Total pages in book: 117
Estimated words: 112398 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 562(@200wpm)___ 450(@250wpm)___ 375(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112398 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 562(@200wpm)___ 450(@250wpm)___ 375(@300wpm)
Long locks of black hair whipped behind her as she headed toward the edge of the river, leaving a trail of torment in her wake.
Chest as heavy as the fucking clouds, I climbed out, and I stuffed my hands in the pockets of my leather jacket as I slowly edged up behind her, feet crunching through the snow and withered grass.
I stopped a foot away, just breathing in her pain.
“He’s going to hunt all of them, Pax. All of us. And he won’t stop until everyone is dead.”
Aria hugged her arms over her chest as she stared out over the muddy, stagnant river.
“Who is he?” My thoughts toiled with the possibilities.
She hugged herself tighter, and her head swept from side to side. “I don’t know. But I remember . . . I remember where I saw his name. When we discovered Abigail Watkins at that library where we met Maria Lewis?”
When we’d been searching for any information on Laven and who we were, we’d found an artist who’d painted visions of Tearsith and Faydor. Abigail Watkins. She’d died more than 120 years ago in a house fire.
“Yeah?”
Aria slowly shifted to look at me from over her shoulder. Her face was pinched in doubt and speculation. “Abigail Watkins’s husband was named Ambrose. That can’t be a coincidence, can it?”
My mind spiraled back to that day, which felt like a lifetime ago when it’d been only a couple weeks. We hadn’t had time to click on the husband’s name since I was unsettled by a guy who was watching us, and we’d taken off.
With everything that’d happened, we hadn’t done any more digging around Abigail Watkins. Figuring it was nothing but a dead end. Too far in the past for us to glean anything useful.
The dread that scorched through my chest told me it had to mean something.
“Not sure there’s a world that small where that could be a coincidence.”
She turned away and looked down, and I knew she was staring at the cell she had clutched in her hand.
I could feel her reticence. Like she wished she could squeeze her eyes closed and all this would go away.
That she’d finally—finally—wake from this nightmare.
But this nightmare was our lives, and I eased up to her side, bringing us shoulder to shoulder.
Vapor puffed from our mouths as we stood out in the glacial cold. Tension bound us, chains of uncertainty and trepidation, before she blew out the biggest sigh and tapped into the search bar on the phone.
She typed in the few details we knew about Abigail.
Abigail Watkins, painter, Tearsith.
The painting titled Tearsith populated first.
As if the chains had been loosened, Aria hurried to click on it, then clicked directly on Abigail Watkins’s name; then from there, she scrolled down her history to her family’s listing.
Abigail Watkins was an American painter.
Born: February 16, 1871, in Pendleton, South Carolina
Died: March 4, 1902, in Charlotte, North Carolina
Known for: Painting
Spouse: Ambrose Watkins
Parents: Robert Ray Smith, Beatrice Louise Remington
Ambrose Watkins was hyperlinked, and Aria stalled for only a beat before she clicked on it.
There was little information.
His name and date of birth.
September 2, 1863.
But there was a picture. A faded black-and-white picture that still held the power to punch the air from my lungs and sent Aria’s free hand clapping over her mouth, though her whimper was clear.
“Oh my God, it’s him.”
Chapter Eleven
Aria
I shivered as I sat with two of the car’s vents pumping in my direction, trying to thaw what had gone cold inside me. It felt as if I’d been frozen from the inside out.
Seeing Peter murdered.
Remembering where I’d heard the name Ambrose before. That thread that had dangled in the periphery of my mind finally knitting into awareness.
But getting the confirmation that he had actually been married to Abigail was what had made me feel as if ice had formed around every organ inside me, a flood of bitter cold rushing from my spirit and spreading out to saturate every cell of my body.
A tremor rolled through me, and Pax turned his vent my way, too. Concern radiated from him as he put the car in reverse, then pulled back out onto the road.
“How is it possible?” I blinked as he made a right. “He was born in 1863. This is beyond—”
I clipped off, not able to process it, let alone voice it.
Pax looked through his side mirror as he hit the freeway before he glanced my way. Apprehension scored deep grooves into his forehead. “So, what, this fucker is immortal?”
His jaw clenched when he said it, and his tattooed hands covered with the vapor of Faydor flexed on the steering wheel.
Another shiver rolled through me at the thought. Uncertainty weaved a path through my senses. “He was born. You and I both saw him walking here, in the flesh. He has to be human.”