by A Corrin
“Are you okay?” the kind carpenter asked, patting my back. “M’lord? Your eyes sort of looked, um…white, for a second there…”
“Y-yes,” I stuttered, putting a hand to the side of my face and shielding my eyes. “I—I must go…tell them.”
The carpenter reached out at me, but I backed away, apologizing. I tripped backward over an oak chest, picked myself up, and stumbled outside…right into the arms of an old lady.
She grabbed my shoulders firmly in her bony hands, talon-like nails digging into my skin. Her crooked yellow teeth gleamed, and her shadowy black eyes rolled. “Don’t!” she shrieked at me. “Your eyes give you away!”
I thought back to when Nikki and I were in the park with the Rankers—how Garrett had said the same thing to me when my irises had glowed red in anger. I struggled to squirm out of her grip, but it was too strong, even for the extra drive my brain was sending through my muscles. I had to get away, had to tell the others.
The woman forced me to meet her bottomless pupils. She rambled on, her spittle flecking my face and shirt. “You can’t let them see! Can’t let them see the cloudy white or the red fire!”
“Get away!” I hissed, yanking to escape from her, but she shrieked, “Look away! He will see! He mustn’t see!”
The carpenter rushed from his shop and shouted, “Hey there! Leave the warrior alone!” He tried to come to me but was held back by the crowd gathering around us. People of the village were emerging from the dark shadows and alleys, their eyes suspicious and flickering, their expressionless, sunken faces thirsty. Many grasped crude clubs or knives, and some of the younger kids were kneeling to pick up rocks.
Giving in to the woman’s iron grasp, I held my hands up, palms out, and looked warily around at everyone. “Okay, guys, this isn’t what it looks like. I mean you no harm. This woman just grabbed me and started shouting at me. Does she do this to people often?”
A guy a few years older than me growled, “Only if they’re different.” He held back his arm, aiming to throw a heavy rock at me. “And we don’t like different.” The guy tensed his muscles and braced his feet; I grimaced, waiting for the bone-crunching thud and the ensuing agony.
But a small, slender hand caught the man’s wrist, and a young girl slipped around to frown up into his face. “Stay your hand! Don’t you know who this is?”
The man’s face was blank, his brain still trying to absorb the sudden change of events. I was both surprised and relieved.
It was Mariah.
She pushed through everyone to me, and grabbed my collar in one hand, pointing at my face with the other. “This is the great assassin of the Northwest Woods!”
There were sharp intakes of breath, and everyone took one big step back. The old lady clutching me released my shoulders and, scowling, merged with the other stiff bodies.
The man who’d been close to beaning me with his chunk of granite said perplexedly, “But, the carpenter said he’s a warrior. Knights errant have no business here.”
Mariah rolled her eyes upward and strode purposefully up to him, towing me by my collar. “‘Warrior’ is his codename, you odorous bucket of booze!”
The man stared, squinting down at us, half of the sentence not registering in his underdeveloped brain. “But,” started another villager, “his eyes…”
Mariah’s own eyes narrowed, and her voice dropped to a condescending hiss. “He has magic powers you aren’t even capable of dreaming about. Imagine, if any of you had thrown a rock…”
A visible shudder rippled through the crowd at Mariah’s trailed-off words. I looked behind me at the carpenter, whose whiskered face was a mask of confusion and fear. As imperceptibly as I could, I winked. He slowly smiled, winked back, waved, and vanished into his carpentry.
Mariah, cringing, turned to look at me and began pulling me away from the stunned bog folk. “Come on, Warrior, and forgive my interruption.”
“You are forgiven,” I said, playing my role nicely, but on our way past the guy that had been about to clobber me, I poked him in the chest and growled, “You can consider yourself lucky.”
Mariah grabbed my hand. “Oh, come on!”
When we were away from the mob and back on the busy street, I whispered frantically to Mariah what I had gleaned from the carpenter: the bartender had the key made for a Ranker, who would leave it for their fresh troops to find. The bartender was apparently in possession of the next clues.
