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Chapter One
Snap.
Snap.
Fingers snapped in front of my eyes, and I blinked.
“Are you listening to me, child?”
Busted.
I sighed in annoyance. I hadn’t been listening to Adrian for a while now. Like, days. In fact, he was really starting to get on my nerves.
I looked to the little, bald man in question, and rolled my eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I lied. “What were you saying?”
He pursed his lips and frowned at me. Adrian was no fool, he knew when I was lying to him. I didn’t do it much, because he always saw right through me, and he had no problem calling me out on it.
Adrian Almatiez was a member of the Council of Elders for the American Witches. I assumed there were other Councils in each country, but the one in America was the only one that I was concerned about.
I didn’t know if Adrian was the head of the American Council or not, but he sure acted like he was in charge of everyone and everything. Bossy didn’t even begin to cover it. It wasn’t just me he bossed around on the daily, it was freakingeveryone. Even the other Council members.
He was an outrageously short man, with an extremely shiny, bald head. He was under five feet, to be sure. The top of his shiny bald head didn’t even come up to my shoulders. It was odd, but he’d somehow managed to perfect the art of staring someone down, even from his height. He was deathly pale and had a round pot belly. The amount of ear piercings he had almost rivaled my own, but instead of studs like I wore, he wore thin, gold hoops. His eyes were a light green that looked like they had started out life as an altogether different shade of green, one far more vibrant, but life had slowly bled the color out of them over time.
He had lines that shot out from around his mouth and eyes that said he either smiled a lot, or frowned a lot. I could confirm the fact that he did both. His smile was never genuine, and never quite reached his eyes, but the lines sure did. The frown was always real, and usually morphed into a scowl. And it had absolutely no problem reaching his eyes.
When I’d first met him two weeks ago, I’d thought he looked like a genie, and he’d scared the crap out of me with his odd and unfriendly behavior towards me. I wasn’t as afraid of him anymore as I had been, but he was still a very bizarre man, and I knew he could flip that switch, and go from nice to scary in two seconds flat. He was simply hiding that part of himself from me at the moment. But I knew his true, scary self was lurking in there and wouldn’t hesitate to come out when the mood struck him.
“What is the matter with you today?” Adrian asked in his smooth, cultured voice. “You’ve been spacing out all day. Would you like for me to leave you alone? Because right now you’re wasting both of our time. As you well know, my time is a valuable thing and not for you to squander away.”
Now Ireallywanted to roll my eyes at him. His time may be valuable, but he was only here at his own insistence. He certainly wasn’t here because I’d invited him, that’s for sure. He’d invited himself, and no one had been brave enough to tell him no or to get lost. If it were up to me (and it wasn’t) I would have told him to get lost. I couldn’t tell him to leave. Adrian struck me as the type of person who would not take to that kind of disrespect kindly. Since I still had no idea what he was capable of, I wasn’t about to disrespect him. Not yet, at least. I would make no promises for what would come later.
I sighed and asked the question I had been dying to ask since we started this nonsense. “What is the point to this, Adrian? We come here every day, and you ask me the same questions over and over again. None of them have triggered any memories. I assure you, like I’ve been assuring you over and over again, I have no memories of Rain. Absolutely zero. This is beginning to get extremely frustrating.”
I sat back in the chair I was seated on, and crossed my legs at the knees. I studiously stared down at the flip flops I was currently wearing on my feet. They were black with silver straps. My toenails were painted black. The polish was chipped, and I needed to repaint them.
“Ariel,” Adrian said in a sharp voice. I knew from his tone that he expected me to look up and make eye contact with him. We went over this all the time.
I looked up from my toes but, instead of focusing on Adrian like he wanted me to, I looked around the room we were seated in. The walls were a deep, dark burgundy. The walls were lined with shelves, and there were no windows.
Quinton had called it his study, but it looked like a library to me.
There were so many books in here that it would probably take me days to count them all.
Quinton had said all these books had come from his father’s library. He’d said that these hadn’t even been a fourth of what his father had had. The rest were scattered. Some, he’d said, were downstairs in the basement in a room I’d yet to see. I didn’t go down to check it out; the basement terrified me. Some were in his bedroom, another place I had yet to see. Some had been given to Tyson, who had them goodness knew where. There was another study upstairs that apparently served as another mini library. And the rest, he’d said, were in his storage unit.
This storage unit was starting to sound more like a mansion sized treasure chest.
I’d fallen in love with this room the moment I’d first walked into it. I would kill to have this many books in my possession. When I’d told Quinton as much, he’d smirked at me, and told me he would buy me some more books. I wasn’t even going to argue with him about it, because it wouldn’t matter what I said to him. He’d do what he wanted, anyway, just like he always did.
“Ariel,” Adrian snapped. “What is the matter with you?”
“It’s not working,” I blurted.
Adrian sighed, and I heard his chair creak as he moved around in it, getting more comfortable or tired of sitting in the same place.
“You must have patience,” he told me.
