

That frightened her more than almost anything he could have said instead.

"Where's Lucien? Mara?"

"I don't know that either."

He started toward the circular opening. Amelia caught his sleeve before he'd taken a second step.

"Don't."

He looked down at her hand on his arm.

"You heard what Eleanor said."

"I did."

"Then you know we shouldn't be walking toward the dark, not right now."

"I know that too."

He didn't move away from it regardless.

She let go of his sleeve. "Adrian."

"What?"

"She warned me not to trust the king."

"Yes."

"And she told me not to fall in love with you."

His whole face went still, carefully, deliberately blank.

Neither of them said anything for a long moment. Amelia looked away first, unable to hold his eyes through the silence.

"I don't know what to do with that," she admitted.

"You don't have to do anything with it."

"That's easy for you to say."

"No." His voice dropped, quieter than she'd heard it. "It really isn't."

She looked back at him, and for one brief, suspended moment, neither of them seemed to remember the monsters, the royal court, the failing Veil, or the man supposedly hunting her through two worlds.

Then something moved in the dark beyond the circular opening, and the moment ended as fast as it had started.

Adrian's blade was up instantly. "Stay behind me."

A figure stepped through into the chamber, and for one heart-stopping second Amelia thought it was one of the creatures from Blackwood Manor come to finish what it started.

Then it straightened to its full height, and she saw it was a man. Tall, gaunt, dressed head to foot in black, his face hidden behind a mask worked in silver.

Her breath caught. "The man from my vision."

Adrian stepped fully between them. "Caelan."

The masked man stopped several yards off, unhurried, as though the distance between them was entirely his to control.

"Adrian Vale." His voice was exactly as she remembered it from the vision — calm, ancient, and entirely without urgency, the voice of someone who has never once needed to rush toward anything. "You've grown predictable in thirty-two years."

Adrian's blade didn't waver. "You're not taking her."

Caelan's masked head tilted, slow and considering.

"You said precisely that once before."

"When?"

"Thirty-two years ago. To the day, if I'm not mistaken."

Amelia's heart slammed against her ribs.

Caelan's attention drifted to her, unhurried and complete. "And here we are again."

"Why do you want me?"

"Because your grandmother made a promise."

"To you?"

"Not to me." His voice dropped, and something in it seemed to reach further than the room. "To the thing beyond the Veil."

The ring on her finger began to warm against her skin.

"What thing?"

Caelan raised one gloved hand, and the symbols carved across the chamber walls answered, lighting one by one like something waking up out of a very long sleep.

"The one your family betrayed."

Adrian moved before the sentence had fully landed. His blade cut the air between them, and a wall of silver light tore open across the chamber, racing toward Caelan.

Caelan didn't so much as flinch. The barrier stopped inches from the mask, trembling there, unable to close the last small distance.

"Still relying on old tricks, Vale."

He lifted a single finger.

The barrier cracked from top to bottom.

Adrian's jaw tightened. "Amelia — run."

"Where?"

"Anywhere but here."

"That's not remotely helpful!"

Caelan made a sound that might have been a laugh, dry and entirely without warmth.

"Do you see the trouble now, Vale? She has all of Eleanor's courage and none of her patience."

He lowered his hand. The barrier shattered outward, and the force of it threw Adrian backward across the stone floor.

"Adrian!"

She was already running toward him when the ring flared white-hot on her hand, hard enough to stop her mid-step.

A voice slid into her mind — not Eleanor's. Something older. Something with no discernible edges at all.

"Come closer."

Her feet moved before her mind agreed to it. One step. Then another, pulled forward by something she had no name for.

"Amelia!" Adrian's voice sounded impossibly distant now, as if the chamber had quietly grown between them.

Caelan stood perfectly still as she closed the distance, the ring blazing brighter with every step she took toward him.

"What are you doing to me?" she whispered.

"Nothing," Caelan said. "Only remembering. The ring does the rest."

