Keeper of the Lost (Resurrecting Magic Book 2) Page 19

  Her eyes narrowed. She leaned in closer.

  Just the same as I had done. The same as Mary-Beth had. The same as Borden had done. And the same as Nathaniel had.

  “How…” she questioned, blinking three times. “The words were certainly Gaelic just a second ago.”

  She withdrew her fingers and sat a little straighter in confusion.

  I pulled out my wand, and at the contact with my skin, it glowed brilliant blue. Poppy’s eyes widened at it slightly.

  An older man who looked to be in his sixties made his way down the hall. “Excuse me, sir?” I called out.

  Blinking in surprise, he walked over.

  “Would you happen to know Gaelic?” I asked him.

  “I’m afraid not,” he answered in an English accent.

  I nodded. I picked up the book and handed it to him.

  “Can you read this?” I asked. And thankfully he gripped it in a way that his thumb touched the pages.

  In confusion, he looked down. “I’m sorry,” he said, shaking his head. “Like I said, I don’t know any Gaelic.”

  Poppy watched this all in utter confusion.

  “That’s okay,” I said, giving him a kind smile as I took the book back. “Would you mind holding this for just a second?” I handed him my wand, which stayed looking exactly like a pencil.

  “I’m sorry, what is this for?” he asked, and I heard him starting to lose a little patience.

  “Just a little experiment,” I said, once more taking the wand back from him. The second it touched my skin, it started glowing again. He looked at it with widened eyes. “Thank you so much for your help.”

  He just shook his head and continued on his way down the hall.

  I laid the pencil on the table, and once more it looked like a pencil.

  “How did you do that?” Poppy asked, looking at it. “And why couldn’t he read the book?

  “Pick it up,” I said, my tone soft and gentle.

  She looked at me with uncertainty, but I was surprised at something I saw there. Excitement.

  She grabbed the pencil, and instantly it turned crystalline and glowed blue. “Why is it doing that?”

  My stomach leapt in excitement. “Because you have ancestors who could do magic,” I said. And I both loved and hated this part, the telling of the truth, because it sounded insane. “And even though it’s been lost and hibernating for centuries, you have it in you too, Poppy.”

  She looked up at me.

  “It’s why you can read the book,” I said. “Only a mage can read it. And that wand only reacts to mages.”

  I looked down at my glass of water. And I asked it to rise into the air, just enough to show her.

  She sat back in her seat, her eyes widening as she watched it levitate off the table.

  “You’re a mage, Poppy Gowens,” I said, confident and calm.

  “Just like the rest of us.” Suddenly, it was Nathaniel’s voice behind me, and I turned back to see him and the others walking up.

  We watched as Poppy’s napkin folded itself into an airplane, and it lifted off the table and made a circle around us all before landing back on the table and lying flat once more, not a single crease mark in it.

  Borden snapped his fingers, and every single light in the hall flickered before returning steady.

  “You’re…you’re saying I can do all of that stuff, too?” Poppy breathed. She was breathing hard and blinking entirely too much. But she wasn’t entirely freaking out, and I gave her a lot of credit for that.

  I nodded and Nathaniel pulled up a chair at the table.

  “Try rubbing your hands together, creating friction and heat,” he said, instantly going into teaching mode. “And then snap your fingers while you look at that napkin.”

  Poppy eyed him warily, but she shifted her gaze to the napkin.

  I grabbed my glass of water in preparation.

  She rubbed her hands together for a good ten seconds.

  She concentrated on the napkin. And when she snapped her fingers, it instantly burst into flames.

  She gave a yelp, drawing lots of looks, but I instantly poured my water on it, dousing the flames before anyone could see them.

  “I did that?” she asked, her voice a little too loud, her words breathy.

  I smiled and nodded. “You did that.”

  She looked around, and grabbed another napkin from the holder on the table next to us.

  She rubbed her hands together. She snapped. And the napkin lit on fire.

  I wasn’t sure if it was Borden or Nathaniel who used telekinesis to move the spilled water and douse the fire.

  “We want you to come with us,” I said, leaning in, holding her shocked gaze. “We’re here to find more magic, because Scotland is where so much of this is tracing back to. You’re one of us. And we want you to join us.”

  Poppy’s eyes cast around to all of us. Dad, who was utterly human. Mary-Beth who looked disappointed that she was the only one who inexplicably couldn’t do even the simplest of magic. She looked to Borden and then Nathaniel. And back to me.

  “You’re not going to murder me, are you?” she asked.