“That means there’s a Ranker out there somewhere bound to notice real soon that no reinforcements are showing up at the bog and they’ll show up to interrogate the bartender about their missing spare key—the bartender, their buddy, their ally.”
Mariah didn’t seem at all bothered.
“We intercepted the clue,” she said. “Even if the Rankers find out, it’ll take them a while to confront the bartender about it; they’ll have to come up with another way to contact their allies, and we’ll be long gone by then.” I must not have looked convinced because Mariah smiled fondly at me.
She pulled me down next to her, crouching over a patch of young nettles sprouting from some upturned soil in the street. Making sure that our bodies shielded what we were doing from passing eyes, she poked her forefinger into the muddy dirt up to the first knuckle, closed her eyes, and murmured distractedly, “When life gives you melons…”
I watched, shocked, while the soil bubbled up and imploded on itself in tiny, quiet mounds. Then a tendril of green coiled and twisted up out of it like something alive. In the span of a few short seconds, a white bulb grew from the end of the shoot, first the size of a pebble but rapidly swelling to the size of my hand. Its color had turned from a ripe white to a healthy, shiny red.
Mariah extracted her finger from the ground, looking sleepy, then plucked the pumpkin-shaped melon and triumphantly held it up. I raised an eyebrow. She shrugged. “Lemons are gross.” She held the fruit forward. “Want some?”
We kept walking, taking turns eating from either side of the melon. I wondered if that was Mariah’s way of telling me we had everything covered. As if reading my mind, she said, “We’ll tell Peter that the bartender is a Ranker ally and we’ll have one of the soldiers tail him and pay attention to his communications. But we’re griffins, Jonathan. Don’t forget that even though we are frightened by nightmares, the Rankers fear griffins a lot more. No need to worry.”
“You’re a griffin,” I said quietly. “I’m just…” but this time the words wouldn’t come. The truth was, I didn’t really know what I was anymore. Mariah just gave me a small, understanding smile.
We walked on in simple, easy silence. We came to the inn. I could hear loud, drunken voices from within. Sighing resignedly, I reached out to open the door, but Mariah tugged me back and to the side. She was avoiding my face, blushing lightly and fiddling with the hem of her blouse.
“What’s up?” I asked, concerned.
She took a quick breath and said, “In France, where I’m from, for most of my life, I never had a television or a radio, or food that wasn’t rotten or moldy. I’ve never seen any movies except through others’ windows. I haven’t slept in a real bed since I was six years old.”
My heart sank in pity. That was why she hadn’t understood my movie references, she hadn’t seen, let alone heard, of them.
Mariah lowered her head, face turning steadily scarlet, her fists clenched. “I can’t remember what it was like before we were poor. My earliest memory is of my mother giving me her own food when I was hungry. My father was always off trying to find a job. He was the one who provided for us. He found us an abandoned house to live in and foraged for food, stealing from vendors’ stalls if he had to. He was a good runner—the police could never catch him. He found us blankets and old rusty toys for me.
“He told me that we used to have a house and money, but when the economy suddenly sank, he lost his business and most everything el
se. I remember him always tucking my hair behind my ears and saying, ‘We have each other, little papillon, ourselves and our spirits. We’ll climb back to the top in no time.’” I smiled, touched by the special moment between father and daughter, and Mariah tried to return the smile, but her lips only twitched.
“I grew under their care. But I also came to see how different my life was compared to the other French children. I watched them come home from school in clean uniforms, talking with real friends. I was envious of them. Why was I poor, and they well-to-do? Why was my fate so different from theirs?
“One day as I was walking, alone, down a street, I stole a pie from a man. But a passerby saw me and cried out, ‘Thief!’ so I ran. I was not as quick as my father. The police followed me home.”
I felt anxiety knot up in my gut. “What happened? Did they arrest you?”
Mariah shook her head. “They crashed through the door and cornered me. But my father pushed them away. While they were wrestling with him, he told me to run, and I did. My mother’s screams are the last thing I remember about my poor family.” She took a moment to just breathe and looked away from me, blinking quickly. I heard her sniffle. She cleared her throat, frowning down at the ground, and continued.
