The Breaker's Promise (YA Urban Fantasy) (Fixed Points Book 2) (14 page)

Though the building didn’t have a door, a black curtain hung over the archway. Owen brushed past it and I followed, revealing a tiny waiting room with a dirt floor, two cement benches, and not much else. To my surprise, Echo and Dahlia sat on the left bench, talking with each other quietly. They both wore the same red and brown standard issue garb that the rest of the Hourglass had on today, but theirs were adorned with a single golden stud that rested over their hearts.

Echo stood when he caught sight of us. “Thank the fates,” he muttered. I could tell he was happy to see us, and that feeling was definitely reciprocated. It must have said something about how out of place I felt in the Hourglass that even Dahlia’s face was a welcome one. “How have you been settling in?”

“Crappily,” I said, not even considering the possibility that he might be talking to Owen. “Is crappily a word? I hate this place. It’s like a jail.”

Echo grinned, and that warmed something inside of me. Though I had pushed Echo away, though I had made sure the lines I expected him to stay behind were clear and pronounced, there was something about him that always made me feel safe. He knew my mother. He loved my mother, and my mother told me that he would always help me. And the thing was, I really believed that. Maybe I should have come to Echo with the truth about who I was. He wouldn’t have turned on me, not Echo. I could see it in his eyes.

“That may be your opinion, but some of us call this prison home. Remember that when you decide to speak your mind.” And there she was, Dahlia; the reason I could never seriously consider telling Echo the truth about me. If she knew I was the Bloodmoon, Dahlia would spearhead a campaign against me that wouldn’t stop until I was cold and in the ground. Hell, there was a good chance she’d be the one who put me there.

“I thought you hated this place too,” I shot back.

“I said some people,” Dahlia answered, looking at her nails. “I didn’t say me.”

“This place takes some getting used to, even to those of us who were raised here. I can’t imagine what it must be like for you,” Echo said, smiling but decidedly not coming any closer. “Are you nervous?”

“About this?” I asked, pointing to the long stone hall that sat at the edge of this room and obviously led to where the crone was. “Not really. I don’t really care about what some old lady has to say about my future.”

“A Breaker through and through,” Dahlia muttered, still looking at her nails.

“It’s a tradition,” Echo answered. “All of us saw the crone before we left for the outside world, and it’s customary for those Breakers who can to see a crone every five years. It helps with guidance and absolution.”

“Absolution?” I asked.

Finally, Dahlia looked up from her nails. “There are those whose futures are dark. Destiny doesn’t always lead us down a path that is good for us, but those parts are just as important as the heroic ones. The crone helps Breakers who are destined for those things; for early deaths, for painful lives, or just for those destined for rather unspectacular existences, to come to grips with what the future holds.”

“But if you know what’s coming, can’t you change it? Isn’t that your whole mission statement?” I asked. “I mean, who’d want to die all tragic and early if they could avoid it?”

I absolutely did not look at Owen. This question wasn’t for him, even though he had a pretty intimate experience with the subject matter.

“Some things that can be changed are not meant to,” Dahlia said coldly.

Echo interrupted, looking from me to his wife and back again. “What she means is, the future is a delicate balance. Yes, all of us want long and happy lives with the people we love; but sometimes our sacrifices can go toward the greater good. Sometimes our deaths, or the things we go through that are so much worse, is necessary to procure a favorable future for hundreds or thousands of other people. “

I thought about Wendy, as I’m sure he was. The pain he felt was still evident in everything he did, but maybe he had at least come to terms with the fact that she did what she thought was best. Maybe that gave him a little comfort.

He cleared his throat and continued. “We give so that others may take. We die so that others may live. And in the end, when it’s so dark that no one can see, we will stand so that others might not fall.”

I bet that’s in the damn code too.