  I smiled and shook my head. “Hardly. We need you, Poppy.”

  She hesitated, and they were some of the longest ten seconds of my life. “Okay,” she said, a hesitant but excited smile pulling on her face. “But you’ve got a lot of answering to do.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  We took a shuttle to our hotel, which was nearly an hour outside of the city. I was too distracted by everything that had just happened to even appreciate the fact I was in Scotland. We all sat together at the back, and Poppy fired off question after question. We gave her all the answers we knew, told her all the history we understood, which was very little. She questioned it all, asked us to repeat information. She asked about the books we had found and the history of all our families.

  And Nathaniel asked his own questions, about Poppy’s family history. Her parents. Her brother. What she knew about the Gowens family. If she knew about any ancestors who were caught up in witch hunts. She didn’t know, but then, she didn’t know much about her ancestors beyond her grandparents.

  It was late by the time we got to the hotel. It was the middle of the night here in Scotland, even though for us it was evening. We grabbed the only twenty-four hour take out we could find, and then we went back to our rooms.

  Only, everyone ended up in mine and Mary-Beth’s room.

  “I’ve been meaning to show you something,” I said, glancing at Nathaniel as I unzipped my suitcase. I pulled out the two books Dad had found in the university. “Dad found the books mom had bought just before she disappeared. But there’s something strange about them.”

  I handed them to Nathaniel, and the entire room watched with piqued interest.

  Nathaniel opened the first, and I knew he was seeing the words swirl and rearrange. “I believe this is Mandarin,” he said.

  My heart sank, even though it was what I suspected. “Which no one is going to speak or be able to read.”

  “Let me see,” Borden said, his brows furrowing.

  “You speak Mandarin?” I asked, shock furrowing my brows.

  “My major was in international finance, remember?” he said, looking at me. “Most of that international business comes from China. It’s kind of important to be able to communicate.”

  I shook my head, floored that I never knew this about Borden.

  He looked down at the characters and several long moments passed as he flipped from the first page to the next, and then another.

  “I can’t make sense of all of it,” he said, shaking his head. “I understand spoken Mandarin better than I can read it. But, it’s talking about…travel. Jumping from one place to the other. This word…” he tapped the page and I watched the gears turn in his head as he tried to piece it together. “I think it means…portal?”

  And it was as if everything in the past four years slid into place.

&nbs
p; My eyes widened as I looked across the room at my father, who wore my exact same expression.

  The way she’d taken no possessions.

  How there were no signs of struggle, no evidence that she’d been harmed.

  The way there were no traces of where she’d gone.

  The way she’d simply vanished.

  “What if she accidentally opened a portal?” I asked, the words coming out almost too fast to even understand. “What if she opened a door to some, crazy, far away place, and she couldn’t get back?”

  Dad nodded, and I watched as his eyes got redder. I watched as hope started creeping into his expression.

  “Dad,” I breathed out. “What if she’s just lost, and hasn’t been able to make her way back home?”

  Emotions filled my eyes, and for the first time in such a long time, I started to hope. Started to hope that maybe she was still alive. That maybe somehow, she could find her way back.

  “This is dangerous, unstable magic then,” Borden said. “Amelia had been practicing for years. And if she couldn’t control it, if she couldn’t make it work again to find her way back…”

  “We need to be very cautious in ever trying it,” Nathaniel concluded.

  I crossed the room and wrapped my arms around my dad. He hugged me tighter than he’d hugged me in years.

  “She could come back,” I breathed against his neck. “She could come back.”

  Dad didn’t seem to be able to speak. He simply squeezed me so tight I could hardly breathe, before he clapped his hands on my back and released me.

  “There are words here on this book,” Nathaniel said, and from the quiet, low way he said it, I thought perhaps it was mostly to himself.

  I looked to see him squinting at the page edges of the sealed book. I walked over, glancing over his shoulder.

  And there, tiny and small, I could see them, just barely.

  “Let him be locked away, until the world be prepared to grant him his due.”

  The second we read the words together, the cover of the book sprang open, and like a nightmare, something started emerging from the book.

  There was a head of dark hair, and then a face marred with scars. Instantly there was a neck, and then shoulders. A torso and a narrow waist.

  And suddenly an entire man flopped onto the floor.

  Everyone screamed. Nathaniel instantly dropped the book, and everyone skittered back from it, their backs pressed against the walls.

  The man propped himself up on his hands, looking around, with wide, terrified eyes. “Where am I? Who are you?”

