City of Magic (Happily Ever Afterlife Book 1) Page 6

  And I didn’t want to say goodbye.

  At least the guy standing with me knew well enough not to press matters. He stayed silent as I was caught in my own thoughts. Harper was gone, forced back to the life she'd come from. She would live through that miserable existence repeatedly. And die repeatedly.

  She was gone, and I was alone.

  I forced a deep breath as my body still struggled to reclaim control over itself, but it came out in shuddering waves. I could already feel the hot prickle of tears forming behind my eyes as I tried to get a grasp on my emotions. I couldn't do this right now. There was too much else going on.

  But my mind and my body seemed to have different plans. They were done, exhausted and broken.

  I heard myself crying, sobbing even, before I realized what was happening. Humiliated, I buried my face in my hands and tried to shove the massive influx of emotion back down inside me, but it wouldn't go.

  Harper was gone. It hadn't been that long ago that we'd settled in for the night and I told her that her life here could be better than what she left behind. Instead, she got up to go to the bathroom and, in one moment, had everything ripped away from her before she had a chance to even enjoy her new life.

  And selfishly, I couldn't help but know that what happened to Harper could just as easily happen to me. Or was I just done? I hadn't prepared for any of this. The letter I'd read when I'd first arrived had promised things like help and a world that was both familiar and welcoming, and instead I just had this bullshit.

  I sobbed harder as both emotions and tears flowed out of me for a few solid minutes, crying into my hands while simultaneously trying to pull it all back in.

  It was the gentlest touch that I noticed first, a hand on my shoulder, calm and reassuring. I flinched a little at first, but soon leaned into the touch. It didn't help to stem the flow of tears, but it was somehow welcome all the same.

  A moment later strong arms encircled me, though they were not holding me in place like before. This time they were warm and soothing. It didn't make anything better, but it did make me feel just a little less alone.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I couldn't say how long it took me to catch my breath and calm down. When I started to feel like myself again, those same strong arms were still wrapped around me. The stranger holding me must've felt the moment when my body tensed because a second later he let me go, taking a long step back as though to deliberately give me my space. He looked away uncomfortably, and I did the same. What had just happened between the two of us?

  "Sorry about that." I gave a helpless shrug. "I didn't mean to lose it."

  "I’m not one to judge, and I can certainly imagine that you’ve had an intense evening." The guy looked back over at me and forced a small smile. "Well, now that we've done that I guess we should get through introductions so I can convince you to let me get you out of here. Protectorate Avos, Hand of the Archive."

  "Kadie Meyer. And I don't know what that means." I shot my eyebrows up a tick in challenge. The last thing I was in the mood for was any more ominous dancing around whatever was going on.

  "You can call me Grayson. The rest can wait until later."

  I stuck my hand out and Grayson mirrored my action. Our two hands touched slowly before his completely enveloped mine in greeting.

  "It’s nice to meet you, Kadie Meyer." Grayson’s expression shifted a little as he watched me. "I'm sorry for everything that has happened to you so far. I wish I could explain, but we don't know enough." A tinge of frustration edged his tone. "For now, we just need to get you somewhere more secure to give you your best shot at making it through the next few days."

  I shook my head, alarmed. "Wait, what?"

  "Everything will be fine. Just follow me, and we'll get you somewhere safe."

  I did as I was asked and followed Grayson through the streets of the city, but my mind was stuck on one of the last things he said: Everything was going to be fine. I could've sworn that same phrase was in the letter I'd read when I first arrived in the After. And so far, that statement had turned out to be a complete and total lie.

  I didn’t know what it meant when Grayson referred to himself as Protectorate, but it sounded official. I wasn't sure where I was expecting him to take me—to a bunker or to the police, perhaps. Instead, we ended up at a train station. There were still a few lights on inside, and I could hear a locomotive moving away in the distance, so it was open for business despite being the middle of the night. But that didn't explain what I was doing there.

  I wanted to ask, to demand an explanation, but Grayson was already holding the front door open for me. I stepped inside, and he followed behind me.

  While the building I entered was far smaller, it held much of the same elegance as Grand Central Station with marble floors and a massive clock tower near the center of the room.

  It was a little after three o'clock in the morning. No wonder I felt exhausted.

  Okay, to be fair there were all sorts of reasons I felt exhausted, but that had to be one of them.

  "What are we doing here?" I forced myself to ask the question as Grayson made his way toward the information desk.

  "Hemingway Station is the central transportation hub in the city. You're getting a train, and you're going far away from here."

  His statement gave me pause as I bristled against someone telling me what to do and where to go. "You’re going to have to give me more to go on than that. I mean, nothing about this day has gone like the letter I got promised it would. What the hell is happening?"

  I felt silly as I stomped one of my feet against the ground, but it was too late to take the action back. If anything, my mini temper tantrum seemed to show Grayson that I wasn't just going to be some lost little lamb who went wherever he told me to go, at least not without more to go on.

  "I've seen you twice today, and both times you were moments away from being taken against your will and shoved back into your origin story. Is that not reason enough to go somewhere else? Anywhere else?"