“That’s kind of beautiful,” I said. Echo smiled and nodded. Suddenly, the clip clop of shoes against stone began to fill the room. Someone was coming. A figure took shape in the hall at the edge of the room. It was an old woman wearing a long silver gown. Her matching hair sat in a severe bun on her head and her wrinkled skin sagged at the cheeks. Was this the crone? If so, she certainly lived up to the name.

“You,” she pointed to Dahlia. “She will see you now.”

Dahlia stood and straightened her shirt. Even wearing the Breaker equivalent of government issued rags, Dahlia wanted to look her best. She looked at Echo,” I’ll see you at home.”

I’m not sure why I said it, maybe because I was starting to get nervous, but I nodded in Dahlia’s direction and said, “Good luck.”

She scoffed. “Luck has nothing to do it with, Cresta. Not one damn thing.” Then, she followed the old woman into the darkness.

“We won’t see her again: Dahlia, I mean?” I asked, once I was sure they were both gone.

“Once you’re done with the crone, you’re given an escort home,” Owen told me. “When people learn bad things about their future, sometimes they react in unexpected ways.”

“They don’t want me to kill myself,” I stated.

“Basically,” he answered. We all sat; Owen next to me and Echo across from us. So much had happened to me in the last few months. I had lost everything I had ever been given and then, when I thought I had nothing left to lose, I realized I was wrong. Still, these two people were the closest thing I had left to a family. I trusted them more than anyone on the planet. And that was a gift worth noting.

“I’m sorry about your father’s family,” Echo said after sitting for a few silent moments. “The way they’re acting is ridiculous.”

“Screw them,” I answered instinctively. “I could not care less about those idiots. If they don’t want to claim me, then I don’t want to be claimed. The only thing I don’t get is, you guys are big into D.N.A. stuff, right? Wouldn’t it be easy to determine whether I was or wasn’t a Blut?”

Echo shook his head. His fingers started drumming against the concrete bench; a constant that, curiously enough, comforted me a little. “Your D.N.A. was sent to the Hourglass after that night in Crestview. You are a Blut. There’s no denying that. Your father’s family is contesting your legitimacy for other reasons. Your mother was a siren. Her Breaker ability had to do with mentally bending people to her will. Because of that, the Blut clan is claiming that your father was psionically seduced.”

“They think my bio dad was raped?” I asked.

“For lack of better terminology, yes,” Echo answered. “But you needn’t worry about that. Public support isn’t with them.”

“I don’t care about public support, and I don’t care about the stupid Bluts. If being declared illegitimate means I won’t have to live with those wastes of space, then I’ll declare it myself.” I looked down at the floor. “Even if it meant I had no place to go.”

“You would never have no place to go,” Echo said. “Not ever.”

I looked up at him and suddenly, I couldn’t remember all those reasons I had given myself to warrant those boundaries I thought were so important. So Echo wanted us to close; would that be so bad? So, somewhere deep inside, maybe he looked at me and saw something of a daughter. Maybe when I looked at him, I saw something similar. And maybe that had scared the hell out of me.

“Echo, I-“

The clip clop returned. The woman appeared in the doorway, cutting into my sentence.

“She will see you now,” she said, pointing to Echo.

“Are you going to wish me luck?” He smiled at me.

“Nah, somebody like you doesn’t need it,” I said. In an instant, he was gone, leaving Owen and I by ourselves.

As soon as he was sure we were alone, Owen grabbed my hand. There was something calming about him touching me, even in this small way. And the fact that, even while in his home, we had to hide the fact that we were together, made little moments like this all the more special.

“I’ve missed you,” he whispered.

“What are you talking about?  We’ve been together this entire time,” I said. He kissed the back of my hand.

“I’ve missed you anyway.”

I rested my head on his shoulder. Just for this, this quiet moment with him beside me, the rest of it was worth it. “Tell me we’re going to make it out of this,” I said.

“We’re gonna make it out of this,” he repeated, squeezing my hand. “We’re gonna move to Vermont and open a bed and breakfast. We’re gonna be the most ordinary boring people in the whole world.”

