Seeing Light (The Seraphina Parrish Trilogy) (23 page)

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Rome

“There.” Da Vinci points to a pile of clothing in the corner.

I rush across the room to riffle through it. “My canteen, it’s gone. Do you have it?” I turn to him.

He shakes his head. “This is everything.” He lifts his shoulders into a shrug.

“The others, the ones who hurt me, they must have taken it.” I go through each piece, inspecting them to decide if I can use them as relics to return to my true time. The tunic is ripped down the back, soaked with blood, and is as useless as the fragmented crown relic. But my sandals, though they are mud-coated, are still usable. When I pick them up, a garnet ring lodged within their straps falls to the floor, and I lean down to pick it up.

“What’s this?” I hold it up for him to see.

“It was in the mud near you. I thought it was part of the crown, but no.”

I glance closely, looking the gold setting over, and the memory of exactly where I’ve seen the garnet ring before floods back. In vivid detail, I see the image of Cece in my mind. She was wearing this ring the very first time I met her in Rome, last semester. That is the only place in time that I know for sure where I can find her. And I have a feeling that my canteen of aqua vitae will be there with her. It’s a start and for now, it’s all I have.

Quickly, I slip my feet into my sandals. My body aches, pain burning all over my body, but I ignore it. The sooner I can return, the sooner I can retrieve the water and find a way to set all Wanderers and Nocturna free.

I scurry over to Da Vinci to give him a kiss on the cheek. “Thank you, sweet friend. If I make it through this life alive, I will look at this painting every day and remember your kindness. I promise.”

He chases after me through the door, concern pinching his features as he waves his arms in protest. “But your wounds are not healed.”

With no time to waste, I wave off his concerns and throw him a smile. As soon as I hit open air and find a clear patch long enough for running, I ignore the discomfort and sprint across the field with the garnet ring tucked tightly within my palm, until a blast of light sucks me into a wormhole.

With the powers of a Chosen, there’s a new connection between myself and relics. I can feel it within every pore of my body. This garnet ring relic will take me wherever I wish; I only need ask it to return to the last place I laid eyes on this ring. So I focus on Rome, where I know it will deliver me straight to Cece.

This time the wormhole holds together, only flexing and bending to shoot me in new directions, and it spits me out at my new place in time.

My feet stumble to a halt atop cobblestones in Rome, Italy, more than half a year before my true time, and a day before I arrived to find my mom with the sundial bracelet.

A double sense of déjà vu comes over me as I take in the scene before me; I never thought I’d return to this place, never dreamed I’d face my past in this way. I march across the Piazza Del Popolo. The soaring obelisk at the center of the plaza casts a pointed shadow in the direction of the Church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli. As before, tourists move around snapping photos of the beautiful Italian architecture, unaware of what lies beneath this space—the hideout of the Underground.

I race up the church’s marble stairs and burst through the carved doors. There’s no choir singing today like before. Instead, a mass is taking place beneath the ornate oil paintings that adorn the domed ceiling. My entrance is so loud that everyone in the extravagantly designed church turns to glare at me, including the priest, who stops in the middle of his homily. Ignoring them, I head for the entrance to the catacombs. The dark opening, flanked by small obelisks, leads beneath the church’s structure.

This time, instead of stumbling through the darkness, I grab a torch and light it. With the light raised, I make my way past dark catacombs and into the room of lined skulls, careful to watch for snakes and avert my eyes from the mummified monks hanging from the walls and the heinous bone chandelier.

Unlike before, Underground members sleep in piles of trash along the walls, ignoring me. The stench of garbage tweaks my nose as I travel around and around the circular hallways. They spiral in wide rotations until I find the opening that leads out to the balcony, which hangs over the enormous open pit.

It’s the one I fell into last semester, the same one I watched Francis die in. I don’t have the luxury of worrying about such things anymore, so I race across the natural bridge, paying no heed to the fact that I am crossing over a pit.

Once I reach the other side, I step behind the dark stone obelisk that rises from the center of the floor, piercing through the ceiling and emerging into the plaza above.

