*Maddy*
I spend the rest of the afternoon and early evening with Ella in her studio. She’s nearly finished with my official portrait, and it’s exquisite, so realistic it could be a photograph.
As I pick through my dinner sometime later, I silently wonder if anyone captured any pictures of Isaac and I on our wedding day. I hadn’t even thought about it before now, and my chest tightens with the sudden realization that we might not have anything that shows us together but a silly piece of paper with our signatures on it proving we’ve wed.
Dinners at the castle lately have been quiet and tense. Emery and Ben’s children are the only reason any of us haven’t succumbed to total numbness waiting for news from the front lines. Isla is getting especially fidgety lately. She wants to go to Maddox, that’s clear, and I know she eventually will.
How would she feel about me going, too?
I shake the thought from my mind as I leave the table and excuse myself, feigning a headache, ready to spend the rest of the night curled up in bed. But then I see the book still lying limp on my sheets and sigh. I have work to do. I have too many questions without answers. I need to know what Isaac is and how our mate bond plays into his fate.
But I also know the second I lay down in bed, I’ll fall into a shallow sleep that will be anything but restful.
I change into cotton pajama pants and one of Isaac’s sweatshirts, thankful for the slight chill in the air tonight now that the sun has gone down and clouds have moved in, threatening rain. I gather up the book and walk to the library, finding it empty and blissfully quiet.
For the next several hours, I sit at one of the tables and read. It’s not easy reading in this new language, but I manage, and as the hours tick by, my comprehension shifts, and a full story develops, playing behind my eyes like a movie.
Once, long ago, the gods and goddesses walked the earth alongside their people. They were both loved and feared. The Moon Goddess was loved most of all, especially by the women, who built temples in her name in every territory. The other gods felt threatened by her prowess and popularity and tried to end her, to strip her of her powers, and wiped out as many of her followers as they could before she banished them during the mythical Great War.
But I know all of this from my dad’s rendition of the tale.
My eyes grow heavy as the clouds part, and moonlight begins to drift through the windows in the library, mingling with the amber-hued lighting coming from the grand chandelier above my head.
I flip through the pages until the word “beast” finally catches my attention.
During the war, one of the two beasts, the guardians of the Goddess, turned on her in order to save its mate. The beast fell from the heavens, banished by the Goddess, and was cursed with the darkness of an eternally moonless night. Banished to a land where the sky is always shrouded in darkness, and nothing grows, the same lands in which the Goddess banished the gods who wronged her and started the war to begin with.
I perk up, leaning over the pages. Mate. At least one of the beasts had found their mate. I reread the page, looking for any clues as to why only one of them had a mate or if the other of the two had a mate as well.
But the story ends, and the myth I know from childhood begins, detailing how the Goddess rewarded her followers with the gifts we still possess today, such as the ability to shift.
I exhale, rubbing my tired eyes. This wasn’t enough. It explained very little about why Isaac can take the form of a beast from the myth. Discouraged, I close the book and stand, but it slips from my hand and clatters against the floor at my feet. The pages whisper in a phantom breeze before falling open to a page I don’t remember seeing.
I crouch down, narrowing my eyes on the strange symbols covering the page, drawn by hand over the text.
The text is still legible, somewhat.
“It’s said a night will come when the moon does not rise, and the heavens stand still in watch, as the old gods make their final stand against the Goddess of the Moon. Her banished companion, her eternal guard, will ride again, and face its other half on a field of blood. The victor will either usher the moon once more, and the Goddess will reign for her rightful eternity, or the veil will lift, and the old gods will come back to power, those followers of her holyness disappearing into mist and ash.”
“Good grief,” I whisper to myself, squinting at the text covered in smears of ink. Had I read that passage correctly?
I look to the window where the sky is turning a deep violet. How long have I been here reading? Too long, I gather, and close the book, deciding to put off interpreting that passage until the morning.
Mostly because I don’t want to believe that this war is some matter between the Goddess and those who wronged her, and my mate is trapped in the middle on some holy quest.
It’s too much.
I walk through the silent house toward my rooms but then stop as the sound of thumping reaches my ears, and a soft whimper coasts through the chilled air. I’m at the beginning of a long corridor leading to several bedrooms and sitting rooms. There’s something in the hallway with me. I’m not alone.
Every hair on my body stands on end as a shadowed figure steps into view. It’s dark enough I can’t make out its face, but my body tingles with a sensation that is begging me to run.
The body slumps to the floor in a heap, a muffled cry of anguish echoing through the hallway.
“Ella?” My blood runs cold as the shadowed figure laying in the center of the hallway jerks, a breathy moan of agony escaping her lips. I take another step, my heart in my throat, as the clouds part, and moonlight drifts through the window at the end of the hall, illuminating Ella’s dark brown hair.
Her tresses are splayed around her, and while her body is twisted at an odd angle, her face is to the ceiling, eyes wide open.
Her mouth quivers as tears roll down her cheek.
“Ella?” I cry out, fear gripping every muscle in my body, turning them to stone. Her back arches off the floor, and she screams, tears streaming down her face.
