Whisper of Souls: A Prophecy of the Sisters Novella (3 page)

Adelaide dropped her gaze, the rocks at her feet blurring as tears formed in her eyes. “Of course I don’t want you to leave,” she said. “I’m sorry, Ginny. I know you’re here to help.”

Adelaide was ashamed. If the truth were told, she needed Ginny. Who else would embrace the daughters that Adelaide herself skirted with fear and worry? Who else would hold her tiny son with love when she, his mother, could not?

“What happened to Henry is not your fault,” Ginny said. “It is simply the way of things sometimes. And he is a happy baby. You would see that if only you would hold him. You would see him smile, his eyes bright with a light that can only be happiness. He needs you, Addy.”

“He needs to gain his strength. Then I will hold him,” Adelaide insisted.

Ginny was a silent for a moment, the only sound the wind whipping angrily around them, the trees swaying with the force of it.

“You must stop traveling,” Ginny finally said softly. “It is dangerous for you. For everyone.”

“I don’t travel any more than you do, Ginny.”

“Yes,” Ginny said, “you do. I rarely travel the Plane anymore, though part of me does miss it. But it is too dangerous, though the threat to me is different.”

Adelaide knew what she meant. Ginny’s role as Guardian made her a target not for the seduction of Samael and his Souls, but for detention in the frigid Void, her soul trapped for eternity while her physical body passed into death.

“If you don’t travel, how do you know that I seek the Plane?” Adelaide asked.

Ginny reached for her sister’s hand, favoring her with a sad smile. “I feel you, Addy, as I always have. You are my sister. My twin. The Gate to my Guardian. I will always feel you. When you seek escape in the middle of the day, fleeing to your chamber though the sun is high in the sky, I know you seek the Plane. When you pace the halls at night, stopping outside the doors of your children before retreating to your bed, I know you seek the Plane.”

Adelaide looked out over the water. “I am not as strong as you, Ginny.”

Ginny squeezed her hand. “Nonsense. You have been through an ordeal with Henry’s birth. You are tired and weakened. But if you stay with us here, in this world, we will help you. Thomas and the children and I will help you find your strength again.”

Adelaide wanted it to be that easy. She wanted to believe that the love of her family, that their care, would weaken the hold of the Souls. That she would realize what she had in this world and no longer seek solace in the others.

But it was not true.

Still, Ginny was her sister. It was her love for Adelaide that caused her concern. In a moment of clarity, Adelaide knew it was true. She turned to Ginny, trying to smile.

“I’m sorry. Sorry for causing you so much worry. I will try to be better. To be present for you and Thomas and the children. Truly, I will.”

Ginny wrapped her in an embrace, her sister’s thin arms still somehow more solid than her own. “I know you will, Adelaide. I know you will.”

The words traveled across the precipice of the cliff, drifting out over the water. Adelaide tried to think them true, tried to believe them. But something in her already knew that it would not be enough.

They spent the rest of the day indoors. Adelaide forced herself to sit by the fire as the girls did their lessons. She tried reading for a time, but finally set the book aside and took up an old piece of needlework on which she had not laid eyes since before Henry’s birth.

 Ginny sat beside her, reading quietly. It was this that kept Adelaide from retreating to the dim quiet of her chamber even though her eyes grew heavy as the day wore on. She had promised Ginny, promised her just this day, that she would not seek the Plane. That she would try to do as others did and live in this world, the flesh-and-blood world of her husband and children.

But it was not easy to find enjoyment in the quiet of the fire, the rhythmic motion of needle passing through cloth, the soft voices of her daughters as they compared handwriting. Not when the Plane awaited.

Finally, Cook called them for supper. Adelaide tried not to hurry through the meal. She forced herself to lift the spoon to her mouth slowly, deliberately, to engage in the conversation between Ginny and Thomas.

 But she was not really there. She felt as if she were moving through the thick syrup tapped from Birchwood’s massive maple trees. As if everything were happening outside her and she was only an observer, watching it all—Thomas gesturing as he spoke of politics, Ginny laughing, the girls sneakily hiding bits of onion in their napkins—from afar.

