Legacy of the Lost Page 2

  At the very bottom of the box, I found a receipt, folded in half, and then folded in half again. There was handwriting on the back, the thick black ink easily visible through the thin paper.

  “It’s a note,” I told Emi as I unfolded the receipt. Once again, my mom’s distinctive semi-cursive handwriting was unmistakable. “It’s from her.”

  “What does it say?” Emi asked, stepping closer. She eased down onto the foot of the bed, craning her neck to see the words.

  “Cora,” I read aloud, “I screwed up.” My heart lurched and my voice failed, and I had to clear my throat in order to keep reading. “I’m so sorry. These should help. You won’t have to live in fear anymore. I wish I’d figured this out sooner. Everything could have been so much easier for you. Better late than never, I hope. I’m sorry, sweetie. I love you.”

  When I finished reading, I closed my eyes, fighting the tell-tale sting of tears. My nostrils flared as I attempted to regulate my breathing. I clenched my teeth and opened my eyes, staring at the note but not really seeing it.

  “May I?” Emi said, reaching for the slip of paper.

  Numbly, I handed the receipt to her, then picked up the smaller of the newspaper-wrapped bundles. It was the heavier of the two, but by no means heavy. The majority of the bulk was paper, and unwrapping it seemed to take forever. But finally, I reached the core.

  It was a necklace. An antique one, by the looks of it. The links of the gold chain were heavier than was fashionable for women’s jewelry these days. A golden, teardrop-shaped pendant hung from the chain, about the size of a silver dollar. Delicate, intricate designs had been etched into the metal surrounding the smooth, round stone set into the center of the pendant. The stone was the color of yellow amber but devoid of any imperfection, and it had a strange, incandescent quality.

  “It’s beautiful,” Emi said, her voice hushed.

  I nodded. “And ancient.”

  It wasn’t that the necklace looked old or worn or anything like that; rather, it appeared to be in pristine condition. But it felt old. I couldn’t explain it, but instinct told me this pendant was older than anything I’d ever touched before.

  “Here,” I said, handing the necklace to Emi. “Take a look.”

  When she took it, I reached for the second bundle.

  “That’s interesting,” Emi said, holding the pendant on the palm of her hand and letting the chain dangle.

  “Hm?”

  “Look,” Emi said, angling her palm toward me so I had a good view of the pendant. “It must be some kind of a mood stone.”

  It took me a moment to register her meaning. But then I saw it. The stone was no longer amber; it was clear, devoid of all color.

  I frowned. “Weird,” I said, returning my attention to the second bundle as I unwrapped it.

  The final layer of newspaper pulled away, and an orb as smooth as glass settled in my palm. It was filled with some sort of liquid, more viscous and far lighter than water, cut through by ribbons of glittering, gleaming turquoise that slowly shifted and swirled, ever-changing and never stopping. I was either looking at the world’s most hypnotizing paper weight, or something else. I was leaning toward something else.

  It started with just a tickle in my mind. The buzz of invisible mosquitos. It grew louder, until whispers filled my ears. Thousands of voices. Too many to distinguish one from another. Too many to ignore.

  My mind suddenly felt fuzzy, my eyelids heavy. The room tilted to the side, then started to spin and darken as the voices grew louder and louder.

  An episode. I was having an episode, I realized distantly. This one felt different. Strange. But it had to be an episode. It was the only explanation my hazy mind could come up with.

  I thought I could hear Emi, but she was too far away. Her words were drowned out by the mass of voices, all shouting to be heard.

  I was grateful for the darkness closing in around me. It promised peace. Quiet.

  And thankfully, it delivered.

  3

  I woke in a daze, mind groggy and memory jumbled.

  “Cora?” It was Emi. “Are you awake?”

  It took some effort, but I managed to crack my eyelids open. One look at the brass and bronze light fixture on the ceiling, and I knew I was lying on my bed, stretched out on top of the comforter, from the feel of it.

