Verum (The Nocte Trilogy, #2)(50)

I walk Father Thomas out and he waves as he drives away.

Then I roam the grounds, because Dare isn’t here and I’m restless.

The mausoleums are quiet, the gardens are still.

And then,

There’s the boy in the hoodie.

He stands just on the inside of the fence, And his head is tilted just enough that I can’t see his face.

I step toward him, and he steps toward me.

His face is dark, and I peer toward him, Then another step.

Then another.

He stops.

“Who are you?” I shout, and my words are carried on the wind. He cocks his head but doesn’t answer, although there’s a low growl in his throat.

“What do you want?”

He’s calm, his head is down. But his arm comes up, And he points at me.

He wants me.

I run to the house without looking back.





Chapter 25





I feel like I need to go home.

I feel it tugging at me, pulling.

I’m not safe here.

But yet, I can’t leave Dare.

I can’t leave him because he’s mine.

The Dare he shows the world is different from my Dare, the one who holds me in his arms. I feel his secrets, though, through my skin, through my bones, and that’s not something he can fake.

I ache for him to take me into his confidence, to trust me that much, but he hasn’t yet. There’s something left to know… an answer left to be had.

I need to find it.

I don’t make it far before Sabine finds me.

It’s like she was waiting just for me.

“It’s time to read your cards again,” she tells me, as though it’s not one in the morning, as though it’s such a normal thing.

I start to shake my head, but she won’t hear it.

“It’s important,” she insists.

Her gnarled fingers sink into my flesh, her fingernails biting into my muscle. I let her take me to her room, to where it’s dark and the moonlight is shining onto the table.

The cards are already spread out, in the same weird cross, the gold gleaming garishly in the night.

“You started without me,” I point out softly. She glances at me, and sits down.

“I read them every day,” she admits. “But recently, the night of the party, they changed.”

The night I was with Dare.

The night I found out what he did.

Of course.

Everything changed that night.

I felt it.

“Pick up a card,” she tells me. “The one on top.”

I do. It’s cool beneath my fingers.

A priest rises against a stained glass window.

“The hierophant,” Sabine whispers. “The teacher. It means you must listen to me now, the time to teach is here.”

“Teach me what?” I ask, my voice the merest of whispers. I’m scared now, at her tone, of these cards, of this place. I was wrong to stay here. I know that now.

There was a fork in the road, and I chose the wrong path.

“I have to teach you what you need to know. Your mother wouldn’t let me, she left. But you’re here and you must learn from me, child.”

Oh my god. This just gets weirder and weirder. I start to get up.

“I’m going back to bed now,” I tell her. “This just got too strange for me.”

“Sit,” Sabine directs, her voice stern and loud and unarguable.

I sit.

I can do nothing else.

Sabine sifts through the cards, her eyes moving so fast that I see them working back and forth, faster and faster, like she’s experiencing a dream.

Finally, she looks up at me.

“Your mind is a gift,” she says simply. “But you have to learn from it, or you will go crazy from it.”

Her words don’t make any sense.

I stare at her, not comprehending.

Her eyes contain a thousand lives.

I stare into them all, into her gypsy mind, and I see that she believes everything she’s saying as truth.

“It’s as much a part of life as the wind or the sun,” she says in her husky, old voice. “It’s not strange, it’s not abnormal. We know what happens while others don’t.”

She pauses and looks out the windows, out at the black waving grasses of the dark moors.

“You can see things,” she says finally. “Little things, things that might seem like dreams. You might feel sick afterward, you might have a headache. You might even feel crazy. You’re not.”

The crypts.

Dare’s parents’ room.

The Sanitarium and Dare’s mother.

I try to hide my expression, but Sabine has already seen and she smiles with her grotesque teeth.

“See? You know what I’m speaking of.”

“I’m not….it’s not… real.”

She cocks her head.

“Your dreams are important. Even when you’re awake.”

I want to scream from the insanity of it, because it does feel like a nightmare.

“Why am I here?” I ask her, because all along, I’ve felt like there was a bigger reason.

“To recover,” she tells me, but I know there’s more.