Burning in a Memory (39 page)

             
While Adelaide was distracted, Margo charged. The dynamic of the fight shifted immediately and Adelaide found herself on the defensive. The magic felt wild within her veins, but she suddenly had trouble taming it. She struck back but the magic wasn’t concentrated. The walls trembled and the shaking threatened to knock her off her feet.

             
Someone snatched her from behind and whirled her around. Adelaide’s aura flailed and she tore back. The grip tightened.

             
“Adelaide!” Leon shouted in her face.

             
She lashed out and made contact. Her head spun. She searched for Margo. She couldn’t waste her magic on him. Leon recovered quickly and grabbed her face again, controlling her head between his hands.

             
“Adelaide! Do it now!”

             
His words pierced the daze in her mind this time, but she had no idea what they meant. The pain in her head was excruciating.

             
“Now!”

             
She closed her eyes. His screaming made her head hurt more. The noise in the room sounded louder than she thought possible. The magical auras slamming against each other made her feel sick. She pushed Leon hard. The throbbing in her head grew worse until it was unbearable. She clutched her own skull until the room faded from view. A knot pulled at her chest and released. The agonizing pain seized her and she screamed. Somewhere after, she hit the floor and clawed madly at the ground until her fingernails bled and the world stopped spinning. She felt lighter and different, but agonizing pain stopped her from thinking about it.

             
“Adelaide,” Leon’s voice reached out to her. He was yelling from somewhere close by, but her ears felt like they were too stuffed with cotton to identify the location. Her muscles answered her and she crawled to her knees. In the wake of an explosion of dust and smoke, she could make out more figures. Tony and Priya had reunited in the corner. They stood oddly still. It took her a minute to realize they studied her like prey.

She saw no shades around them. Only the Colton coven stood in the room. The idea of the missing Hawthorns didn’t
evade her but she didn’t think about it then. Between the lingering agony and the hyperawareness of being watched, she stood on shaky knees.

             
“Adelaide, run! Run!” Leon screamed at her. She didn’t see him, but to her left, she could see the hint of the outside world. Fresh air with faint orange sun in the distance beckoned. She forced her feet to move and then ran blindly for the exit. Just as the bottom of her foot hit the grass outside, she collided with something large enough that she bounced to the floor. Her head snapped up but her aura refused respond. Zachary towered above her.

Their eyes met for a lingering moment and then Zachary recoiled. He twitched before he took off in a full run in the opposite direction. She stood again against the protest of her bones. To the right of her were the remains of the Hawthorns
’ manor nearly on verge of collapse. Inside it was at least five mages and perhaps more shades. To her left began the woods and the hills they’d traveled to get here. And where she stood was in the open grassy lawn.

She staggered for the woods, grasping at the
singed branches to propel herself forward.

             
“Adelaide!”

             
She heard the calls behind her but refused to stop. The sense of her body fully becoming hers again, she managed to dash forward until her toe clipped a root. She staggered and spun into a tree. Her fingers grasped the bark to still herself. She’d lost all sense of direction. Before she could place herself, footsteps thundered in her direction.

             
She squinted to see the new arrival in the darkness.

             
“Adelaide!” he gasped again. She recognized the voice, uncertain in that moment as to why she hadn’t before.             

             
“Adam,” she whispered. Her voice felt sore. She’d been screaming recently but she didn’t remember when. Adam slid to a stop a few feet away leaving only a treacherous root between them. She held out her free hand to stop him from moving closer. Adam hovered in his spot, body tense and aura flickering.

             
She refused to look at his face.

             
“Please,” Adam suddenly begged. He said nothing else, but he repeated the word again.

             
She still held her hand out to prevent him from closing the distance between them. The agony still racked through her bones making her concentration on him fleeting.

             
“I saw it. Adelaide, I’ve never seen it before. I’ve never seen a shade leave a body…” He stumbled over his words. They triggered very agonizing and recent memories that she struggled to understand. She’d felt lighter, freer, with no resistance against her movements. She couldn’t place it before but now his words hit a nerve. Jane had gone from her somehow. Leon had been hollering in her face for her to perform a miracle.              

             
Her mouth responded when she tried to speak, and this time, she begged.

             
“Leave me alone,” she whispered. Her whole world was racked in agony and he was making it worse.

             
Vision growing blurry, she could barely see him.

             
“Adelaide, I’m not here to hurt you,” he said softly. He offered her a hand but never approached.

             
She shook her head. She clutched her hands at her side, steeled herself, and spoke through the pain.

             
“Go get your brother,” she said.

             
She finally snuck a look at him. Maybe half an hour ago, he’d given her a glare of disgust that had been permanently etched in her memory.

             
Incoherent shouting sounded nearby and people buzzed around the house. Adelaide recoiled against the tree and when Adam glanced behind him, she stole the opening. She slipped through the trees and ran, but he didn’t chase her. Only when she reached the roadside, dry heaving, did she collapse. Her body refused to answer her now. Her eyes shut and the world slipped from her. She did not dream of the park again; she dreamt of nothing but darkness.

