Myths: Chamberlain Codex, #2

By Emery Cole

Morgan's gone from college dropout to a poster child for a wanted poster. Except it's not the government who wants her. It's a society of scientists who plan to run dangerous experiments on other types of beings. Types like Azril.

 

Is that all? As if that's not enough, her sister's still unconscious and has a death sentence looming. Her parents plan to pull the plug on her life support system. Not if Morgan has anything to do with it.

 

And by damn, she fully intends to do something about it, with or without Azril's help.

• Language: English
• Publisher: EmCo
• Release date: Jul 31, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201020255

Book preview

1

The beeping of the monitors was starting to permanently embed itself into my brain. Even when I wasn’t at the hospital, I could hear them. My footsteps timed themselves to the rhythm of Isabella’s heartbeat.

I spent most of my time at Shadow Vale Books, trying to busy myself reorganizing shelves that didn’t need to be reorganized at all. My parents had told me it was okay to close the shop for a while, but after two whole days of not going in, I realized that spending time alone with my thoughts was worse than going into work.

We all do what we have to do to get through each day. Mom started to research medicine on Google so she could talk to the doctors. Dad picked up smoking again, and I found a brochure for a support group for parents going through the loss of a child, but I didn’t think he had attended any meetings.

At least, not yet.

We all knew what the doctors said. She would never recover. She was braindead. It didn’t matter that we could see the rise and fall of her chest with each breath she took, that we could feel her hand in ours, warm and alive.

None of that made a difference anymore.

I kept the details of what happened that night vague. That way, I wouldn’t forget the story, and it left the doctors to fill in the medical blanks. They were still running tests to figure it out, but a few theories that had gone around were that she had a stroke or a heart attack. I don’t remember what else they had tested for, but it seemed like they were spouting non-stop theories to my family, desperately trying to help, but only serving to make it worse.

I kept it as accurate as I could, but it didn’t matter. The most important part, what actually happened to Isabella, was something I could never tell anyone. Not that they would have believed the real story, anyway.

When it all first happened, Azril and I had brought Isabella to the hidden cave under the waterfall where we had first met. It was never meant to be more than a temporary place to rest, to figure out what we would do next, and plan what I would tell people about what happened that day.

Azril and I sat in the cave, watching Isabella sleep peacefully on the table. He assured me that the Nightshade Society was unlikely to check this place and probably weren’t aware that its previous occupant was dead. Once they found out, which could be anywhere from a few hours to a few days from now, they would come back for his research which was stored in the cave. It left me with enough time to gather my thoughts together and figure out what I would do about Isabella.

A few hours passed in silence, and Azril started to get restless. He didn’t say anything about it, but I could tell from how he kept shooting furtive glances at the door that it was time to leave.

He carried Isabella outside and left us at the edge of the forest preserve. It wasn’t dark out anymore, and he couldn’t risk being seen with us, or being questioned by police. I couldn’t imagine explaining the real story to them, so it was better Azril stayed out of it as much as possible. He gently set Isabella down on the sidewalk before giving me a quick nod goodbye and disappearing back into the forest.

As I watched him go, I was reminded of how different the two of us were. He was out of sight in less than a second, seamlessly blending into his natural surroundings. I, on the other hand, couldn’t help but stick out wherever I was.

I sat down on the sidewalk next to Isabella and flagged down the first person who walked past. It was an elderly woman in a pristine mauve overcoat, walking a crusty little dog. She didn’t even notice Isabella and me in the middle of the sidewalk until I stood and asked her for help.

As soon as she got over her shock, she called an ambulance, which took almost thirty minutes to arrive. The whole time we were waiting, they kept asking me if I was okay. I tried to brush as much of the dirt off myself as possible, realizing it would only lead to more questions that I couldn’t answer.

Yeah, I would say, all the while shaking my head no. Maybe that was why they wouldn’t stop asking.

The only upside to leaving my phone and Isabella’s in our jackets back at Shadow Vale Books was that I had an excuse not to be the one to tell my parents what happened. As soon as Isabella was settled in the hospital bed, a nurse called them to inform them what happened. Or, at least, give them a brief overview.

My story was that after we had gone to get slushies, Isabella wanted to see some of her old high school friends. Since they would check her phone records, I had to say that it was because we had seen someone from our high school in the gas station convenience store while getting our slushies. I told the police that I couldn’t remember the names of the people she wanted to visit since they hadn’t been my friends, giving them no way to look into that part of my story.

To explain why we had left our phones at the bookshop, I said that we stopped there because I had forgotten my wallet in the employee room, and I wanted to make sure I could pay Isabella back for the slushies before we forgot.

Then, on the way to visit her friends, Isabella collapsed while walking, and I had no idea what could have happened to her. I said that it was sudden and that she had been feeling fine until that point. At least that part was true.

The story seemed unlikely, but other than that, there wasn’t anything else our small-town police force was going to look into. It was believable enough, and that was all that mattered. My parents didn’t suspect I was lying, either. That was partly because the police confirmed my story and didn’t have the energy to question me. What mattered was that it was an accident and that there wasn’t anything I could have done to prevent it.

At least, I couldn’t have prevented what happened to Isabella in the story that I told. The real story was an entirely different situation. A string of events had been triggered the second I decided to open the codex when it fell on me at work.

