Authors: Lisa Rayns
He smiled and effortlessly picked me up. “Of course you are, and we have many, many choices for you. Spain, Switzerland, Portugal, Morocco, France…”
“France is fine.”
“The French suite it is.”
He carried me to a room across the hall and three doors down and then helped me into bed. Candy knocked a moment later and brought in a tray of gourmet food: Steak, soup, a salad, a crescent roll, and three different dessert cups.
I giggled.
“I’m sorry, Milady. I didn’t know what you liked so…”
“It’s perfect. I’m starving.” When Candy curtsied happily and slipped out, I set the tray aside and stared at Draven. “I want to go back to South Dakota to wait for you. I’m afraid here.”
“That’s understandable. I’ll take you back in the morning.”
“Do you have any leads?”
“I will by morning.”
“You work better at night anyway,” I said with a wink.
“Sleep well.”
When he disappeared, I sat against the headboard, picking at my food. The French room felt much more soothing than the Egyptian room. It gave me a sense of being closer to Draven since he would be spending the night in France as well. The pictures in the room were beautiful; the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame Cathedral, the Pantheon, and the Louvre. I fell asleep wondering if he was looking at any of them.
“Elizzz-a-beth…”
When I heard the familiar female voice, I got up and followed it to a room at the end of the hallway. Pushing open the door, I found a moderately decorated study with a long bookcase that lined the wall behind the desk. The books were neatly organized according to size, largest to smallest, and they covered every subject known to man, including reincarnation theories.
“Elizzz-a-beth…,” the voice called again.
I turned to where the voice came from, but saw no one. Along the wall were larger pictures of the girls I’d been in former lives. The last one was moving so I walked over to the wall to inspect the picture closer. Lissa waved her arms frantically and called my name, “Elizzz-a-beth…”
“What?” I demanded, on the verge of annoyance.
The girl in the picture folded her arms across her chest and scowled.
“Okay, I’m sorry.” Sensitive!
With a satisfied nod, Lissa motioned me closer and said, “In the Eiffel Tower, you will find my power. Ignore my last wish, and Draven will perish.”
“What?” I shot out, terrified by the thought.
Lissa’s hands flew to her hips. “Figure it out! It’s my last gift to you.”
“No! He can’t die!”
“That’s up to you,” she said, before she reshaped into her original unmoving pose.
Her words repeated in my head, turning into a chant. “In the Eiffel Tower, you will find my power. Ignore my last wish, and Draven will perish.”
I sat straight up in bed, but a thick darkness surrounded me, and I barely remembered where I was. A light clicked on, and the Eiffel Tower on the far side of the room began to glow. I shook my head to make sure I wasn’t still dreaming. That didn’t work so I pinched myself. The light on the tower remained.
“In the Eiffel Tower, you will find my power. Ignore my last wish, and Draven will perish.” I said the words out loud, committing them to memory before sleep washed them away.
A small lamp in the hallway cast enough dim light for me to make it to the room from my dream. The room looked the same as it did in the dream, so I walked over to the picture of the girl that was signed:
Love Always, Lissa.
When my likeness didn’t move or talk, I turned to leave but something on the bookshelf caught my eye. All the books were still organized largest to smallest, but now one book stood out––a tall, thick book placed among the shorter ones.
I snatched the book off the shelf. Though the spine of the book revealed nothing, the front cover read:
Complex Witchcraft and Spells.
It was the oldest book I’d ever seen, and I immediately took care not to rip the pages. The bookmarked page read:
Imprinting a thought onto an object: Invoking dreams.
Red marker underlined the title.
Replacing the book, I shivered and returned to the French room. The tower was still lit up. I walked slowly toward it in the otherwise dark room, half-expecting it to jump out at me. I reached out slowly with my fingers, the glass felt cold…
“Can’t sleep?”
My heart jumped, and I pulled my hand back immediately.
Crap, you scared me!
“What’s wrong?”
Nothing,
I returned a little too sharply.
How did you know I was awake?
“A feeling…a rather odd feeling actually. It was similar to…never mind.”
You should be concentrating on other things right now. I need you to…so you can find Armando faster. Promise me you won’t listen or think of me until morning. Can you do that?
He sighed.
“You’re right. I know you’re safe. Sleep now.”
Don’t you dare put me to sleep! I’ll handle it myself.
He conceded with a laugh.
“Sweet dreams, Elizabeth.”
I love you, Draven.
“And I love you.”
I took a deep breath and stared again at the illuminated picture.
“What are you doing right now?”
When the test proved Draven loyal to his word, I repeated the rhyme as I stared at the picture. “In the Eiffel Tower, you will find my power. Ignore my last wish, and Draven will perish.”
I stared at the picture for a long time, hoping the power would come to me. Nothing did. I turned on the light and inspected the picture closer. Two thin layers of glass gave it a 2-D look, and to my immense relief, it had a cord that plugged into the wall. The back held an internal clock that turned on the lighting at midnight and shut it off again at four a.m. Semi-disappointed that I hadn’t found a clue, I turned off the light and returned to the glowing tower. Balling my fist, I slammed a hole through the center, hitting the wall behind it. The pain felt intense, but I was careful not to scream or moan or cuss.
Candy stood in the doorway a minute later. She turned on the light to appraise the situation. “Are you all right, Milady?” she finally asked.
“I’m fine,” I said, squinting sideways at the punctured picture. I barely realized what she was doing when she cleaned my hand and wrapped it in a tight, clean bandage. “I need to be alone.”
