Page 91 of Soulbound Shadows: Part 1

I flipped open the other box and took out the pieces of the array. Would I be able to figure out which of the tools hanging on the wall had made which marks? If I flipped through my mother’s notebooks, would they tell me which of my parents had twisted the wire, melded it together, etched and enchanted each piece? My hands began to move of their own accord, slotting the pieces together as if muscle memory had taken over. It was simple—so simple. How had I not seen it before?

The ascendancy array was beautiful. Now that all four of the scattered pieces were gathered and put together, it was shaped kind of like an hourglass. It had two elongated teardrop shapes made of intricate metalwork joined together at their points. As soon as I completed it, it floated a foot or so off the desk. Weirdly, it didn’t feel as though it had lifted up, but as though the world had moved down around it. A faint wave of vertigo washed over, but I shook it off.

The artifact began to glow, faintly at first, then blindingly bright. I reeled back, throwing an arm up to shield my eyes, and the light slowly dimmed into something warm and gentle. I blinked the afterimages away and looked around me, trying to get my bearings.

I was in a version of the cellar workshop, but a version sketched loosely in golden light. If I looked at things out of the corner of my eye, they were just soft fuzzy shapes, but they sharpened into odd wireframe versions if I looked directly at them. I turned, trying to take it all in, and gasped.

Behind me, in the middle of the room, stood two figures more real than the room around us, but not by much. They looked like watercolor versions of the real deal, color shifting fluidly over their forms in a desaturated suggestion of what they must have once looked like.

“Evie?” one of the figures said, taking a half-step forward. Her hair was swept into a loose, dark braid, her green eyes wide behind her glasses. Next to her, a tall man with curly red hair and three days’ worth of stubble raised a hand to reach out for me, but it passed through my arm.

“Mom,” I choked out. “Dad?”

“You’re so tall,” my father said.

My mom elbowed him in the side. “Of course she’s tall, honey. She’s not a baby anymore,” she said, her voice full of fond exasperation. “God, look at you. You have your grandma’s cheekbones. You’re so gorgeous.”

Watercolor tears welled in her eyes. I was crying, too, my eyes stinging, and I could feel my nose getting heavy in the way that meant I was about to have a full-on ugly sobfest.

“You’re here,” I said dumbly, my voice wet.

“Sort of,” my father said. “We’re just echoes, sweet pea. We put a bit of our spirits in the array so we could talk to you when you found it.”

My mother wiped a hand over her cheeks. “We don’t have long, baby. I’m sorry, I wish we had more time, but… we only have time for the important stuff.”

I nodded, trying to ready myself to hear about the powerful magic and the danger that could come with it.

“We love you,” my mother said, and I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. “We love you so much, baby. I’m so sorry we weren’t there to see you grow up.”

“We had to protect you,” my father agreed, putting a hand on her shoulder. “You’re incredible, Evie. You’re the best thing we ever did. I can’t tell you how much it means to see you like this, all grown up.”

I was crying properly now, ugly shuddering sobs that shook my whole frame.

“You have no idea how much I wish we could hug you right now,” my mother said gently, her voice hitching.

“It would probably just make me cry harder,” I admitted between sobs.

“I was like that, too,” my father said soothingly. “Real big crier. You should’ve seen our wedding pictures. I looked like I had severe hay fever.”

I snorted out a wet laugh at the same time as my mother and tried to wipe my eyes.

“Are you… are you guys…?” I’d heard stories about powerful magic users trapping parts of themselves for safekeeping, hiding them so they could never be truly killed. Most of them were fairy tales, sure, but I’d dealt with enough eternal sleep curses and enchanted animals to know that just because something was a fairy tale, it didn’t mean it wasn’t true.

“No, sweet pea,” my father said sadly. “We’re gone.”

“I started to get visions,” my mom said. “A woman, a powerful dark witch, was coming for us. Magic users had been going missing, then turning up with a hole in their memories and their powers stripped. Ewan and I are—were, I guess—pretty damn powerful, and if she’d gotten our magic…” she trailed off, her lips pressed into a thin, grim line.

“So, we put our magic somewhere safe,” my father said. “We loaded the place up with as many protective spells as we could, and we built the array. It has every single ounce of magic we had left in us. We knew it would… that it would mean we were pretty much sitting ducks, but…” He took a deep breath and blew it out again, slow and measured. “It would also mean the world would be safer. You would be safer.”

“You sent me away.” My voice came out tiny and fragile. I hadn’t meant to say it; it was like that hurt little five-year-old deep inside had taken the reins for a minute. Tears were still streaming from my eyes, and I wiped them away with the back of my hand. At least the sobbing had stopped.

“We had to,” my mother said. She took my father’s hand and clutched it tightly, clinging to him like a lifeline. “We set up a portal spell. It was designed to trigger if anything happened to us, to send you somewhere safe. If we hadn’t…” She closed her eyes, burying her face in her husband’s shoulder. He hugged her tightly, rubbing a soothing hand up and down her back.

“I remembered,” I said. “When I touched the first piece of the ascendancy array, I saw fire. That was when it happened, wasn’t it? When you…” I couldn’t make myself say the word.

My father nodded, and he looked worn-out. The color that was washing over them became fainter, slowly but surely. “The witch came here,” he said. “I don’t know how she found us, but she did. She brought one of her followers, the leader of a major vampire clan, to try to take us in.”

“Roland De Montclair,” I said numbly.

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