by Holly Hook
There was no sign of Mother or Alric anywhere.
And all around us, doors opened.
People leaned out, people very much like the ones in Mary’s village. Women whispered to their men and children crept out as if scared something would happen. I felt as if the world was waking up from a long nap.
Henry faced me again. “I remember wandering,” he said. “I could barely see. Then I got to the desert and Alric found me. He sealed me inside a box and I remember nothing more.” His jaw dropped as he walked up to a house and felt the wall. “This is my kingdom. It’s back. Rae, Alric shrunk and stole my kingdom months ago. How did this happen?”
The dread feeling had vanished from my stomach. “I don’t think we’re in the dark region anymore,” I said. “Alric had all of this trapped in a box. And your people trapped in jars. I broke the prison. When that happened, we must have come here along with the entire kingdom.” It was the best explanation I could think of. Alric wasn’t here. I hoped we had left him back in that secret chamber.
I thought about the sleeping woman still trapped there, the one I couldn’t free, and her kingdom. It wasn’t my place, Alric said. I hoped that it was someone else’s place soon.
“You healed me,” Henry said.
He stood right in front of me and close.
“I healed you,” I managed.
He nodded and swallowed. “Your tears. When they touched me, my eyes came back.” Then he looked down like he was nervous. “Can I…can I…”
“Can you what?” I asked.
“Kiss you.”
“Kiss me? What does that mean?”
Henry puckered his lips and heat exploded through me as I understood.
"Yes," I said. I felt dizzy. "I would like to kiss you."
Henry leaned in.
It was as amazing as I imagined. We also hugged. It was then I was convinced that the world wasn't such a dark and horrible place.
Time slowed and at last, we separated. Henry smiled. I was even dizzier, and all sounds popped out at me. There was another type of magic in this.
"I should introduce you to my father," Henry said. "Come on. Let's walk up to the castle. He's a very nice man and I know he'll like you." Henry motioned to the hill. "He'll want to meet the girl who freed this whole kingdom." Then he turned. "Where are your friends who came with you? I'm sure he would like to meet them, too."
I checked the house.
Brie and Stilt walked down a dirt path about as fast as they could towards the forest as if danger lurked right behind them. Stilt was waving his arms at Brie, but she was storming away and not looking back.
I ran after them.
"Stilt! Brie! Where are you going?"
Brie turned towards me. "I have to leave this place."
"Why? Alric's gone. We've left him behind." And my mother, I wanted to say.
Stilt cleared his throat. "I suppose we should stop holding things from you," he said. "A long time ago, before we had even met, I promised Brie to King Franz here. And now he's free--"
"What?" Henry asked. He had come up behind me. "My father doesn't believe in a forced marriage. I'm sure we can sort this out."
"I still think we should leave this place," Brie said. "We have to go back to Mary, anyway. Her village isn't too far from this one." She wore a sad look. "Rae, it I enjoyed meeting you. I'm sure we'll see each other again."
Brie and Stilt had to leave.
And it was my fault.
Brie gave me another hug. "Don't worry," she said. "You did the right thing. Stilt and I need to be away from this kingdom. I'm sure the king here will welcome you and Henry."
We separated. Stilt had joined Brie, and he looked as sad as she. His inner glow had died. It made me feel the same way.
"She's right," Stilt said. "The two of us need to go while we figure this out. I'm an elf, and I have to keep my promises, but I never told Franz when I would deliver Brie to him. There is still time but we are safer if we're not here."
"I see," I said.
"But," Stilt said. "I promise we'll see each other again, soon."
He extended his hand, and I wasn't sure what to do, so I took it. Stilt shook it around and released it. Then he smiled. "We need to go."
And the two of them turned away.
I watched them head down the trail. Henry waited next to me and we stood there and watched them go until they had vanished into the forest and around a curve.
Then I looked around again as I remembered.
Mother wasn't here, either. She hadn't come to this kingdom with us.
