Heart of the Rebellion Read online

  Also by E.E. Holmes

  THE WORLD OF THE GATEWAY

  The Gateway Trilogy (Series 1)

  Spirit Legacy: Book 1 of The Gateway Trilogy

  Spirit Prophecy: Book 2 of The Gateway Trilogy

  Spirit Ascendancy: Book 3 of The Gateway Trilogy

  The Gateway Trackers (Series 2)

  Whispers of the Walker: The Gateway Trackers Book 1

  Plague of the Shattered: The Gateway Trackers Book 2

  Awakening of the Seer: The Gateway Trackers Book 3

  Portraits of the Forsaken: The Gateway Trackers Book 4

  Heart of the Rebellion: The Gateway Trackers Book 5

  Soul of the Sentinel: The Gateway Trackers Book 6

  Heart of the Rebellion

  The Gateway Trackers Book 5

  E.E. Holmes

  Lily Faire Publishing

  Townsend, MA

  Copyright © 2018 by E.E. Holmes

  All rights reserved

  www.lilyfairepublishing.com

  ISBN 978-0-9984762-7-8 (Print edition)

  ISBN 978-0-9984762-9-2 (Barnes & Noble print edition)

  ISBN 978-0-9984762-8-5 (Digital edition)

  Publisher’s note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Cover design by James T. Egan of Bookfly Design LLC

  Author photography by Cydney Scott Photography

  For my “little” brother Eric, whose heart has always been the biggest.

  i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

  my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

  i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done

  by only me is your doing,my darling)

  i fear

  no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

  no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

  and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

  and whatever a sun will always sing is you

  here is the deepest secret nobody knows

  (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

  and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

  higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

  and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

  i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

  -e.e. cummings

  Contents

  Also by E.E. Holmes

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1. Sleepwalking

  2. Interpretations

  3. Marching Orders

  4. Wide Awake

  5. Tribute

  6. Make-overs

  7. Fireflies in the Darkness

  8. Found and Lost

  9. Confidantes

  10. SOS

  11. X Marks the Spot

  12. Game Plan

  13. Captive

  14. Fight and Flight

  15. Solitary

  16. Walking

  17. Betrayal

  18. Allies

  19. Heart of the Rebellion

  20. Horizon

  About the Author

  1

  Sleepwalking

  “JESS, DON’T MOVE and don’t panic!”

  My twin sister Hannah’s voice reached through to me, prodding the fog of sleep so that it did not lift so much as swirl and part and swirl again.

  “Jess? Can you hear me?”

  “Mm-hmm,” I tried to tell her, but I couldn’t be sure if the response had traveled the distance from my head to my mouth. That distance felt so, so very long—a journey hardly worth taking when I could just stay comfortably asleep.

  Wait a second, though. Was I comfortable?

  Her voice had not yet woken me, but my senses were rousing, and what I felt wasn’t comfortable at all. A sharp, biting wind made me shiver. A dampness clung to my hair. The inside of my nose tingled with night air and the mineral chill of stone. And my muscles were so taut and tense I felt as though I were being stretched on a rack.

  “What the hell?” I asked myself. Again, the words lost motivation halfway to my lips and echoed inside my head instead—a head that was clearing by the second.

  “Jess, whatever you do, do not move,” came Hannah’s voice again, and though she was working to keep it calm, there was a bite of panic in the words—a tinge of something that tasted like fear.

  “Why?” I asked, and this time I heard my own voice aloud, a sort of slurred and sleepy murmur.

  “Do you trust me?” she replied.

  “‘Course I do,” I muttered.

  “Then do not move. Just breathe.”

  “What…?” But the question died before I could fully formulate it. I was distracted. I had just felt something under my right hand. It was rough, jagged, and cool to the touch—stone. The moment I realized what it was, I felt it beneath my left hand, too, and—even more oddly still—pressed against my chest and the flesh of my cheek. My breath began to quicken as the cogs and wheels in my head squeaked and juddered against each other.

  Another breeze lifted my hair. I was outside. The front of my body was pressed against stone. I became aware that I was upright, and that the full weight of my body was resting on my feet.

  I was standing. I was outside and I was standing up and yet I was asleep.

  This realization sent a jolt of electric terror zinging through my veins, waking every muscle and sense to its most heightened state. My eyes, which had been on the verge of fluttering open, now glued themselves shut in fear.

  “Hannah?” The sharp note of panic was in my voice now, and Hannah heard it. When she spoke, it was with the air of an animal that was treading carefully because it had scented danger.

  “Jess, listen to me, okay? Hold on to what’s in front of you with your hands. Find a way to grasp on, something to steady yourself, okay? And don’t move your feet.”

