Legends: Chamberlain Codex, #3

By Emery Cole

Morgan's made a deal with the devil. She's committed herself in servitude to a lunatic just to keep her sister alive. Oh, and Azril too.

 

Except, now she's figured out that the plans the lunatic has for her sister and Azril are far more nefarious than she ever could have imagined.

• Language: English
• Publisher: EmCo
• Release date: Sep 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201304355

Book preview

1

The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was the smiling face of my new assistant. Her face loomed over mine, close enough to touch if I reached up. I would have let out a yelp of surprise if I had managed to regain any energy at all while I slept. Once she had determined I was finally awake, she took a step back.

You slept through your alarms, Neera explained.

I didn’t remember having set any alarms the night before, but it’s entirely possible that in my delirious exhaustion, I had set them and then forgotten about it. I sat up and tried to blink the sleep out of my eyes. It was surprising that I had managed to fall asleep at all the night before, but I was glad that I would be at least somewhat alert for the day ahead.

I vaguely remembered a dream I had. Something about Azril, and the forest, narrated like the pages of the codex. I could almost feel the weight of him sitting on the bed next to me, like how we had spent the night in his room.

Thanks, I gave Neera a polite nod. The illusion of Azril’s presence was quickly fading, and I desperately wanted to cling to it but couldn’t when Neera was standing right in front of me, demanding some sort of action on my part. I knew I needed to get up and start the day and that she was only there to ensure I was able to manage my schedule, so it was irrational of me to blame her for having forgotten some unimportant dream.

I sat in bed, expecting her to leave so I could get ready by myself, but she didn’t move. She stood a polite distance away from my bed, never letting go of that plastic smile.

I debated whether or not I should ask her to leave but decided against it. I’m sure the real reason she got assigned as my assistant was so that Mr. Nightshade could have her report back to him about everything I was doing. There was no way that he would have simply handed over his personal assistant to me simply because she was the one I requested.

Maybe it was a terrible choice on my part, but I knew that Neera might be useful in some way. Even if she was still more loyal to Mr. Nightshade, she was also the only familiar person in the whole building, aside from Azril, who couldn’t be my assistant for obvious reasons.

I got out of bed and looked around, still trying to get used to my new environment. My room was beautiful and ornate, like many of the rooms within the underground complex, but I found myself wishing that it wasn’t. It was almost like I had an entire apartment to myself. My bedroom was at the end of a hallway, which widened into a sitting area that had a large floor-to-ceiling bookshelf and a kitchenette. There were a few other doorways along the hallway, but when I finally got shown to my room the night before, I was completely out of energy and had pretty much just thrown myself onto the bed.

Appreciating my new space and exploring everything it offered seemed `I didn’t deserve all of the comforts that my betrayal had come with, not when Azril was sitting in a cold, bare room, being subjected to the horrors he had already managed to escape.

He must have been thinking about the time we first met like I often found myself doing. The scene played on repeat in my head. I’d been excited to discover the secret cave under the waterfall, thinking that for the first time in my life, I would actually have some kind of adventure or importance. I didn’t help him escape it so much as he helped me when a soul reaper appeared, and I was too naïve to run.

I forced myself out of my repetitive thoughts, knowing that dwelling on the past wouldn’t help me at the moment.

At least what I had done was good for Isabella. If I had turned down Mr. Nightshade’s offer to become the vice president of the Nightshade Society, my sister would be dead by now. It wasn’t perfect, but my decision had bought me some extra time. Not to mention that they already had Azril and me and probably didn’t have any plans to let us go if I turned down the position. Azril and I knew too much about them already and had proven to be an annoyance to them at best. We weren’t going to get a quick tour and a goodbye hug.

But I doubted Azril saw it that way. Especially considering where he was.

It was impossible for me to think about something that didn’t eventually remind me of him. I guess that was a good thing. Otherwise, I would have been a sociopath, only caring about myself. Thinking about Azril hurt, but it meant that I was still myself. The Nightshade Society hadn’t gotten to my soul.

I’d been there for about a day, and I was already worried that they would turn me into one of their corrupted workers, like Neera. As far as I knew, they didn’t experiment on other humans, but that didn’t exactly make me feel safe.

Neera watched me curiously, and I realized that I had been standing still for over a minute.

What’s on the schedule for today? I asked, practically praying for a distraction.

You will be beginning every day with a meeting with Mr. Nightshade, Neera replied. Her voice had a silky but robotic tone, a side effect of whatever they had done to her brain to turn her into a loyal assistant to the Nightshade Society. As an air nymph, Neera should have been free-spirited and playful. Instead, she was almost like a machine.

The Chamberlain Codex called this process corruption. I didn’t know the specifics, but I felt like I could grasp the basic idea.

But I had seen firsthand that the corruption’s hold over Neera’s mind wasn’t perfect. She was still somewhere inside, locked away. I didn’t know how to trigger her to come out, but I knew that it was possible, and that was enough to give me hope that we could help each other. If anyone in the Nightshade Society was likely to help me save Azril, it would be her.