“Cece!” I roar her name as I rush though the corridors searching for her. She laughs somewhere off in the maze of hallways, and her voice ricochets off the walls as it did the first time we met. Somewhere she’s waiting for me, mocking me.

Finally I find her in a room made of stone, seated on a crumbling throne. Cerberus, her Protector beast dog, growls at her side and snaps ferociously when I enter. Exeter, her Seer, stands at her flank, hands folded in prayer.

Drake, the gang leader, lounges in the corner with other Underground members including Francis, the bum who tricked me into meeting Cece in the first place. But in my past, that meeting doesn’t take place until tomorrow. They stand as I enter and he’s the first to approach, but Cece quickly waves them away.

“This is not the young Sera we seek,” she says, somehow knowing. “This Sera is of the future.” The dog growls at her side and she hushes him with a wave of her hand.

“How can you tell?” Drake asks and crosses his arms.

She smiles. “She’s glowing from the mark of the Chosen.”

“I’m here for the canteen you stole.” I throw her garnet ring across the room to the floor. She ignores it, but Francis scurries to pick it up.

“Pity we won’t be giving it to you.” She pushes her long, sweeping red hair over her shoulder.

“I disagree.”

“Child, how do you think we’ve lived this long? The water is almost gone.”

“Lived this long?” I’m not sure what she means. I stop to think about it. She attacked me in Italy, sometime in the 1600s. I thought that maybe she had Wandered there, but if she’s saying she’s lived all this time with the special water… “You’ve lived since the time of Da Vinci?”

“For a Chosen, you’re a stupid one,” she says.

Everyone in the room laughs.

“Shall I kill her now?” Drake asks with a yawn.

Cece seems to consider this for a moment, looking me over with a narrow gaze. “We thought maybe if we let the boys erase you in your true time, we’d live even longer, but now that you’re here, we have another idea.”

“What do I have to do with you living longer?” I rest my hands on my hips.

She stands and descends the stairs of her throne and steps forward. Standing rigid, I don’t fear her like I did when we first met. I’m a better fighter now, and she has something that I desperately need.

“You have everything to do with us living longer.” She smirks.

Now that she’s in front of me and I have a moment to really look at her without the overwhelming fear I’d experienced during all our other meetings, I sense something in her I didn’t notice before—I see all the bad, all the evil that good people suppress. Hers is born from the smallest seed of hate, nursed until it is exaggerated and overgrown out of proportion. In essence, I see myself. The idea of it scares me so badly that I step away in disgust. It’s something I can’t fathom, can’t even bear to think about.

I shake my head, trying to dislodge the abhorrent thought. “No, no!” Da Vinci’s explanation of what happened to me, why my wormhole fell apart, floods my senses. He called it a “fragmentation” because of my broken relic, but I was so busy trying to leave and follow through on my task that I hadn’t given myself enough time to understand what the word fragmented meant for a Wanderer, but I do now. I understand completely.

It was not just the relic that was fragmented, it was
me
. I became fragmented, literally breaking into several pieces, or in this case people. Cece, Cerberus, and Exeter were all born from me, exiting through my Chosen mark, all extracted from my body, from deep within my soul. The stitches that run over my spine throb as the memories become clear, and my face twists in horror.

Even Elijah Vanderpool mentioned that this could happen when I saw him at the exposition. And in Nocturna, Stu said that the Time Reapers were fragmentations, all born of each other. So it is possible that I’m not the only one this has happened to.

“Yes, we think you’ve caught on now, haven’t you? The three of us,” she gestures back to her team, “are from your blood, fragmented from your body, birthed from you in the rain in Italy through your Chosen mark. But instead of killing you like we originally planned, we think we’ll use you.” She steps closer, so close that we are only a foot apart.

I step backward, bumping into a wall of Underground guards. Instead of cringing in fear or even trying to fight, I face her.

She grabs my chin, clenching my jaw between her long black fingernails. With their points, she draws blood, and then lightly touches her blood-covered nail to her tongue. As she samples, she jolts in shock at the taste.