“On my own on the streets, I had to fend for myself for the first time. The nights grew more and more cold and dark just as I grew more thin and ill. One night, I caught a fever. I found a pile of blankets behind an apartment, curled up in them to rest, and woke up here.”
She stopped talking, looking expectantly up into my eyes. I didn’t know what to say. How did someone handle a situation like that? She had been here in this dreamworld for two years. Sick for two years. And I’d been complaining about being stuck here for a few days.
“So, you’re ill?” I asked feebly.
Mariah nodded. “I think so. Very.”
I bowed my head. “I am truly sorry. I guess I haven’t been really considerate.” I wanted to comfort her somehow, but the blunt way she had told her story made me wonder if she needed pity. It had sounded like she had accepted her life and what had happened, made peace with it.
“You’re not a jerk.” Mariah giggled. “Just scared.”
Crazy emotions were chasing each other inside me. Before, I had felt a sort of acknowledgment toward Mariah, accepting the fact that she was there, that she was a nice, shy girl who could turn into a beautiful griffin. But now, I was feeling something else for her: respect. Respect for her courage and compassion.
“Can you forgive me?” I asked.
“Oh…” Mariah put her hands on her hips. “I guess so.”
We shared a laugh and began to start back inside. “Hey,” I started, “what about Kayle and Peter? How did they—?”
“Nope! That’s all you’re getting from me!” Mariah interrupted heartily, holding open the door for me to enter first.
I stepped sluggishly into the warm, dim inn, trying to ignore the raucous voices of drunken men. As Mariah followed me inside, scowling distastefully at a ragged, bearded old man collapsed on the floor beneath a window, I caught sight of someone outside.
It was a boy around my age. He looked familiar; too familiar to be there by coincidence, but I couldn’t quite place why. He seemed to be blurry around the edges, but he was looking right at me from across the cobbled street.
I tilted my head to one side, nodded at him not unkindly but not too warmly, and shut the door.
Chapter Seventeen:
Meanwhile, Back in Reality
At St. Paul’s Hospital
Tyson’s eyes shot open, and he wriggled swiftly up into a sitting position. His leg had been detached from its suspension and lay plastered in a thick, heavy cast beneath his covers. Still, bruising aches echoed painfully in his bones as Ty moved.
His girlfriend, Lia, lying against him, jumped aside, rubbing her eyes. “Honey, are you okay? Should I call a nurse?” she asked sleepily.
“I saw Jonathan!” Tyson shouted, finally smiling.
From the couch by the window, Nikki sat up from her own slumber, hair brassy colored in the setting sun’s light. “Jonathan?” she murmured plaintively.
Tyson immediately felt bad for waking her when Jonathan was actually nowhere in sight, but he couldn’t help his excitement. “I was dreaming,” he began, straining to remember. The two girls gathered close, eyes big and doubtful. “I was in a swampy place, but it was one of those dreams where you can barely see, like you’re in a little cubicle of foggy glass. It was so realistic—I was on a street, and people walked past me on all sides. Then across the street and going into a big, old building, were Jon and some girl. Jon looked at me on his way in, but I don’t think he recognized me. He just kind of flicked his head…and I woke up.”
“Exactly.” Nikki morosely patted Tyson’s recently unbandaged, scarred arms. “It was only a dream.” She stood from kneeling at his side and faced the window, the people on the streets below hurrying along, her lips trembling and her eyes filling with tears. “Jonathan’s not…coming back.” And then she clapped her hands over her face and broke into the sobs that Tyson and Lia had so often heard.
“Nikki, come on, how can you know that?” Lia asked. She put her arms around her friend and soothed her, a habit she was becoming increasingly good at.
Tyson was indignantly persistent. “It was so realistic—I could smell and feel and hear things! I swear to you both, it was, like, a vision!”
The girls continued to ignore him, faces dyed orangish pink in the dying sunlight. Nikki turned to face him, her tear-streaked cheeks red from crying. “If you believe what you saw was real, then what was Jonathan doing? Where was he?”
