Chasing Freedom (Book 2)

Chapter Twenty-Two: The Way Out (Cole)

Chapter Twenty-Two: The Way Out (COLE)

           
"You better start talking," I ground out. "And fast."

Skylar just stares at me, and after checking that there was no physical harm done to her, my eyes narrow into slits.

She shrugs simply and I glare in response, finding it impossibly weird that she was acting so nonchalant about everything that just happened. "What the hell Skylar?"

I step forward in warning.

Her eyes narrow, "you need to calm down Cole," she says in a dangerous tone, her voice soft, "it was nothing."

"Nothing?" I exclaim, "you call that-" I gesture around wildly, "nothing!?"

She nods her head and shoots me a look but I'm too busy brimming with anger to notice.

She stands up and tries to move away but I'm so close to her chair that she ends up within breathing distance of me, the only separation between us a few mere inches. "I said calm down," she says again, obviously not threatened by my lack of self control.

"You try calming down when you wake up in the dead of night in a house that you've never been in before, in an even sketchier city, without the person you got there with. I walk out to see torches lighting up the whole damn hallway like some kind of creepy ritual and follow them all the way to this room, where I see you screaming hysterically with your head bent and your eyes rolled back in your head and some weird ass bible sitting on a table in front of you, generating so much light I actually had to shield my eyes."

My chest is heaving at this point and Skylar has backed away from me with wild eyes.

The look on her face indicates she's about to say something serious and so I let her speak, but after the words leave her lips, I wish I hadn't.

"Wow," she says in a falsetto tone, "Cole Shadowhert actually cares about someone? I'm gobsmacked!" she giggles at her joke.

"This isn't funny, Skylar," I warn. "What the hell is going on?"

"I said let it go," she whispers, her face now completely serious.

"No," I shake my head, "I'm not just gonna let it go; not until you tell me exactly what witchy mo-jo crap you were just performing."

She sighs in a strangled away, and stomps over to the table she was sitting at, pointing at a really old and ugly book with thick pages. "This weird ass bible," she states, her voice bleak, "is called In Libro Caeli, one of the most powerful books in all of immortal history."

My eyes bug out of my head when she says the three words, "I know what it is," I say, cutting her off from explaining anymore, "What I'd like to know is what the hell it's doing here."

Skylar sighs again before lowering herself into one of the chairs and fingering a page of the book, "my father told me that he linked it to me before I was even born and now it follows me everywhere I go."

She must've noticed the look on my face because she rushes to explain. "I don't know why he did it; something about wanting me to be the only one that can get it to open because he believed in his own messed up mind that I would one day join him on his plan to destroy the world."

She rolls her eyes as if all this information means nothing. "The reason it's linked to me specifically isn't only because I'm Malum's daughter, but because I was named after it. In Libro Caeli in Latin means in the air, or, in other words; the book of light, the book of the sky. So ever since the day I was born, it's always been with me, only coming around when I called upon it."