Chapter 55: Chapter 55

First a finger, then my hand. Wedged on my belly, it suddenly felt hot. I dragged it up to my throat. My breathing was calm, my pulse normal although a little rapid. My eyes narrowed several times and then opened. I discovered absolute blackness, nothingness. A chill. I was lying on a hard floor. My arm wanted to lift, but the effort was too hard. I could hardly move. I tried again, and this time my knuckles banged hard against stone. A tomb?! My breathing quickened, taking with it more oxygen every second. I had to calm down, but panic took hold of me. The long hours that followed the macabre discovery of my burial were torture. I was suffocating but I was not dying, madness was almost overtaking me when I began to recover some strength. The more the minutes went by, the more my body regained energy. My powers were still muted, but now I could use the strength of my arms to move the stone lid. The effort was useless, but it gave me a little hope. Now I had to wait to get my powers back. The pain caused by the lack of oxygen, mixed with the regeneration of my capacities, gave the trying sensation of being torn from the inside. Just when I thought I had reached the climax of pain, my powers were finally reborn. It took me a while longer before I could blow up the marble tomb.

I jerked my upper body up. My lungs gulped in the air greedily. Once sated with oxygen, I paid attention to the faint glow that came from my left and came faintly to illuminate my legs. My only clothing was a long, light-colored dress. A single strap held the airy fabric I was wearing which extended to my ankles. My long hair was swept over my shoulders and I was wearing no shoes. The time locked up hadn’t brought back memories of what had brought me here. I was sure of only one thing; that I had been buried in some sort of vault. Around me, two other tombs surrounded mine. It was cold and my feet felt the immediate effect. My abilities helped me push open the heavy door from which the thread of light came. I did it with delicacy out of respect for the dead, but I felt like I had the energy of a lioness when I dashed through the passage that took me straight to the Pomona room. Deserted! I didn’t stay long and headed for the exit as I had done when the castle was attacked by Morgan.

What had happened since? My rush became frantic when I arrived near the garden courtyard, I hadn’t realised that I had arrived flying. My telekinesis had never been so strong and so fluid, as if it had permanently anchored itself in me, so natural that my body commanded it without my having to do so by thought. I put my feet on the ground and found myself just behind one of the doors leading to the garden courtyard, the sun dazzled my eyes and made me take a step back. Once recovered from this assault, I scanned my surroundings. A few castes were there basking in the sun or having a meal on the terrace. I put a bare foot on the lawn of the courtyard and advanced with my heart beating wildly. With my head down, I felt everyone’s presence with such intensity that my breath was difficult. Silence fell and every gaze turned to me. Only the songs of the birds and the noise of the leaves of the trees agitated by the wind came to disturb this supernatural silence. This time, I didn’t use my powers, but I still managed to freeze everyone in the yard. Then came whispers, like a distant noise caressing my ears. I raised my head a little and the first person knelt down. My reaction was to step back, but others followed suit. Little by little, each caste of all territories combined bowed before me. Suddenly, coming from the common room, Carmichael and Thomas appeared in the courtyard. Thomas was next to me the next second and wrapped me in his firm arms. He squeezed them tighter and lifted me up in front of everyone.

“You’re alive!”

His enthusiasm touched me and I would have liked to express my gratitude to him in turn if my thoughts at this very moment hadn’t been so lethargic. Alive? Really? The words stuck in my throat and Thomas loosened his grip. I moved forward again, and this time it was Johnny who appeared in front of me.

“Damn it, Eve! You came back from the dead!”

“I came back,” I repeated mechanically in a hoarse voice.

“Okay, not completely,” said Johnny, his voice quivering. “You’ll have to perk up, my darling.”

