As I stepped over a branch, before I had time to think about it, I brought my foot down on it hard. The dry, brittle wood broke in half with a resounding snap.
The balataur’s footsteps halted.
So, did I. My feet remained planted where they were. Move, Gaige. Make noise. This won’t work if you don’t. For Aoife. I hoped Seanna knew what she was doing. I took a breath and ran a few steps. The dry leaves on the forest floor crunched spectacularly well. I stopped, then ran a few more steps like I was trying to find the beast and Aoife.
I paused by a tree to listen for the balataur. I hadn’t heard it move since I drew its attention. I knew it was still out there. Aoife’s emotional waves rolled like mist along the forest ground.
A sudden noise overhead nearly made me jump out of my shoes. I saw the flapping wings of a bird flying off into the night sky. I took a breath. Then another. I needed to calm my heart before it beat itself right out of its cage.
After long moments, I heard the beast moving again, its steps unhurried.
Move, Gaige.
I turned to run again. I made it half a step before I barreled into something, ricocheted off it, and spun to the ground. I looked up at a balataur standing over me, its black lips twisted in a sneering snarl.
I froze. Physically and mentally. I didn’t know what to do, how to react. I just lay on the ground watching as the thing reached a furry hand toward me.
A flash of purple lit up the woods. The balataur looked up and squinted. The light faded, plunging the forest back into darkness.
It was like breaking eye contact had disconnected whatever had seized my brain. I scrambled to my feet and ran in the direction I had last heard the beast that had Aoife. They came into view as one large and dark form standing among the trees, my friend squirming desperately to free herself. Seanna was nowhere to be seen. The thing made a slow turn, searching the woods, Aoife thrown over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes.
I had made a lot of stupid decisions in my life. A lot. Somehow, I had managed to make it through fifteen years of life without any major injuries. Like death. Some of those decisions were epic on the stupidity scale, especially since stepping through the gateway. I hoped the one I made at that moment wouldn’t be another one. Fast, hard decisions usually are. The one I made while running right at the thing wasn’t any different. Those things stood almost twice as tall as me and weighed at least four or five times more. I had already found out their leg muscles provided too much support to do any damage kicking the knee. As I ran fast at the thing, I placed a huge bet that it couldn’t withstand all my weight. The wager? My life most likely. Probably Aoife’s. Maybe Seanna’s. Where was she?
The balataur started to turn in my direction. I didn’t give it time to finish the rotation. I launched at its leg. I put my shoulder into the side of its knee, throwing all of my 175 pounds into it. The leg buckled in. I heard the snap of multiple ligaments tearing inside the joint. The beast squealed, actually squealed, and collapsed sideways to the ground. I rolled over it and Aoife fell out of its massive arm. She scrambled away on hands and knees. I tried to do the same, but it grabbed my ankle. I kicked its fingers and it let go, yanking his hand back into its body. It seemed like kicking had become my weapon of choice. Not exactly the manly way to fight, but I was more than okay with that.
More thumping and crashing brought my head around to see trees swaying violently toward us. Purple light flared to life from behind me, illuminating the balataur I had run into. It raised an arm to cover its eyes from the sudden light.
“Get up,” Seanna yelled. “Run!”
We did. Tripping and stumbling through the dense undergrowth, we did our best to stay together. If we got separated, finding each other would be like finding a friendly employee at Wally World. Damn near impossible. I hung back, making sure we didn’t get too far ahead of the slower Aoife, forcing Seanna to do the same. Branches, invisible in the night, reached out to grab at us, smacking us painfully across the face.
I didn’t know how long we ran. Long enough to set my lungs on fire and make my legs weak. We stumbled to a stop when we couldn’t run anymore. I should say when Aoife couldn’t run anymore, but I probably couldn’t have gone much further, either. Not eating was zapping my strength. My chest rose and fell as I bent over, hands on knees, to try to catch my breath. Aoife slumped to the ground where she stopped. Seanna barely looked winded.