  "That's not an explanation. I think there's been a mistake. None of this should be happening to me."

  "Honestly Kadie, that's the question of the day. You, and others like you… you aren’t supposed to be here in the city. And yet here you are. You have us scrambling for answers where there shouldn’t even be questions.”

  My eyes narrowed as I dissected his statement. I couldn't say why but the tone of his voice had me more than a little insulted. What did he mean I wasn't supposed to be here? "I arrived here this morning," I explained, not sure how much he knew about me. I was already aware that it had to be more than a coincidence that this guy kept finding me right at the perfect moment. "I had this letter"—I took a second to rifle through my pocket, glad that at least I was no longer carrying my welcome letter around in my bra—"and it said all this stuff about me being a character in a book. And that I could start a new life here, and that people would help me and everything would make sense and be fine."

  Grayson watched me.

  In the bright lights of the train station I could make out far more of his features than I'd been able to in the dark, or in the blur of the fight earlier. Like when I'd first seen him, he had deeply tanned skin with an olive tint to it, and his eyes were a slightly darker brown. His hair was nearly black, with curls that framed his face. He was only slightly less imposing to look at than he had been before, now that my life wasn't in immediate danger.

  As far as I knew.

  "And let me guess, your day hasn't quite gone the way you expected."

  I shook my head.

  "Fair enough. To start, this is the city of Sanctum. It's one of the four capital cities of the After, situated in the Western Realms. Until today, at least for generations, new characters didn't arrive in the capital cities. Instead, they turned up in some of the more genre specific places throughout the world. No one is forced to stay where they first arrive, but many do as they end up feeling the most comfortable there. Those places a
re set up to take in new arrivals. In Sanctum, everyone has been in the After for years, if not their whole lives. They choose to come here. So technically speaking, you really shouldn’t be here. Yet, for some reason, over the course of ten minutes today, we started getting new arrivals all over the city. No more since then, but it was enough. No one knows what this means."

  "Is that why people are trying to shove us back through Reclamation Centers—to pretend like this never happened?"

  Grayson opened his mouth, but then closed it again in short order like he was rethinking what he wanted to say next. "We don't know. Your friend wasn’t the first person to be made to disappear since her arrival."

  "And what about this?" I was about to pull my sweater up from my wrist and shove it in his face, but Harper's words of warning from earlier still rang in my head, even if she wasn't there to speak them. Instead, I tried to subtly place my wrist in between the two of us so he could see it. The symbol etched into my skin was still there, as clear as ever. Despite the scarred tissue, it still managed to look deliberate, almost artistic.

  "That’s the third of those symbols I’ve seen today. We're doing everything we can to figure it all out, but we don't know what it means. The people I work with are convinced that it must have some greater purpose or meaning, because the Archive doesn't make mistakes. But I'm telling you, the best chance of keeping you safe, of keeping you out of whatever is coming, is for you to go far away from here where no one, including me, knows where you are or where you're headed. Maybe you'll end up in a city more like wherever you came from, and you can settle in there like any other new arrival and start a life for yourself."

  I looked around, suddenly nervous that somebody might be watching us, but the few other people in the train station all seemed to be minding their own business. Either that, or fast asleep on nearby benches. It was a bit of a relief to have at least something explained to me, to learn the name of the city I had been running through all day. Sanctum—it wasn’t the first time I’d heard it mentioned, but now the name held so much more meaning. It certainly hadn't felt all that much like a sanctum or sanctuary for me so far, but giving the place a name made it just a little more real.

  Grayson must've taken my lack of answer as agreement. "Stay here," he said, before taking off toward the ticket counter. Feeling too exposed standing in the middle of the room, I wandered over to a large map that took up a few feet of wall space.

  It was the kind of map you'd see in the opening pages of fantasy stories, dark lines etched onto faded parchment. But the places this map showed me were well beyond anything I'd ever seen in a book. Unlike what I’d seen before, the ocean made up far less of the available space. There were undeniably four major landmasses, but I wasn't sure I would call them continents because each one was connected to the others in some form or another. There were still large swathes of water in between some of the spaces, but from a cursory glance there was no visible end to the land.

  I found Sanctum on the map easily enough, even though it didn’t have a large gold ‘you are here’ sticker. As promised, it sat near the western corner, on the edge of one of the larger bodies of water. Between Sanctum and the next city, which appeared to be New London, was a massive forest with no discernible landmarks besides trees and more trees. I tried to take everything in all at once, but the number of things to see was overwhelming. So many forests and mountains and cities and open spaces and castles. And there had to be so much the map didn't show. I was mostly focusing on the main destinations that I could get to from Sanctum, but this map promised that and so much more.

  There was no question that it was a big world out there, and it still wasn't one I could even begin to understand.