He grabbed me by the shoulder and led me towards Carmichael. He remained standing there, upright. His horrified gaze lacerated my heart and I would have slapped myself when I felt the tears surround my eyes. He moved a little but didn’t make a sound. Prisca appeared behind him and grabbed my hand. She called Estelle, who dared not say a word, and they both took me to the top floor of the south wing. Without a word, we climbed the stairs and reached the bathroom. This floor had always been reserved for Prisca and her suite, but only Prisca had the leisure of this bathroom. Upon entering, I was dazzled by the picturesque side of the room. The decor made me think of the baths of ancient Rome. The mosaic floor whose designs I followed led me to a huge bathtub sunk into the floor. Estelle took off my dress and helped me sink into the water. The heat of the bath caused a strange shiver and then every part of my body appreciated this moment. Prisca went to sit in a corner and for a long time didn’t say a word. My thoughts clashed. Thinking, understanding and putting my feelings into words was impossible for me. After a few minutes, the water had realised its effect, so I relaxed little by little.

“I knew what just happened to you,” declared Prisca, a lump in her throat.

“But what happened to me?”

“You died and came back to us.”

A silence.

“Your body regenerated. The first time is the slowest and the most painful, but it’s an essential experience to understand that your life is still precious, even if you’ll not age any more or almost any more.”

“Do you think I’m alive?” I whispered, tears in my eyes.

“Your heart beats, you breathe, you are stronger than ever. So yes, I think you’re alive. You’re going to need time to fully recover. The heart is the most difficult part to recreate the first time.”

“How long have I been away?”

“A little over a month,” she said, ignoring how terrified I was. “You’re the first to reveal yourself in over a century, do you realise?”

“But how is that possible? My parents weren’t immortals, as far as I know, and aside from the Six, the only ones existing in this world are your family and Morgan. What have I to do with all this?”

“Maybe nothing, maybe it was written. Your resemblance to Eleonore proves that there’s a bit of Burton Race in your blood. It doesn’t matter, it’s a fact and you’re alive, so just ask yourself what you’ll be able to do for the many centuries to come.”

“I refuse to think about it, it’s impossible.”

“Do you want me to tell you what happened to you?” inquired Prisca, who seemed to dread saying it.

“Not today. Today, I don’t want to know anything.”

“Then I leave you with Estelle. Sleep tonight and calm down, you have the whole floor.”

I followed her advice. Without a word, Estelle put on my nightgown and accompanied me to the huge bedroom adjoining the bathroom. She promised to sleep in the next room that night and kissed me warmly before leaving me. I crawled into bed, closed my eyes and fell asleep.

I got up at dawn, took a pen from a desk and left a note for Estelle.

“Thanks for everything, my friend.”

I went barefoot towards the north wing through corridors that were still unknown to me. I didn’t even know if I had taken the right direction, it was so difficult for me to choose a way. The top floor was usually deserted, except when an event came to invite castes from around the world. I went up and then down larger stairs, along a huge corridor whose only daylight came from thin glass loopholes. Still advancing, I passed through a series of adjoining salons. Each more charming than the other, the dawn crossed the rooms which followed one another with elegance. A French ceiling, double bronze curtains on large bay windows, and an exposed stone wall gave even more grace to the pretty apartments in which I had arrived by chance. The rest of the decoration was modern, neat and streamlined, but it was difficult for me to get a precise idea because the darkness was still very present. Suddenly, I saw a trickle of light under the door of the next room, and I could already feel in my flesh the presence of the person who occupied it: Carmichael. I crept over and slowly opened the door.

“Hello…”

He was sitting on a fabric armchair facing a sofa in matching grey tones. Behind him, a huge fireplace took up the space of a restored wall lined with contemporary portraits. The rest of the decor was modern with designer furniture, but the room lacked a bit of warmth, some colour wouldn’t have hurt. He hadn’t answered my hello so, without getting upset, I took the trouble to sit on the couch. Carmichael was following my every move and I clearly felt the temperature in the room rise a notch.

“You may have decided to upset me since my return, but I’ll not let myself be intimidated,” I continued.