“I think we lost them for now,” Seanna said. “In spite of all that noise,” she added after a moment.
Aoife climbed to her feet, wincing the whole way up, and stepped over to Seanna. To my surprise, she took a swing at the Ashling. The wild punch wasn’t even close. Seanna leaned back to avoid it, just as casual as can be.
“This is your fault!” Aoife yelled and took another swing.
Seanna avoided it with equal ease.
“Aoife…” I started.
“Shut up! I almost died!”
“You didn’t, though,” I said. I had feared she was going to die, too, but I knew I had to calm the situation.
“No, I didn’t!” she agreed. “But I was just dragged off in the middle of the night by a walking cow that smelled like it had been gallivanting around its pasture and rolling around in its own crap. This is insane!”
“We all need to calm—” Seanna started.
Aoife whirled back at her. She swung and missed again. “Shut up, you…you…walking stick!”
“That’s a bug,” I said unhelpfully.
She grunted in frustration, spun back to me, and bent over to snatch a fallen limb from the ground, nearly falling over in the process. “She’s a stick!” She held it up as a demonstration and threw it at me, missing badly.
“We need to calm down,” Seanna said again. “Get some sleep and—”
“No!” Aoife screeched.
I was about to tell her to keep it down, but never got the chance. She spun like a top, and with surprising speed, her hand snatched out and grabbed Seanna by the neck.
“No,” she said again, her voice dropping to deadly quiet. “No more magic.”
“Aoife,” I said. I reached out a hand and kept it there, unsure what to do.
Things were getting way too real. Seanna went still when Aoife wrapped her hand around the slight Ashling’s throat. Her blue eyes steadied and lacked any emotion at all. They scared the crap out of me. Aoife didn’t seem to care.
“I was just—” Seanna started.
“No. More. Magic.” Aoife emphasized every word like a hammer hitting a nail. “You don’t think I’ve figured out you’ve been using your magic to make us sleep? You think I’m that stupid?” She swung a finger on her free hand at me. “He might be, but I’m not.”
The forest went completely quiet as the two girls stared each other down, Aoife’s hand wrapped around Seanna’s throat. I knew I was slow on the uptake sometimes, but it did take me a few minutes to figure out exactly what Aoife was saying. Seanna had been using magic on us? I wasn’t surprised. Not really. She had been the whole time. She used it to draw me through the gateway. Every night, Aoife fell asleep almost instantly as soon as Seanna suggested we sleep. I was never far behind.
I remembered the tingle in Seanna touch. I remembered how it altered my emotional state. I had thought it was because I was starting to like her. No. She was using magic on me. She had been dragging me along like a little puppy on a leash the whole time, and it nearly got Aoife killed.
“Is that true?” I asked. I knew it was, but I had to hear it from Seanna. She needed to say it.
Her blue eyes flicked toward me. “Of course, it is.”
I nodded. Of course, it is. I put a hand on Aoife’s shoulder. “Let her go.”
I didn’t think she was going to and I wouldn’t have blamed her. She had every right to be pissed off. I was, too. I started to worry she wasn’t going to let go, which led me to worry what Seanna would do to her if she didn’t. I’d seen enough of the Ashling to know Aoife had no chance if
Seanna lost her temper. Aoife outweighed her by a great deal, but I had no idea the extent of Seanna’s powers. But several very long moments later, Aoife kept her grip.
Finally, Aoife’s arm fell to her side. I let go of the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. She slumped and stumbled to a tree. “Stay away from me,” she whispered as she turned and sunk to the ground with her back against the tree.
I wasn’t sure exactly who that command was directed at. I hoped it was Seanna. I looked at her and even in the dark I could see the reddening of her thin neck. She never once lifted a hand to touch it. She pointedly ignored it, crossing her arms over her chest.
“Now what?” she asked.
“What do you mean?” I replied.
“Now that you know I’ve been manipulating you, what are you going to do? Are you going home now?” Her voice held no small amount of challenge in it.