“Yes, Milady.” She tied off the bandage and bowed before leaving the room.
When the door closed, a yellow envelop fell down from behind the backing of the Eiffel tower. The picture flickered once, and then the light died out. I stepped closer to read the word on the front:
ELIZABETH
.
Ignoring the letter, I paced the room, my mind racing. Could I really have sent myself a warning from my past life? And could I really have known that Draven would die if I didn’t find the letter and fulfill the last wish? The thought sent me rushing across the floor. I dropped down to scoop up the letter in my now aching hand. I carefully opened it and read.
Elizabeth,
Yes, I am you in your previous life. My name is Lissa, nice to meet you. I see my own death. I will die tonight on the way to my birthday party but I
will not
change my destiny when I have a chance to save yours. You must fulfill my wish. You cannot marry Draven until you go to France. You cannot go to France until you have looked into the eyes of the Lord of the Underworld. The answer lies there.
What you find will save your life and in turn, save Draven.
Love,
Lissa
P.S. Please tell him I’m sorry.
P.S.S. And
please
have the house redecorated…I feel awful!
I gasped and lay down on the floor, trying to process the new information. Lissa
had
seen the future and long before it came too. It must have taken her months to redecorate the house and learn to how to cast spells if she wasn’t a witch already. She’d loved Draven just as much as I do now, and she was willing to die to give him his final chance at happiness.
For the first time, I had a very real understanding of my former lives and knowing that my soul had sacrificed herself for Draven was a two-sided blade. She’d done it for him, but at the same time, she’d left him behind to suffer for it. I vowed to make things right in this lifetime. I had to.
The Egyptian room was dark when I entered it. No lights glowed, and nothing appeared to move except the eyes of the dead that watched me. When I turned on the light, he lay there in front of me, bright and woven on the floor. “Osiris, Lord of the Underworld, what power do you have for me? What secret do you hold in your eyes?” I tried to put a mysterious edge on the words for fun, but ended up with the same results as I had with “The road off 212.” The eerie feelings that surrounded me seemed to double.
Stubbornly, I held my ground and looked him over. He wore a white robe, and his head and collar were bejeweled with gold. In his hands, he held two staffs, one resembling a cane and one a whip. He faced left, revealing a long beard and only one eye. I stared at him, not knowing what was supposed to happen. Was another dream going to pop out at me and reveal another riddle? After an hour of nothing, I laid down beside the eye, thinking that dreaming in the room might offer me the image I sought. I had just drifted off when…
“Don’t tell me the room’s grown on you.”
“Draven!” I popped awake, feeling strangely renewed.
He stood above me looking real and delicious in fresh clothing. I jumped up and tried to put my arms around him but he snatched my wrist out of the air and inspected the bandage on my hand.
I shied away, pulling it behind my body. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s the reason you wanted me to ignore you last night. That’s something,” he said, raising his eyebrows suspiciously. “What are you doing in here?”
“I…I was just wondering about Lissa.”
Abruptly, he turned and stormed out of the room. I followed him out and into the French room where he found the picture shattered.
“The light…it bothered me,” I explained.
He turned to me sharply. “What light?”
“It was lit up.”
Finally, he chuckled and the lines on his face soothed. “She went through an electronics phase. It took her only a month to figure everything out. It was on a timer, right?”
“Yes.”
“All right. What do you want to know?”
“Tell me about her…please.”
He smiled and looked up at the ceiling. “She was beautiful, almost as beautiful as you,” he said, pausing to wink at me. “She was different though. She liked to be alone a lot, and when she had an idea in her head, she obsessed over it for months at a time. I’ve never seen a woman so driven before, or a man…not even a vampire for that matter.”
“Do you miss her?”
His perplexed expression made it seem like he didn’t understand the question. “Not anymore. You’re here.”
I swallowed and ingested the consequences of the question before I repeated it. “I mean, do you wish it was her instead of me here with you?”
“Elizabeth,” he said softly, pulling my chin upward with his cool fingers. “I have always regretted it when you died, I will not deny that. But you forget that there is no her. You are merely a continuation of one soul, and I love you as much as I did in 1944.”
He wrapped me in a chilled embrace and kissed my lips. When a cool wind whistled in through a window, I found myself in my attic in South Dakota alone. It was better that he’d left me quickly because I was just about to demand my way with him.
I hurried downstairs to greet the blower of the horn that echoed through the house.
“Tommy!” I hugged him swiftly when he got out of his pickup, thinking it was the closest I would get to a homecoming. The air smelled fresh, the sky looked clear, and I wasn’t terrified of leaving the house. In fact, I wanted nothing more than to spend the entire day outside.
“I got your post card from New York,” he said. “Thanks, but I really wish you would have told me you were leaving so I could’ve said goodbye.”
“I’m sorry, Tommy. Things were kind of crazy then.”
“It’s all right.” He shuffled his feet through the gravel. “What happened to your hand?”
“Oh, it’s nothing. I’m fine.”
“Well, I was hoping you were gonna be home today. I came to take you shootin’. I did promise you.”
“Oh! Shooting,” I gulped, remembering the shots that hit Draven. “It sounds so…dangerous.”
“It’s all right, Elizabeth. I’ll go with you.”
I turned to see Candy walking toward us. “Candy!” I welcomed the girl with a big homecoming hug. “I didn’t know you were…” I stopped myself and glanced at Tommy.