Et tú, Clarissa?

Chapter seventeen

54 BC (Latium, Italia)

Aurelia words could not quite reach my brain.

My-my father?

"You can tell me who my father is?"

A careful smile appeared on her lips, but it did not look especially happy. As she started walking, I followed her into a room whose walls were solely filled of books. I looked around with big eyes. I had never seen so many books.

"This is the library." Aurelia said and turned her back to me as those sparkles started playing around her fingers and one very big book hovered through the air down onto the big table in the middle of the room.

The pages as thin as leaves browsed wildly and Aurelia had her back towards me until they stopped. As they did, I looked at them, but I could not read. However, the two golden cat eyes who stared back at me did not need to say anything for me to understand.

"Your father, Clarissa, is Azus." I looked up at her as she walked towards me and the book. "The king of Hell, prince of darkness, the original demon. It was he who made Lilith, the mother of demons, a demon. No one has seen him for a very long time and he does not often take interest in human woman to the level that they bear him a child."

I fell back in the chair behind me and felt how it suddenly became difficult to breath. Aurelia ran around the table and took my hand as she felt how I was about to break. Pictures of mother gushed at me. Pictures I had tried to forgot for a very long time, but clearly had not succeed with. That day she taught me how to ride and the one when she showed me how to fight. All those beautiful days when we watched the sun wake up and fall asleep over lakes, treetops and oceans we stopped by. How she came into our tent with some man at night when she thought I was asleep. When she got drunk with the men of the tribe and everything leading to her hanging at the end of a rope with those letters engraved on her pale back. As the pictures continued to whizzed through my head the time I was sold to that man in Londinium another life time ago came to mind and all those dreadful fights. The last pictures were of how Hermes betrayed me and how that black-dressed man slit Julia's throat right in front of me.

I saw how Aurelia twitched and how a tear appeared in her eye.

"Oh my..." her voice was unsteady and as she looked at me, I could see in her eyes that she had seen and felt it all.

She took my hands and looked up at me with her beautiful hazel eyes in which I lost myself for a moment.

"No one should have to endure all that in the few years you have lived, but you are safe now. I promise you, I will not let anything bad happen to you again as long as you are by my side."

It felt like 100 pound fell off my chest as she said those words and before neither of us understood what happened, I felt her soft lips against mine as I pushed her against one of the bookshelves and she created a portal with an easy hand gesture that took us to my bedroom.

I felt a breeze caress over my cheek which made me turn towards Aurelia, but as I thought I would feel her, I did not and opened my eyes. The place beside me was empty. As I forced myself up, I looked around to see if I could see her, but as I did not, I put on some clothes and sneaked out of my door. I wandered around for a while without seeing anyone in the dark corridors. Some burning torches helped the lonely moon light up the landscape outside, but with my night vision, it would not have made any different. Since I would have seen just as good without them. Due to the protective walls, I could not hear anything from the other rooms, which made an inconvenient and was quite annoying since I was used to hear everything. Because of that, I could usually locate a person without having to look for this individual for especially long, which in turn made this quest quite new. What was making me inconvenient was that I did not know if there was someone waiting behind a door to jump out and kill me. Do not call me a little paranoid, because I was more than a little, but who can blame me?

I wandered around for a while before I ended up at the door. The door was the one leading into the room with the poison. I wondered why Aurelia did not want me to look inside. It had to be ready by now. I knew I was not supposed to, especially not when Aurelia had been nothing but nice to me, but I had to look. The door gave away too easily as I put a light hand on it and as it allowed me to look in, I could not lay my eyes on the bottle. With light feet I sneaked across the floor to the round table where I saw that the red brown wood had turned black around a big hole that had appeared in the middle of the table top. Right where the bottle had stood. My fingers traced the burned wood before I looked down through the hole to realise that it had not just gone through the table; it had continued down through the stone floor so far that I did not even see it. Far, far down there, I believe I could see a flick of a light, but I was not sure. It was too far down for me to know if it was light I saw or not, before someone coughed behind me. I fast spun around to find Wilson in his proud demeanour, but it did not make him any longer than those six inches that he missed yesterday to be as long as me.

"You are not supposed to be in here, miss Clarissa af Warlock." he said and I looked down at my feet.

I knew that, but I had to know. The only question was; was Wilson going to tell Aurelia? When the silence filled the room between us, my gaze gathered courage enough to look up from my feet. Wilson came closer, but just as he was about to come to me, his eyes shift from me to the table. As he went me by, I turned around to look at him whilst his fingers traced the table top.

"This table was enchanted to stand heat." he said a bit out of nowhere before he looked at me. "It has never as much as burned once before you came. Not even as much as a black spot."

"Really? Not even when Aurelia was tested?"

"Mistress Aurelia was the founder of this institute and was tested someplace else if even at all. She is, with no doubt, a most powerful woman. I would advise you not to make yourself at home on her bad side."

"Will you tell her?"

He looked at me a long time before answering.

"I will not tell her, unless she asks. I cannot tell my mistress a lie."

"I understand."

It looked like he wanted to continue saying something more, but he did not.

"Thank you." I said and turned to the door, but looked at him once more before I went back to bed. "Good night."

He bowed easily as a 'you too.' and I left him.