At last, Thomas retreated to the library to work, and Ginny to her chamber and whatever book awaited her there. Adelaide kissed the girls’ milky cheeks before they were taken to bathe. Relief washed over her like a salve as she ascended the stairs, the careful facade of nonchalance slipping from her shoulders.

Making her way down the hall, she stopped at Henry’s door, listening to the cooing of the maid. She leaned forward, peering through the crack between the door and its frame. The maid sat in the rocking chair by the window, the chair Adelaide had ordered placed there before Henry’s birth so that she might look over the fields as she held her son.

She had always known Henry would be a boy. She had risked her life—and his—to bring him into the world, and had known almost from the start that he would be the son Thomas hoped for. Thomas loved the girls. Adored them with his whole heart. But he longed for a son to teach the ways of the Brotherhood, ways that seemed lost to him here in the gray, chill landscape of New York. He wanted a son to take up the mantle of manhood that would someday, upon Thomas’s death, be vacant, a son to stand between his daughters and the Souls.

She had failed them all. Poor Henry would have a difficult life, though it would be made easier by their wealth. Thomas would teach his son all he could, of course, but there was no telling what other injury the child had suffered with his birth.

And the girls might have no protection at all upon Thomas’s death.

Adelaide watched as the maid looked down at Henry with adoration. His tiny fisted hand flailed, the skin plump and dimpled at the forearm and wrist. Adelaide’s heart swelled with love, and she wondered if the maid—was her name Mary?—felt maternal toward the child. Did her heart tighten when she gazed upon his perfect beauty? Did she raise his head, covered in fine, soft hair, to inhale the scent of him, as Adelaide longed to do?

Adelaide didn’t know. But her heart was heavy, her body almost incapable of carrying it, as she gazed upon them. She couldn’t bear it, and she turned away, making her way silently down the hall to her chamber and the relief she knew she would find there.

She dressed for bed quickly, grateful Thomas had been working in the library when she had come upstairs. At least she didn’t have to feel guilty about sleeping in her own chamber once again. It was not that she didn’t wish to be with him. She missed lying with him at night. But she could not travel the Plane while her body lay in Thomas’s bed. Could not free herself of worldly constraints knowing he was close enough to judge—or worse, stop—her.

Once in her nightdress, she climbed into the massive bed. The medallion was still in the drawer of her bedside table, though leaving it there would do no good. She would find it on her wrist in the morning, would know she had brought forth more of the Lost Souls who waited for Samael’s return.

It was not to be helped.

She could not stay awake forever, and though there was a time when she tried, a time when she suffered to keep closed the Gate, she had long since given up that fight.

She put out the lamp and turned over, her head sinking into the pillow, her soul already sighing with the promised release. Her body was asleep, her soul lifting into the air above it, less than five minutes later.

This time she did not head for the sea. Samael always felt closer there. It was far too tempting to give in to him as she hovered over the undulating water, the solidity of Birchwood and her bed a lifetime away.

She floated down the side of the enormous stone house. She saw Thomas, head bent to his papers, through the leaded panes of the library. He looked so serious, so weary. She felt pity for him. That he should not know the sweet relief of travel! That he should see it as evil and frightening when in fact it was a sweet release from the worldly cares that rode them like a plague.

But Thomas was a Brother, and though he certainly had the gift of travel, he viewed the Plane as a dangerous place, one that harbored the spirits with which he fought for his wife’s soul.

No. Abandoned by Ginny and Thomas, the Plane was to be Adelaide’s alone.

She continued across the lawn, leaving the more manicured grounds for the mown fields around the stables. In no time at all, she saw the lake glittering in the distance, the moonlight casting a million diamonds onto the water’s shimmering surface.

She willed herself to drift to the ground and was not surprised to feel the wet, spongy earth under her feet.

It had not always been so. When she had first started traveling, she couldn’t feel a thing. She saw the wind move the trees but did not feel it touch her skin, saw her feet meet the ground but did not feel it underfoot.

Little by little, things had changed.

She could not say when or how, but at some point, the Otherworlds had come to life. They had become more real to her than the physical world. The only place where she felt alive. Where she was not lost in the grip of a numbness that left her desperate only to feel
something
.

