Traveler

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  “Come on,” she said, twisting back and pulling his arm across her shoulder. “We’re going to a hospital.”

  “A different hospital, right?” He laughed sleepily against her. “Don’t think we should go to the same one.”

  Quin smiled. That he was still making jokes was a good sign. “Yes. We’re on the other side of the world now.”

  Some yards away, the trees ended at a narrow, winding path, one of the many that encircled the Peak. Quin moved them both carefully in that direction.

  “We could have beaten those boys,” Shinobu told her thickly. “We didn’t have to run.”

  “I was worried about you getting injured—more injured—if we kept fighting.”

  “Who were they, do you think?”

  “My father brought them somehow,” she said as she maneuvered him between trees. “And maybe they thought the athame was his?”

  When she’d last seen her father, he was thrashing about and fighting medical personnel as they tried to load him into an ambulance by Traveler’s crash site. In the hospital, she’d seen sparks around his head, and she now understood his wild behavior—he’d been disrupted, at least partially, during the fight on Traveler.

  “He was disrupted,” Shinobu said, echoing her own thoughts. “But he didn’t act completely disrupted.”

  Shinobu had seen his own father disrupted, and he’d described to Quin the unthinking wildness of the state. Briac hadn’t been like that, though he’d been strange.

  “I—I froze a little when I saw him,” Quin admitted.

  “Feeling sorry for him?” Shinobu asked her.

  She didn’t feel sorry for her father, who’d lied to her for years, who’d forced her to do terrible things, and who would dominate her by any means if she let him. She’d been ready to kill Briac Kincaid during the fight on Traveler. But in the hospital, she’d wavered—because there had been something helpless about him.

  “I don’t feel sorry for him,” she said, “but I did hesitate.”

  Shinobu’s head lolled against her. He mumbled, “It’s all right, because you’re touching me again, can’t keep your hands off me, can you?” He tried to lace his fingers through hers where they gripped his shoulder. He was losing consciousness. He lurched against her as she moved out of the trees and down the embankment. “You should want to touch me,” he went on, slurring his words. “I’ve had many satisfied customers. Believe you, I did.”

  Quin couldn’t help smiling again. “Many satisfied customers? How many, exactly?” she asked, easing him onto the paved path and trying to keep him talking. “Did any of those girls have to carry you to the hospital twice—”

  She stopped.

  She was face to face with her father. Again.

  Briac Kincaid was standing in the middle of the path, looking at her, wild-eyed. He opened his mouth.

  Quin was momentarily paralyzed. She watched Briac’s head swivel in a circular motion, as though he were trying to locate someone. His mouth moved again.

  He’s going to scream, Quin thought. He’s getting ready to scream.

  She heard a rustling in the branches overhead. Someone was high up in a tree on the other side of the path. And that someone, quite obviously, was there with Briac Kincaid. They’d followed her here—or perhaps they’d gotten here before her.

  Careful to keep hold of Shinobu, she grabbed a stone from the edge of the walkway and threw it past Briac’s face. Her father turned his head to follow the stone’s arc through the air, and Quin seized the moment. She grabbed Shinobu tightly and plowed into the trees on the downhill side of the path. Shinobu was barely conscious and still badly injured—there was no way the two of them could be involved in another fight.

  “Ah!” Briac yelled, finally finding his voice. “Ahhhh! Ahhhhhh!”

  “What?” demanded a young and irritated voice from the tree above.

  Half pushing Shinobu, half dragging him, Quin moved deep into the greenery and fell to her knees. Shinobu collapsed in front of her.

  “Ow,” he mumbled.

  Quin pulled him beneath the covering branches of a large, dense bush and eased him down until he was lying on damp soil. Then she slid across Shinobu’s chest and glanced upward through the branches. Both boys from the hospital attack were perched in trees, looking north, toward the harbor, which she guessed was clearly visible from their vantage point.