“I have absolutely no intention of hurting you,” he finally said with his voice as warm as a bubble bath.

“It’s curious, I rather tend to believe that’s exactly what you want to do.”

“You don’t know yet what your return means.”

“It’s hard enough for me to point out my own feelings right now, so yes, I’ll grant you, I’m not aware of it and I don’t want to be.”

“I understand.”

“Is that right?! I would have rather thought that you would hasten to tell me everything in order to put in place a strategy and to attack who knows what enemy of the great caste cause!”

“Your sarcasm is a pleasure to see.”

“I’m at least happy not to cause your immobility, as was the case the day of my return.”

“Excuse my behaviour, my reaction was only guided by the immense surprise to see you again among us, as unreal as it may have seemed. It’s definitely a sight I will never forget.”

A shiver shook me, and Carmichael fetched a plaid and placed it on my shoulders. I stretched out one arm on the cushion and folded my legs up on the couch, looking at him lost in his thoughts.

“Where are we?” I asked, eager to continue the dialogue.

“In my rooms at the castle.”

“Your apartments? Why don’t you live here?” I asked, surprised.

“I had them redone about fifty years ago and have maintained them until now. But I never lived here.”

“It’s very pretty though. The chapel isn’t bad either, even if your questionable taste has turned it into a bachelor pad…”

“The chapel is smaller than this floor. After the series of living rooms, you come to the corridors of the bedrooms and the bathrooms. I can welcome friends and not leave this level. I have my kitchen, my weight room, a steam room and a huge bedroom.”

“So I repeat my question, why don’t you live here? Is it too big?”

“Maybe, I don’t know… I happened to feel a little lonely here,” he answered, his eyes vague. “But let’s talk about you, why are you here at 5:30 in the morning when you just woke up from death itself?”

“I felt a little lonely, too.”

He gave his first smile.

“I’m torn between several feelings,” I continued, “the urge to flee, the urge to collapse and no desire.”

“I felt the same the first time. I stayed six months as a hermit and saw hardly anyone for a long time afterwards. A century later, it happened to my sister. It was then that I was finally able to confide in this rebirth.”

“You mean I’m lucky to have people who understand me?”

“That wasn’t what I wanted to tell you, but indeed. What is happening to you is incomprehensible. You know now that you’ll see all your close people die one after the other, but at the same time you find it natural because you are already dead yourself. You already see life differently because you believe that your life, your real life ended on the day of your first death.”

“So it never happened to you to experience an event afterwards that seems as unique and exciting to you as in your first life?”

A silence. It was hard for me to explain, but Carmichael’s last words struck me like a revelation. The feeling of being out of time was the strongest and loneliness no longer scared me. I had never been very surrounded before my life at the castle, but it seemed to me that this time now was almost over, that I was part of the spectres of this world to haunt it forever.

“A lot of exciting things happened to me after my first death,” replied Carmichael with a sublime crooked smile. “And to be honest, one of the rare moments when I felt more alive than ever was the day of our meeting.”

Carmichael’s words left me speechless, for they had been spoken with great sincerity.

“It’s funny!” I said stupidly. “That day leaves me with less happy memories.”

“It doesn’t surprise me… My behaviour wasn’t that of a gentleman.”

“You’re not wrong!” I scoffed. “You tried to violate my mind and allowed yourself to kiss me against my will, if I remember correctly.”

“That’s true, but imagine yourself in my place. I came to recruit a caste and my only desire was to monopolise their powers and then I came across you.”

Carmichael surprised me. He had never confided in me until now and the ease with which he twisted his words appealed to me. I thus understood that the fact of having been killed and having come back to life meant something to him. As if a barrier between us had just crumbled and made me discover a Carmichael in a different light.

“Meeting me was so striking to you?”

