by Jay Barnson
“Sure. That ain’t nothing where I come from. You hear much worse in the ten minutes between classes in high school.”
“Your life sounds so strange, Jack. I would like to visit your world sometime.”
“I would love for you to see it, Delcina. I mean, it ain’t a castle or anything like that.”
“That’s okay. I’ve seen castles.”
“At least we got indoor plumbing, so you don’t have to use them chamber pots.”
“We have indoor plumbing.”
“Not in my room!”
She laughed and said, “We’ll have to see that you get moved to more appropriate quarters, then.”
“Okay. Well, we do got some pretty good movies. And airplanes. Not that I ever been in one. And ice cream, if you ain’t got that here.”
“I have no idea what those things are. But they sound wonderful.”
“Maybe when all this mess is cleared up, you can come. You know, for a visit or something. Make it an official state visit or whatnot.”
She took his hand. Jack’s heart raced as he stared first at her hand, and then into her eyes. They were kind of spooky, but in a mysterious, deliriously attractive way. She leaned closer and half-whispered, “Jack, I’m in no hurry to be married off, either.”
Jack smiled and whispered back, “So we’re both okay on that account?”
She nodded. “As heir, even today I am not completely free in the choice of my future husband. I want you to know that if you had accepted... Well, I wouldn’t have considered it the worst of fates.”
Jack nodded back. “I don’t reckon it would have been for me, either.”
She glanced around the hallway, then raised her head and kissed him on the cheek. “Yes, we’re both fine on that account.”
Jack returned to his quarters feeling considerably lighter. She’d kissed him. He wasn’t being forced to be married. Some noblemen might hate him, but who cared about them? They could go pound sand as far as he was concerned. And who knew? Maybe in a few years, if she was still available and they still felt good about each other, maybe something really could work out. It was a long shot, but if he could survive the most dangerous giant in the land and win the affection of the most beautiful girl, then maybe anything was possible. Jack fell asleep in his bed feeling like he was the luckiest guy in two worlds.
He woke up early in the morning to Bachan’s sword-tip at his throat.
Jessabelle hitchhiked to the cemetery in Callan. When the truck pulled off to the side of the road, the big man with the scraggly beard who offered her a ride didn’t exactly feel safe. Even knowing that she was probably far more dangerous to anyone giving her a ride than they were to her, or that she’d been in far more dangerous situations in just the last two days, didn’t slow the pounding of her heart. How anyone could do this without being armed or able to turn into a giant hunting cat baffled her.
The man’s name was Mike. After looking up the name of the place on his phone, Mike said, “That ain’t even a community, that’s like somebody’s field west of Cascade. You sure you want to go there?”
Jessabelle nodded emphatically. “I’m going there to visit the grave of an old friend,” she said. Technically, Debra was her grandma’s old friend, but Mike probably wouldn’t care. The driver spoke about his little fishing boat, his kids, and his wife in that order. Jessabelle listened and nodded over the fifteen-minute drive. Then Mike pulled off to the side of the road and pointed to a dirt road heading up the hill. He shrugged and said, “I reckon this is it, right up yonder. I’ll ask again, you sure this is where you need to be?”
Jessabelle nodded and tried to give him the remaining twenty-dollar bill from her jacket. He shook his head and said, “No, I ain’t an Uber. You pay your respects and have a good day, okay?”
Jessabelle smiled and thanked him as she got out of the truck. He gave her one more wave and drove off. She turned and made the hike up the dirt road.
Callan consisted of only four buildings and an overgrown cemetery. The cemetery’s headstones were small but uniform, as if everyone had died all at once and been given matching, plain marble slabs to decorate their evenly spaced graves. A much larger construction, a vault, sat out-of-place in the center of the cemetery. She was too far away to read the nameplate over the mortared stones sealing the entrance, but she was willing to bet the discolored brass read, “Arnot.”