“Stop it! You–You’ll kill him, please!” Another gut wrenching scream of both agony and terror slices through the hallway, echoing off the walls, and then she slumps to the ground again, taking a ragged breath.
Suddenly, I’m moving, breaking through that paralyzing fear, and fall to my knees at her side. I check for blood, my hands running up and down her painfully rigid body. I can barely see in the darkness but don’t have the wherewithal to even think about turning on a light before running to her side.
She’s shaking and blinking rapidly, a trail of saliva leaking from her mouth. “Ella, look at me. Wake up, Ella, please. You’re dreaming. It’s just a dream!”
I grab her face, trying to turn her head to face me, but she lifts her hands up and clasp my wrists so tight I feel my bones grind together. Her eyes meet mine. They’re cloudy with tears and totally unseeing.
“It's me,” I beg as her grip tightens to the point of pain so severe I feel tears sprouting in my own eyes. “It’s Maddy! Ella, please, wake up!” I scream the last words as her nails bite into my skin, drawing blood. “WAKE UP!”
“H-He’s just a child,” she whimpers through gritted teeth, her expression shifting to something so heartbreaking I momentarily forget that she’s actively cracking every bone in my wrists. “You’ll kill him. Please, y-you’re going to k-kill him.” Her eyes roll back in her head, and she loosens her grip just as multiple hurried footsteps sound in the hallway–guards and maids, several woken from our shouts.
I manage to pull away from her, examining my wrists, which are red and swollen. A deep ache radiates through my bones as the throbbing begins, blurring my senses for a moment while the group crowds around us.
Ella is screaming again, pleading for someone’s life, a child’s life. Frantic voices mingle with her desperate screams, and I lift my throbbing wrists to cover my ears.
Someone tries to touch her, and she jerks violently, her head slamming against the stone floor with a smack that echoes up and down the hallway.
“Luna Madeline–”
“Get away! D-Don’t touch me–” I croak to the maids gathering around, choking on tears of pain as I reach for Ella again, clutching her sweatshirt with what little strength I have left in my numb fingers. I yank on her shirt and shake her from side to side. “Wake up! Wake up, wake up!” I start screaming Isla’s name for help, over and over, my raised voice cutting through Ella’s howling cries. I lean over her and scream as loud as I can, grabbing her face between shaking heads. “WAKE UP!”
“He’ll be good. He’ll be what you want him to be. I promise. I p-promise–” Ella’s whimpered words cut me to the soul. There’s so much pain there, so much white-hot agony that I feel it eating away at my soul as she pleads for the child in her nightmare.
“GET BACK!” Isla storms into the hallway screaming at the top of her lungs. I don’t look in her direction, but the people gathering around us immediately retreat, shifting nervously from foot to foot. Isla drops to my side. I glance at her through tears as her eyes linger on my wrists.
Isla is about to lay her hand over her daughter’s forehead when Ella arches violently, her entire body frozen in pain. She lets out a guttural scream like she’s being torn apart and then slumps to the ground. “Find his mate. Find his mate. Find his mate. It’s the only way. The only way.” She starts speaking so rapidly the words blend together into something new, something ancient, a language I’ve never heard before in my life.
“Isla?” I whimper and turn to look at my mother-in-law, still holding Ella’s face as she starts to shake. “What’s happening?”
Ella jerks and strains, her eyes going wider than I think possible. She gasps as if she’s fighting for breath as she looks from me to Isla. “Help–Help me– Mama, I can’t breathe–” Blood begins to drip from her mouth as the shaking becomes more violent.
Isla jumps into action, reaching into her robe pocket and pulling out a vial of the tears she’d likely been collecting tonight to give to the healers at the hospital.
Ella’s eyes go dull and cloudy, her chest moving in sporadic fashion.
“I’m right here,” Isla says, cooing and shushing in a broken tone. “Open your mouth, Ella. Please. You have to relax.”
Her skin is turning blue. I can feel Isla’s fear as she tips the vial against Ella’s gritted teeth, but the liquid just dribbles down her chin.
“Ella, please!” Isla pleads.
I look from Isla to Ella, then suck in a breath and do something I really didn't want to do.
Thankfully my shattered wrists aren’t totally useless as I physically wrench Ella’s mouth apart. She bites down hard on my fingers. It takes all my strength to ignore the searing pain. “D-Do it! Please!” I cry out just as Isla dumps the bottle into her mouth.
Ella jerks and chokes, then stills, and I remove my fingers and let my useless hands fall to my sides.
I watch her chest convulse–once, twice, then nothing. The gold pendant on her chest trembles, the symbols covering it worn from her rubbing it between her fingers.
There’s nothing in my mind. I feel numb, like I’m watching the scene unfold from outside my body. Isla is leaning over Ella, begging her to breathe. She shakes her daughter as tears glide down her face and onto Ella’s blue-tinged lips.
But I’m still looking at the pendant, at the symbols. The familiar symbols.
The symbols on that piece of paper in Isaac’s office.
The same symbols on the page in the book.