I don’t think that had anything to do with the decision. She’d already admitted to using magic on me to get me there. It wasn’t a huge surprise she would keep using it. Besides, she wasn’t using it to harm us. Just the opposite actually. What was the harm in helping us sleep? Something in the back of my head nagged at me like a puppy insistently pawing at my arm, trying to get me to pay attention to it. Maybe I should see some harm in her using magic on us even for something as benign as making us sleep. What exactly did it say about her if she was so willing to manipulate us through magical means?
But I couldn’t keep hold of that line of thought. For the moment, it didn’t matter. What really mattered was Aoife. She was right. She could have died. We both could have died on multiple occasions since stepping through the gateway. The bat things. The thing that attacked the Jo-Shar village. The big cats. Falling into a river. Now big, mean cows with a nasty attitude and a hankering to get their furry hands on me for whatever reason. I’d previously rationalized her staying here was her own doing because she followed me and refused to go back when she had the chance. I couldn’t do that anymore. She was there for me.
“We have to go back,” I said quietly, almost before I knew the words were going to come out.
I expected more of a reaction from Seanna. Any kind of reaction really. She could have started yelling at me or she could have slumped her shoulders in disappointment. She did neither. She only looked at me and dropped her head in a single nod.
“What?” Aoife said. She struggled to her feet and walked to us. “Go back?”
“We have no business here,” I said. “We have come so close to getting killed so many times since we got here.”
“Yeah. And for what? To turn around and go back in defeat?”
Well, this was a new development. I wasn’t quite sure how to react. I would have figured she would jump at the chance to go home. She had zero stakes in being there. I was there for my mom. She was there because of me. If I wanted to go home, she should, too. Right?
“Is that what heroes do these days? Is that what you want to do, Gaige? Do you want to go back to your home and your mom and aunt and your life just the way it was?”
“You could have died, Aoife.”
“Yeah, I could have. That’s because of her.” She jabbed a finger at Seanna. “It’s because she’s keeping things from us and putting us in danger. But if we turn around and go back, we still have to travel the way we came, putting ourselves in the exact same danger. And for what? What would we have to show for it?”
I didn’t know what to think. I wanted to go on. Then I wanted to go back. Now she was talking me into going on and that was what I wanted to begin with. My head was starting to spin again. “I just don’t want you to get hurt because of me.”
“I won’t. If I get hurt it’s because I decided to be here.” She thought a moment. “And Seanna. It’s always her fault.”
Seanna rolled her eyes.
When I still hesitated, Aoife raised her shoulders in a shrug. “You figure it out. If you go back, there’s no reason for me to stay obviously. But if you want to help your mom like Seanna says, then we’ll go. If she’s not lying about that. I’m about to drop where I stand. Figure it out and let me know what your slow, little brain comes up with in the morning.” She went back to her tree and slumped against it, closing her eyes and breathing deep breaths.
Seanna said she’d watch out for the balataurs while we slept and moved off in the dark. Just like that, the discussion was over like turning off the TV. Apparently, I had the rest of the night to think about it on my own. And think about it I did. All night without Seanna’s help in sleeping.
Part Three
Delicia
21
Musical Montages
Despite the lack of magical sleeping aid, Aoife fell asleep pretty quick. I can’t say that I blamed her. She was exhausted both physically and emotionally. Nothing like being kidnapped by killer cows to wear you out. I could tell her sleep was anything but peaceful. She moaned and tossed most of the night, huddled in a tight ball against the tree. I watched her most of the night. I wanted to go over to comfort her somehow. I didn’t.
Sometime during the night, the dreams that haunted her must have subsided. The fear stopped flowing from her. She rolled herself into a tighter ball, shivering from the cold and in near constant movement due to physical fatigue. I should have tried to help warm her. I didn’t.