  I blinked, then opened my eyes wider and really looked around.

  Tila lay stretched out beside me, a none-too-dainty snore rumbling the mattress with every inhale. Emi was perched on the edge of the bed near my right hip, her upper body angled toward me, close but not touching. She was cradling the glass orb in one hand, absentmindedly rubbing her thumb against the smooth surface.

  “What happened?” I asked, then coughed gently to clear my throat.

  Emi frowned, her eyes shifting from me to the glassy orb and back. “I was just about to ask you the same thing,” she said softly.

  Groaning, I propped myself up on my elbows, my stare fixing on the orb. It was empty, looking like nothing more than clear glass Christmas tree ornament.

  “It’s empty,” I commented.

  Emi’s brow furrowed. “There was something in it?”

  I looked from the orb to Emi and back. “Yeah, the blue swirly stuff . . .”

  “Oh.” Emi frowned. “I didn’t see that.”

  It was my turn to frown. Had I imagined the swirling ribbons of blue? Had it been a hallucination, just an early symptom of the mounting episode?

  “So, was that an episode?” Emi asked, the concern in her voice palpable.

  I swallowed roughly, finding the implications that touching the orb had caused an episode extremely disturbing. Up until this point in my life, the debilitating effects of my condition—the hallucinations, seizures, and on occasion, loss of consciousness—had only reared their ugly heads when I’d had human contact. Skin-to-skin, for the most part. Animals were a safe zone.

  But if touching things was going to start triggering episodes now, I might as well just seal myself off in a bubble. No food or water, thanks. If I couldn’t touch anything anymore, I wouldn’t want to live that long, anyway.

  “It felt kind of like one,” I admitted reluctantly. Speaking the words out loud made the horrific implications seem that much more real. That much more threatening. What would trigger an episode next? Tila? My computer? The VR headset? A glass of water? The air?

  I let my elbows slide out from behind me and dropped back down to the bed, exhaling in a huff. After a second thought, the few days it would take me to perish in that bubble would be too long to wait. Better to just end it now.

  The worst part of it was that my mom wasn’t even here to talk me down. If the package and its ominous note were anything to go by, it looked like my worst fear about her was coming true. She might never return.

  The tears that had threatened earlier were closer now, making my eyes sting and my chin tremble. Sure, my mom was gone half the time, but she was still the most important person in my life, and I couldn’t imagine her being gone for good. Being gone forever.

  I rolled onto my side, away from Emi and curled into the fetal position, knees tucked against my chest. I’d never been a fan of putting my misery on display. I was damn good at sucking it up, and my stiff upper lip had been perfected a long time ago. Both my mom and Emi tried so hard to make me feel normal—each in her own way—and I never wanted them to know just how far short they’d fallen.

  As I moved, something metallic slid out of the V of my T-shirt and landed in front of me on the comforter. It was the necklace my mom had sent. Emi must have put it around my neck while I’d been unconscious.

  I raised one hand and curled my fingers around the pendant, enclosing it in my fist. The stone felt warm against my skin and, somehow, strangely comforting.

  The bed shifted as Emi stood. “I found the number for the shop where the receipt came from,” she said softly. “No answer, but I’ll keep trying.” I heard a dull clink as, I assumed, she se
t the orb on the nightstand. “Get some rest,” she said. “I’ll let you know if I hear anything.”

  Her footsteps were soft, quiet. Barely audible. The sound of the door’s hinges creaked once. Twice. And then she was gone. I was alone.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and, chest shuddering, gave in to the tears.

  4

  Sitting at my desk, I fingered the pendant hanging from a chain around my neck and stared out the window, watching the rippling sea.

  Well, technically it’s a sound, an ocean inlet too large to be a bay, too wide to be a fjord, and too deep to be a bight. It’s East Sound, to be exact, not to be confused with West Sound on one side of the island or Rosario Strait on the other. I knew this—had a brain packed full of useless, obscure knowledge—because I had no life. Because this place was my life. This place, along with my mom and Emi—and Raiden, once upon a time—were my whole world.

