Chapter 14

Nova stood there staring at the fish tank without really seeing it. The last two days she’d spent poring over the journals, all of them. She had notes of anything that seemed out of the ordinary written down. Just the thought of ‘out of the ordinary’ made her smirk, she was the definition of it. She knew of all of her past lives, her soul’s lives. There was a lot. How had she missed it before? She didn’t know, but now she needed to fit the pieces together.

Nowhere in any of the journals did it mention others like her that remembered past lives. Was Crissy like her, with her own journals and history of memories? She had pulled out a notebook with the symbol in it. Of course, that didn’t explain how Bastian and his people from Solrelm had the same mark. Solrelm wasn’t a word and didn’t exist anywhere. So that brought her full circle to where had the symbol on the trunk come from.

Shaking her head, she turned and walked out of the library to the kitchen. She’d tackle the Solrelm thing later. It could be something as simple as it was a well-guarded secret because most people didn’t know or want to know that souls are real. She knew all about secrets. She also knew how much people don’t believe in souls because she’d read every book that had ever been written on the subject or even closely related to it.

Opening the small freezer, she looked inside while playing with the stone hanging from her neck. Her soul hadn’t done any sort of communicating in the last two days, which confirmed it was Bastian it had been affected by. That fact brought up more questions. Like, if she were to avoid him at all costs, why did her soul do that near him? He’d felt it too and seemed thrilled by it. What did that mean?

Pulling out a TV dinner, she turned around and set it beside the microwave oven. She was tired of meals like this, but it wasn’t like she could fit a full-size oven through the trap door to get it down here. The stove in the upper part of the house was just there for appearance’s sake and didn’t even have a power cord to connect it. What had they used before microwaves and toaster ovens? She had no idea. She stayed down here because anytime she’d gone up there to do more than dust, she’d been so paranoid with windows and the possibility of being seen, she’d come back down into what she thought of as her real home.

Pausing, she looked around and then at the ceiling. Crissy had said ‘go down’ and think… How had she known that if she wasn’t living in a similar situation? Her breath hitched in her throat; could it be true? Is someone else like her?

“I’m going to have to go see those women and get the phone.” She popped the dinner into the oven. She needed to talk to Crissy again. Since coming back down, she’d been checking the cameras often. It didn’t look like anyone was watching the alley, so running up to go get that phone should be safe enough. Not that she had the first clue how to use one. She’s never even held a cell phone, although with what she’d seen up there, she may be the only one on the planet that didn’t own one. Hopefully, it would have reception down here. Getting the internet wiring down here had been hard enough. She had no clue about phone reception.

Once she had the phone, she was calling Crissy. Answers were long overdue. Clearly, Crissy had friends and lead a semi-normal life. Except for talking to herself in front of others, she grinned, talking to herself was also something she knew too much about.

Back at the desk, she skimmed her notes while she ate. She circled two things. The first was the mention of damaged souls. More than once the previous women had written it. One time the damaged souls took a very uncooperative man away. She didn’t know what was meant by ‘damaged’ though. Damaged how? How had they been able to tell? It didn’t explain that.

Tapping her pen over the other thing she’d circled. She took a bite and looked at it for a moment. How did the dark ones know about her? She wrote ‘why me?’ beside it.

She was going to go through all the journals one more time and double-check everything. Sometimes while reading them, she got lost in what was written. The stories were actual memories, but in someone else’s words, always distracted her. In a good way, she supposed, it did prove this was all real and happening.

Would Crissy have answers to anything? The symbol? The dark ones after her? She probably should have listened to more of what they wanted to say, but in truth, it was all overwhelming and she’d needed time to adjust to it.

Glancing over at the fish, she glared at them. “Don’t judge me, I’m allowed to have all these questions.” She turned away from them. If she could have just one thing answered, she hoped it would be the biggest question in her mind, the one that had always been. What was the reason she was like this? It had to be for a purpose, otherwise, why hide through countless lives? Why was she hiding? Stabbing a piece of the meat with her fork, she lifted it and turned it slowly, looking at it. “Everything has a purpose,” she blew out a breath, “mine better not be something stupid like a housekeeper to this hidden house, or I’m going to be really miffed.”