"Mother!" I shouted, cursing myself for forgetting. She turned good when she held Alric there. Healed and free of her evil. "Where is she?"
Henry wrapped his arm around me from the side. "She's still back in Alric's chamber," he said. "I don't think she's your mother, Rae."
"I know she's not," I told him. "But she saved me at the end."
"She might still be alive," he told me. "Alric could have imprisoned her in a glass coffin. After what she did, I think she might want to sleep. But she can rest easy, knowing you're safe."
Something about that idea made me feel better. Mother had escaped one prison only to wind up in another. "We have to get her out of there."
"We will," Henry said. "She wanted you to escape, Rae. I'm sure that meant a lot more to her than you know. Come on. Let's go to the castle. I'm sure we have a great welcome ahead of us."
There was nothing else I could do right now.
Hand in hand with Henry, we made our way up the hill.
Chapter One
"Mara. What are you doing?"
I lifted my head from the table and blinked.
A man in a white shirt and black necktie stood right in front of me, one hand on his side. He held a long pointer in the other hand which almost scraped the green, worn carpet. I sat in a chair, in a contraption with a small desk attached and a book that was way too big for it.
Around me, people laughed.
I sat up and blinked again. Where was I? This place was like nothing I had seen before, but when I tried to remember how I had gotten here, my mind turned fuzzy and distant images darted away, laughing like a bunch of little goblins. I caught something about the color red and a man in black holding his palm up but nothing else.
I sat up straighter. The table creaked with the weight of the book. The pages were shiny, shinier than any should be. I glanced at the inscriptions on it. Complicated formulas I could never decipher made up the spaces between type. My head hurt just looking at it.
"Sleeping in class again?" the man asked.
Class.
Classroom.
The word popped into my head as I nodded at the man. I took a breath and picked at the corner of the shiny page, not sure what I should do here. A piece of lined parchment—
Paper—
—sat on the table with its corner drooping off. It looked like it was trying to hold on for dear life. There was also something that must be a writing implement sitting on top of it.
Pencil. The word rose as if a gremlin in the back of my head were whispering it into my thoughts, trying to erase whatever was there before. I could imagine it laughing at my confusion.
Panic rose inside of me. I hadn't been here before. I'd been somewhere else only moments ago and something had been going down. Something major. Adrenaline pumped through my veins and my legs shook as if I hadn't woken up from a nap at all. The man continued to stare at me, waiting for an answer as if I had been lying here the whole time. He raised his eyebrows as if he had dominion over me. He was short. Maybe even shorter than me, and in spectacles.
"I..." I said, feeling a lot smaller. I sat in the room with many others, all sitting at these same tables with the same huge books open in front of them. All the books were even open to the same page. The young men and women were all around my age—seventeen. They came in all shapes, shades and sizes. And every one of them was staring at me and waiting, too.
"
I felt cold." That was all I could manage. The surrounding air crackled with energy. It was chilly and sharp. How did any of these people not notice it? In fact, the girl next to me blinked sleep out of her eyes. The only one who seemed alert was the man.
There was something about a guy in black. And the color red.
A flash of cold, and then this.
I shook my head as someone in the room laughed. I got that it was because I had said something stupid. Heat rushed to my face, but the clung to me.
What was happening?
"You felt cold," the man said. There was a whiteboard on the wall behind him and more of the formulas decorated it in colored ink.
Marker, my mind spat up.
"You've been doing this in class a lot," the man continued. "I know the quadratic formula is less than exciting, but if you want to keep your grade up, Mara, you need to pay more attention. Now, let's get back to this. Jamal, please tell us the answer to number eleven?"
The man's gaze switched to a young man—
Guy. Kid.
—and he faced the paper in front of him, tracing his finger along scrawls. He, too, blinked sleep out of his eyes. He stopped on a set of numbers and slashes.
Algebra.