  What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck, became the refrain inside my head as I clawed with my fingers, trying to find a handhold. I dug the fingers of my left hand into a jagged crack in the stone and tried to grab a small outcropping of rock with my right. As I did so, I realized that I had something clutched tightly in my right hand. Without looking at it, I knew it was a writing implement—maybe a pencil? No, chalk. I fumbled it between my shaking fingers, before losing my grip on it. It hit the stone below me with a hollow snap.

  I understood in that moment what I had been doing in my sleep, but still couldn’t fathom where I had been doing it.

  “Did you find something to hold on to? Are you secure?”

  “I… yeah, I think so.” I pulled first with one hand, and then the other. Both felt steady.

  “Okay, now take a deep breath and open your eyes, but do not move your feet,” Hannah instructed calmly.

  My eyelids did not want to cooperate, but I forced them open and let out a gasp that echoed into the cold night.

  I was staring out over the darkened grounds of Fairhaven from a dizzying height with my cheek pressed against a stone wall—the outer wall of the castle. Beneath my feet, a narrow ledge of rock was all that separated me from a long and deadly drop to the lawns below. I was standing only a few feet from the curve of the North Tower, where the ledge disappeared smoothly into the carved stone base of a tall, arched window. No lights shone from the room behind the leaded glass. On the stretch of stone wall between myself and the tower was the beginning of a drawing—the outline of a castle and the suggestion of figures upon its battlements, already dissolving and dripping down the stones in cloudy rivulets as the first raindrops began to pelt against it.

  Slowly, I turned my head, pressing my face into the wall, breathing in the damp,
natural scent of the stone as it brushed against my nose before twisting my neck and resting my other cheek against it.

  My eyes found Hannah, some twenty feet away, leaning her torso out of our open window. Tendrils of her long, dark hair floated around her face as though she were floating in water. Her eyes were wide with terror, staring out of her pale, pointed face like mirrors reflecting my own fear back at me.

  Gently, almost tenderly, she extended her arm out into the starlit space between us and crooked her slender fingers at me. “Move slowly back toward me, now. That’s it. Just kind of shuffle your feet across a little at a time.”

  I stared back at her, utterly unable to move. “I can’t.”

  “You can. You got all the way out there without falling, and you can get all the way back.”

  “Hannah, how the hell did I—”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. All that matters right now is getting you back inside safely, all right?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, okay,” I squeaked. “But, it’s so dark, Hannah. I can barely see where I’m putting my feet. How am I supposed to—?”

  From behind Hannah, a second face peeked out of the window, his features full of the same shock and terror that was currently flooding me.

  “What in the actual…?” Milo Chang mumbled weakly. In the darkness, his form gave off a dull glow, like the gentlest, most human of lanterns.

  Hannah just shook her head and he understood at once. This was not the time for questions.

  “Milo, go out there and help her. Talk her through it,” Hannah urged him.

  Milo looked horrified at the very thought. “I… okay. But what if I… yeah, of course.” He shook off his own misgivings with a violent toss of his hair and flew out the window at once.

  Oh, sure, getting on and off castle ledges was a piece of cake when you were already dead.

  “Show-off,” I muttered as he floated up behind me, giving me the sensation of standing with my back to an open freezer.

  Milo tried to laugh in response, but the sound that escaped him was more of a hysterical squeak. “You know, if you wanted to take a walk in the night air, I hear the ground floor is really good for that sort of thing.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind next time,” I said, gritting my teeth. My fingers were starting to cramp. I tried to loosen them, but survival instinct kept them locked stubbornly in place.

  Milo drifted down toward my feet, where he could get a better view of the ledge I was perched so precariously on.

  “Okay,” he said. “Just start sliding your feet across. There are a couple of gaps and one part that’s kind of narrow, but I’ll guide you across them, okay?”

  “Yeah, okay,” I whispered, a gust of wind lifting the words right out of my mouth and whisking them away into the sky.

  For what felt like an eternity, I slid first one foot and then the other, inch by inch, across the ledge. Each time I found a new footing, I would then have to slide my hands across and find a new handhold. Some stretches of wall were so smooth that there was nothing to grip, and I simply had to spread my fingers wide and pray for balance. Milo calmly intoned his instructions. “Shift onto your toes, this bit is cracked. Pick up your right foot and shift it over about six inches to avoid the gap. A little further. Okay, now you can put it down. Good, it widens for the next few feet, so you can put your heels down.”

  All the while, Hannah’s hand reached for me, and I turned to look at it after each movement, ensuring myself that I was getting closer, watching that distance between us shrink and shrink until at last her fingers closed around my arm just above the elbow.

  “Just grab the top of the window casement. That’s good. There’s a ledge you can grab just underneath on the inside. Feel it?” She guided my hands as Milo guided my feet and, at long last, I collapsed into a shuddering heap onto the floor of our room.

  Hannah slammed the window shut and bolted the lock upon it, as though I were in danger of being yanked back through it by the malevolent hands of the night.