  I heard Grayson come up behind me before he said anything. As I turned, he handed me a ticket and a small leather pouch. "There's money in there. For now, I've gotten you on the next train out of here, but get off at whatever stop you want and get another train to anywhere you like. I'm sure you can recognize which cities will be most suited to you. But either way, there's enough here for you to do a little moving around. And then to make a start for yourself with whatever help you're able to find. I promise, if you go somewhere else, anywhere else, there will be people to help you. The After isn't in the habit of bringing in new people and simply leaving them to their own devices, unless that was exactly what they came from before. And even then, the help is there if it's needed or wanted. What happened to you today... it's inexcusable and inexplicable."

  I looked up at the map again and tried to figure out where would make the most sense for me to go, but I could feel resistance building in my gut. There were so many different options, how could I possibly know which was the right one? Which would offer the best mix of city and suburb, be the most like home? Which place was most like the version of Paris from the world I'd come from? The one I'd always dreamed of visiting.

  After the day I’d had, the last thing I wanted was to get on a train by myself and shoot off in a direction of someone else's choosing. Yes, the decisions from there would be my own, but I'd still be alone and clueless. There were so many things that could go wrong.

  "And what if I don't want to go?" I asked, holding my jaw firm to try to hide a slight quiver of my lip.

  "That would be a mistake. We don't know enough about what's going on here or how you're involved. It's too risky."

  "What do you care? You don't even know me." I knew it wasn't fair to say that. He'd already gone out of his way to help me, to save me from myself. If I'd gone after Harper, I'd probably already be dead. But that didn't change the fact that it wasn't his job to send me off like some wayward child to the countryside.

  Part of me suspected that what he suggested was really my best choice. Everything he was saying made sense. And I'd seen with my own eyes that this city wasn't exactly my good luck charm. The other part of me, didn't even trust my own instincts anymore. So far, I'd had more bad luck than good, though I certainly counted meeting Harper strongly in the positive column. But at least I was starting to know my way around. Granted, not really a big win in the positives column, but it was something. Leaving would mean starting all over again.

  "Is there another option?" I asked. "Is there any way I could stay here and still avoid getting myself killed or whatever? I don’t want to be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life, wondering how all of this played out, never knowing if I’m really safe."

  I expected a no right away, but instead Grayson considered my question. "There's no ‘or whatever’ about it. Let's be very clear here, if this is something you're considering. I know you’re new, and this will be more than a little strange for you, but finding yourself forced back into a Reclamation Center is a damn big deal. Being sent back is in some ways worse than death." Grayson paused, appearing to brace himself. "That being said, death isn't always a bad thing and some people do choose it. But dying in the After and being reclaimed to your origin story are two different things. If your friend had simply been killed, she would have woken up again without any memories back in whichever city made the most sense for her character. She would've started fresh, like her story had just finished and there was a world of possibilities in front of her. But reclamation is permanent. She's gone and will never be a part of this world again. So, if you take that train ride, and you end up in trouble, or even dead, it's probably still a better fit for you than if what happened to that girl happens to you."

  "Harper. That girl's name is Harper." My tone was angry, but I was doing my best to take in what he was telling me. On one hand, death wouldn't be the worst thing ever—which was a weird thing to even think to myself—but on the other hand, losing all my memories and starting over would be a kind of death all on its own. And yes, maybe I'd wake up where I was supposed to be with no memories of everything that happened today, but I couldn't make myself see that as a good plan. I wanted to make the decision for myself about what would happen to me, and to get the chance my letter had promised,
to build my own life. I didn't know for sure that I wanted to build it in Sanctum, and deep down I knew that if my only other option was being left alone in a train station, then I’d do as I was told and go. But getting on a train and disappearing forever wasn't what I wanted. Hell, I had left Harper's backpack at that park along with whatever there was left in her wallet, our breakfast, and my pajamas from before. So now even the one thing I'd had when I'd first arrived was gone, probably forever. All I had left was that gaudy leather bracelet, and that wasn't even mine. Just another reminder of Harper.

  Shit. There really were no obvious answers, and I resented having to decide at all. I certainly wasn't in the right frame of mind for it. Which meant I wasn’t in anywhere near the right frame of mind to take a solo train trip in a world I didn't understand. There were going to be countless rules and laws of physics that were completely foreign to me. Assuming magic and physics were in any way related.

  I had a lot to learn. But I wanted the chance.

  No, I wanted to stay, and I said as much aloud to Grayson. "If I stay, what does that mean for me?" I didn't ask if he’d leave me there because I didn't want to make it obvious that that was something I was worry about.

  "Then whatever happened here in the city today, you'd now officially be a part of it, for better or worse. You'd come with me, to where I work. From there, it's mostly out of my hands, but I can at least promise to try and get you answers."

  "Well, shit. That sounds way better. Why didn’t you offer this in the first place?"

  "Because where we’re going next, I can’t guarantee your safety. This has already been tumultuous enough, and one less moving piece might have made things a little easier. Or, you may offer the clue that we’re looking for before we even know we need it. Honestly, at this point no one really knows what's going on, and if you're prepared to put yourself in the middle of it, then I can't stop you. But if you want out, all the way out, then getting out of Sanctum is your only real choice."