I rubbed the dark hair away from my eyes and grabbed the edges of the table. Desk. I felt as if my memories were getting ripped away and replaced with something else. Something false.
Who was I?
Mara. My name was all I knew.
Lights shone down on me from above. I looked up and studied them. Brilliant rods behind foggy glass made me squint. It must be some kind of magic. I was in some wizard's lair, but then another word surfaced in my mind. Electricity. This wasn't magic at all. Electricity powered everything.
Jamal explained meaningless numbers to the man—no, teacher. Mr. Rain. That was his name. I knew what my teacher's name was. I was sitting in second year Algebra and we were in the middle of a new unit and all of us hated it. My friend, Sara Weiss, sat two rows away. We hated that Mr. Rain made us sit in assigned seats. He was one of the most strict teachers in Ellwood High School.
Of course I wasn’t losing my real memories and getting stuffed full of new ones. This was my life. Right?
I checked where Sara was sitting. I caught her black hair and her dark Goth outfit which stuck out in the middle of class. We were the only two in black here which was likely why Mr. Rain had decided not to let us sit together. He always made sure no one in the same social groups ever got to talk to each other, ever. Cheerleaders got the four corners. Football players got the front and the back. Goths and people with freaky colored hair got scattered in between them.
Are you okay? Sara mouthed.
I nodded, still disturbed by my confusion when I woke up. I wasn't anywhere else before here. I must have been having a nightmare even worse than this class. It might be a good thing I couldn't remember it.
But something about the whole thing still bothered me.
I had my dream journal in my backpack. I always toted it with me so the boys in Haven House wouldn't snoop through it while I wet to school. They'd gone through my stuff before and one of them ripped out a page and made a paper plane with it once. It always helped if I wrote two words to help jog my memory later when I had the time to write the whole dream down. I shuffled through my skull backpack until I found the hardbound journal Sara had gotten for me last year and my gel pens. I chose a blood red one, the same color as the roses that decorated the black cover of my book. Then I opened the book and wrote the two things I could remember.
Cold.
Red.
"Mara," Mr. Rain said.
He stood over my desk again.
A flash of anger zapped through me and I dared to look up at him.
"What's that?" he asked. His brown eyes were hard and the color of dirt. "I'd like to see it."
More snickers rose from the class and terror exploded in my chest.
My dreams were in there.
All of them. The personal ones. The ones about Eric Chandler. Oh, God—the ones about Eric Chandler.
"Hand it over," Mr. Rain said. He smiled. "I think this will entertain for all of us." He leaned over my desk and tried to get a peek, but I pressed the open dream journal to my chest so hard that I pushed my rose necklace into my skin. I didn't care. He wasn't getting this.
On the other side of the room, Sara watched with horror.
"I'm not giving you my book," I said. It sounded like a plea and I hated that. I had to stay tough. My reputation would be a puddle in a desert if I gave in to Mr. Rain.
"You are to give me whatever I ask you to give me," Mr. Rain said. His expression remained as hard as ever.
"Is that right?" I asked. "That's sick. You're like, fifty years old."
I knew I had a victory when the class made sounds of disgust and blood rushed to Mr. Rain's cheeks. "You know what I meant," he said, thrusting out a hand. "Give me that dream journal or I'm calling your parents and telling them all about it."
He let the word parents hang over the classroom.
Blood rushed to my ears. I lived in Haven House with Sara. My parents had both died in a car accident when I was only a few months old and I'd been a lucky ward of the state ever since. My father's parents weren't interested in me since my parents had never married and never visited. I was a sin or something. Everyone knew this, including the teachers. It was great.
I swallowed down my pain. I had to. Everyone was watching. "Well, I guess it looks like I have nothing to worry about." He'd just call Stephanie and Tom and gripe to them. Not that they would care much. They had twenty other kids to deal with, spread out over a few locations, most of them younger than Sara and I. "You still think you're getting this?"