“I don’t know if you can grasp the situation as I experienced it. I’m over three hundred years old, I’ve died many times and always come back. I no longer see life as days that follow one another and where I had to obey a father whose madness was gaining ground over the centuries. I’m in a high school classroom in London and I’m about to meet a promising young caste and all the witnesses who know her relate surreal facts. Until finally we talk about the fact that you could be the young woman of Egeria’s prophecy. Obviously, I’m interested in your case, but I didn’t expect you to share power with me.”

“Attraction?”

“Yes, attraction, which hit me in the face when I walked into that classroom, because it was the biggest slap I had ever received. From that moment, I knew that my destiny would be linked to yours in one way or another. Yet I continued as planned by letting Sophie try to read your thoughts and trying to seduce you like the last of the castes. I blame myself now for having such a childish approach, but I wasn’t quite myself anymore.”

“If these explanations serve as apologies, they are accepted.”

“I took to the road after that but hardly had I gone a few kilometres then I backtracked, I had to see you again. Let you know that you weren’t just anyone. There was no way my father would get his hands on you, I told myself over and over again. I thwarted Gregory’s plans several times while waiting for the moment when, on your own, you would come to join me. I had kidnapped Thomas the morning of our meeting, not out of jealousy, but to get to you and do the few DNA tests that I had promised my father on this unknown caste. As I knew he was in love with you, I preferred to remove him rather than Eric, and I now understood my mistake. Every male caste within a few yards of you was lost, you still would have attracted them like flies. When I saw you, I remember it well, I knew how much you cared about Thomas. I knew that as long as you were so in love, I had no chance of finding my place by your side. That’s when I asked Naomi to use whatever means possible to keep Thomas out of your life for good.”

“All that, I know, Carmichael, but what did you expect from me?”

“I don’t know. I’m not going to lie to you, at first my thoughts weren’t very moral…”

“I wasn’t going to remind you!”

“Now everything has changed.”

“Yes, everything has changed.”

A new silence fell between us. I didn’t know yet where this conversation would take us, but I didn’t want to interrupt it. In a way, it made me feel good. I lived through Carmichael’s words and rediscovered, thanks to his memories, the time of my properly human life. It was, so to speak, the time of innocence, where futile primary desires ruled my life.

“You don’t ask me about your brother?” wondered Carmichael.

“The truth is that I’m afraid to ask you, if he hasn’t come to welcome me yet, I conclude that he must have something to do with my death in one way or another, doesn’t he?”

“Your brother didn’t kill you.”

“So where is he?”

“He disappeared with Blake and Naomi the night you died.”

“All three?!”

“That’s not all.”

Carmichael’s speech suddenly quickened. He was scrutinising me carefully to see if the memories were coming back to me.

“Close your eyes, Everliegh, and relive what happened.”

I did so and my mind took me to the Pomona room:

Six strange individuals have just entered, Caleb is violently thrown and hits the ceiling, I save him from a painful fall, the Six kidnap Magnus, I mentally fight the alleged Althea who presents herself as the caste queen, the mistress of all time. I’m exhausted but I feel my strength quickly returning. The image becomes blurred. I begin to make out the exit. I run. I’m in the garden courtyard. The battle rages on and the sound of broken windows bleeds my ears. I feel bad for the castle, I want to see all these strangers outside, but I want to know who each one is, what they want from us. I freeze everything. My power insinuates itself through all the pores of the castle, the energy that I deploy is fluid, it takes strength from me, but rather slowly. I release my friends. Morgan is unmasked. Everything becomes blurry again.

“What happened to Morgan? Did you capture him?”

Carmichael looked taken aback. He was obviously expecting another question.

“He’s dead.”

“Dead? Who killed him?”

“Blake.”

“And Blake disappeared right after?”

“Yes.”

“Did you have time to get Morgan to talk?”

