Authors: Jamie Magee
Cadence gripped my arm, trying to tell me to calm down, but I didn’t care to hear her warning.
“Listen to me,” I said flatly. “You can throw every lawsuit you want at me, you can dig up any past you want—but let me be clear: this is my house, and you are not welcome. And if you intend to dig up my past I will gladly dig up yours.”
She smirked as her dark eyes inched over me to the tattoo on my shoulder that had seven unique flowers across a vine, one to represent each of those that I’d lost, my parents and five of my sisters. Her gaze moved to my wrists, one layered with watches and handmade bracelets and the other where my scarf was. She could not stand my appearance and often let her disapproving gaze state as much. “Why on Earth would you think that I would have a past that would need to be researched?”
“You’re a gold-digger. We both know that,” I seethed.
“It breaks your uncle’s heart when you say such things…” She stepped forward and slowly circled Cadence and me. As she passed by my ear, she whispered, “A gold-digger is the least of my crimes.”
My emotions went wild, and my breath became a fog once more. I gripped my wrist, feeling the burn come back to me, feeling the courage to push my justifiable emotions deep down inside of my soul.
After she circled Cadence, she stopped in front of us and glanced at my wrist. “If you want to be an heiress, act like one. Lose your rags, your wild friends, that little coffee bar you love so much, and go to school for a real degree. Otherwise, leave my house and return when you understand what ‘class’ means. When you become the daughter your mother thought you could be.”
She turned to walk toward the doorway. At the threshold, she stopped and looked back. “Stop acting like the trash she found in her garden.” And with that, she smirked and left the room.
I stood frozen with rage. Cadence rushed to the thick oak door that led to our room and shut it. She grazed her hands through her long strawberry blonde hair, then let her head fall. “The night terrors are back,” she said in a hushed whisper.
I had more than a few odd flaws, and not being able to lie clearly was one of them. My silence has always been my lie. If I didn’t answer a direct question that meant that the truth was more than I could say or admit.
I didn’t want to admit that on the inside I was damaged, that I could never dream when I was asleep, that the only real dreams I have ever had were the terror I just had…and the one I had just before I lost my family.
When I didn’t respond, she turned and wrapped her arms around her petite body. Her faint freckles along her high cheekbones were made apparent by the blush that surfaces when she’s angry. “What else is back? Are the illusions back?”
“She’s not an illusion,” I said under my breath, knowing she was talking about my friend Skylynn, the one who’d given me this scarf, the one that had brought me back from the brink of insanity so long ago. “And she never left. I just stopped talking about her.”
I turned to walk to the edge of my bed that was centered before a massive window. I collapsed on the edge and held my head in my hands. A beat later I reached for the small pillow on the bed, the one embroidered with a flaming ‘F’; when I touched it, if I let my mind carry me away, my mother would appear. I would see her holding this pillow as she sat at the end of my bed and listen to me tell her about my day. She would smile warmly, eagerly, as I told her every secret I knew. This was a memory. A memory locked within that pillow, one that I could call forth at any time.
That was one of my other odd flaws. I never dreamed when I was asleep, but when I was awake, if I touched something that belonged to me, belonged to someone I loved, these vivid images would appear around me; ghostly images carrying an echo of a lost past. A past that was rich within the manor I was raised in, a past that I dare say I was madly in love with.
I have been told by more specialists than I could remember that I never really reached or stayed in a dreaming state at night, so my mind produced these memories, these images, as a way of locking my memories in place.
I would have believed them if it weren’t for the fact that when I touched really old items, items that this manor was filled with, I saw images from a past that I could not have possibly been old enough to witness. I have personally watched the most epic love affair of all time within these walls. A love affair that I could feel in nearly every room. The images of the past were so vivid that at times I spent more time staring into the past, to a love that could never happen again, rather than living my own life. I was obsessed with this manor. Obsessed with each memory locked away within it.
A few beats later, I felt Cadence sit down next to me. “Freaking fantastic,” she uttered under her breath.
Cadence was the last foster child my parents had the privilege of taking in and later adopting. My parents, by all means, were philanthropists. They both came from old money, money that would take centuries to spend. A year after they were married, they opened their home and became foster parents. At all times, there were no fewer than seven children in their massive home. I guess you would call them children; most them were fourteen or older, kids that just needed one break, one chance at a real life. Each of them left my parent’s nest with infinite love in their hearts, a solid education, and the means to change the world—or even create one of their own. Before my parents died, they had changed eighty-four lives…they had changed the world and had planned to save so many more.
I was the only one they adopted at birth, and that was by fate itself. On a cold winter night almost twenty-one years ago, my mother woke from a dead sleep. She thought she heard screaming. She rushed outside in the snow thinking that one of her children was hurt somewhere on the grounds.
In the snow, she found my birth mother, she found me, minutes old...the second my mother cradled me in her arms, tucking me in her coat, my birth mother breathed her last breath. She died without ID, without any evidence of who she was or even how she had made it on the grounds of this manor. It was as if she appeared only to give me life.
When I was fourteen, they adopted Cadence. She never had a chance to get to know them the way I did; they died three months later. Cadence was safe with us, though; my parents had the foresight to assign my grandmother as the primary guardian over the two of us. My uncle Jamison was the secondary, with which I had no issue. My only issue was that he married a gold-digger, and right after he did I lost my family. I’ll never forget the look on Mrs. Rasure’s face when the police escorted me in the manor, telling her that I’d survived, that I wasn’t on that boat. I saw right through her fake grief. That day, our war officially began. That was the last day I had a night terror.