Instead, I sat with my knees pulled up and my arms crossed on them. Sometime in the dead of night, I rested my head on my forearms and fell into a fitful sleep of my own. I only slept a couple hours before I had another dream. In it, I lay on my bed after my dad’s funeral, my face buried in the pillow trying to not cry. Somebody laid a hand on my shoulder to comfort me, but unlike in real life, in my dream I turned to look. A balataur leered down at me with blood-stained square teeth. That had woken me up for the rest of what was left of night before morning.
Seanna returned just as the dark forest was starting to turn a hazy gray like a smeared painting. She was already on top of us before I realized she was there. She just appeared like a ghost. I nearly crapped myself before I realized it was her. She didn’t say anything as she crossed to me and slung a pack from her shoulder. She produced two blankets from it and handed them to me. They were much lighter than the Jo-Shar blankets I had lost falling in the river. They were stitched from what looked like plants but were as soft and flexible as if they were made of a nice, light cotton blend.
While I laid one over Aoife and put another over my shoulders cape style, Seanna dug a pouch out of the pack and dumped a handful of berries into her hand. She held them out to me. I eyed them. My stomach had given up hopes of a real meal a while ago, so it took some willpower to take them from her. They were round, about the size of a strawberry, and after I popped one in my mouth, I found they tasted like blueberries with a slight bitterness of raspberry. My stomach turned at the sudden addition of food to its empty cavern.
“Where did you get this stuff?” I asked, swallowing the feeling like I was about to vomit.
“I went back to my clan’s city,” she said, averting her eyes.
I stuffed the last of the berries in my mouth and swallowed them with minimal chewing. If I was going to throw up, I might as well do so on a fuller stomach. If I didn’t, well I guess that was a good thing, right? “What’s it like there?”
“A few Ashlings lost their lives, but those beasts left when they realized you weren’t there anymore.” She picked at a spot on a fingernail with another nail.
“Where did they come from?” I asked. “It was like they fell out of the sky. They were everywhere.”
“We don’t know. It’s being investigated.”
“How’s your dad?”
“Father is well,” she said. “Sore, but well.”
“I’m sorry some of your people died,” I said. I didn’t want to admit to myself they had died because of me. I knew if I said it out loud, Seanna would deny it, but she just said so herself. The balataurs left because I wasn’t there anymore, which meant they
were there specifically sent for me. The Ashlings’ deaths were on my hands. “Why are they after me?”
“They’re Lortmor’s muscle.”
“You mentioned that name in Elder Narit’s hut.” I ignored a tiny, sharp pain that stabbed through me at the thought of the Elder. I still hadn’t figured out why her possible, and most likely, death affected me so much. I only knew her for something like a half hour. Maybe it was because she’d been the only one on this planet who didn’t look at me like I was a fly that had flown inside when the door was left open for a split second. She had been kind in spite of her warning to not come back. I understood why she didn’t want me to—I put everybody I came in contact with in danger. The thing that sucked the most was I still didn’t know exactly why. I was a Gatekeeper and everybody wanted me. Beyond that, I had no clue what that had to do with anything. “You said he’s after me. Why?”
“Because you’re the Gatekeeper,” she replied.
Point proven.
“I figured that. I just don’t get why everybody on this world wants me.” I ran a hand through my messy, oily hair. “Back home, I might as well be as invisible as the breeze. Just passing through, barely even noticed.” I started to feel a little proud of that metaphor until I realized exactly how true it was. Coming to that conclusion about myself was a real downer, to put it mildly.
“He wants Earth for himself,” Seanna said, sitting on a rare patch of grass. “The Gateway is the way to get it.”
“But why me? Why this gate? You said there were others, so why don’t they try those?” I didn’t care that my irritation and life took precedence over Earth. There are other ways to get to Earth! Use those. Just leave me alone! I’m not ashamed that I didn’t care I was being selfish. As long as I wasn’t bothered, this Lortmor could do whatever he wanted.
“As I said before, those gates are closed and the keepers are on the other side. There’s no way to get them open unless the keepers open them and that hasn’t happened in decades.”
“How did my gate get open?” I asked.
The Gatekeeper Trilogy Page 20
