by Emery Blake
He picked his way carefully along the riverbank until we reached a gentler slope. He looked back again and then lowered his head like he was trying to tell me something. I leaned forward onto his neck and he snorted again. Then he launched us up the slope and onto the dirt path in a few bounds.
In an instant, I forgot about the pain in my ankle and how angry I was with Aiken for his stupid prank and I exulted in the feeling of speed. The wind whipped my hair back and made my eyes tear up as we raced down the trail. It was too fun to feel fear. And besides, I felt like I was attached to Aiken’s back like Velcro.
In the back of my mind, I remembered what the folk tales said about kelpies, how they would encourage children to pet them, but once touched, the children would be unable to remove their hands from the horse’s coat and he would drag them underwater. Maybe there was some truth to it, because I felt as though I couldn’t be thrown off if I tried.
The exhilarating ride came to too swift an end in front of the hospital, the building where I’d woken up on my first night in Inter-realm. I almost fell off when Aiken assumed his human form, but he leaned forward and caught my legs behind his back. His hands grabbed my upper thighs, a little higher up than I was prepared for.
He quickly realized what he was holding and dropped his hands, letting me slide down his back and onto my one good foot. When he turned around, his cheeks were red. Whether from exertion or from embarrassment I wasn’t sure.
“I’m sorry about your ankle. Do you need help getting inside?”
His relentless kindness made it difficult to stay angry. And the rush of the ride had flooded me with endorphins.
“No, I’ll be fine. Thanks for the ride. I still don’t forgive you for tricking me, though.”
“Fair enough,” he nodded his head. “See you in class.” Then he turned on his heel and walked back the way we had come.
Doctor Orban had me walking out the door within a few hours. It turned out my ankle was only sprained, so he wrapped it in a poultice with herbs to reduce the swelling and then conjured a magical splint to provide support.
“The spell will wear off slowly, so you won’t have full range of motion for a while. You will have to take some time off from the more physically demanding training sessions for a couple of days at most.”
“Thank you, doctor.” While a few days reprieve from Baev sounded good, I was worried that any time away from training would just leave me further behind. Doctor Orban must have seen the look on my face.
“Are you alright, Skylar? Is something bothering you?”
I hesitated. I wasn’t sure what had happened at the river. Had I really done magic? Aiken seemed convinced, but I didn’t even know how to describe what had happened.
“Doctor Orban, have you always been able to do, well, magic?”
He smiled kindly. “No, magic has to be learned. I grew up in a small village in southern India. Before I went to medical school, I learned the use of healing herbs from a Vaidya. It was from him that I first learned rituals and spells of healing. For many healers, they were just ritual, something left over from generations past. But when I performed them, it amplified the effect of the herbs beyond their usual potency.
“It wasn’t long until a TRIP representative showed up in my village. They paid for me to attend medical school and then brought me here, where I studied with healers from the other realms. From what I understand, I had an inherent magical sensitivity. The Vaidya inadvertently helped me to unlock it. The rest I learned here. Why do you ask?”
Part of me wanted to spill out everything that happened at the river. Orban was a human, he would understand how I was feeling, be able to explain things in ways I might be able to understand. But another part of me was unsure. I didn’t know what I’d done or how I’d done it. I doubted I would be able to reproduce it, anyway. I might be inviting further scrutiny and embarrassment if I started going around claiming I could do magic when I wasn’t even sure it wasn’t part of some prank.
I don’t think Aiken would do something mean spirited like that. He had set the whole thing up, but he seemed to genuinely want to help me. Even if he was misguided in his methods, I couldn’t believe he wanted to humiliate me.
“No reason, really. I guess I was just curious.”
“I know it is tough to be a human here, sometimes, Skylar. If you ever need anything, just let me know and I will see if I can help.” He shook my hand and walked back down the hallway. I was alone in the bustling entryway.
Chapter Seventeen
I was lost in reminiscence as I crossed the open square in front of the hospital. I thought back to my first day here, when the sight of dwarves conversing amiably with a centaur shocked me to my core. I had seen so much already that I barely noticed it until the centaur started trotting toward me. Great. Chiraena was the only centaur that I knew well and the best that could be said about our relationship is that she at least talked to me. The others that I had met did their best to pretend I didn’t exist.
I recognized the bearded face that approached. He was a chieftain among the centaurs in Inter-realm, the one who was there when I popped through the portal from their home realm. He hadn’t looked very friendly then and by his expression he was not happy to see me now.
“Skylar Dufrense.” He spoke my name as a greeting with no further elaboration. None of the Cloven cultures were particularly polite or given to linguistic excess, but the centaurs were downright abrupt.
“Chieftain…I’m sorry, I have forgotten your name.”
“I am Ziphus. You will remember it next time.”
I blinked in surprise. I had come to accept a certain rudeness from Cloven, but this was a bit much. I planted on my good leg and placed my right hand on my hip, affecting an unintimidated air, or trying to, at least. Ziphus towered over me. His long beard fell in narrow braids across a broad and muscular chest. He snorted, crossed a massive pair of arms, and stomped his fetlocked hooves.
Despite their terse speaking style, centaurs were highly attuned to posture and body language. I had clearly upset him. Not wanting to exacerbate an already tense situation, I dropped my hand and assumed a more neutral stance.
“What do you want, Chieftain Ziphus?”
“The faun, Zhas. He is in Inter-realm.”
“What? When did he arrive?”
I thought I had seen the last of the little goat-man when he left me at the outskirts of the old city. A knot I didn’t know I’d been carrying unraveled and I felt a sense of relief and happiness that was entirely unexpected.
“He said that he didn’t want to come here, that he wanted to stay in his home. What happened?”