Chapter Two
Flashes of the worst day of my life rushed through my thoughts. Without fail, when I wanted to feel my mother’s embrace or my father’s words of wisdom, my mind would take me back to the last time I saw them.
My parents fostered a strong belief that you must face the demons of your past in order to move on. Often, once they took in a child, broke them from their shell, and helped them find what made them special, they would set up a meeting with their birth parents, allow them to talk through the shattered memories and mend their broken hearts.
These meetings were always a surprise, and that surprise had a dual purpose for each of the Falcon children. One was to teach us that our past could surface at any given moment, and when it did we had to face it with open arms. The second was to teach us that literally anything could happen at any moment and that learning to react calmly to those unexpected moments would teach us never to fumble through life.
I’d seen the act enough times to know that when they planned a day at sea on one of my father’s boats, more than likely one of my sisters would meet someone from their past. I just didn’t think it was me.
No evidence of either my birth mother or father was ever discovered, but my mother was relentless and wanted to give me some kind of closure, some kind of peace. The morning we were to set sail, we were all at breakfast at a little restaurant near the docks. Cadence was terrified of going out on the boat and was begging not to go aboard. I was teasing her, telling her that we were all born to die, not to fear it…then I heard someone behind me say, “I’ve heard that line before.” I turned to see a young woman with long blonde hair and an innocent smile.
Turned out that a private investigator my parents had hired found her. Years before, she had filed a missing persons report on a friend of hers; she only knew her first name and offered a brief description that matched my mother.
All of my foster siblings were given the chance to see their parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, but no such people could be found for me. This woman, who knew my mother for all of nine months, was the only connection I had to a sealed, and presumably lost, past.
I stared at that woman, completely speechless. I can still feel my mother’s arm go around me. “This is
your
day, baby,” she whispered to me.
My grandmother stayed on shore to watch over this meeting. Nerves had gotten the best of Cadence; after she got sick, Mom and Dad decided to let her stay on shore with us, too.
Side by side with my grandmother standing behind us, we waved as our perfectly flawed family boarded the boat.
I remembered thinking that I should stop them, that I should go with them, ask this lady who had come to see me to go along, too. I told myself this was the beginning of my night terrors; I was happy and safe one minute, and the next I was all alone, running from an evil that promised to destroy me.
My mother thought the night terrors meant that I was afraid a dark past would come for me one day; that was why she was so urgently insistent on finding anyone from my past, anyone who could help ease my fears and allow me to feel at home, truly at home. My father had tried to help me overcome them by telling me to stop, turn, and face my demons. He told me they may not even be as terrifying as I thought, that in my dream I could simply be running from my own fear.
I knew if I chased after them, they would both tell me to stay with that lady, that this was my only cure for the terrors that had tormented me for months before that moment.
We never saw them again. Hours later, the Coast Guard was called out to a craft in distress alarm. They found a burning boat that was halfway under water…and no survivors. I lost five sisters and two angels that I called Mom and Dad that day.
My parents were right about one thing: the terrors did stop that day—they stopped because they became my life. I was alone and running from the evil that Rasure was.
I didn’t learn much from that lady they arranged for me to meet. Her name was Megan—I think. My birth mother had leased out a studio apartment attached to her home. She’d paid in cash, leaving no paper trail. Megan said my mother never had any guests or talked about anyone. That she was quiet, beautiful, loved to read, loved music, and more than anything photography. Megan only filed the report out of curiosity. My birth mother vanished, leaving the next three months worth of rent on the nightstand next to her camera. Megan just wanted to make sure she was okay, but she never found her answer.
To this day, I will swear that Mrs. Rasure had something to do with that boating accident. She was too shocked at how Cadence and I had survived. She demanded that we have immediate counseling and fought my grandmother at every turn on how to raise us. The paperwork to add Cadence to my parent’s will was never complete, so I was the sole heir to the majority of their assets.
My inheritance was supposed to be given to me at eighteen, but my grandmother had a stroke three months before my birthday. Mrs. Rasure convinced a judge that my grandmother was not of sound mind and had him grant power of attorney over me to my Uncle Jamison. One day before my eighteenth birthday, she filed against me, stating I was too young and unbalanced to be given my inheritance. The judge enforced a clause in the will that pushed the time back until I reached the age of twenty-one, which was now weeks away.
For the past year, Mrs. Rasure had pulled every stunt in the book. She even hired a private investigator to follow me; her argument was that I was still mentally unbalanced, captivated by my grief, and that it was affecting my sleep, my judgment. She claimed I was rebellious and would not only lose my inheritance but also destroy my family name. Her goal was to freeze my trust until I was thirty or married. I was sure that the age of thirty was another clause in the will, but the marriage was all her idea. She knew that I was the last person on Earth that would be able to stomach the confinement of committing to anyone, but by proposing that compromise she managed to paint herself in the light of a concerned relative.
Cadence let out a deep breath. “Okay…I’m not going to argue that Skylynn is or is not real; just tell me about the night terror.”
I had told her more than once how my last one came true in its own way. I didn’t want to tell her that I would lose them all this time. I had to make sure this dream didn’t come true.
Maybe I could ask Skylynn to watch out for all of them, not just me. Skylynn—my phantom friend. I pulled back the scarf that was folded into a wide bracelet on my arm to see the scar that was no more than a centimeter long.
Grief was my demon when I met Skylynn. I was a lost kid who didn’t think she had the right to live, that she could possibly be the last child of the Falcons.