Heart of Darkness, page 1
part #8 of Dark Secrets Series
Contents
Other Titles In This Series
Also By This Author
Best Reading Order for Dark Secrets
1. Aubrey
2. Ara
3. Aubrey
4. Ara
5. Aubrey
6. Jules
7. Ara
8. Aubrey
9. Ara
10. Aubrey
11. Jules
12. Ara
13. Jules
14. Aubrey
15. Jason
16. Aubrey
17. Elora
18. Aubrey
19. Jules
20. Ara
21. Aubrey
22. Harry
23. Aubrey
24. Ara
25. Aubrey
26. Jules
27. Aubrey
28. Jules
29. Elora
30. Ara
31. Jules
32. Ara
33. Aubrey
34. Ara
35. Aubrey
36. Elora
37. Ara
38. Jules
39. Aubrey
40. Ara
41. Aubrey
42. Ara
43. Aubrey
44. Ara
45. Jason
46. Aubrey
47. Elora
To be continued…
~Book Eight of Dark Secrets~
Text © 2019 by Angela M Hudson
All Rights Reserved
Cover image © Angela M Hudson
Editor: John Edmunds
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Characters, names, places, events or incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to places or incidents is purely coincidental.
www.angelamhudson.com
Other Titles In This Series
(should be read in order)
Dark Secrets
The Heart’s Ashes
Mark of Betrayal
Lies in Blood
Echoes & Silence: Part One
Echoes & Silence: Part Two
Bound by Secrets
Heart of Darkness
Underworld
Also By This Author
Bound Series Book 1
Bound Series Book 2
In Another life 1
In Another life 2
In Another life 3
In My Blood
The Legend of the Raven Wolf
Best Reading Order for Dark Secrets
Dark Secrets
The Heart’s Ashes
Mark of Betrayal
Lies in Blood
Echoes & Silence: Part One
Echoes & Silence: Part Two
Bound Series Book 1
Bound Series Book 2
Bound by Secrets
In Another life 1
In Another life 2
In Another life 3
In My Blood
Heart of Darkness
Underworld
Aubrey
For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Aubrey Knight. I’ll eventually be a Lilithian vampire—a what? I’ll get to that—but I was born with an ability to lift dead souls from the Other Side and bring them to life again.
Necromancy?
That’s not a word I like to use, but my family did once refer to me as The Daughter of the Phoenix—a child conceived from one reborn in fire. That was my mom, if you're wondering. She’s a bicentennial ruler of the entire supernatural community.
Well, she was, until the other rulers had a messy divorce that caused a permanent division in our family. Which, you know, eventually led to the downfall of the entire Knight monarchy.
If you’re new to this world, to my world, none of that made sense, I guess, because you may not know that my dad and my Uncle Jason were the kings—yes, two kings; each one getting 100 years to rule before passing the baton—and that my mom and Aunt Lily were the queens. They all have a complicated history. You could practically fill an entire novel with the stuff that went down between them. And when I say complicated, I mean really complicated. Like, my mom is only alive because Aunt Lily gave her half of her soul. And my mom and Uncle Jason were in love once but now he’s with Lily. Actually, I think Mom still loves him—because it’s a forever kind of love—but since they’re soul mates, and since my dad is also her soul mate, Mom had to decide to “commit” to my dad or end up feeling lost for the rest of eternity, pulled between two hearts who owned her equally. Confused yet?
Don’t worry. You’ll catch on as we go along. Although, the real story I need to tell you is what comes after we found my mother and my baby brother on the beach. One dead, the other alive, the murderer having escaped just moments before, taking my father with her.
But we’ll get to that.
Because, if you keep reading, you’re about to see just how complicated my life is going to get. All because I grew up in a generation of kids who fight for what they believe in, for what they want.
And what do I want?
I want to be powerful. I want to say I have a talent that no one else does. And I want to be damn good at it. But how can I become everything I’m supposed to be if I’m not allowed to use my abilities? Not even to practice.
People die every day. I get that there has to be balance, but once they’ve died, why shouldn’t they come back to life? They did their time, right? And since I can bring them back, I don’t see why I shouldn’t. It’s not that complicated.
Unless you ask my parents.