Of the four buildings opposite the graveyard, a barn and neighboring farmhouse were approaching a state of ruin. One side of the barn’s roof had collapsed, and the damage seemed several months old. The farmhouse’s windows were boarded up, and the yard was overgrown with weeds and tall grass. A white house seemed far better maintained, though it had few features to make it look like anyone’s home. The lawn had been largely destroyed in patches beneath the trees where the leaves hadn’t been raked for at least a year. There were no lights on in the house, and no cars in the driveway. The faded numbers on the mailbox matched those of the address in the documentation Jessabelle had stolen from Bowman. Jessabelle stepped up onto the property, walked along the overgrown rocks to the front door and knocked. Nobody answered. She tried the handle on the storm door, but it was securely locked..
The last building in the abandoned community was a shed behind the white house, easily large enough to be a single-car garage. Wires crossed the property from the roof of the house to the roof of the shed. It, too, was securely locked, but one of the boards making up the wall was loose. Jessabelle nudged it with her foot, and then bent down and yanked until the gap was wide enough for a small animal to get through. Jessabelle became a small animal and squirmed inside.
A tiny glow near a switch cast microscopic illumination in the interior of the shed, but it was enough for her cat’s eyes. It also proved that someone was still paying the electricity bill. The building was a storage room, filled with tools and shelving. Three shovels, a pair of pickaxes, and two sledgehammers hung on hooks on the wall. Two tall, steel safes stood against the wall she’d slipped through. She’d seen a few of these in Maple Bend... gun cabinets. Next to them, a wooden trunk was stacked with some kind of clothing and a cardboard box. Turning back to the front door, the glow glinted off a metal latch mechanism. Could she just open it from this side? She risked transforming into the girl.
She immediately regretted it. Jessabelle-the-girl was almost blind in this room. She fumbled for the light switch and flipped it on. Sterile florescent light flooded the room, revealing a storage space kept scrupulously clean in spite of its outward appearance. Under the harsh glare, more details revealed themselves. The shovels and pickaxes were in pristine condition, having never bit into solid ground. A pair of machetes also hung on the wall above the other tools. A shelf opposite the front door contained two dozen vials of some brownish liquid. She picked up a vial and held it to the light. It looked like a small perfume-bottle, marked with a date of October of the previous year. Tiny confetti-like bits of matter swirled suspended in the liquid.
She took the lid off and smelled the substance. The earthy smell wasn’t terrible, but it didn’t smell good, either. These were definitely not perfume. The smell reminded her of Hattie’s healing juices. She replaced the lid and put the vial in her pocket.
The cardboard box was already open and filled with individually wrapped, industrial-sized glow sticks. Instructions on how to bend and shake the glow sticks to activate them were printed on the plastic wrapper, with translations in three different languages. The clothing on top of the trunk proved to be a stack of black vests. The vests were heavy, weighing over five pounds each, made of a thick, semi-hard material. A tiny tag on the inside of the vest read, “Ballistic: NIJ Level II, Stab: Level I.”
She moved the box and vests onto the floor and opened the trunk. Her eyes widened at the plastic-wrapped packages inside, all labeled “First Strike Ration.” She flipped one over and read the contents. After reading the words, “Sandwich: Bacon Cheddar,” she tore the packaging. The resilient plast
ic wrap slowed her down, but she removed a machete from the wall and used its edge to cut through the material. It took her only a few minutes to scarf the entire contents, which proved amazingly filling. She hadn’t eaten since the coffee shop, and she’d transformed several times. After being hungry much of the day, a full belly was a welcome change.
She considered her next move. Assuming the crossroads really existed here, what if she found herself in a dungeon just like the one in Josie and Burke’s basement, and the crossroads went only one way? She grabbed some glow sticks and shoved them inside a jacket pocket. The rations were too big even for her jacket pockets, proving they had their limits. She scooped two of them out of the trunk and shoved them under her arm, then pulled a pickaxe off the wall. If the other side was enclosed, maybe this would give her a chance to break through!
