Here's the new chapter! I bring up a lot of family history in this chapter so let me know if it's nat all clear and I'll fix it.
The song for this chapter is Lifeline by Imogen Heap—Link in my profile.
Chapter 16
Lifeline
The bell rang and we took our seats at the back of history class as usual. Things had been tense among the group for the past few days. After Tyler told Caleb, Reid and Pogue about the blood clot, there was an impending rain cloud that followed our every move. No one knew quiet how to deal. It wasn't like he was already gone, but there just didn't seem to be enough time.
As we sat there, Caleb tried to fill the air with small talk by mentioning the weather for the fourth time that day.
"This weekend is supposed to be beautiful. The nicest days so far this spring." He sounded like a broken record and Pogue nodded too enthusiastically, trying to act normal; like the news didn't affect him. Reid ignored us as he dropped into his seat next to Tyler. He rested his chin on his folded arms and stared at the clock with such intensity that it would have scared me if he hadn't been acting this way for the past few days. I hadn't spoken to him since we had our conversation in the hummer a few nights ago, but then again, no one had really spoken to him besides Allison. I was glad that he had her to keep him from running away which was the alternative to his silence.
Tyler looked uncomfortable to say the least. He knew that if he called them out on their strange behavior they would deny it and then act even more awkward. All he could really do was wait for this delicate period to pass and hope they would start joking and picking on him again like they always did.
I met Tyler's eyes and squeezed his knee under the table offering him a smile that held no sympathy. He didn't need any more sympathy.
Our history teacher, Mr. Turner entered the room and took his place in the front of the lecture hall.
"I have some good news for a few of you." As he said this, he looked directly at Reid. "Before the final exam, I'm offering an extra credit assignment for those of you who are interested in raising your grade. You have a week to hand in a report on a topic of local history." A murmur went through the room and the words 'Boston' and 'Fenway Park' were audible through the noise.
"By local I mean something about Ipswich or one of the surrounding towns, not the history of Fenway Park, Mr. Abbot." Aaron let out a sigh and rolled his eyes. "It cannot be anything that we have studied in this class and you may work with a partner if you wish." Before he even finished explaining the assignment I had an idea. This would be the perfect excuse to look through the old Covenant books with Reid without it looking weird that we were spending time together.
When the class ended I quickly gathered up my things and jogged down the hall to catch up with Reid, who was walking at an impressively fast pace.
"Reid!" I called, but he didn't turn around even though I knew he'd heard me. I took a few more steps and grabbed on to his shirt sleeve. He turned around quickly with an annoyed look on his face and I almost expected him to yell at me.
"I was just wondering if you wanted to work with me on the history project?" I asked before he could get a word out.
"Why would I do school work when I don't actually have to?" he replied still looking upset.
"I just figured we could kill two birds with one stone," I explained, and he looked confused. "You promised me that you would help me look in those books for something to help Tyler. It would be less weird if there was a reason why we're spending time together." I saw his shoulders slump. He knew this was coming and I could see that he regretted agreeing to help me. "I know that you have a C in history and this could really help you. We could do something on the founders and it could be really detailed and Mr. Turner would love it." I was nearly begging him now and I couldn't control the pace of the words coming out of my mouth. I needed to look at those books and I didn't think that I could postpone this another day. It was almost all I thought about; I even dreamed about it.
"I'll meet you in the dorm lobby after school." He was walking away before I'd even realized what he'd said.
xXx
Reid was five minutes late and he found me pacing up and down the length of the common room.
"I'm here, you can relax now," he said sarcastically. Some of the anger that he'd held earlier that day seemed gone and I relaxed a bit.
"Let's go." He followed me out to the parking lot and got into the passenger's seat of my car.
"Did you tell Tyler about our little project?" he asked as I threw the car into reverse.
"I told him we were working together; I just didn't tell him what the project was on." Reid started nervously clicking the button on my emergency brake and I wanted to slap him.
"What's the big deal about us looking in the books anyway?" he started. "I mean, if it were me, I would have everyone down there looking." I felt the same way.