And that brings me back to them and their story. You see, everything that happened, it can’t just be told by one person, from one perspective, because so many threads came together to bring you this epic tale of the fall of an empire, but there was so much I didn’t know about until now. Until I was looking back. So, I’m gonna go ahead and give you the side notes as we go along—my parents’ story, and my Uncle Jason’s—because, otherwise, you can’t really get the complete picture. And I’ll probably have to write it all down in more than one journal, because there’s too many pages of madness and chaos to fit in this one.
So, get comfy, friends, because your journey begins here.
Do you believe in magic? I hope so. Because everything, from the moment you turn this page, is about to change.
Even for you.
See you on the Other Side…
Ara
Aubrey slammed her door.
Sighing heavily, I glanced over at David, who slowly placed his morning coffee on the lamp table and stood up. “I’ll deal with her.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I told him. “She just has to accept it.”
“I won’t have her disrespecting you, or slamming her door,” he demanded softly, moving toward the stairs. “I don’t care how angry she is. If she wakes Daniel, I’ll ship her off to Elysium to live with her grandfather.”
Another heavy sigh pushed my shoulders down as he walked away. Once, I might have laughed at that statement, but this morning, it just dredged up the many ways our lives had changed since we found Jason. After he went missing for two years, following a devastating event, he’d come back with a fiancé, divided the supernatural world again, and seen our once dear sister Lily become an outsider to the family. Our world was in a state of unrest, and it was all for love.
Because of love.
In spite of love.
Now, with Aubrey stamping her feet about a total ban on using her abilities, I felt like I was being pulled in all directions. Add to it that I had a headstrong almost-two year old—unplanned—and that Jase and his fiancé Jules were coming to Perth in a few days, and it just seemed like I was in a blender, being crunched up into a recipe for the most soul-tiring situation a person could be in.
Rubbing my face firmly, I pushed my hair back and prepared myself for another long day, looking up as the front door opened.
“Morning,” Elora chimed as she came through, always just that bit too cheery for my liking. “Uncle Mike sent me to get those bedsheets for Jules and Jase.”
Without a word, I aimed a finger at the stack by the door.
“Ooh,” she trilled, “nice thread-count.”
“Nothing but the best for the former king of the people.”
“And his new fiancé,” she added.
“Yes. That, too.”
Elora placed the sheets back down then and swept over to sit on the coffee table in front of me, the high white walls going up around her like she was a snow queen in an ice castle, graceful and elegant as a vampire, but as alive and thriving as a human. “What’s wrong, Mom?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Is Aubrey being a brat again? Because I can talk some sense into her—”
“It’s not that. We have her under control. She hasn’t lifted a soul from the Other Side for over a month now, but she’s arguing about it constantly—says they won’t leave her alone.”
Elora’s gaze fixed on my face, and she reached over to touch my arm. “But it’s not that, is it, Mom? That’s not what’s bothering you.”
I sighed, rubbing m
Her eyes narrowed at me, boring inside my soul to read the energy imprint that I, stupidly, had taught her how to read. “It’s Uncle Jase,” she said, curious. “Why are you dreading him coming to stay? He’s not staying here.”
“I know.” I sunk back in the lounge chair. “It’s not that.”
Elora jumped up and came to sit beside me, head on my shoulder. “Is it… do you still love him?”
“Not in that way.” I laughed, shaking my head, trying to think of a way to put this. “But things… have been complicated since the vision.”
“The one Drake showed you three years ago?” she confirmed, voice lifting upward on the end. “The other life?”
I nodded.
“How is that still an issue? I thought you and Dad went out to Loslilian to talk it out with Uncle Jase and Lily.”
“We did, but…” My eyes drifted across the room, thoughts going back to that night—the night that started this entire mess:
“Happy New Year.” Drake hugged me, stepping back to allow Jase in. I hugged him tight, opening my arm then for David to join the huddle. I hadn’t seen Jase and Lily in a little over three years now, but I’d missed him a lot. Missed the dynamic between us all.
“Happy New Year, guys.”
They both kissed my cheek and turned to hug Lily, while the rest of the family exchanged sentiments of joy and good tidings. I stood back with my arms folded and watched the others, all smiling and laughing, gathered in a room equipped to host fourteen but, over the years, having multiplied so much that I thought about moving to a bigger house—if it weren’t for the fact that I’d never want to be anywhere but across the road from Mike and Em. Especially now, with the trouble they were going through. Neither had admitted it, but it was obvious enough just looking at them—they hadn’t even hugged—that things were rocky. And with my ability to feel their energies, I knew it went a little deeper than that. I could almost hear the words ‘divorce’ in their thoughts.