Thirty-
four

             
The door gave under a gentle push and squealed on its hinges. The fact that it was locked dawned on her, but the second the street lamps illuminated the dark interior, she didn’t think about it twice. Taking the first high step inside was the most difficult. Her muscles cried out as she lumbered over the threshold. She patted along the wall until she found and flipped the switch to turn on the overhead lights.

             
The downstairs greeted her quietly. She maneuvered slowly around the wicker furniture and stopped inside the kitchen.

             
“Hello?” she called softly. She’d guessed it to be just past three a.m. when the occupants had to be asleep. Indecision racked her, but she knew she had to wake them. She slipped off her boots with much difficulty before she took to the stairs. Her body ached with each step until she reached the top landing. On this landing, all of the doors were open. She reached the first room.

             
Adelaide felt cold.

             
“Hello!” she yelled out. Her voice returned to her in the confines of the small room. Inside, the sheets had been torn from the bed and left on the floor in a jumbled mess. Dressers hung open, clothes dangled from the shelves, and trash had been left out. She raced to the last door at the end of the hall. Finding another room empty and basked in darkness, she faltered.

             
She stumbled down the stairs. The last step made her sway and she hit her knees. Shaking, she wrapped her arms around herself.

             
“Mom? Bradley?” she called out a last time, in sudden desperation. “Hello? Come out. Come back…”

             
No one answered her. She let out a breath. With every passing day, she felt more in control of her body but found it extremely uncomfortable. As if she’d been plucked from her skin and dropped right back into it, nothing fit quite right. Thoughts raced through her mind in a jumbled mess.

             
“They aren’t here.”

             
She heard the voice, but it took a solid second for her to recognize that it wasn’t in her head. Adrenaline surging in her veins, she lurched back and scrambled to stand. Before she recalled how to make her feet work properly, she identified the owner of the voice.

             
“Adam?” she asked without thought.

             
He stood in the front door and leaned against the frame. She recognized his familiar face below bruising discoloration and mad locks of his hair. She just didn’t believe what she saw.

             
“Hi, Adelaide,” he said.

             
The sound of his voice hit her hard. She clutched her chest as if the source of the pain.

             
“How did you find me?” she asked.

             
She’d seen him in the woods outside the Hawthorn house but had left him there. Despite that being their last meeting, she only remembered the expression he wore when she was a shade. She saw it now, through the watery smile he offered. There was a reason Adam stood so far away and next to an open door, an easy escape. It fueled her to add on another question.

             
“Why did you come?” she asked.

             
He only answered the first question.

             
“When we first met and we looked into your background, this was the house we found. I thought you might come home when we couldn’t find you anywhere else. But we beat you here. I thought if I waited that you’d show, and here you are.”

             
She stiffened. In her spot, crippled on the ground, it was difficult to manifest a threatening posture but she tried.

             
“We? You mean Tony. You guys came after my family!”

             
Adam looked shocked. He couldn’t seem to shake his head fast enough.

             
“No. It was like this when I came here. I mean, I did break open the front door but that was it.”

             
“They weren’t here?” she asked. Tony had threatened her family’s life—the memory of it made her stand. The bottom floor was perfectly ordered but lifeless. No one was here, or had been here recently.

             
“No, I promise. I’m not here to hurt you or your family.”

             
“You’re not? Who did you bring?” she hissed, suddenly eager to see behind him. An unfamiliar black sedan sat on the opposite curb. From her vantage point, she could not see through the tint. But that was even assuming that anyone waited in the car. Paranoid now, she whirled to double check the other rooms.

             
“Just me. When I said we, it was me and my brother but I’m the only one inside.”

             
She snorted.

             
“You’re stupid,” she quipped out of instinct.

             
He twitched.

             
“You’re crazy. If I wanted to ambush you, you’d never know it,” he countered.

             
She wasn’t sure if she believed that. She stood and leaned against the staircase to position her body at an angle to him. Though she watched him for the past five minutes, she couldn’t wrap her mind around seeing him. She was afraid to look away, as if he’d disappear like a figment of her imagination.

             
Her silence made Adam move. He dared another step inside the house but left his door open.

             
“I didn’t sense any shades when I arrived,” he said.

             
The thought striking her now, she openly panicked.

             
“Do you think they could have…” she said, but her voice broke and she went quiet.

             
“No,” Adam added quickly. As if to double check, he raised his chin and very briefly shut his eyes.

             
“No, I think your family left on their own,” he said.

             
She tried to calm the pounding of her heart, but her own gaze lingered on her hand. Jane would have known where her family was. She could have done something to them while Adelaide was completely incapacitated. She struggled to dig through her memories now. After a minute, she thought of it from her own memory bucket.

             
“I told them to leave. I forgot about that,” she whispered. Pressing a hand against her forehead, she remembered the phone conversation. At the time, her mother even predicted Adelaide would come home. She could have laughed now, but she was more concerned with how that memory had escaped her. It felt like a lifetime ago. It was a lifetime ago when she slept with Adam and then tried to kill Leon.