“Nope. You had just died. The moment you hit the ground, everyone regained their powers and the fight started all over again. Blake managed to capture Morgan and burned him until his body was reduced to dust. He couldn’t stay alive, even to be interrogated. He represented a great danger with greatly improved abilities over the centuries. According to Blake, Morgan was fifteen hundred years old. You can’t survive all this time without having great powers. Finally, his only weak point was Blake, who had rubbed shoulders with him for a while. They had forged a relationship before, based on a certain respect. Blake didn’t know many immortals, other than his brother and Egeria, and anything to do with immortality fascinated him. My father always said that even a caste with the most extraordinary powers would no longer be able to impress Blake if it turned out that this same caste was mortal. Which is why I wonder why he’s not in that castle right now, looking for your company. Anyway, Morgan and Blake were friends for a while, both were passionate about science and often they confronted their theories and their experiences. One day, Morgan suggested to Blake that Magnus no longer had a place in power and that it was time for things to change. Blake saw through his words the first steps of a man fomenting a revolt and who, with judiciously scattered sentences in their conversation, wanted to convince him to help him overthrow his own brother. My uncle was right, and before Morgan knew anything, Blake sold him out to Magnus as a traitor and he was left to rot in Amsterdam for centuries. We certainly freed him inadvertently, but he’ll not have benefited much from his freedom.”

Carmichael was silent for a moment. He was watching me, stretched out in front of him, the plaid pulled up over my shoulders, ready to listen to the continuation of the fascinating story of the adventures of Blake and Morgan.

“Don’t you remember anything else?” inquired Carmichael.

“Nope.”

I stared at him for a moment. He had his arms crossed, and the feelings I perceived showed some agitation because he clearly feared something. I closed my eyes again and relived the whole scene from the beginning. The minutes passed and I still made efforts to concentrate. The blur took some time to dissipate, then an image took shape slowly then became clear, precise. It imposed itself on me like a new death. I uttered a cry of terror.

“Is he alive?!” I shouted, both mad with rage and sadness.

“Yes.”

“Why did he do it?!”

“We don’t know.”

“For a month, he’s been alive and you don’t know why he did this!”

“He didn’t wake up.”

“What?!”

Then reality hit me. Eric had wanted me dead. I was dead. What was I doing here talking when I should have been nothing. My tears dried up like my heart at that moment. Tired, I went to the window. Carmichael sat watching my every move and weighing his words, but I didn’t want to hear him anymore. Before my eyes, the garden courtyard was deserted. From the top of this floor, I could see the heights of the castle and further on its stables and a magnificent landscape sublimated by a rising sun. Behind the ramparts, outside the enclosure, extended the ruins of the annexes of the castle. Facing each other, they ran from the small tower in the north wing to the edge of the forest to the east. Abandoned, they had been destroyed in a fire during the French Revolution. I rarely went to this side, because the small paths didn’t lead to the lake, my favourite place for my daily walks. However, I had been there a few times for a walk and I was amazed each time by the way these ruins were hidden by the trees scattered all around. It seemed to me that at one time, they were used as dormitories for the servants of the castle, kitchens and laundry. Since then, neither Magnus, nor Blake, nor Carmichael had had the premises restored. In the course of a conversation, Carmichael had hinted that renovating the two annexes would revive bad memories for some and that the castle, the lake pavilions and the pavilions near the main entrance, reserved enough space for accommodation. I thought it was a shame but didn’t see the point of it either, unless it was to give more character to the estate. But the main thing was the castle. On closer inspection, it no longer bore the scars from Morgan’s attack and all the windows had been changed. Given the incalculable number of windows, it must have cost a fortune. Only the bay window giving access to the garden courtyard from the entrance was still under repair.

“Eric fell into a coma right after…,” said Carmichael, tearing me away from my thoughts.

“I don’t want to know.”

A silence.

“Understood.”

It was a few more minutes before Carmichael picked up his cell phone and made a call. He went into a nearby living room while I sat down again, haggard, on one of the sofas. The fireless fireplace was my focus, as my brain no longer dared to think. In the vagueness, I jumped when Carmichael put his hand on my shoulder.

“Get your things, we’re leaving.”