The Mirror of the Moon (Revenant Wyrd Book 2) (26 page)

“D
o you need anything?” Jovian asked Angelica as she situated herself on the couch.

“How about some white willow bark?” she offered, her head pounding from all the wine she had drank the night before.

“I have some of that; it is in a pot on the table,” Grace said, indicating that more than Angelica had needed pain relief that morning. With a grunt, Angelica looked toward the table trying to decide if it was worth the effort to get up. With a scoff, Grace brought some over and sat it beside her.

“Thanks,” Angelica said, relieved. “What are you going to the market for today?”

“Dalah wants to show us around some more. Are you sure that you are not feeling well enough to go?” Maeven asked.

“I am sure,” she grunted and lay back on the sofa. A few moments later she groaned when a knock came to their door.

“That would be Dalah,” Grace informed them.

“So we will be back and we will bring you something to eat and maybe some coffee from this great café we will be stopping at,” Grace said and Jovian looked at Angelica with longing to stay behind written in every line of his face.

Ha ha, have fun with them,
Angelica teased him.

Bitch,
he scowled.

Now that isn’t nice, Jovian!
she scolded.

You know what isn’t nice?
he asked rhetorically, and before she could ask what, he sent a loud clapping noise through their link that made the pain in her head thunder to near blinding proportions.

Jerk,
she moaned and she got the impression of laughter down their link as they walked out of the room. Angelica was not sure how long it was after they had left before the knocking came to her door, but it succeeded in waking her from a doze where her head had finally stopped pounding.

She pushed herself off the sofa and made her way to the door.

She wasn’t in pain any longer, but she was still groggy from the over-dosage of white willow bark Grace had given her. Angelica pulled her white dressing robe around her tighter and belted it loosely; it was most likely Rama coming to check on her on Dalah’s orders, but when she opened the door she realized too late her mistake.

The Tall Stranger, if it was at all possible, looked worse than Angelica had remembered him looking upon their first meeting. With a gasp she took an involuntary step back into the room, which gained him entrance.

“Don’t worry,” he said and closed the door behind him. Listening to his voice gave her the same feeling that coming in contact with his wyrd for the first time did; she felt as though insects crawled over her. “I can’t use my wyrd against you for someone has stolen it from me.”

JOVE!
she screamed down her link to her brother, but he must have been too far away from her for she could not feel his presence, only the link.

The first punch caught her by surprise and sent fire through her jaw. She stumbled back and almost fell into the divan. Quickly she regained her footing and took a defensive stance, which only made the Tall Stranger laugh.

“Don’t think this will be easy for you,” he told her matter-of-factly. “I am a skilled fighter.”

“So am I,” Angelica said and took a swing at him, but the Tall Stranger easily ducked away from, kneeing her in the stomach as he sidestepped, effectively pushing her off balance and knocking the wind out of her.

An elbow to the back of the head sent her mind swimming, and her body crashing to the floor.

“I told you this would not be easy,” he straddled Angelica and, gripping her hair in his fist, pounded her head off the wooden floor twice. Blood flooded her mouth and drizzled out her nose even as darkness formed in splotches at the edge of her vision.

He lifted Angelica by her hair from the floor and threw her face-first into the wall. Angelica stumbled, arms reeling as she tried to gain her footing again, but it was in vain. The darkness at the edge of her vision became more than splotches, and soon it was not only invading her vision, but her muscles as well. She stumbled into a table near the door. The unlit lamp and other trinkets on the table smashed on the wooden floor and oil soaked into the Balageshian rug.

Blackness came to her for a time before she was enveloped in warmth and the smell of lavender. Strong yet pliant arms lifted her and sat her on something soft, yielding, and when she forced her eyes open it was to look into the warm encouraging face of Rama.

The attendant cupped her hands before her face and Angelica could feel the gathering of wyrd. She had never thought that sorcerers were as prominent as they were here in Fairview, but she was being proven wrong.

The space before Rama’s face glowed with power, lighting her face in golden relief. Angelica had never seen a Message Orb wyrded before.

“Dalah, emergency, Joya has been taken, Angelica beaten, the room penetrated … somehow.” In haste Rama threw the orb toward the patio. The golden ball of light quickly tracing its way to the intended recipient.

“Sleep now, Angie,” Rama said kneeling once more beside Angelica, whose headache was back. Her face felt like it was swollen ten times its normal size. Rama smoothed her hand over Angelica’s features. With the passing of her hand all care and worry left Angelica, soon her eyelids were too heavy to keep open any longer, and they shut of their own volition.

The last thought Angelica had was
he took Joya,
and without realizing it because of her stupor she sent that thought to Jovian as they raced haphazardly down the streets, winding their way back to Fairview Heights.

The next thing Angelica remembered was waking in a soft bed to the worried faces of Maeven, Grace, and Jovian all staring down at her from places around the bed.

“What happened?” Grace asked. “Where is Joya?”

“He took her,” Angelica said thickly, her voice barely understandable from the swelling in her jaw. She tried to sit up but the room spun around her, and for a moment Angelica couldn’t remember being in a spinning room. With a groan she was forced back onto the bed by ancient hands.

Grace pushed Angelica back onto the bed. “Stay where you are. I don’t think it would be a good idea for you to be moving just now. You will need to rest for a few days at the very least.” Grace scowled. “However, it is unfortunate that Joya has gone missing; we might not have that much time. We should be moving as soon as possible.”