  I’d only stepped foot outside of the San Juan Islands a few times. This archipelago was my home, Orcas Island my safe haven. Unlike Raiden and the other kids who’d grown up on Orcas and the surrounding islands, I hadn’t taken the interisland ferry to Friday Harbor on neighboring San Juan Island to attend school past a single, disastrous week of kindergarten.

  Sometimes, on weekdays when my mom was home, the two of us would head into town for ice cream and some light shopping. The town of Eastsound was next to dead on weekday mornings, especially mid-week, when tourist traffic was nil. Only the shopkeepers posed any kind of a threat to my tenuous sanity, but they knew me—the Blackthorn girl—and rumors abounded about what ailed me. I was sick, or insane, or both. They knew enough to keep their distance, which was all I needed.

  Those were my favorite days.

  And if my mom never returned, those days would be a thing of the past.

  My mom wasn’t all right. The package pretty much guaranteed it.

  Emi had spent the afternoon tracking down my mom, or trying to. She’d managed to get a hold of the shop owner, but the woman on the phone had claimed she didn’t remember my mom coming in. Emi also called just about every governmental organization, both US and Italian, but everyone told her the same thing: they couldn’t help.

  Apparently, there was no record of my mom entering Italy, let alone leaving Brazil. There was nothing for any agency, foreign or domestic, to use as a starting point in the search for her. No way for anyone to help. We’d been advised to file a missing person’s report with our local law enforcement agency. Fat lot of good that would do.

  Swallowing the growing lump in my throat, I focused on a distant ferry gliding across the water’s silvery surface. For minutes, I watched the ferry, following its slow, steady path, until the mounting fear and frustration dimmed into the background of my mind and I had better control over my emotions. Ominous looking clouds were rolling in from the east, coloring parts of the water a duller, darker gray. A storm was moving in. The swells would be high tonight.

  Movement caught my eye in the yard below, out near the edge of the grounds, where the subtly manicured landscaping met up with the sandstone bluff that dropped straight into the sea. It was Raiden, Emi’s son, picking up the branches that had fallen during the previous night’s storm and piling them in a wheelbarrow. He limped slightly each time he took a step.

  I rose from the chair and moved around the desk to stand near the window.

  Raiden had been my best friend, once. My only friend. But that was years ago. Now, he was practically a stranger. He barely resembled the boy who I explored the wooded grounds with as a child. The boy who I taught to hold his breath underwater, despite being a few years younger than him. The boy who helped me build Fort Blackthorn from driftwood on the beach. The boy who had always been able to make me smile, even during the bleakest of times.

  I was three years behind Raiden in age, and he joined the Army straight out of high school, even against his mom’s protests. As a teenager, he’d been eager to make a difference, to fight the good fight. He had wanted to change the world, but it seemed to me that the world had changed him.

  Raiden had always been a big, solid kid, taking after his father, I supposed, though I had never met the man. Emi’s husband was Hawaiian, allegedly, and must have been huge to make Raiden dwarf his mother the way he did. Raiden was even bigger now than he’d been when he left. Stronger, and harder.

  But it was the changes inside Raiden that seemed most drastic to me. He left the islands a boisterous, fun-loving young man, filled to the brim with confidence and ambition, ready to right the world’s wrongs. He returned subdued and somber, the light in his eyes dimmed by whatever he had seen out there. By whatever he had done. Things I could only imagine.

  Raiden had been back for a few months, but I more or less avoided him now. He was more dangerous to me than Emi or my mom, my mind ready to fill in the unknown with all manner of horrors should contact between us trigger an episode. The horrifying hallucinations I experienced when I bumped into him in the kitchen shortly after his return had left me bedridden for a solid week. I didn’t want to experience that again. Once had been enough. More than.