Mr. Rain stood there with his hand out for another moment, but at last he gave up. A look of exasperation came over his face and he retreated to his desk. "I'll talk to you after class, Mara. Don't pack up yet."
I stuffed my dream journal in my backpack, relieved that at least my secrets remained safe for a while.
And very relieved because Eric Chandler sat three desks behind me.
That was it. I couldn't risk so much as opening my backpack this class ever again. Just to stay safe, I'd leave my dream journal in my locker.
Sara nodded, and I returned it. She'd take my dream journal from here when the bell rang. We had to time this just right.
Class droned on and I kept watching the timepiece—clock—above Mr. Rain's head as he scribbled more formulas on the board. While he wrote a fraction problem and droned on, Sara tiptoed over to my desk and I handed her the dream journal. No one in the class dared speak up. Sara shuffled over and got back in her chair right as Mr. Rain turned around and picked on a mousy girl in the back I whose name I never caught.
When the bell rang, Sara kept with the plan and bolted out of the room, leaving me alone. The class filed out, leaving only me and Mr. Rain behind. Eric was the last out. I watched him go.
He didn't give me a second glance.
And he never would.
"Mara," Mr. Rain said, sitting down. "Grab a chair. We will discuss what you did in class today."
"They're all attached to these crappy desks," I said. "You should get new ones. These are so old they still have Led Zeppelin carved into them."
I realized I wasn't sure what Led Zeppelin was or why I blurted it out. Why did I feel like I wasn't supposed to be here, like I wasn't a high school student? The gremlin was speaking again. Maybe I was coming down with something and I needed to go home and crash. I'd probably feel better tomorrow morning.
Mr. Rain wasn't amused. "Then stand there." He threw open a drawer and rummaged through it for a pink slip that must mean detention. That was something else Stephanie and Tom wouldn't care much about, either. I'd be out of Haven House in a year, anyway, and then I'd have to figure out where the heck to live.
Movement caught the corner of my eye. Sara still stood there beyond the doorway while students fl
owed past her, chattering. Everyone was moving on to the next class. She was standing too close, trying to give me backup.
I appreciated it, but I turned away so she wouldn't see that.
This was something I could handle myself.
"I'm standing here," I said.
Mr. Rain sighed. "I've had it with you kids," he said. "I wished the Haven House had never set up shop here."
More blood flowed to my ears, and they grew hot. "Excuse me?"
Mr. Rain went to work pulling his sleeve down over his wrist. I could see through his white shirt a little and it was gross. He had something red on his upper arm that might be a wound or a tattoo, but I wasn't about to ask him about it.
"I said excuse me?" I asked. "All I did today was fall asleep in your class. In case you haven't noticed, everybody does that. It's not just limited to us rejects who live at Haven House."
Mr. Rain leaned across the desk at me. His brown eyes were wide and dangerous. "I've dealt with lots of House kids," he said. "None of them ever do anything with their lives and I'm sure you're no exception, Mara. Now let me write up your detention slip so you can take it to your, um, guardians to have it signed. And then I want you out of my classroom."
The heat spread down the back of my neck now. I clenched my fists. I'd never hit a teacher, but I was thinking about it right now. Mr. Rain fished his red pen from his State University cup and jabbed it into the detention slip. He filled out my name.
And then he stopped.
Straightened up.
And grabbed at his neck.
His tie was tightening around his throat.
I froze and stared at him. Mr. Rain struggled for breath and pulled at the knot, but it was getting tighter and tighter and his whole tie hugged his neck like a boa constrictor trying to kill its prey.
"Mr. Rain?" I asked. A chill swept over me and the air grew cold.
My teacher choked. His face turned the shade of whatever red mark he had on his arm. His struggles got more desperate, and he grabbed the edge of his desk with one hand. Mr. Rain's eyes got huge. Terrified.
He was choking to death on his tie.
My heart raced. I was frozen at first. Outside the door, students walked past, oblivious to what was happening.