The chamber dissolved around her.

She stood somewhere else entirely — a vast field stretched thin beneath a sky the color of old blood. Thousands of people knelt in rows before a woman crowned in branches of silver, and the woman turned, and Amelia knew her instantly, without being told, the way you know your own reflection.

The first Hart.

Beside her stood something built from light and shadow both, a shape her mind refused to hold steady for longer than a heartbeat at a time. The first Hart extended one hand, palm up, and blood welled and dripped from an unseen cut across it. The creature reached out and touched the blood.

The earth shuddered beneath thousands of kneeling bodies.

A wall of light rose up between two worlds, vast and singing with its own strange frequency.

The Veil, born.

Then the vision shifted, and Amelia saw what she hadn't expected — the first Hart wasn't standing alone after all. Behind her stood a man crowned in gold, the first king of Elarion, and between the two of them stood a child.

A child with silver eyes.

Generations poured past in seconds after that, kings rising and dying, Guardians born and buried, the Veil thinning with every passing century like fabric worn too many times.

And then, at last, Eleanor — young, furious, unmistakably terrified, standing before that same ancient shape of light and dark.

"I will not give her to you."

The creature answered without a mouth to answer with, the words simply arriving, already understood.

"She belongs to the pact."

Eleanor shook her head, once, absolute.

"She belongs to herself."

The vision tore itself apart, and Amelia came back into the chamber with tears already tracking down her face before she'd registered crying at all.

Caelan stood directly in front of her now, close enough to touch.

"Now you understand."

She stumbled backward. "No."

"Your grandmother broke the original pact the moment she chose to hide you."

"She saved me."

"She condemned both worlds to save one girl."

Adrian was on his feet again, blade raised, blood still tracking from his brow. "Don't listen to him."

Caelan's masked face turned toward him, unbothered. "Why not?"

"Because he wants her to believe she never had a choice in any of this."

Caelan's attention slid back to Amelia, patient, certain.

"She doesn't."

The ring cracked.

Amelia cried out, more from the sound of it than the pain — a sound like something ancient finally giving way.

"Amelia!" Adrian reached her in two strides.

The crack spread across the silver band, and light began pouring out through it, and somewhere far beyond the chamber walls something enormous drew a breath.

Once.

Then again.

The stone beneath their feet trembled with each one.

Caelan lowered his head slightly, as though listening to something only he could hear clearly.

"The Veil is opening."

Amelia stared down at the ring, fractured now, still pulsing with light through the crack. "What happens if it opens all the way?"

Caelan's eyes found hers through the mask, and for the first time his voice carried something almost like regret.

"Your world dies first."

Adrian's grip tightened on his blade until his knuckles went white. "And Elarion?"

"Then ours." Caelan's voice had gone almost gentle with the answer, as though gentleness cost him nothing now that the outcome was already decided.

Amelia looked between the two of them — the man who'd sworn to protect her and the man who'd come to claim her — and understood, all at once, that the choice waiting for her had never been between Elarion and her own world at all.

It was between two worlds that might both be lost together, if she chose wrong, or chose too late, or simply chose nothing at all.

The ring cracked again, wider.

A deep roar rolled through the chamber, shaking dust loose from symbols that hadn't moved in centuries. Somewhere beyond the stone, in the dark past the circular opening, thousands of voices began to whisper her name in a chorus that pressed against her skull from every direction at once.

"Amelia... Amelia... Amelia..."

She closed her eyes against the sound.

Then opened them again, steadier than she felt.

"If I'm the one who controls the Veil—" Her voice shook, but she forced the rest of it out anyway. "—then I'm going to find out exactly what it wants from me. Not what either of you decide it wants. What it actually wants."

Adrian looked at her, something unreadable moving behind his eyes.

Caelan went very still.

And somewhere beyond the Veil, in the dark that had been waiting thirty-two years for precisely this moment, something ancient finally answered.

"Finally."