“I know,” Angelica said around the pain in her head. “It was the Tall Stranger.”

“I didn’t think he was a problem any longer,” Maeven said.

“Me either.” Grace looked down on Angelica with concern. “Tell us everything from the beginning.”

So she told them.

“You mean he no longer has access to his Wyrd?” Jovian asked.

“That is what it sounded like.”
At first I was blocked from reaching you, Jovian. I originally thought it was because you were so far away, but after he had Joya, and Rama found me, I was able to project my thoughts to you,
she explained silently.

Maybe he is working with Beckindal?
Jovian queried.

It is possible, but then who is Beckindal working for?

Isn’t that obvious?

But what would they want Joya for?

Maybe two sorcerers of the LaFaye bloodline are better than one? Or maybe they really don’t want Aunt Pharoh’s work being completed and to stop it they have taken both the sorcerers descended of her blood? It is the same possibilities we spoke of before, after all.

I know,
Angelica said, pinching the bridge of her nose to ease the headache.

“I have not heard of such a thing happening before.” Grace dismissed it, but by the tone in her voice she was not letting the topic rest. “For now you need more rest. We will be in the common room if you need anything. Maeven, Jovian, come with me.”

“If it is all the same I would like to stay here for a moment with Angelica,” Jovian told Grace, and she conceded with a nod. “Do you think it is possible that he no longer has access to his wyrd?” he asked once everyone cleared the room.

“I don’t know,” she answered truthfully.

Two major things weighed between them at that moment and they voiced their concerns almost instantly, their words running together.

“What is wrong with me?”

“Why do they want Joya?”

Jovian smirked without humor and took Angelica’s hand in his own. “To say that something is wrong is to imply that something is not right with you, and I don’t think that is the case.”

“But is this right?” She snorted. “He said I took his wyrd from him, and it is true; I could not feel a trace of wyrd left in him. What if when I stopped his wyrded storm I also cut him off from his wyrd?”

“I could not feel it on him at the festival either. I remembered how it felt from meeting him in the ravine, but it was just a memory of his wyrd, not the thing itself that I was feeling,” Jovian confessed.

“What am I that I can do that? Reversing a wyrding is one thing, nullifying it another, but taking away a wyrders ability to wyrd?” Angelica stopped, for there were no more words to describe what she felt. Jovian didn’t have an answer for her. “Has anything strange been happening to you?”

“No, I think I might be the only normal one out of the four of us.” Jovian smiled.

“There is most certainly nothing normal about you, Jovian,” Angelica teased.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you obviously have some kind of wyrd that works like that of sorcerers, other than taking away wyrd itself.”

“I have been thinking the same thing. It doesn’t make any sense to me though. Why would I have the ability to do what they can and not have the markings? Then it brings about so many other questions. I am twenty-one now; will I go through training with the elementals like Joya and Amber, or is that something that only comes with the marking? Will I too become immortal?”

“Maybe you are not a sorceress; maybe you are something different altogether,” Jovian offered, and his comment did not help Angelica one bit.

“But what? I have been through the short list of wyrders and what I can do only matches up with sorcerers, yet not even they can cancel out what another creates.”

“Maybe you are something that has not yet been categorized.”

“That is what worries me, and I think it is the same thing that worries Grace. I can tell by the way she looks at me.”

“Have you researched it yet?”

“Yeah, philosophy tells me nothing about that particular gift.”

“Most likely nothing will,” Jovian told her. “If it is something that has not happened before, than most likely it is not written anywhere.”

“But how can we be sure that it has never happened before?” Angelica asked.

“We can’t be sure that it has never happened before.”

“Grace said that it was nothing that had ever happened before,” she said ironically.

“Have you looked in Joya’s book yet?” Jovian asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I remember when she first got it that I had no problems reading certain passages, passages that she could not read as well. I never said anything because at the time I didn’t think there was anything strange about it. Now, however, we are getting more used to wyrd and I am finding that my being able to read that book was not at all normal.”

“So you think that the book might give me answers?”

“It couldn’t hurt, and who knows—you might learn something more from it, like how to use your wyrd? So this brings us to my next question: Why would they want Joya? It doesn’t fit that they would want her just to stop Pharoh’s teachings,” Jovian began pacing.

“Doesn’t it?” Angelica asked. “She hated our aunt and mother, hates the thought of them and the work they did. Insanity like hers would extend to the offspring, right?”

“What about Cianna? She hasn’t been taken yet.” Jovian reasoned.

“That we know of. Maybe that is next?” Angelica ventured, propping herself on more pillows to better watch him fret.

“That doesn’t feel right either.” He ran a hand through his already awry hair, crinkling his face in thought.

“Okay, so let’s fall back on what we know about the situation and see if there are any solutions there,” Angelica was already beginning to think.

“Which is nothing. We know nothing about what is going on, Angie.”

“Not necessarily. Porillon needs Amber for the medallion. It won’t work without our blood; she has already alluded to that.”

“But she already has Amber. Why would she need Joya?”

“I am not sure. It can’t be that she needs more power because Grace said there was only so much that Pharoh could do. Remember when we were talking about using a lot of the power to open the veil between the Otherworld and the world of the living, she said that only necromancers could do that, and as Pharoh was not a necromancer she had no control over that, so the medallion would not be able to do that. It sounds like whoever awakens the medallion has control over it.”

“And whoever has control over the one who awakens the medallion?” Jovian asked.