Lightning In My Wake (The Lightning Series) (21 page)

“We need to go see mom and help her make arrangements. Then we need to get to Portugal and set everything up.” She stomped over to her closet and threw the doors open with
such spleen that one of the doors protested by breaking free of the tracks and almost slammed into her. I caught it with one hand and pulled it away just in time to stop it from nailing her. In her duress, Colby didn’t even notice. She started simple enough, moving hanger by hanger from right to left, callously inspecting each garment and finding it not up to her standards. Halfway through the rack, it all turned disastrous. Dresses, shirts and skirts were tossed behind her, each with a matching curse.

“Colby, I thought
we were going to see your mom. What are you doing, Querida?”

A long, lithe finger was suddenly in my face, “No you don’t Theodore Ramsey. Don’t you sexy Portuguese talk me into whatever you’re talking me into. Look at this,” she
thrashed her arms out toward the closet. “Colby Sage Evans—probably the best shopping diva in the entire world. The girl who flashes into Bloomingdale’s and H&M in the middle of the night to pick up the latest fashion trend—her grandmother dies and she doesn’t have one single white dress—that—would—ever—do Rebekah—justice. I’m just a failure.”

She’d broken down again. I ignored her self-reliant attitude and pulled her to me wit
hout a second thought. She cried for another three or four hours before coming back down from the mountain.

Chapter Twenty

Colby

All Lucents are to be buried on the land of Xoana.

There were now two goals in my life—be there for whatever was in store for Theo—and kill Regina. I would never tell Theo about the last goal. Mr. Rule Stickler would gasp and cough and probably have some kind of seizure.

It was my goal nonetheless.

I knew it was the Synod. There was no other person so hexing, so foul that would ever kill a person as revered as my grandmother. And their little warning to me about complacency was well remembered. The Almighty should’ve struck them down with a murderous lightning years ago.

The next day Theo took my grandmother
to Portugal, her throat stitched up by a Lucent surgeon. My mom wrapped her in a length of white silk over a white silk dress—making sure that her hair was just right and her appearance was just so. Theo handled her as if she were made of glass, but somehow held onto her hands in a grip that told me she would be safer than safe with him.

Lucent funerals were void of music and void of speaking. I’d never understood that as a kid. I’d been to several funerals as a kid and wrestled with the silence of it all.

It was so clear to me as I looked at the pedestal, adorned with every white flower from every country the Lucents could pluck them from, that not only was silence the most respectful thing to do, but there was no music in this great world that could ever do my love for my grandmother, and the sorrow I felt in losing her, justice. And this time, this one time in my life, I would have no trouble keeping my damned mouth shut.

A pinch alerted me that my mother needed me and tore me away from staring at that pedestal any longer. Her pinch took me by the sleeve of my dress into the house of
Xoana.

“I think we’re in the wrong garden.”

I gave her as stern of a look as I could muster, “No talking.”

“If we have her funeral in the wrong garden, she will haunt me forever. Look at the maps and compare it to her letters.”

We sat down at the larger than life marble table and scanned everything quickly. I couldn’t tell heads or tails about the damned maps. For someone who spent her life travelling, I was horrible at directions.

“It’s not the right place,” Theo burst through the glass French doors.

These two together were going to drive me nuts.

“How do you know,” I doubted his theory.

“The voices—they’re angry. I’ve never heard them angry. This is a mistake. We must move her to the keyhole.”

As he spoke, Theo unknotted his tie from his neck and unbuttoned the top button on his perfectly pressed white shirt. Lucent’s didn’t wear black to a funeral. Black signified death to us and we preferred to think of our loved ones as travelling to the light.

“Look at the map, Theo. Can you see?”

Through all the incessant studying and reading, we still didn’t have a clear hold about Theo, his gifts and especially not the voices.
There had been no time for me to speak to him about what Regina had told me and I didn’t know when a good time would ever be.

I shoved the papers in his direction as he approached the table. There was no hesitation, no pause in his movements. His pointer finger pinpointed a garden, deep within the surrounding acreage.

The honest dour in his expression left nothing to doubt. He knew where we should be—or they knew where we should be. Our eyes were still locked when my mom circumvented what was proprietary and announced to those already present that we had to move everything to the other area. Theo led the way while an empty, yet determined air commanded his path.

And once we got there—it was as if we’d stepped into the knowledge of the ages. Topiaries of all heights and breadths formed a
key shape and in the middle was a perfect circle around the most majestic marble, center-staged pedestal. It put the rest of the gardens to shame.

Xoana
’s gardens were open for all Lucents, anytime. I’d often flashed there when I was going through something or just needed to be closer to my people. It was the only place that I ever really felt like I belonged—almost like I was destined to be there.

It was said that her gardens took up one fourth of the entire country of Portugal itself.

Lucent females filed in all around us. We’d had the funeral so quickly after her death that only those who could flash, or those who were close enough to fly in could attend. There must’ve been thousands of Lucents gathered to celebrate the oldest Prophetess.

And then Regina stepped into view, wearing a cream colored gown.

It hadn’t escaped me that ever since my little meeting with Regina that the Resin weren’t on our tail anymore. She tucked a stray hair into her conjured coif and all of it, the off white dress, the hairdo and as I starred at her, the way she sneered back. It was all more than I could take.

Suddenly the impact of everything slammed into me. Ari was in my face, holding my hands down. Regina backed away into the crowd. She was smarter than I thought.

