Light's Keeper Book Three

By Odette C. Bell

Jane might have her powers. But as she grows her skills, the council only gets closer.
As she’s thrust further into the fight for the city, she’s thrust underneath it.
Alone.
For now.
Because the time is rapidly approaching when she must face her greatest fear. It isn’t Andre, though maybe it should be. It’s Julian.
She can’t keep herself hidden from him forever. It’s time to let him catch her one last time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Odette C. Bell
• Release date: Jan 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9798215846995

Book preview

Chapter 1

Jane

I was… doing something. I was somewhere. I was someone. And even though the last bit shouldn’t have to be an assumption, it was. I… I didn’t think there was anything behind the concept of I anymore.

I won’t say that I lost hold of my memories, won’t say that my personality dribbled out of my fingers like water through a broken colander. But I will say that with every passing moment, it was like I was dragged into a deeper stage of sleep.

I could remember the journal’s last words. I had to… shine a light? It was something like that.

I squeezed my eyes closed harder. It honestly didn’t matter if they were open or closed. It was dark around me. This thick and cloying, heavy dark. Yet one that was weightless at the same time. It was as if every time I attached a concept to it, it shrank back. It was beyond definition. And I was beyond… beyond help.

As I thought that, I yanked my knees up, settled my chin against them, and closed my eyes.

This position felt familiar, like I’d done it many times before. Like I’d done it for the majority of my life in fact. Sorry, lifetimes.

I’d floated alone in voids like this, safe but far, far away from anyone else.

Unbeknownst to me, a single tear developed in my eye, shimmered on my lashes, and trailed down my cheek.

I still didn’t know where I was, but I can guarantee you this – that tear wouldn’t go anywhere.

It would tumble in this dark space forever.

… And so would I.

If I didn’t do something. If I didn’t figure out how to shine a light and escape.

I’d already groped around me to find the journal. It wasn’t there. If I could retrace precisely what it had said to me, it was as if it had known it would abandon me. Did that mean Julian had it?

Did my stomach twitch at that? Did I freak out? No. It was best that Julian got the journal. If someone had taken it off me, he was infinitely better than Andre or the Council.

But it didn’t change the fact I was alone and I had nowhere to go.

So I tightened my arms around my legs harder. I fell deeper back into…. It couldn’t be sleep, because I was nominally aware. But the more I tightened my arms around my middle, the more I closed myself off, the less the outside world mattered.

What is it to be an I, anyway? You have to be distinct from the things around you, right? For that to occur, there has to be something around you that you care about. There was nothing here but me.

I can’t tell you how long I tumbled. It felt like an age. It also felt like time was meaningless. Like it always had been. Like my memories of my old life, of Nice, of everything, had been nothing more than a confusing dream. This was real. And this was endless.

And this… was so fundamentally lonely.

Another tear trailed down my cheek. I felt this one tremble right on my chin. On a specific point, in fact.

I didn’t think there was anything that could get me to unhook my arms from around my knees, anything that could get me to move, let alone appreciate I was still a me. But that could. Because the tear got stuck at the exact same point where I’d let Julian touch me.

One eye opened. I saw nothing. But that was irrelevant. I felt. And if you want to know the secret to becoming an I, it’s that. Feel.

The more you feel, the more you start to distinguish, the more you start to hope, and the more you start to move.

Slowly I lifted one hand up off my knee, let it pause just over the tear, then let it descend. I picked it up. I assessed it.

It was small, only the size of a bead, really. It shimmered there on the end of my finger. Sorry. I couldn’t see it. How did I know it shimmered then?

The word still felt right. As if, with just a little more effort, I could see it shimmering. I just had to decide I wanted to.

I had not lived the kind of life where I got to decide on much. Other things outside of me, far more powerful, had dictated how I’d lived. I now understood that those things were probably the Council of Nix and Julian, too.

The point was, I had never experienced pure choice like I did now.

And as that concept snaked into my mind, I realized that’s how I could describe this place. This black, seemingly endless lonely void was like what pure choice was. Pure choice devoid of any motivation, anchoring points, or people.

I still held my tear. I reached my other hand up, finally unwinding it from my legs.

I stretched out. It felt a little like showing my belly to a predator. There was nothing here that could hurt me, and I think that was the point.

But isn’t life about being vulnerable? The more you close yourself off, the more walls you put around you, and that includes hugging your knees like I just had, the less you experience.

Until you become exactly like me, floating in the void of your own creation.

I held onto the tear. But I held onto my cheek harder. I really drove my thumb against it, not wanting the sensation to depart.

Because if it went, I really would be alone.

Far back at the corners of my mind, something started to spark. Little memories attempted to rise up off the swampish, brackish waters of my past like fireflies.

One or two at first, then more.

I knew that I’d been here before. Not in this life, but another. If that was true, if I’d had other lives, what had I done during them? And who, specifically, had I known?

I opened my eyes harder. I wanted to see the tear. More than anything, I wanted to see my hand as I clutched my cheek. I wanted it to mean something, and for that to happen, I had to reinforce it. With every touch, with every choice.

I suddenly squeezed my eyes closed, but I wasn’t giving up. I was doing the exact opposite.

I still didn’t understand the precise connection between one’s mind and magic, but concentration was key. Now I grabbed hold of my focus like someone trying to drag a bull with a piece of string. It didn’t work.

It was as if the entire black void was my mind, and I was attempting to wrangle it. I was too small. It was too big.

But I was also too stupid to use the right methods.