Tyson looked down into his hands, picking at his hospital bracelet. His stitched arm skin and muscles blistered dully under his pain medication. “I told you, I couldn’t see that well, but it was dark and smelled funny, like peat, sort of, or compost. He was just eating some sort of fruit and went in a loud building with that girl.”
Nikki’s eyes flashed, her brows dipping down into such a fleeting frown, that Tyson wasn’t sure he had seen it. “She wasn’t...wearing a black robe, was she?”
“No,” Tyson said, perplexed. “Why?”
Nikki shook her head in the way a person might to keep from sneezing, and tangled her fingers in her hair, more warm tears spilling from her bloodshot eyes. One fell onto Tyson’s wrist, and he jumped in surprise, drying it off against his blanket. He felt bad and was beginning to think that perhaps he had only dreamed about his lost friend. How long had it been? A week, now?
Lia once more glued herself to Nikki’s side, rubbing her back with one hand and gripping her shoulder with the other. The atmosphere threatened to escalate into a cry fest until the staticky intercom buzzed on.
Lia squeaked, and Nikki took in a sharp breath.
A voice, thick with an Indian accent and urgent with worry, issued from the speaker above the door. “We need all doctors, nurses, and able visitors to assist in evacuating patients from their quarters and out of the hospital.”
After a weighty pause, during which the three friends gazed at one another blankly, with concern slowly seeping into their hearts like slow poison, Lia whimpered, “It’s another disaster, it has to be.” From outside the door came the frantic noises of running feet, high-pitched voices, and alarms.
“Rankers,” Tyson heard Nikki say quietly.
“What’s that sound?” Tyson scrunched up his face and tilted his head as if that would help him to identify the grumbling, shattering sounds steadily growing louder from the streets below.
A large truck, a snowplow built for shoving massive snowdrifts off of the Coloradan mountain roads, was slowly but steadily approaching from the far end of the main street that Tyson could just see if he sat up tall and strained his neck to the window. It was closely followed by a swarm of police cars with sirens yowling, sma
shing into, over, and through any vehicle in its way and picking up speed. Now it made sense why everyone was rushing around in the streets below, people abandoning their vehicles to the bedlam: they were fleeing.
A woman slammed open the door, startling everyone. Her hair was escaping her bun in frantic curls and snarls, and her eyes were perfectly round. She was pursued by Tyson’s parents, who had both been out getting some afternoon coffee. The two shoved brusquely past her, and the nurse stumbled in with a wheelchair. Everyone was shouting at each other; it made Tyson’s head spin.
“Come on!” Tyson’s mother babbled, lowering the rail on one side of her son’s bed.
“Mom, what’s happening?” Tyson asked. On the streets below, people had started to abandon their vehicles and push their way into buildings, shrieking and glancing up the road.
The nurse threw her arm in an impatient arc behind her and yelled at Nikki and Lia, “Kids, get out!” In her rush, she accidentally hit Tyson’s father in the chest, but he didn’t seem to care. He was ripping aside the blankets, shooting furtive looks out the window.
“Sounds like someone’s hijacked a truck and is aiming to crash it into the hospital. Law enforcement’s been trying to communicate with the driver, but there’s no response.” Tyson picked up unspoken information from his father’s silence: there was something more—a bigger threat than just a truck smashing into the hospital’s parking garage or, by now, probably mostly vacated waiting room.
“Is there something wrong with it?” Tyson almost choked on his words just voicing them. His dad glanced at him as he started clearing Tyson’s blankets away. “Is there a bomb or something?” Tyson asked even more quietly. His father didn’t answer—silent confirmation.
The truck was getting closer. The police cars were squealing to a stop, too late to barricade the truck, too far back and stuck in the carnage left by the snowplow to continue the chase. Cops had stepped out behind the safety of their squad-car doors and were firing at the rampaging vehicle, perhaps desperately hoping to pop a tire, kill the driver, detonate whatever payload it was packing before it could reach the hospital.