She unlatched the door. Immediately the keypad beside the door lit up, with a thirty second countdown. A beeper sounded every second. Next to the countdown timer, the display read, “Disarm Code:” Jessabelle had never seen anything like this except on television. Was the shed going to self destruct? Was it going to set off an alarm and notify the police?
In her mad dash out of the shed before the countdown hit zero, she dropped one of the ration packets. The pickaxe slowed her down, but she wasn’t about to let it go, and it was too large to transform with her. Behind her, no bomb went off, and nobody rushed out of the house after her. She didn’t hear police sirens, which she took as a good sign. She slowed to a fast walk and continued across the street into the graveyard.
The tomb had a clear entrance, an arched doorway that led nowhere, blocked with white stone. She’d never used a pickaxe before, but after setting the remaining food ration down, she tried her level best. Her first clumsy hit nearly missed the seal by coming short, chipping the stone in a glancing hit and continuing down to bite the concrete foundation inches from her foot. She dropped the handle and stepped back, breathing heavily. She stared at the tool, coming up with a new plan. Picking it back up, she turned sideways to the door, stepped back, and took a swing that fit somewhere between the swings of a golf club and a baseball bat. The pick took another chunk out of the stone.
On the second hit, the stone cracked. On the third, the stone proved to be heavily mortared bricks painted on one side. Several swings later, there was little left of the seal but a pile of brown and white rubble. She took a moment to rest, but then she heard the cars. It was impossibly soon from the moment she’d triggered the alarm, but five large vehicles pulled up the road. Hesitating only to grab the pickaxe and abandoning the ration, she ducked inside the tomb.
The tomb was little more than an empty concrete room five feet wide and twelve feet deep. The entryway faced northeast, opposite of the late-afternoon sun, so the far wall was hard to see, but she felt what was there. The prickling sensation returned as she drew close, just as she’d encountered above Maple Bend and in Josie’s basement. There was a crossroads. Jessabelle reminded herself that if she went through, she’d never be able to come out.
Outside, she heard shouts. One way or the other, she was trapped. She’d made her decision hours ago. The shouting men behind her simply gave her the will to take the final action. Turning to the rear wall, she focused on the tingling sensation, and what lay beyond. She stepped forward into the wall and kept moving. After an eyeblink of time sensing absolutely nothing between worlds, she emerged in a lightless place, filled with the smell of dust and stone.
Jessabelle fought back panic. This dungeon was drier than the one Burke had been trapped in, with a flat, man-made stone floor, but she felt no tingly sensation of a nearby crossroad. There was no escape back to her world. With trembling fingers, she reached for a glow stick. Snapping and shaking it illuminated part of the bare room around her with a surprising amount of green-yellow light.
She paced along the mortared stone walls, finding it to be about twenty feet square, with a barred doorway and a stairway beyond. The bars were hinged on the other side, but bolted shut by three long iron bars encased in thick iron housings, and mounted into heavy hooks along the wall. If the housings were well-oiled, and she doubted it, someone on the other side could readily open pull the hooks free and unbar the door. From this side, it would take someone with impossibly long, flexible arms to do the same. It would take hours to break through it with the pickaxe. Only a small child could fit through the bars.
However, a cat or panther could escape with ease. Was that why the Coven had pursed them in the first place? She transformed into the cat, unsurprised to discover the pickaxe did not transform with her. On the other side of the bars, she changed back into the girl, and she stepped carefully up a short set of the stairs, guided by the light of the glow stick. She didn’t want to startle anyone on the other side by appearing anything other than human. She was looking for allies.
At the top of the stairs, she encountered a thin hallway to the right. A few feet farther, it turned in a ‘U’ shape back the way she had come, and light drifted back from the far end. Twenty feet farther, iron gratings above let the waning sunlight drift in and illuminate the pit and the doorway ten feet beyond.
“Don’t move!” a man’s voice said from the other side of the pit. Neither the light from her glow stick nor the limited sunlight illuminated the speaker, but her ears picked up the motion of at least three people. “Drop your weapon.”