  But even in his seemingly damaged state, I envied Raiden. He’d made it out. He’d had adventures. If his mom went missing in Rome, he would have gone after her. He would have been able to find her if she was still alive—to save her—and he would have been able to avenge her if the worst had happened. He was everything I wanted to be . . . and everything I never would be.

  Bile rising in my throat, I hugged my middle and turned away from the window. It was pointless to pine for such things.

  My gaze landed on the receipt that had been tucked beneath all of the wadded-up newspaper pages in the package. It was sitting on my desk in front of my laptop, flipped over to the back, displaying the note from my mom.

  I narrowed my eyes. Just because I wasn’t as outwardly capable as Raiden didn’t mean I was completely useless. Maybe I could track down my mom—save her if she needed saving—in my own way.

  I walked around the corner of the desk and settled in the chair. I opened my laptop and flipped the note over to reveal the receipt side. I typed the address at the top of the receipt into the internet browser’s search bar, then clicked on the map of Rome that popped up with the location of the address marked by a yellow star. Maybe the shop owner didn’t remember my mom, but somebody else might—maybe another worker or shopper or just a passerby. Or maybe a street camera had captured her leaving.

  It was time to unleash my inner Veronica Mars and get to sleuthing.

  I scanned the map, noting the various landmarks surrounding the location. The receipt had been printed in a shop near Vatican City, just northeast of the tiny sovereign nation in what the map informed me was the Prati neighborhood of Rome. The shop appeared to be a convenience store of some kind, but didn’t have a phone number listed. No matter. Emi had already found the number. I could get it from her.

  I pursed my lips and repeatedly tapped the nail of my index finger on the keyboard.

  After a long, thoughtful moment, I turned my attention back to the receipt. Assuming it was a genuine receipt from a purchase my mom had actually made and not just some scrap paper she’d fished out of the garbage, she had physically been in the shop at 10:19 the morning of the same day the package had been postmarked, and she had purchased four things: a box, a newspaper, a bottle of water, and a lemon. The total had come to just under eleven Euro, and she’d paid cash. Useless details, at first glance, but I couldn’t help thinking there was more to it.

  I blew out a breath and ran my fingers through my hair. It was longer than usual, the dark brown waves reaching well past my shoulders, and it was starting to drive me crazy.

  I twisted my hair up into a bun that I secured with the tie I’d been wearing around my wrist. I pinched my bottom lip, my gaze drifting above the computer screen to the window behind the desk. The ferry I’d been watching earlier was long gone, and a seagull was swooping lazily over the bay, just beyond the bluff
at the edge of the yard.

  “What happened to you, Mom?” I asked, the question barely audible.

  How long after mailing the package had she gone MIA? Had someone been chasing her? Had she been injured? Was she an unconscious Jane Doe lying in a hospital bed somewhere in Rome? Or was she awake, but suffering from amnesia? Or was she in a ditch somewhere? Or face-down in a river? Had she been abducted? Was she being held prisoner? Was she being tortured?

  Was she even still alive?

  The sun set while I considered all of the horrifying, mind-numbing possibilities, and the view through the window faded to a deep, inky darkness. After a while, all I could see was a ghostly reflection of myself sitting at the desk in the dim bedroom.

  Sighing, I reached across the desk to pull the chain dangling from the antique banker’s lamp sitting near the corner. The halogen bulb flared to life, the brightness momentarily making me squint, and I angled the lamp’s green glass shade downward so the direct light would be out of my eyes.

  I shut the sleeping laptop and picked up the receipt, turning it over to reveal my mom’s message, once more. I moved the thin paper into the pool of light from the desk lamp. My mom’s words were the same as ever, but I still felt like I barely understood their meaning.

  I screwed up.

  So she’d made a mistake of some kind. What, exactly? And, when?

  I’m so sorry. These should help.

  Somehow, the necklace and orb were supposed to rectify her mistake. But what had she “screwed up” in the first place? And how could two such seemingly random objects help with anything?

  I shook my head, not even close to understanding.

  You won’t have to live in fear anymore.