The Secret of Spellshadow Manor 4 by Bella Forrest (life books to read TXT) 📕

crossed Vincent’s pale face, but Alex would not be deterred, not when such a huge opportunity was orbiting within his grasp.

“I’ll be okay—the food helped, and we’ll end the lesson straight afterward,” he said.

Vincent raised a silver eyebrow. “You’re certain?”

“Yes,” he replied, though he had to wonder if this was the whole point of Vincent teaching him how to trace spirit lines, to encourage him to try it on himself and learn more of his secret past, as a secondary observer. Who was to say that, while Alex was in someone else’s memories, Vincent wasn’t rooting around in his? Trusting a necromancer only went so far. Still, he was desperate to try his own spirit line.

“Very well, then. Let’s begin.” Vincent spoke softly, gesturing for Alex to close his eyes, as he had done before. “Seek out the pulse of your own spirit, deep within the heart of your inner core, beyond the realms of solid flesh.”

Alex searched through the darkness, reaching through the blockades of his conscious mind, pushing deeper into the very epicenter of himself, feeling his physical self fall away as he sought out the glow of his own spirit line. It burned brightly, though it surprised him to see that his was the same color as the mages’.

See, we are not so different after all.

“Now, follow it,” whispered Vincent, somewhere in the air around him.

Gathering his anti-magic, he poured it toward the burning heart of his spirit, watching in delight as a silver stream flowed away into the distance, mapping out the history of his existence. Alex wasn’t interested in the near past; he had lived those days and moments, and he did not need to see them again. However, he paused awhile on a memory of his mother. It wasn’t something he could pass up, seeing her again, even if it was just in memory.

In the vision, she was sitting, curled up on the sofa with a tartan blanket draped across her legs, laughing at a terrible gameshow answer on the television. There was a mug of steaming hot chocolate on the coffee table, a mountain of marshmallows bobbing on the surface—too many to melt, just the way she liked it. The memory stung him with a bittersweet barb. He must have been sitting in the armchair opposite, because his view of her was perfect. It was a simple, domestic scene between the two of them, no doubt identical to a million others he could find in his library of remembrances, but it was everything Alex had wanted and needed to see. He didn’t even remember it, or how old he must have been, but it didn’t matter; it was enough just to see her, to refresh the picture he held of her within his mind.

It was tricky to pull away from her. He knew he could have spent a week there, watching only her, but the draw of his past soon overcame his desire to linger in the realm of his old life.

Moving farther back, things began to speed up, like a fast-forwarded version of This is Your Life, until there was no more of him to see. Reaching the edges of the next person in his spiritual timeline, he came to a standstill, pressing the metaphorical pause button. However, the images that rushed into his mind were foggy, swirling around his vision like a black mist. He wondered if it was just this small section of memory that was distorted, but, as he pushed farther and farther back, the visions grew even worse; they were barely discernible, as if someone had tied a blindfold around his eyes, blocking the images from sight.

Frustrated, he flitted back to the gleaming spool of recent times and childhood memories, just to check that it wasn’t him losing strength, causing the images to blur. To his utter vexation, the images of his own life were crystal clear, but as soon as he moved back along the line, to delve into the ancestry of his father and beyond, everything went dark. It was like a curtain being dragged across the scenes that were playing out, keeping him from seeing. The shapes and images weren’t discernible at all, but he could feel things and hear muffled words and conversations—he just couldn’t see them or touch anything, in the way that he had been able to in his own, personal memories.

Trying to push away his annoyance, he honed in on the emotions he was vicariously feeling, through the person whose life he was viewing, and the sounds that rushed all around him, drowning his senses in a cacophony of noise. Without warning, grief and fear shot through him like a lightning bolt, driven by the experiences of someone else and a scene he couldn’t see. It coursed through every cell with an intensity he had never felt before. His body was in shock, his anti-magic faltering in defense against the pain, until the sensation was so overwhelming it drove Alex to pull away from the hidden memory.

He tore back into reality, his chest heaving, tears pouring from his eyes. Inside his ribcage, his heart thundered against the bone so hard he felt it might explode. Once again, the adventure had taken a vast amount of energy from him, but he was relieved to feel that it had not touched the edge of his essence, even though he felt utterly broken. It had taken nothing important, but this excursion had drained him as physically as it had emotionally.

“You must be careful!” said Vincent, worry furrowing his veined brow. “Rushing from a spirit line as fast as you did is never advisable. It takes time to unpick your consciousness from the spirit world—do you feel well? Do you feel strange? Are you in one piece, do you think? Is there any chance you may have left a piece of yourself behind?”

Alex couldn’t deal with the bombardment of questions while his mind was still reeling, and it was everything he could do not to