I looked at Neera’s polished outfit, a charcoal grey blazer and pencil skirt with a white button-up blouse, and her hair cut at a blunt angle just above her shoulders. Everything about her appearance was perfect.

In contrast, I looked like I had crawled out of a dumpster a second ago. There was no way that I would be able to go another day wearing the same clothes.

Do you think there’s any extra clothes around here that I could borrow? I asked, figuring that someone would at least have a spare set of medical scrubs I could use until I got some real clothes.

You have plenty of clothes here, Neera said as if it was obvious. Follow me.

She turned sharply, her glossy hair glinting in the light. She led me to the opposite end of my bedroom, stopping at the arched entryway in front of the sitting area and pulling open a small door that I hadn’t seen there before, revealing a walk-in closet.

I took a step forward, gently brushing my fingers along some of the clothes. The closet was fully stocked with clothes that all seemed to be in my size. It was impossible, and at the same time, unsurprising.

How did you have all this ready? I asked, not expecting any kind of answer. As far as I knew, the Nightshade Society could have been preparing for my arrival ever since they found out that I existed.

The clothes that hung in the closet were nothing like what I would normally wear. Instead, it looked like it could have been Neera’s clothes, all black and grey pressed pencil skirts and blazers, with button-downs and stockings. Exactly what a classy female member of the Nightshade Society might wear.

I looked down at the clothes I had been wearing since I had left my parents' house a few days ago for my shift at Shadow Vale Books. My jeans and sweater were smeared with dirt and torn where they had caught on branches as I ran through the forest.

These clothes in the closet weren’t anything I would ever want to wear, especially since it visually aligned me with the Nightshade Society, but at that point, anything was better than what I was currently wearing.

I didn’t even want to think about how the rest of my body looked. Before I changed, I knew that I was going to need a shower.

You can clean up in the bathroom down the hall, Neera said, answering my question before I had the chance to ask.

Thanks, I shot her a smile.

There were three doors along the hallway that Neera had directed me to. I looked back at her to make sure I was going the right way, but she had pulled a small tablet device from her blazer pocket and wasn’t paying attention to me.

Luckily, the first door I opened was the one that I was looking for. The bathroom was relatively unremarkable, aside from being the absolute largest home bathroom I had set foot in. A vintage clawfoot tub sat in the center of the room, with a large glass-doored shower along the right side and a sink on the left side. There was even a separate room just for the toilet, which seemed both excessive and absolutely necessary.

A few necessities were set out on the counter as if this were some kind of boutique hotel. I tied my long brown hair into a bun before I stepped into the shower, telling myself that when I had more time, I would actually wash it, and hoping that it wasn’t as dirty as it felt.

As I undressed and stepped into the shower, I thought about how this might be the only reliable time alone I had that day. I needed to come up with a real, concrete plan, but nothing felt possible. Everything was falling so far out of my control that I didn’t realistically see a way to get out of this. It wasn’t just Isabella’s life anymore, or even Azril’s. Now, I was responsible for the lives of all the beings who were captured by the Nightshade Society. It might not have been my fault that they were there, but it felt like I was responsible for them now. If anything happened to them, it would be my fault for not at least trying to do something to save them.

I closed my eyes and let the hot water from the shower run over my head. The simple comfort of the water made it impossible to think straight. Impulsively, I reached out and turned the water as cold as it would go. Ice-cold water felt sharp as it hit my body, but I didn’t allow myself to move out of the way.

I thought that getting Neera to glitch would be easy and that it might happen on its own like it seemed to when we were in Azril’s room. In the limited time that I had been around her over the last day, I was convinced that it wasn’t going to be that simple. I found myself beginning to doubt what I had seen when her eyes were switching between black and white, and her demeanor was so fragile. That was a far cry from the Neera that was standing in my room, all polished and perfect. What was it about being in Azril’s room that had made her so fragile? I wasn’t an expert on the corruption process, but it could have been because she was far away from the Nightshade Society complex, kind of like Wi-Fi signal strength.

So far, my only plan for getting us all out of there alive wasn’t going very well. Then again, I’d barely been there for a full day. After spending the last week fighting against time to save Isabella, it was difficult to adjust to not having such an immediate timeline. Now, the best thing to do was wait patiently and learn the inside details of the organization instead of trying anything and everything blindly.

I needed to be careful, or it would all come crashing down around me.

I imagined I was back where this all started, standing under the waterfall where I had discovered the secret door to where Azril was being held by the Nightshade Society, the first time he was captured by them. It wasn’t that there was anything that happened back then that was important to me now, but more that I wanted to think about what that version of me would have done in my current situation.

That version had something I didn’t have now, but it was hard to put my finger on exactly what that quality might have been. My current self had more power, knowledge, and skills than she did. So why did I find myself calling on my past self like it would be able to solve all my problems?

It wasn’t until I had finished my shower and was slipping on a plush robe when I realized what the key difference was.

My past self had hope. A tiny fire inside that kept me going, even when I knew I shouldn’t have been messing with the codex and the entire world that it contained.

If I wanted to be able to defeat the Nightshade Society, I had to find a reason to have hope.

I