“And the happiest,” I added. Leaning up, I kissed his cheek.  “How’s Merrin?” I asked. “I know you went to see her last night.”

“The same,” Owen sighed. “I’m sorry if you heard-“

“It doesn’t matter,” I answered. “You’re here now, with me. Merrin will wake up.”

“She will,” he answered. “And when she does, we’ll deal with it. What about the letter?”

“I haven’t opened it yet. I wanted to be safe,” I answered.

He leaned up, brushing bangs out of my eyes. “Surveillance of any kind is forbidden in the lair of the crone. It doesn’t get any safer than this.”

Reaching into my back pocket, and pushing past Casper’s sweater piece, I pulled the letter out. The ‘Poe’ on its front had worn and was running, probably from the warmth that came with being pressed up against me all the time. Like a soldier working to defuse a landmine he had stepped on, I opened it slowly. The envelope ripped easily, like the letter wanted to be released. Funny enough, my hand started to tremble a bit. Whoever Poe was, he must have been important to me. Why else would my bio mom leave a picture of the two of us in the locket she left me; the locket my dad gave to me before he died?

Cautiously, I pulled the letter out of the envelope. I was about to find out who Poe was, what Dahlia had to do with it, and hopefully, why he was so important to me. I thought about the picture that fell out of my locket; two babies, Poe and me, according to the inscription on the back. But who was he? What did he have to do with my past and, given the fact that I had learned pretty much everything there was to know about my origin story in the last few months, why hadn’t I been told about him?

The letter rubbed at my hands like sandpaper. It was folded in the middle and browned with age. As I opened it, breath caught in my throat. Owen’s stare weighed heavy on me with the letter in my hands. I wasn’t the only one who had something to discover here. If Poe had something to do with my past, it also meant that he might have a hand in shaping my future. And, given that fact that he was the Dragon and that we planned on spending the rest of our lives together, my future was of the utmost importance to him.

“What does it say?” He asked before I had even opened it.

“Gimmie a second,” I answered. I blinked hard as the letter unfurled in front of me. It would tell me everything I needed to know. It would answer questions I didn’t know I had. It might even direct me to my bio mom, to that idyllic place my mother had told me about the night she died.

…you know, if it wasn’t totally unreadable.

It was nothing, gibberish. The letters were a mixture of weird shapes and numbers that made absolutely no sense. There was something that looked like half an eight, a shape that closely resembled a humpback whale and, toward the bottom, the number 46 written over and over again.

“It-It’s garbage,” I stammered, totally floored. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

Owen leaned over my shoulder, examining the letter. My heart sank. All the things I had built up in my mind were dashed with a single page of unreadable jibber jabber. But why would Dahlia have something like this locked up?

“It’s encrypted,” Owen answered. “What we’re seeing are anchors. The real contents are being hidden from us, sort of like what my dad did to my tattoo.”

“So it’s not gibberish?” I asked.

“Nope,” he answered. “If anything, what’s in this letter is probably very important.”

“So how are we gonna manage to actually read it?” I asked.

“There are people who can do that sort of thing ; people trained to see through even the most complex of anchors.”

“And my guess is the number people who can do that and the number of people we can trust probably overlap exactly zero percent,” I muttered.

“Probably,” Owen sighed. “But we’ll find a way. We always do.” He looked up at me from the letter. “What I don’t get is, why this letter? I understand why you went into Dahlia’s office, and I get the whole ‘Mother’s man’ thing, but what made you pick this letter? And what does Poe mean?”

My face flushed. I wasn’t sure exactly why I hadn’t told Owen about the picture in my locket or the inscription on the other side of it, other than the fact that I hadn’t told anybody. Still, Owen wasn’t just anybody. He was Owen. I told him everything. But there was something about that picture, about that little baby boy with those weird eyes that made me feel instinctively guarded. Besides, I was willing to let him read the letter, so it’s not like I wanted to keep whatever it was from him forever. I just-I just didn’t want to burden him it; that was all.