"Tyler's sure that there's nothing we can do and he doesn't want me wasting my time and getting my hopes up. He said that it's very easy to become obsessive over the power and that reading those books will do more harm than good." Reid only shrugged like he knew exactly what I was saying even if I didn't quite understand it myself.
I took a right turn and pulled into the driveway. My yellow diamond caught the sunlight as I turned the wheel, reflecting light into Reid's eyes.
"I still can believe you're wearing that thing," he commented, but not in a rude way.
"I can't really believe it either," I replied. Tyler and I told everyone about our engagement the day after Tyler told them he was sick and we were met with bitter sweet congratulations from our friends. They knew without us saying what we were trying to do. It made the whole dying thing seem much more real.
We got out of the car and walked up to the Danver's colony house but I stopped and turned to him before we went inside.
"I think we should read the books outside," I suggested. "It's such a nice day and no offense but it's really creepy in there."
"So you want me to not only carry the very heavy books up the stairs, you want me to carry them outside too?" he asked.
"That's exactly what I mean," I dead panned back. "I'll meet you under that tree over there," I pointed to a huge willow tree that was near the water. He rolled his eyes, but opened the front door and started toward the basement.
I grabbed my beach blanket out of the back of my car and spread it out under the tree. By the time I was settled Reid was in his way over, his arms full of books. They were all different sizes and looked so old that I was afraid to touch them.
He dropped them unceremoniously onto the blanket and sat down beside me.
"Here's how this it gonna go," he started. "I figured we could start with the oldest and work our way forward because there's probably nothing recent that would help us anyway." He handed me an ancient looking smaller book and picked up one of the larger ones for himself.
"I'm going to take the spell books and you're going to take the Books of Shadows, because I know how to read the spell books and you don't."
"What are books of shadows?" I asked having no idea what he was talking about.
"They're like journals. We're all required to keep them."
"So you, Caleb, Tyler and Pogue all keep diaries?" This seemed a little funny to me. I couldn't picture any of them spilling out they're darkest secrets into a book.
"Laugh all you want, but we don't really talk about our feelings, we're supposed to write about the power," he explained. "It's how we understand it because there's no one else like us so we can only learn from each other. We can't lie in our Book of Shadows, and no one else can read it until you're dead."
"What happens if I read Tyler's?" I asked. I didn't really want to, but I was just curious.
"You'll die," he replied too calmly.
"I don't believe you."
"No," he smiled. "It will just look blank."
I opened the book in my lap and read the first page. It was dated 1658 and was written by Marcus Simms. I settled in with my back up against the tree and started to read as fast as I could while still taking in information. Marcus started the book when he was thirteen. At first he wrote about getting his power and how amazing and scary he thought it was. As he got older he wrote about the people associated with the power and about things that he had come to understand about himself and his brothers. The further along I read the more personal it became and the more I felt like I was prying into someone's deepest secrets. In 1665 when he was twenty the Covenant came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony to escape religious persecution in England. He wrote about how scared they all were and how much he wished the power would just go away. If he was captured, there was only so much he could do to save himself.
Startled, I looked up when I heard Reid slam his book shut and toss it away from him. The ancient tome landed in the grass and I was about to scold him, but he spoke first.
"This fucking thing isn't even in real English!" he said, frustrated. "It's so old I can't even read half the words."
"How old is that book anyway?' I asked. I didn't think mine was that hard to read.
"I don't know," he sighed. "Twelve hundred something."
"Are there any Books of Shadows that old?" I asked thinking that he'd kept something from me.
"No," he replied, picking the book back up and thumbing through the pages in a last attempt. "They were all left behind when they crossed from England. They didn't have time so they only grabbed the important books. Apparently blessing the live stock was more important than reading diaries," he said holding up the book to me one last time before setting it down again and reaching for a new one. "You don't think Tyler qualifies as live stock do you?"
I let out a laugh relieved that Reid at least still had a little bit of humor left. I had a feeling we were going to need it.