Ari widened her eyes, begging me not to wig out. I calmed down at her prompt, but I knew that one day, one way or the other, Regina’s days were numbered.  

She didn’t deserve to live.

I distracted myself by taking in the garden and trying to make eye contact with those who came to truly mourn.

I hadn’t missed the fact that neither Collin, nor Pema were present.

Theo insisted on flashing my grandmother’s body from the house, directly into the garden. He’d taken care of everything for us through this whole thing. He’d intercepted phone calls and took over when my mom and I just couldn’t say the word ‘funeral’ one more time.

When I tried to argue with him, fearful of his flashing becoming common knowledge, he insisted that Rebekah didn’t deserve to be carried on the backs of anyone. She deserved to travel one last time.

And how could I argue with that.

And after he did, he came to my left side to hold my hand, while Ari kept a tight rein on the other one.
Collective gasps could be heard above the silence and the wind. But I didn’t want him to be constantly in hiding like Eivan.

That wasn’t living.

Sway had also made her excuses even after I offered to flash with her.

Instead of allowing mys
elf to mourn during the funeral, which was little more than each person silently paying their respects, I chose to count the people as they admired Rebekah. When the line ended, there were six hundred and seventeen people in total. The counting was the only coping mechanism I could come up with.

Some left directly after seeing her one last time. Others hung around, taking in the gardens. I chose to admire the place we were in, the place she’d chosen to be remembered.

My mother, myself, Theo and his family were the only ones who tagged along to see her laid to her final rest.

When everyone was gone, only the three of us remained. Me, Theo and Ari.
My mom had gone back to Rebekah’s. She wanted to get everything cleaned up. She said Rebekah wouldn’t want anyone seeing her house like that.

Three days after the funeral, I’d decided to tell Theo the truth about my visit with the Synod. He needed to know
and I desperately needed to get it off my chest. If they would kill my grandmother for my failure to show up at a summoning, then they would kill him or me for not giving them what they wanted—whatever that was.

I strolled through the gardens, focusing on his location. He was back in those gardens. I’d begun to call them the keyhole gardens. Ari had begun to call them the butthole gardens. He was always there and the day before, when I found him there, his head was in his hands. Slumped over in what seemed to be pain, he rocked back and forth. Whatever was consuming him never let him rest.

“Theo?” I called to him. There was no answer. He was on his knees on the circular plate of marble next to the pedestal. He didn’t hear me, but clearly he heard something.

The atmosphere was different in this garden. I’d thought I
had imagined it during the funeral—chalked it up to an air of sorrow. It was something more. Looking around, mentally comparing this garden to the rest, I realized the difference. The grass wasn’t growing in this garden. In the past days, the greenery in the other parts of the vast property had grown up a bit, but the grass in what I was now calling the keyhole garden wasn’t. Through the holes in the topiaries that gianted over us, butterflies fluttered and danced in the neighboring areas.

But no insects or butterflies meandered through this place.

“Theo,” I yelled at him this time. He never budged. I ran to him, desperate to relieve him of whatever I could.

I reached him just as he’d raised his hands to cover his ears—as if he could squelch the voices inside with the act. Kneeling down beside him, his reaction to my touch was immediate.

“Thank you,” he covered my hand that lay on the side of his neck with his own, keeping it there. “I don’t know how you can get rid of them, but thank you.”

“Are they getting worse?”

He shrugged and consulted the sky before answering, “No. Yes. There are more of them and they’ve gotten louder. They get louder and instead of demanding that I help them—they demand that I come here over and over again. So here I am, but they are relentless. What do they want from me?”

A new voice
entered our conversation then. I missed that voice. “They want what we all want in death, Eidolon. It’s simple, really.” Collin came to perch on his haunches near the marble circle, but not touching it. “There’s some correlation between the Prophets and those who are stuck in the fray. Some have said that the Prophets giving their wisdom was actually words straight from the mouths of the soldiers of God. The Eidolons in the past have heard the voices from the other side—and in order to quell them, visited the fray to help them find their way to heaven. Before, being the Eidolon was a gift.”

As I listened to Collin, I should’ve been amazed at his knowledge. I should’ve been grateful that finally we were being given straight truths, or what I hoped were truths, about what Theo really was.

Instead, anger pulsed behind my closed eyelids and drummed between my temples.

How could he keep such information from us?

“And now?” No matter my level of anger, we needed to know what we were up against.

“During the time of Eivan, the Synod, through the torture of Sevella
, found out that Eivan was travelling from the fray and then to Heaven and back to Earth, bringing back stories and revelations that the Prophets were no longer able to give.”

Theo was focused on Collin and twitched as he eagerly waited for his chance to propose a question, “So what? Why did the Synod care?”

The more Collin spoke, the lighter the air became around us.

“Why did the Synod declare the Prophets’ revelations void,” Collin shot back at him.

Theo hesitated, but I didn’t. “They wanted to make their own rules. The Prophets spoke of an Earth where humans had full knowledge of our gifts—and we lived in peace.”

“Yes,” Collin switched from a crouch to a sitting position. “And the Synod wishes for us to remain elite. Which is why when a weak link is discovered, they simply remove the weakness.”

“I don’t understand,” Theo and I both spoke at once. What was he trying to tell us?

“There is no difference between the Synod and the Es
curo. They are one in the same. Didn’t you ever wonder how Demetrius was killed by Sanctum when that was before there even was an Escuro? The Synod and the Resin council came about at the same time, during the rise of Eivan. So what happened to Demetrius? Sanctum was Demetrius’ brother.”