Jessabelle doubted they had detected the revolver in her pocket. “What weapon?” She called back.
“The wand in your hand!”
“Wand?” She realized they meant the glow stick and let it fall to her feet. It rolled diagonally, stopped by the wall before it tumbled into the pit. “Who are you?” She asked.
“We are the Gateway Guard of the Wardens. Now identify yourself!”
“Jessabelle Rose.”
“Jessabelle Rose of what? Whom do you serve? How did you find the gateway?”
“I’m here to warn you that the Coven is fixin’ to come through to get the man in the white suit’s daughter. There are men coming through any minute now.”
“Impossible!”
A second man spoke. “Extend the ramp. We’ll find out if she’s lying.”
“She can’t be telling the truth,” the first voice said.
A third voice, older and calmer, came from the hallway beyond the pit. “If she cannot provide proof, then she dies.”
“Choose your words carefully, young Jack,” Bachan said. “I will know if you lie. Did you kill King Ferik?”
Jack didn’t think this was very funny, but he kept his body still. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“Answer!”
“Of course not. We all talked, and then he offered us some drinks and sent us to bed.”
Bachan inched the tip of the blade away from Jack’s throat. “You shared drinks with the King?”
“Yeah, and the Queen. Aidan was there, too. Nothing happened.”
“Who prepared the drinks?”
“What? I don’t know. I reckon the Queen did. She brought them in. Why? What happened?”
Bachan sighed. “The King and Queen were both poisoned. The King is dead, and the Queen is possibly on her deathbed.”
Jack restrained himself from shaking his head or making any other move due to the proximity of the sword-tip. “That ain’t possible. Everything was fine when we left. You can ask Aidan. He stayed behind.”
“I would if we could find him, Jack.” Bachan withdrew the sword, but didn’t sheath it. “For what it is worth, I am inclined to believe you. In the short time I’ve known you, I know you tell the truth to a fault, but this is something anyone would lie about. I am required by my office to question all suspects, and you are at the top of the list.”
Jack sat up in bed. “Because I’m a foreigner.”
“In part, yes. But that’s secondary to your position as potential consort-to-the-heir.”
Jack shook his head. “That ain’t happening. That’s what I told th
e King last night, but he asked me to think about it a few more days.”
“Did Delcina drink?”
Jack shrugged. “I don’t know. I wasn’t really paying...” His eyes grew wide. “Delcina! Is she okay?”
“Yes, she was the first person we found. We have her in custody now. Go ahead and get dressed.”
Jack sighed with relief and pulled clothes on. Pausing before throwing on his shirt, he asked, “You mean like protective custody, right?”
“That, too.”
Jack narrowed his eyes at the older man. “You ain’t saying she’s a suspect too?”
Bachan nodded. “I am. And while I doubt her innocence even less than yours, I am not the final judge. The rumor is that with your betrothal...”
“I told you, that ain’t happening.”
Bachan scowled. “That is immaterial. As of this morning, the King’s pronouncement is still official. By legal precedent, this means the king considered the princess to be of maturity to take the throne. And even if the scheme was not yours, one could certainly make the case that you could be convinced to take action to secure your own proximity to power.”
“Yeah, if I was that stupid.” Jack mulled this over. He liked Delcina, but he had to admit he didn’t know her that well. Could she have arranged for her own father’s murder, framing Jack? It made devious sense. He didn’t want to believe it, and he certainly didn’t like being the top suspect. “If Delcina and I were out of the picture, who would benefit? What about the queen?”
“Queen Taliel? She occupies an unusual position. If she lives, she’s dowager queen. She has already been approved to act as limited regent until an heir assumes the throne, but that has little authority beyond the palace and the royal family other than having a vote and a half on the Council of Lords. However, she was also poisoned and may not survive the morning. That makes her involvement unlikely. Beyond that, there is a long list of those with some claim on the throne.”