  “They must have their own athame,” she whispered. “The boys who attacked us are here—with my father.” Had she and Shinobu spent more time There than she’d thought? It had seemed they’d been gone only moments, but who knew? That was the danger of using an athame. You could separate from the time stream of the world and lose yourself. If you weren’t careful, you could lose yourself to the point where you wouldn’t come back at all.

  “He’s making things up again!” This was the younger boy, the freckled one who looked eleven or twelve.

  “It’s my mother!” Briac yelled. “Come down and find her!”

  “Your mother would be ancient,” the older boy told him. “And this city is enormous. You’ve led us on a fool’s errand.”

  “Look at the ships,” the little one said, a note of awe in his voice. “There are so many.”

  “But she was here. I was right,” Briac insisted, in a moment of verbal clarity. “And if she’s here, the—the athame of the Dreads is here too.”

  Quin could see her father’s legs, still out on the path. He was turning around in circles. “Fiona!” he called. “Fiona MacBain!”

  “Shut him up, Nott!” the older boy ordered.

  Quin watched the branches shake as the smaller one—Nott—leapt downward. His movements were thoughtlessly graceful, beginning slowly then bursting into explosive action. He was a little bit…he was a little bit like the Young Dread, Quin thought.

  “Fiona MacBain?” Shinobu muttered, reacting belatedly to what Briac had said. “MacBain” was Quin’s mother’s maiden name, a name she hadn’t used for nearly twenty years.

  Quin whispered, “His mind is two steps off. He keeps thinking I’m someone else.”

  When the boy called Nott reached the ground, Quin saw how beat-up he looked—a huge goose egg on his forehead, a swollen nose and cheek, dozens of other cuts and scrapes from the fight in the hospital, and the marks of many older wounds. The smaller boy pulled Briac off the road, into the greenery and down onto his knees. Then Nott clapped a hand over her father’s mouth. Briac wrinkled his nose at this contact, and Quin realized that the boy’s odor was so awful, she could smell him even at this distance.

  The older one was coming down his tree, his motions even more graceful, as if time were unfolding at an even, easy pace for him. He wore an athame at his waist. When he reached the forest floor, his fist shot out at Briac’s neck, and Briac fell, gasping, to the ground. Both boys laughed, revealing the dirty mess of their teeth. They peered around the woods, as if assuring themselves that Briac had not, in fact, seen anyone. Quin flattened herself against Shinobu.

  The boys were a bit like the Young Dread in the way they moved, she thought, but they were nothing like her in their glee to cause pain. And her father—he was like their pet. Who were these boys, and how had they gotten hold of Briac? The athame and whipswords indicated they were Seekers, but Quin could not quite believe that. And if they felt entitled to take the athame of the Dreads from her, what was their relationship to the Dreads? Had the Young Dread given Quin the athame, knowing those boys would come after her? She studied their filthy, brutal faces between the overhanging branches. No. She couldn’t imagine the Young Dread having anything to do with those boys.

  One thing was certain: if she’d thought she and Shinobu would have time and space to explore the mysteries of Seekers on their own, she’d been badly mistaken. Somehow they’d stumbled into a new and dangerous piece of the puzzle.

  “How could we possibly find her in this place?” the older boy asked, squatting down to loom over Briac.

  “We can—we c
an find her…and the athame,” Briac stammered. It appeared to take great effort to keep his thoughts moving in a straight line, but he was making a noble attempt.

  “We shouldn’t be here at all,” the younger boy complained. “We’re supposed to get the others, and do our proper search. I thought we were finding him, not chasing some girl. He lied to us, Wilkin, to make us help him.”

  At that, the older boy—Wilkin—cuffed the younger one on the side of the head.

  “I say what we do! We’ve seen the athame, Nott, haven’t we? We ought to get it back now that we’ve seen it. He’ll be pleased with us. You know he will.”

  “Or he’ll be furious!” Nott said. “What if we end up in our cave, Wilkin? If it comes to that, I’ll blame you.”

  “And I’ll blame you,” Wilkin said. “So that’s settled.”