  The three of us sat on the floor for a long time, slowly recovering from the grip of fear, prying it away from ourselves finger by icy finger, until our breathing quieted and our panicked thoughts settled into our own heads rather than thrumming unsettlingly through our shared psychic connection. That was one of the biggest challenges of being Bound to a Spirit Guide; our heads became shared spaces for each other’s strongest emotions.

  Finally, I sat up. “Well,” I said, “that was new.”

  Hannah gave a shaky laugh. “You could say that, yes.”

  I looked over at her. Her eyes were still bright with unshed tears. “What happened?”

  Hannah shrugged helplessly. “The breeze woke me up. I saw your bed empty and the window open. At first I thought…” She shuddered but did not complete the thought.

  I swallowed back the memory of one of the worst nights of my life—the night I walked into our mother’s room to find the window open and the curtains askew, and there below on the pavement…

  Nope. Close the mental door on that one, Jess. You’ve got enough shit to deal with at the moment without falling headfirst down that rabbit hole. I refocused on Hannah, who was still talking.

  “Then I looked over and saw you on the ledge with the chalk,” Hannah said. “I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid to wake you and I was afraid not to.”

  I let out a low whistle. “Yeah, that could have gone badly either way.”

  “I was still trying to decide what to do when the rain started and you just sort of… stopped drawing. I thought you might be coming out of it, so I started calling for you.”

  I nodded. “Well, I’m persistent, I’ll give myself that.”

  Hannah dropped her head into her hand and rubbed at her temples in a weary sort of way. “I hoped… if we just locked the door…”

  But doors did not stop me, it would seem. Nothing would stop this prophecy when it worked its way down to my fingertips.

  It was only a few months ago that I had discovered I was a Seer, and the denial had been bone-deep. I mean, let’s be honest, didn’t I have enough to deal with? I was a Durupinen, which meant it was my job to guide trapped spirits between the worlds of the living and the dead. I was a Muse, which meant that spirits often used me as their own personal sketch artist when they wanted to communicate. I was a Walker, which enabled me to leave my body behind and roam the world in spirit form—a talent I had no intention of using again. And now, I was a Seer.

  I couldn’t decide whether the Universe was trying to tell me it loved me or it hated me, but I was more than okay with spreading the wealth around a bit. Four gifts were great on your birthday, but four gifts tying you to the spirit world was decidedly less fun.

  Seeing was perhaps the least desirable gift of them all. I had come to terms with the others. In fact, I personally thought I should be congratulated for how little I whined about them. In the past few years, I had even begun to see that value in what I was able to do—the unique ways I was able to help people at a time when they were beyond other people’s help. But Seeing? Seeing was nothing but trouble and I knew that all too well.

  There were no two people in the history of the Durupinen who knew better the destructive power of a prophecy than Hannah and me. We had been the subject of a centuries-old prophecy that had torn apart our family, made us outcasts, and had nearly destroyed the entire spirit world. We had barely survived it, and though we had since rebuilt lives for ourselves, it was safe to say that neither of us wanted to see or hear the word “prophecy” ever again.

  Then, less than a year ago, I made a prophetic drawing. And then another. I did not realize what they were at first, but my mentor Fiona, another Muse and artist, had brought me to terms with the unpleasant reality of my gift—a gift that was turning out to be far more curse than blessing. And that curse was currently on display on the side of the castle for the entire world to see.

  “What are we going to do about it?” I asked, pointing to
the window. “The drawing? We can’t just leave it out there. Someone will see it! I’m going to have to go back out there and—”

  “It’s already gone,” Milo assured me. “The rain took care of that for us.”

  I sighed. “Good. That’s good.” I’d once made a drawing from a creative combination of ash and my own blood while in a trance. At least I was getting better at choosing less painful media, but my choice of canvas still left something to be desired.

  “So, now what?” I asked. “The locked door didn’t help.”

  “No,” Hannah agreed. “I might even argue the locked door made it worse. The hallway was exposed, but at least there was no risk of falling to your death.”

  Only two nights ago, Hannah had found me in the corridor outside our room, attempting to scrawl another iteration of the same prophetic image onto the wall. Luckily, I had grabbed a pastel instead of something more permanent, and a bucket of water and a sponge stolen from a supply closet had removed most of the evidence of my artwork. An tastefully arranged potted plant on a plinth had concealed the rest.

  Our hope had been that, if Hannah locked the door from the inside and hid the key from me, we could at least contain my sleepwalking to the confines of our own room, and therefore have a better chance of hiding the evidence from the rest of the Durupinen in the castle.

  It was now apparent that plan sucked.

  “Well, the first thing we do is lock the windows,” Hannah said firmly. “Although, I suppose you might just break them if you can’t get them open.”

  “What about hiding all the pencils and art supplies?” Milo suggested. “I mean, if she doesn’t have anything to draw with—”