Just when I felt like my tear was going to disappear and Julian’s touch with it, I shook my head and clenched my teeth. I felt my hair flopping against my face. It gave more differentiation, more reality, more hope.

If you have a body that can experience things, then you have a potential path to a future.

You have more than this black void of choice.

And I would have more. Because even though I couldn’t be certain, back then, when I’d floated alone in this void, that’s all I’d ever wanted.

I closed my hand around the tear, trapping it and keeping it safe.

I squeezed my eyes shut. I thought of Julian, deliberately throwing my mind into him even though for most of this tale, I'd done the exact opposite.

You can’t grab up a memory and hold it in your heart. Your heart is for pumping blood. Your mind can hold on to concepts, sure. But I needed something more solid. Something more tactile. So I used my whole freaking body. I hurled it into the thought of Julian until he started to become realer, until I swear I could see a perfect facsimile of him from my dreams. The same broad stance, the same dead-eyed stare.

I could pretend that he’d been my hunter, someone there to trap me and stop me from using magic. He was instead my guard.

I opened my hand. I opened my eyes. And finally, I opened my mind. I stopped running from the apparitions in the dark, the demons that had kept me back from my magic. I'd come to Nice for a clean break with my past, hadn’t I?

I’d come to Nice to grow. And sometimes we don’t get to decide how we grow. We just have to accept the shadows in our closets and move on.

And I moved on. I thrust forward.

Can you swim in the dark? You can if you try.

I held onto my tear. As fast and hard as I could.

Because I held onto it with far more than my body and mind. I wrapped my strongest feelings around it, and you wouldn’t be surprised to find out they came from the concept of Julian.

I fed it everything that’d happened, not just in Nice, but beforehand. I was almost certain he was the man I’d seen on the side of the road when I was 16, the same man who’d saved me.

And now I started to sift through my mind, I wondered if I’d seen him at other times, too. Other moments of danger throughout my life. He’d been there, guarding me. Because that… that’s what he did. And now the memory of him guarded my tear. Guarded it until it started to glow.

I couldn’t forget the journal’s words, even though it seemed so far away from me now, it was like a distant, distant memory.

It was as if I was 100 years old and about to die but it was the first thing I’d seen upon being born.

I still wrapped Julian up around it. From the first time I’d seen him in his car, to when he'd grabbed my hand and prevented the lightning from striking me.

The more I ran through the memories, the faster I got, the more determined, too. I gathered the feeling of him, the exact sense, and wrapped it around the tear. It started to glow.

It was the most beautiful glow I’d ever seen.

Sometimes the thing that’s stopping us from seeing the beauty in the world is contrast.

We surround ourselves with comfort, with the things we want, but we forget to see the single flower on the otherwise dead tree. We forget to see the glimmer of light on the darkest day. Contrast can sometimes let you appreciate things that were always there but you were too blind to see. And the contrast of that little, subtle glow against the absolute darkness around it was perfect. It narrowed my mind in on it. And as this place was only mind, that just gave me more focus.

I smiled. Twitching, barely there, but it was the beginning. So I threw more attention into it until my mouth opened wide. That’s it. Glow. Light my path forward, I said in a determined voice as I lifted my hand up higher.

Light my path forward to where exactly? I was still in an endless dark expanse, and you had to pay attention to the word endless there. I knew, just knew it went on forever. You could bravely swim through it. You could run. You could chart a path in any direction. You would never get to the end. It would be continuously created instead. It was the perfect prison.

But it was a prison made up out of darkness. And the light could penetrate it.

I knew that, just as I knew my name, just as I knew from this point on, everything would be different. I was done running.

I pumped more attention into the light, gathering up more concepts and feeding them to it. While mostly they were Julian, it was also Camille, the House of Locks, everything I’d learned, the sheer fact that everything had to change. The Council of Nix could not be allowed to do what they were doing.

They were accessing ancient forces. They were controlling magic. They were killing people to hide their secrets.

I would not allow that to continue.

That gave me the last determined rush I required, and I channeled it down into the tear.

It suddenly shivered in my fingers, growing so large, it forced them back. It created this big ball of light that hovered just a few centimeters above my skin. I’d seen beautiful things before. I had never seen anything like this. It looked like someone’s soul come alive, like the ever-after of the entire universe concentrating down into a ball you could actually hold. And feel. And what did it feel like?

It felt like hope.

I lifted higher, straining from my shoulder, ignoring the pain, forcing the light out wider. Finally cracks started to appear in this endless jail.

I didn’t care if it was there to keep me safe.

I didn’t need to be kept safe anymore.

I’d come to Nice for a clean break with my past, ha? This was the sound of it breaking.

As the cracks formed, as I forced more light against them, I realized I’d always been wrong. Why hide from the things that make you afraid? They are often the things with the power to pull you forward, to transform you. Embrace them instead. And if you’re like me, and you’ve got a little magic, use it.

I used mine and more.

With a roar, I broke through my jail.

I drifted down.

I landed outside Nice.

I was in the mountains somewhere.

I hadn’t thought about where I’d head to. I'd just arrived.

I could see down a small, grass-covered path to my left.

It looked like there were the ruins of some kind of church.

I patted my face. I closed my eyes. I opened them again.

Excuse me if I was doubting reality right now. This could be nothing more than my prison changing shape. But it wasn’t. The scent of the pastureland was too specific. The wind as it grabbed my hair and whipped it across my cheeks was far too alive. I could see Nice out in the distance. I thought I could hear the rumble of engines from a road nearby.

I let out a breath and sank down to my knees. Then my fingers