  His accent was English, but in a unique way I couldn’t quite identify.

  “He just came from inside that book,” Mary-Beth said, her voice shaking with shock and fear. “How did he get inside a book?”

  The man sat up, looking terrified and bewildered.

  And just then, I noticed his strange clothes.

  He wore a button up shirt and boots with pants that were tucked into them. His hair was longer, and he clutched a hat in his hand.

  He looked…he looked like he’d just crawled out of another century.

  “Why…why are you dressed like this?” he asked with a shaking voice. “What is that accent?”

  We all looked at each other. I was hardly breathing. My head was still spinning from the discovery of the portal book, and now I’d just seen a man erupt from a book that had previously been sealed shut.

  “What year is it?” Nathaniel asked the man, keeping his voice very calm and steady.

  “It’s the 1656th year of our Lord, of course,” the man said. But as he looked around, he seemed less and less certain of that.

  “Who put you in that book?” I asked, my tone darkening as I tried to fill in all of my questions with answers.

  The man’s dark eyes slid over to mine. “An enemy. Someone who took things too far. Someone who slid into the dark.”

  Nathaniel and I glanced at each other. “And could you do the things your enemy could do?” Nathaniel asked.

  The man looked over at Nathaniel, and he evaluated him. But he kept his mouth shut.

  Borden stepped forward and held up his hand. It sparked with electricity. “You need to answer our questions. We mean you no harm so long as you’re honest.”

  Maybe it wasn’t the best way to handle it, but at least Borden knew how to be direct.

  “Yes,” the man from the book answered. “I can do what he could do.”

  “1656,” I said, looking up at Nathaniel. “That’s nearly fifty years before it all disappeared.”

  Nathaniel nodded. “What is your name, Sir?”

  Warily, the man eyed us, cautious and defensive. “Olin. Olin Rayburn.”

  I saw sympathy and fascination in Nathaniel’s eyes. He crouched down, leveling with the confused man on the floor. “Olin, you’ve been trapped inside that book for over two hundred years. Magic has been gone for centuries.”

  His eyes widened and his expression went slack.

  “We have so many questions for you,” I said, taking a cautious step forward.

  Mary-Beth suddenly stepped forward and knelt in front of Olin. I’d never seen more desperation in her eyes. “Do you know why some of us can do magic, and why some can’t?” she blurted out.

  Olin gave her a look, one that questioned her intelligence. “What do you mean? If ye all be witches, surely you know?”

  Nathaniel leaned forward. “Sir, magic has been dormant for over two hundred years. As far as we can tell, we’re the only magic wielders left. We hardly know anything.”

  Olin looked cautiously around, confused and overwhelmed. “You have never heard of the Lock of Sandris?”

  My heart jumped into my throat, and I looked around at everyone.

  It sounded so official. So sure. Like a fact.

  “No,” Mary-Beth said, and for the first time in a long time, she sounded hopeful.

  The man looked more confused and lost than ever. “You don’t know that fifteen years ago, Euan Sandris locked half of all magic wielders?”

  I looked back at Mary-Beth. Her expression was pale. She stood stark still.

  Answers. Finally, there were answers.

  “Please,” I said as I looked back at the man. “Tell us everything.”

  THE END OF BOOK TWO

  Don’t miss the next book!

  Margot and Nathaniel’s journey continues in

  SHADOW OF THE LOCKED

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  Also by Keary Taylor

  THE RESURRECTING MAGIC SERIES

  Rise of the Mage

  THE BLOOD DESCENDANTS UNIVERSE

  House of Royals Saga

  Garden of Thorns Trilogy

  Crown of Death Saga

  THE FALL OF ANGELS TRILOGY

  THE NERON RISING SAGA

  THE EDEN TRILOGY

  THE McCAIN SAGA

  WHAT I DIDN’T SAY

  Also by T.L. Keary (thriller/suspense pen name)

  THREE HEART ECHO

  OUR LAST CONFESSION

  SKIN AND BONE

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  About the Author

  Keary Taylor is the USA TODAY bestselling author of over thirty titles, encompassing paranormal, sci-fi, and contemporary romance. She grew up along the foothills of the Rocky Mountains where, from a young age, she started creating imaginary worlds and daring characters who always fell in love. She now splits her time between a tiny island in the Pacific Northwest and a beautiful valley in Utah, with her husband and their two children. She continues to have an overactive imagination that frequently keeps her up at night.

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  Keary Taylor, Keeper of the Lost (Resurrecting Magic Book 2)