  Who was “he”? Quin wondered. Were they talking about Briac? If so, they were speaking of him as if he weren’t present—though, since he was disrupted, that was partially true. Was it Briac who wanted the athame of the Dreads? But the boys were treating him like a possession, not like someone who deserved their respect or fear.

  Briac had gotten back up onto his knees, and his face went very still. He was trying desperately to concentrate.

  “Quin,” Shinobu breathed, “I think you’re bleeding…”

  She was still leaning across his chest. She moved aside and saw that the lower part of Shinobu’s shirt was covered in blood. Very carefully she pulled the wet material up off his skin.

  “Oh,” she breathed. The wound in his abdomen had torn open. Blood was oozing out of it in a thick, dark stream.

  “Are you all right?” Shinobu asked her, so softly she could barely hear him. He thought the blood was hers.

  “I—I am,” she whispered back, gently putting her hand over his mouth. They could not afford to be heard. “Don’t speak, all right?”

  She’d planned to hide until the boys moved off, but now she couldn’t wait. Making as little noise as possible, she moved her hand from Shinobu’s mouth and cut off a patch of his sweatpants, folded the material several times, and pressed it firmly against his wound. Then she cut longer strips, to tie the makeshift bandage in place.

  As she worked, she glanced through the branches at the boys. The youngest had picked up a small rucksack and from within it had taken out some sort of metal helmet. The older one snatched it away from him.

  “If you won’t do what we’re supposed to do, at least we should use the helm again to figure out where she is,” Nott whined. “How else are we going to do it?”

  “Don’t be an idiot!” Wilkin responded, cuffing Nott again. “We don’t know where she is. We never did know where she was, or anything about this city. The helmet won’t help us!”

  “But he knows,” Nott answered. With one hand he was holding the ear the older boy had struck, and with the other he was pointing at Briac. “I was going to put the helm on him, not me. Straighten his mind out. Like we did in the madhouse.”

  The older boy paused, as though the suggestion to use the helmet on Briac were, in fact, clever.

  “They have a helmet,” Quin whispered. She was reaching beneath Shinobu to pull the strips of fabric around his torso. It wasn’t easy, and she hoped her soft words would distract him. “There’s a drawing of the same one in Catherine’s journal.”

  She cinched the strips down over the makeshift bandage. The blood was already soaking through. She tore and folded another thick piece of fabric and added it over the wound. It was nowhere near sufficient.

  Peeking up again, she saw her father staring at that helmet with shocking intensity. Even in the shade of the trees, the helmet caught the ambient light with glints of changing color. Its metal was iridescent…like the metal of a disruptor.

  The two boys put their heads together and whispered, and as they did, Quin watched her father stealthily grab the helmet from the ground and pull it onto his head. Then he reached for the boys’ athame…

  Quin took this moment to make her move.

  “I’m going to pull you,” she breathed.

  She grabbed Shinobu’s ankles and dragged him out from beneath the bush. He groaned, his eyes half open and watching her.

  When they reached a clear space between trees, she drew out her athame. She hoped she could shift one dial slightly and bring them to a different area within Hong Kong—away from these boys and closer to a hospital. If they could get somewhere safe, even for a few hours, perhaps she could figure out what was happening.

  A bloodcurdling screech from deeper in the trees made Quin freeze.

  “He took it!” the youngest boy shrieked. “He took it, Wilkin! And the athame!”

  As quickly as she could, Quin set her athame’s dials to bring them There and struck it against the lightning rod. A deep vibration followed, and a moment later she heard the competing tremor of another vibration. Her father must have struck the boys’ athame. Though Quin could not see him, she guessed he was trying to escape with their helmet and their stone dagger. And the boys were furious.

  Quin carved an anomaly, making it as large as she could.

  The branches of two nearby trees started shaking—Briac and the boys were grappling with each other just yards away.

  “Step through!” Quin whispered urgently, hauling Shinobu to his feet, praying the bandage would hold and she was not killing him by forcing him to move. He managed to stay upright and stumble into the solidifying hole she’d ripped into the world.