“Mmm. You—taste—like—life.” She draws out the words with a hiss. “You’ll be better than the aqua vitae.” She snaps her fingers at this and her army descends.

One man approaches before I can react and jabs a syringe into my arm. The plunger depresses, releasing a black liquid that pulses beneath my skin. When I look down, I can actually see the ink traveling through my veins, and helplessly watch it spread whatever poison it carries throughout my body like a tree rooting in the soil. It branches to my fingertips, turning them black, and then reaches across my chest, up my neck and to my face until it consumes the whites of my eyes, bleeding into my corneas and blocking my sight.

Desperately, I grasp at the air, thinking someone may help me but there’s no one here. I’m as alone as I’ve always felt, and I drop to my knees as the vile concoction weakens me and I pass out.

•

Several jolts of electricity awaken me, and my hand falls to the side, clutching the arm of a chair. The commotion around me urges me to open my eyes. I tell my eyes to open but they protest, taking all the energy I have just to open a sliver, but it’s enough to see.

Three figures float across my vision. Cece, the farthest away, struts back and forth wearing a long red cape. Her dog-beast falls in line behind her, growling with his hair raised on his back, and then nearest to me, Exeter. They move in a peculiar way, like vertebrae, one piece connected to another; the image reminds me of a snake slithering back and forth in an undulating wave. When I saw them for the very first time when I was here before, they seemed to be connected to a person in a wheelchair, the person who I assumed was my mother, but who I now realize is me.
I’m the person in the wheelchair.
We’re all connected, and I remember through my haze that they’re a fragmentation of me.

During the first meeting in Rome with Cece, I believed the woman in the wheelchair draped in a green cape was my mother. We looked exactly alike, but I can see now that it was always me. Back then, I needed my mom so badly that I only saw what I wanted to see.

This horrifying revelation makes me want to scream out loud, but I have no energy to do so. The life that beats weakly through my body somehow surges out of me and directly into Cece and the others. Because of the black liquid, they’re able to suck the life from me, extending their own. They’re connected to me in a way that I never could have understood until now.

A strange understanding pours over me as I watch Cece strut around, and I realize that I’ve been fighting myself all this time. She—they—are me, a part of me. This entire time I’ve been fighting against the evil part of myself. I’ve literally been my own worst enemy. I’d laugh at the irony if it weren’t so heartbreaking.

Each time Cece and I met, she said that she knew me better than I knew myself. Being a part of me she must have my memories, as well as my secrets, hopes, and dreams. That’s why my blood heals her and her team, and why she always speaks in the third person for her team members who are all deeply connected.

“What shall we do with her?” Cece asks a crowd of Underground members, whose heads poke through several levels of archways around the pit. They cheer loudly, arms waving.

She walks dramatically in a circle and I see myself—my past self—lying on the ground, trembling with fear in front of her. I’m watching a replay of our first meeting, reliving it from the other side. Somehow I’ve been under the influence of the black poison since yesterday and now my true timeline is colliding with my past self.

Even though I can’t see him from my position, I know Past Bishop is somewhere in the background, fighting off the Underground guards, probably too far out of the field of my foggy vision.

Everything is falling into place, every little detail explained. This is why Cece seemed to know my every move and know everything about me every time we fought, both here and at the theater in Gibeon. We practically share the same brain; we
are
the same.

“Or shall we send her into the pit?” Cece stops and stares down at Past Sera.

“Never,” Past Sera says vehemently.

Cece rushes to her, lowering her gaze to the girl. “We tricked you into reconstructing the relic,” she says in a playfully sinister tone. She holds up the sundial bracelet, dangling it in the air like a cat’s toy.

Past Sera sets her jaw and her face turns determined. In one precise movement she smacks the bracelet from Cece’s hand and it flies across the room, landing ten feet away.

Sera dives for it, sliding across the floor to snatch it in her hand, and then she flips over to defend herself. Cerberus descends, foaming at the mouth, anticipating a fight.