She was skirting the shore of the lake, the water soft and lapping at her bare feet, when she heard them coming. It started with a rumble, as it always did, the ground of the Otherworlds vibrating and shaking. Then she heard the hooves of their horses pounding the skies above, the beat of their wings sounding like a great bat preparing to descend above her.

She looked up, seeing their shadow cross the moonlit sky in the distance. Their approach was swift, the laws of the physical world irrelevant in this one. Soon they were crossing the cliffs overlooking the lake, the cliffs on which she had stood with Ginny in the physical world this very afternoon.

She did not raise a hand in greeting as they came to rest all around her. She knew they were there, and they knew she knew.

For a time, they simply observed her. Then, miraculously, one of them came forward. She recognized him as the leader of the pack. The one she often saw in front, raising a sword that glinted like fire.

His hair was flaxen. It was incongruous with his fearsome expression, and she didn’t know whether to smile or cower in his presence.

He stopped when he was a few feet away. Something seemed to move at his neck, and when she looked more closely, she saw that it was a mark very like the one on her wrist, the one that had appeared after her father’s death years before. She trained her eyes on it, surprised to see the serpent writhe and move on the surface of his skin. She was shocked when the man opened his mouth to speak.

“You will go to him.” The voice was guttural, sending a slither of fear mixed oddly with arousal through her veins.

She swallowed, steadying her voice. “I cannot. There are those who depend on me still in the material world.”

The soul’s ebony eyes bore into hers. “They are no matter. You belong with the master. He has instructions for you.”

She shook her head, taking a step backward. “I cannot help him. Not now.”

The being stepped toward her, stopping when he was only inches from her body. He was tall and imposing, arms and shoulders massive beneath his tattered white shirt. Had she met him in the physical world, she would have thought him a beautiful and alluring man. Here, his strange beauty only frightened her.

“You will,” he said. His voice was low, but the ground rumbled underneath her feet as he spoke. “You will come of your own volition, or he will come for you.”

She shook her head. “I cannot. I am not…I am not ready.”

She felt Samael then, felt his presence like an actor waiting for his cue in the wings of a surreal theater. Would he come for her now? Fear coursed through her body at the realization that he could. He could take her now, sever the astral cord binding her soul to her sleeping body. Send her to the Void forever, while her husband and daughters and sister buried her body in the family cemetery on the hill.

 But she didn’t believe Samael would choose such a course. With her soul stranded in the Void, he would not be able to pass into the physical world. Would not be able to rule it. He needed Adelaide’s body alive and breathing, a living Gate through which he could pass, for once she was lost to him, he would have to wait for another. For Lia, though it seemed improbable that her clear-eyed daughter would grow to sympathize with the Beast.

Yet, hadn’t Adelaide herself once been innocent and good? And here she was, communing with the Souls who would bring an end to her world, an end to any kind of life for her children and husband.

“He will not wait forever,” the golden-haired Soul growled.

“I know.”

And then, as if at some silent cue, he stepped back, joining the other Souls, who now moved away, standing sentry on the periphery of an unmarked circle. Samael’s heartbeat grew louder and louder until it was not simply his heartbeat. It was hers, too.

The sea of Souls shuffled on the backs of their horses, parting as the Beast himself moved through their number.

He rode atop a snow-white steed, its mane as fine as silk even in the faint light of the moon. It was at least three hands taller than the largest horse kept in the Milthorpe stables, yet it nickered softly as it approached.

She was not afraid. Not as she should have been when face-to-face with Samael himself.

Yet he was not ugly or frightening or horrid. This was the secret that she had told no one since her first glimpses of him on the Plane.

Samael was not the Beast. Not outwardly.

To Adelaide he appeared as a man. His shoulders were broad, his large hands capable as they gripped the reins. His thighs strained the fabric of his riding breeches. But it was his eyes that captivated her. Black as night, they were not devoid of feeling, as she’d once expected. Instead, they seemed to see into her. To understand her private pain, her shame and guilt. There was acceptance in his gaze. And not simply acceptance, but adoration. As if it were enough that she was Adelaide, failed mother, disappointing wife, conflicted Gate.