  “Let me wear it!” Briac gasped within the trees. “My mind will work, we’ll find her, we’ll find that athame. We’ll have it.”

  “Get it off him!” said the older boy.

  “He’s through!” said the younger one.

  “Follow him! Follow him!”

  Quin understood: The helmet somehow counteracted the disruptor sparks. And when Briac’s able to think straight, he’ll come after me again, she thought, in Hong Kong or on the estate or anywhere—to get his hands on the athame of the Dreads. For years her father had kept the fox athame, which rightly belonged to John. Now John had it back, and Briac must be desperate to find another. Clearly those boys were not going to give him their own—but in some fashion, Briac was allied with them to find the athame of the Dreads.

  An object rolled out of the trees and bumped into Quin’s foot. As she stepped through the anomaly, she snatched it up, discovering it to be smooth and cool against her skin.

  The boys had knocked the metal helmet from Briac’s head, and now Quin was holding it in her hands.

  From high in the oak tree at the edge of the forest, the Young Dread looked through the night air at the commons, the large meadow at the center of the Scottish estate. Around the edge of the commons were dotted what used to be cottages but what were now, mostly, burned piles of rubble, smudges of black in the moonlight. Only a few structures, including the workshop and dairy barn, stood unbroken.

  The three visitors to the estate were running between the ruined buildings in a frantic search. Two of these visitors were boys, and they were trailing after the third visitor…who was Briac Kincaid.

  Maud had last seen Briac being forced into an ambulance in London, fighting wildly against the men trying to help him. Now she understood why. The Young Dread had thrown her sight, sending it out across the distance so she could examine Briac closely as he charged across the top of the meadow, from the abandoned cottages of the Dreads toward the dairy barn. Around his head danced a handful of sparks, flashing in the nighttime air. He’d been hit with a disruptor. It must have been John’s disruptor, used during the fight on Traveler, and somehow Briac had avoided all but a few of the sparks. Even so, he was obviously mad.

  “Fiona!” she heard him yelling as he reached the dairy and peered inside. “Mother?” Then he shook his head and said, “Quin, for God’s sake! Where are you?” He’d done much the same thing at each of the empty or destroyed cottages he’d passed.

  Not finding anyone in the d
airy, Briac stomped over to the stable, which had burned but still stood partially intact. He disappeared inside, and by throwing her hearing, the Young Dread could follow his motions as he flung things around and called for Fiona and his mother and Quin again—though it seemed to be Quin he really wanted.

  It wasn’t only Briac’s noise that Maud had heard when she’d stood in the castle ruins with John after their training session. She had known he was coming before he’d arrived, because a thought had dropped into her mind: …he’ll come after me again—in Hong Kong or on the estate…

  She was quite certain that thought had come from Quin. Maud had felt this mental connection off and on for a month. It had begun on the day when Quin had fought John on top of the small barn above the cliff on the edge of the estate. During that fight, the Young Dread had chosen to help Quin by tossing her a lightning rod. It was as though she’d unwittingly created a permanent connection between them in that instant; Quin’s thoughts now traveled freely across the link at unexpected moments. The Young Dread could even feel Quin looking through her own eyes from time to time. She was not sure that Quin was aware of the connection, despite its strength.

  “She’s not here!” the younger of the two boys said. Both stood outside the stable, waiting for Briac to reappear. “He’s acting mad again, Wilkin. If we’re going to follow him, maybe you should let him wear it awhile—”

  “He can’t wear it now, Nott! He tried to steal it,” the other one—Wilkin—said. And then: “Are you crying?”

  “I want to wear it!” the younger one, apparently called Nott, replied.

  Briac emerged through the burned stable doorway, and immediately headed toward the old barn.

  From her perch in the oak tree, the Young Dread heard John approaching below. He’d paused in the castle ruins to put on his cloak and gather up their weapons, and now he was sprinting through the woods toward her, his cloak streaming from his shoulders. The night was dark, but Maud’s eyes gathered all available light to allow her to see him easily among the shadows and the trees.