Drake moved in beside me and watched on. “They don't look happy. Mike and Emily.”
“They'll be okay. It's just a rough patch. Love like theirs doesn’t die, Dad—”
“Love like theirs?” He scoffed, folding his arms. “I wouldn’t say they’re in love, Amara. And if they were, it is certainly not some great love.”
I glared at him. “What do you mean?”
“Mike has never loved her in the way he should. He held on to her because he was under your curse and needed something, somewhere to place all that love that had nowhere to go. And were it not for the fact that they had a child literally the day you broke the curse, I think Mike would have come to realize that much sooner.”
My jaw dropped. “What a horrid thing to say!”
He shrugged unapologetically, looking a little bit human when he did. “I’ve seen alternate futures for them—”
“You have?”
Drake nodded, watching them. “This is the only one in which they ended up together.”
“Why? When did you see these alternate futures?”
“When you were younger, I concocted a potion that would give me the gift of foresight, like my father, but only for the length of time that the potion ran through my veins. And I saw some… interesting things in those alternate lives.”
“Like what?”
“For one, I saw a future where you married Mike.”
“For real?”
“Yes. And you had a number of soulless babes that died soon after birth. It tore you both apart, but you were happy to begin with.”
I glanced over at Mike. “And what about him? Who else did you see him with?”
“I saw a path where he ended up with Morgana, and I almost took steps to see it come to fruition, were it not for the fact that the very path that saw her happiness also saw the resurrection of Anandene in her witch form.”
“And chaos ensued?” I said with a smirk.
“It did.”
“Wow. And… what, you were just going to… choose it? Choose a path?”
He nodded once, moving his eyes across the room to Jason. “I saw many paths in those weeks, Amara—”
“Why were you looking at alternate paths?”
“To see if there was a way around Safia’s demands,” he said. “I needed to know if I could spare you the horror that awaited you at her hands, and I feel, despite all you suffered to get here, I chose the best path possible for you.”
“Chose!” My arms dropped to my sides and I moved around to stand right in front of him. “You chose my path for me?”
He nodded again, unfazed, even though my entire head and chest were boiling with the rage of ultimate violation.
“You can’t just go around choosing people’s lives, Drake. How do you even know you chose the right path?”
From across the room, David looked up, casting his eyes in our direction.
Drake smiled softly. “You have such little faith in me—”
“Yes, because I went through hell, Drake! And you chose that for me?”
Now, everyone was looking. Drake stood taller, exhaling. “Yes. And I did so, knowing it was the best path.”
“How so? What were the other choices?”
“It’s irrelevant now.”
“The hell it is. I have a right to at least know what my life might have been—”
“Very well then. You ended up with Jason.” He smirked, taking a sip of his drink to wash it down. “In every other conceivable path I could have taken.”
The air squeezed out of my lungs, making my stomach sink. “What?”
“Still think I chose the wrong path for you?”
I just wanted to smack his smug face. David moved over then.
“Show me,” I demanded.
“Out of the question.”
“Why?”
“Because it will tear open old wounds, Amara—”
“No, it won’t.”
“It will, because these visions are as real as life itself. You will feel, at the end, as though you lived it. You will make connections with people you have no feelings for in this life, and it will alter you. I have no doubt in my mind.”
“Mom,” Elora said, moving over to me, her eyes locked to the mirrored necklace she wore that helped clarify the energies she could see in a person’s soul—energies that could map out pathways, futures. “You don’t want to see it. Trust me.”
“I need to,” I insisted. “I want to know what life you thought was so much worse than this, enough that you took steps to choose a path that put me through torture, that—”
“You must trust that I have only ever done what’s right for you—”
“I can decide that for myself—”
“I’m warning you, daughter. It will do you more harm than good—”
“I’m willing to take the risk—”
“Show me,” David offered, laughing at me as he peeled me out of Drake’s bubble. “I’ll tell you if he chose the right path or not.”
My jaw set hard, feet edging along the rocky ledge of middle ground. David and I were like one person these days, so connected, so close that I trusted him to know whether or not I should see the vision. “Fine. But if he’s lying, if it was a better path, then I want to see, so I can hate him for the rest of my days.”