As I moved through the books of shadows from Conrad Parry, Harrison Danvers, Thomas Garwin and Joseph Putnam I noticed that they all kept referencing a book called the Book of Ascension. As I moved on to the next generation, the generation of the Covenant that turned against John Putnam, I came across something that made me stop dead. I needed to know what the Book of Ascension was.
I put the book down and rubbed my tired eyes. Retaining as much information as I had in the past few hours had played with my head and I needed to make sure that I was on the right track. I looked up at Reid who was staring intently at yet another ancient tome, and it took me several tries to get his attention.
"Reid!" I called for the fourth time and he finally looked up as if he hadn't heard me the first three times I called him.
"What?" he asked moving suddenly toward me. 'Did you find something?"
"No," I answered as his face dropped and he sat back. "But I have a question. Have you ever heard of the Book of Ascension? Does it have anything to do with the Book of Damnation?"
"I've never heard of it," he said pulling the book I was reading into his lap. "What book is this?"
"It belonged to one of Pogue's ancestors; Andrew Parry," I explained. "I was just reading where he talked about how the Covenant had changed after they had gotten rid of John Putnam. And how the Book of Ascension, which seems like an important book was discovered missing after his death."
Reid held the book up closer to his face and his eyes were reading the delicate script very slowly. Reaching behind me I picked up one of the older Books of Shadows and thumbed through it trying to find the places in the older book where the Book of Ascension was mentioned.
"Look," I said thrusting another book at him. The entry I was pointing at was in the book of George Danvers who was from the same generation as Andrew Parry and John Putnam. "He's talking about consulting the Book of Ascension before getting rid of John Putnam to see if there is an explanation or cure for his madness." Reid took George's book and studied it as if he didn't believe what he was seeing.
"When was the Book of Damnation written?" I asked searching his face for an answer.
"Sixteen-ninety three," he said slowly, trying to puzzle this all out in his head.
"Putnam was killed in 1692," I stated. I could see the recognition on his face as he realized where I was going.
"You think that the Book of Damnation was written to replace the Book of Ascension?" he asked, and I nodded clarifying the statement.
"Why wouldn't we notice if something that important went missing?" Reid said this more to himself but I couldn't help answering the question anyway.
"Like you said before, most of these books have probably never been read."
"We don't exactly want to spend a lot of time reading about a curse that haunts us every day," Reid snapped but I decided not to fight him on it because I knew that he wasn't really mad at me. "Shit," he continued, "I don't even know how to begin to deal with this. The Book of Damnation is so important and I can only imagine what the Book of Ascension says."
"Do you think that it has what we're looking for?" I had a feeling that it did but I wanted him to prove me wrong.
"The Book of Damnation is a record of our lives and is pretty much the only useful book that we have. All the rest of this shit," he gestured behind them to the heap of spell books, "is pretty much useless because we don't do spells and we never really have. If this has happened in the past, if someone was looking for something to save someone else it would have been recorded in the Book of Ascension whether they failed or not."
"Do you think we should even bother still looking through all these books?" I asked, my moral plummeting to the floor. All of the hope that I was depending on for the last few days was sucked out of me and I could almost physically feel myself deflating.
"I think that I should stop looking at the spell books and that we should both look at the Books of Shadows for any clues about where this book could be or if anyone else has ever tried to find it." I had never seen Reid look so serious and it was scaring me.
"It's getting dark," I realized. "Maybe we should stop for tonight and clear our heads; come back tomorrow."
"Okay," he agreed. "Put these in your trunk and we'll look at them tomorrow," he said, handing me the Books of Shadows. He turned and picked up most of the spell books and entered the colony house as I got into my car. A few minutes later Reid got into the passenger's seat without saying a word. Equally as silent I started the car and headed back to Spencer.
Fifteen minutes later I pulled my car up to the curb.
"You're not going back to your room?" Reid asked.
"No. I've got a wedding to plan," I stated. He nodded and let out a small, humorless laugh as he closed the door. I pulled away from the curb and out of the parking lot, turning toward Tyler's house.