If I had just been mediocre at my job like I usually was and slipped it back on the shelf without checking it, none of this would have happened. And if I hadn’t figured out that the author of the codex, Vincent Chamberlain, was my great-great-grandfather, I wouldn’t have felt as connected to it. I might have left the whole thing alone the second I realized how dangerous it was going to be.

The truth was that I knew that something like what happened to Isabella was a possibility. I just thought that it would happen to me. Not her.

I didn’t see Azril for a few days after what happened. We didn’t have a reliable way of contacting each other, and all the times that we’d met, it had been accidental. I probably should have been worried about him, considering what we had all gone through, but I was sure that he would be okay. It seemed like he knew how to take care of himself and that I only weighed him down.

I don’t know what gave me that impression, considering both times I had run into him, he had been trying to escape some Nightshade Society danger. I guess it was how he carried himself, like he was a part of the air, like he didn’t have a physical form in the same way that I did. Even the most graceful human lives in defiance of their surroundings, constantly aware of the space we take up and the things that we touch. Azril was different. He belonged in a way that I never would.

Even though I didn’t see him, sometimes I got the feeling that he was watching me. There was a slight tingling sensation on the back of my neck that told me I wasn’t alone, but I didn’t feel threatened in any way. If the Nightshade Society were keeping an eye on me, I was sure that they would make themselves known. They hadn’t been exactly subtle in the past. They would probably want me to be aware that they were observing me so they could scare me into making a mistake or revealing something. Instead, I felt safe. I wanted to be annoyed that he didn’t trust me to take care of myself, but it was too comforting for me to really think anything else of it.

The only place I knew of that Azril seemed really uprooted was in the bookshop. It was my realm, but I was still a human, so it didn’t give me an upper hand. Instead, it was more like an even playing field. Both of us lost in the world, two halves of a story.

That was precisely where he found me, three days after I brought Isabella to the hospital.

It was my first day back at work. I’d gone through the motions of opening the shop mechanically. I half hoped no one would come in that day and half hoped it would be so busy we’d have a line out the door for the first time in the shop’s history.

Something about the shop felt different, and at first, I attributed the feeling to it being my first day back. After I’d finished opening the shop, I sat back at the register. Word had gotten out around town about what happened to Isabella. I figured that most people would assume that we were closed while we dealt with our family emergency, so there wouldn’t be too many customers that day.

I kept looking around the shop, trying to figure out what about it felt so off. It wasn’t that it was weird to be back there. I was sure that there was something physically different about the store, but everything seemed in order. None of the furniture had been moved. The decorations behind the register were the same as how I left them.

When I finally realized what it was, I almost started laughing. The shop was clean. Too clean. I would never have left it that way. Then, I remembered how the Nightshade Society member had broken through the glass to access the store. There should have been glass all over the floor, and the door should’ve been an empty frame.

And there should have been a body.

Instead of feeling surprised or afraid, I felt relieved. I knew that I was alone in the shop, and there was no immediate danger for me there. Actually, the possibility that I could get in any trouble was gone entirely. There was no body or mess, nothing that I had to do to cover the tracks of the Nightshade Society.

They must have sent someone to retrieve the body of the goon they sent after us. I had to give them credit; they did a great job of making sure they kept their secret society a secret. I looked around the store from my comfortable chair behind the register, searching for anything they might have forgotten, but it was pristine.

The only mistake they had made while cleaning was that they had cleaned too well. Otherwise, I might have forgotten about the mess entirely. There were more pressing issues in my life, and I hadn’t gotten around to sorting through the less important details of that day. It had all been done for me.

I was just starting to relax when I remembered something important—the Chamberlain Codex.

I hadn’t taken it with me when the three of us ran from the shop and never came back to collect it. The last time I saw the codex, it was sitting in my leather satchel on the floor of the employee room.

I jumped up from my chair and raced to the back of the store, taking the stairs to the employee room two at a time.

By some kind of miracle, the codex was sitting in the same place where I had left it. If the Nightshade Society had come by to cover their tracks, they hadn’t done an outstanding job of investigating the rest of the shop. They probably had to work quickly to make sure that they went unseen by any pedestrians or police. I clearly wasn’t the only one who didn’t want people to find out what had happened there.

I wanted to take it back down to the register with me but forced myself to leave it in the employee room when I went back down to sit at the counter again. It would be safer there, anyway.

I spent the next few hours reading a random book I had pulled off one of the shelves at the front of the store. It was the newest true crime novel that we were advertising by some author that had grown up in Shadow Vale. It didn’t have any references to the town or the town’s famous cryptids, but we shelved it next to those books anyway since it was town-adjacent. I didn’t so much read it as I looked at the shape of the words on the page, unable to get myself to focus.

The bell rang, and I gave the customer a quick glance and an obligatory hello before going back to the book I was trying to read. I kept reading over the same few sentences because every time someone else came into the store, I would forget what I was reading entirely. It took me longer than it should have to realize that the customer hadn’t walked right past me and into the store like everyone else did. He was hovering in front of the desk, waiting for my attention.

I was annoyed at first, but when I recognized who he was, my attitude changed.