Love Between Two Worlds - Chapter 2

  

Chapter 2 — The Ring of Two Worlds

Amelia did not sleep that night.

She tried. For nearly two hours she sat at the edge of her bed with the curtains drawn tight and the silver ring resting on the nightstand, telling herself she was only restless, only shaken, only human after a night like that.

It was a lie, and she knew it the moment she closed her eyes.

The forest came back to her instantly — the blue mist, the black trees standing like something that had learned to hold still on purpose, those slow lights drifting between the trunks with nowhere to be. And Adrian. Always Adrian, but more than anything, the look on his face when he'd said the words the people who killed your grandmother — no hesitation in it, no room for doubt. He hadn't guessed. He had known, the way you know something you've carried for years.

The mantel clock struck three.

She looked at the ring. It hadn't so much as shifted since she'd set it down.

She reached for it, then stopped, her hand hanging in the air.

Find Adrian.

The voice returned to her uninvited, threading itself through the dark. Her grandmother's voice — or something close enough to it that memory couldn't tell the difference. She'd heard Eleanor speak a thousand times as a child, but grief has a way of sanding down the edges of a voice until you're no longer sure what you remember and what you've built.

She picked up the ring at last.

The warmth was gone. It sat cold and inert between her fingers, and she turned it slowly, reading the engraving again as if it might have changed.

Two Worlds.

There had to be an explanation. There was always an explanation — that was the one rule Amelia had never let herself break. Her grandmother's odd habits, the rooms kept locked for no stated reason, the strange symbols cut into the walls like scars — all of it, she'd always assumed, would resolve into something ordinary if she looked hard enough.

But there was no ordinary explanation for a door that opened onto another world.

Unless she'd dreamed the whole thing. She almost laughed at herself for hoping so.

Then the ring moved.

Not in her hand. On the table. Unassisted.

It slid from her fingers and landed with a small, precise click, and a thread of silver light unspooled across its surface — thin at first, then blooming outward until a symbol burned itself into the band: a crescent moon ringed by seven small stars.

She knew that symbol. It was carved above the fireplace in her grandmother's study.

Amelia was already moving before she'd decided to — robe thrown on, candle in hand, down the staircase into a house that felt wrong in the particular way a house feels wrong at three in the morning. The portraits along the hall seemed to track her as she passed. Shadows pooled in corners that had no business casting any.

The study door was locked, as it had been since the funeral. She'd tried the key exactly once, months ago, and it hadn't turned then either.

Tonight she didn't bother with the key.

She pressed the ring flat against the lock instead, and the mechanism gave a single, obedient click.

"Of course," she murmured, and pushed the door open.

Dust lay over everything inside like a second skin. Books climbed three walls floor to ceiling. Maps papered the fourth, most of them showing places Amelia had never heard of — until she raised the candle and found one that was different.

It showed Blackwood Manor and the land around it, familiar down to the tree line. But past the forests and the villages she recognized, the map kept going, rendered now in ink so black it seemed to swallow the candlelight — a second landscape, labeled in a careful hand:

Elarion.

Beneath a ring of unfamiliar symbols, in her grandmother's own handwriting, someone had written a single line:

The door does not connect places. It connects histories.

The breath went out of her.

She was still reading it when she heard the footsteps.

Slow. Deliberate. Not her own.

She turned. The doorway stood empty.

"Hello?"

Nothing answered — except the candle flame, which bent sideways as though something had exhaled across it, and a cold that rolled into the room from nowhere at all.

Then, from the dark beyond the door, a voice she knew.

"You shouldn't have come here."

Her heart lurched. "Adrian?"

He stepped into the light. He'd changed — the black coat gone, replaced by a dark shirt beneath a long gray cloak — and he looked, for the first time since she'd met him, tired. Worried, in a way that made him look younger.

"You need to leave," he said.

"You disappeared."

"I had to."

"You left me alone in a corridor after telling me someone murdered my grandmother."

His jaw set. "I didn't want you involved in this."

"I'm already involved." She held up the ring between them like evidence. "In case that wasn't clear."

Something shifted in his face the moment he saw it.

"Where did you get that?"

"You left it. On the corridor floor."

His eyes didn't move from the silver band. "I didn't."

"You were standing right there when it fell."

"No." He crossed the room toward her, slow, careful, as if the ring might bolt. "I have never carried that ring."

"Then whose is it?"

He didn't answer, and the silence frightened her more than any answer could have.

"Your grandmother's," he said finally.

Her fingers closed around it. "Why would she give it to me?"

"She didn't."

His gaze went to the map behind her, to the black ink and the word Elarion.

"She gave it to someone else."

"Who?"

He looked back at her.

"Me."

The room seemed to lose a few degrees all at once.

"Then why is it in my hand?"

Something in his expression eased, just slightly — the closest thing to gentleness she'd seen from him yet.

"Because the ring chooses who carries it. Not the other way around."

Somewhere far off, a bell began to toll. Once. Twice. She counted without meaning to — three, four, five — and Adrian's head snapped toward the window before it reached seven.

"They've found you."

"Who?" she asked, though some part of her already didn't want the answer.

He closed the last of the distance between them.

"The ones who crossed through the door before you were born."

She swallowed. "What do they want?"

His silver eyes held hers, steady, unflinching, and that was somehow worse than if he'd looked away.

"You."

The candle guttered out on its own.

In the sudden dark, something dragged itself across the outside of the window glass — slow, deliberate, testing.

She heard Adrian's voice at her ear, low enough that it barely counted as sound.

"Whatever happens — don't let them take you to Elarion."

The window shattered.