“Home,” Ziphus snorted. “What home? Weeds choking to death in dusty soils? Sandstorms and wildfires? Only a fool would call that place home anymore.”
Beneath the stoic mask and thick beard, I could see pain and sadness. Incongruous in such a massive and mighty creature, and one who affected such a frosty dignity.
He sighed and looked directly at me. His unblinking gaze was seriously discomfiting, but I straightened my back and resolved not to look away. “It took us several weeks to find him. He had moved from the cave you described. He resisted, initially. But in the end, he saw reason. Since you were responsible for informing us of him, I thought you should know.” And with a nod, he danced around in a half circle and trotted back towards the dwarves.
I stood there dumbfounded for a moment, then turned to walk, as best I could, back to my room. I was never going to get used to dealing with centaurs and their utter lack of social grace. I suppose I should count myself lucky that none, so far, had engaged in violent drunken orgies, but then again, I hadn’t been here very long. The myths and folktales held truths and falsehoods about the creatures I had met. It was difficult to predict what parts could be relied upon.
“Centaurs.” I spat, shaking my head in disbelief.
“He would be pleased to see you, I believe.” The centaur chief had walked up behind me wi
th a silence unbelievable for a creature so large. If he heard me, he gave no indication.
“I will come visit him the next chance I get.”
Ziphus nodded and trotted off again. I resolved to keep my thoughts in my head until I was back in my own room.
Thankfully, the walk to my apartment was uninterrupted. The only thing I wanted was a few hours of quiet. I flopped down on my bed and stuck a throw pillow under my left foot. The magical cast made it feel stiff, but the pulsing pain had receded to almost nothing. Just a slight tingling from the herbs in the poultice.
The events at the river kept flowing through my head in a loop. From the first moment I saw the little kelpie to his insouciant leap back into the water. I had done something. That tug, the feeling of a rope connected to the center of my stomach, it was real. I had reached out and grabbed the boy with, what?
I didn’t know.
I looked over at my desk. There was a cup of tea left over from the morning. I stretched out my hand toward it and imagined it floating gracefully toward me. I focused on my midsection, picturing a rope stretching from my belly button to the cup, like I had felt at the river. Nothing happened. I dropped my hand back down onto the bed. I didn’t know what to try. I didn’t even know what I was trying to do. Exhausted from the day, I rolled over onto my side and fell asleep.
When I woke, it was still dark outside. Pale silver light drifted in through the window. I tested my foot and found that the spell binding it in place had faded. So had the pain and stiffness. I gave a silent thank you to Doctor Orban and hopped out of bed. Underneath the poultice, the swelling had disappeared.
I jumped in the shower and let the hot water run down my body. I reached out to grab the bottle of shampoo from the other side of the shower and stopped. Another try wouldn’t hurt. I tried to replicate the feeling of reaching out for the boy, the sensation of the invisible rope attaching itself to my stomach. But nothing came. I was just standing there pointing at the shampoo bottle when the door to the bathroom burst open and I let out a scream.
“Skylar, are you feeling better?”
I poked my head out around the shower curtain, wrapping the rest around my body. It was Kaia. She stood there in the oddest, most ordinary outfit I had ever seen her wear. Normally, there wasn’t a moment she wasn’t sporting some ornately carved gold jewelry or a heavily ornamented coat. But there she was in a faded pair of jeans, a plaid button-down shirt, and a wool-lined jacket. It looked like she was cosplaying as a lumberjack.
I tried to stifle a laugh. But when I raised my hand to cover my mouth, the shower curtain dropped, uncovering half of my chest. I could feel my cheeks redden, but if Kaia noticed, she gave no indication.
“Get dried off and dressed. I need your help.”
She walked back into the main room. I stepped out of the shower and closed the bathroom door. It isn’t that I was ashamed of my body or uncomfortable being naked, depending on the circumstance. But I also wasn’t one of those women who paraded around a gym locker-room with everything on display. And Kaia wasn’t exactly one of my girlfriends. I wrapped myself in a towel and walked out to find her leaning back on my bed.
“I heard you were in the hospital. How is your ankle?”
“It’s fine.” I drew that out, hoping she would catch on and answer the unspoken question. She did not. She just stared at me. I figured that she was the one who was in my room unexpectedly and without asking, the least she could do was to explain her purpose without making me ask. So I grabbed a pair of pants and a shirt from the dresser and proceeded to dress myself under the towel. Kaia sat there silent until I was fully dressed. Finally, she leaned forward.
“Do you think you are well enough to run? Fight?”
“I suppose. I was planning on going to training today.”
“You’ll have to skip training, maybe for a few days. I have something I need your help with.”
“And that something requires me to run and fight?”
Kaia grinned, apparently pleased by the prospect. “If we’re lucky.”
That made me uncomfortable. After weeks of listening to Baev tell me that I would be killed in spectacular and gruesome ways if I stepped foot in the field, Kaia was here saying that is exactly where she wanted to take me.
“I don’t think I am authorized for field work,” was my diplomatic way of saying I was scared to go.
“You’ll do great. Don’t worry about it. I will talk to Baev and make that old harridan see reason. You will be with me the whole time, perfectly safe.” Something about her easy manner made me skeptical about the safety of whatever this mission was. “Come on, it will be way easier than what you have already faced. No djinn, I promise.”
I wasn’t convinced. I knew that Kaia’s concept of safety was quite a bit different from mine. She probably would have danced a tango with the buda before wrapping it up like a present. She must have read the concern on my face because she broke into a broad smile and hopped up off the bed.
“Trust me, you will feel right at home.”
Chapter Eighteen
I followed Kaia through the Veil, the familiar cold prickling my skin. As soon as I stepped onto the soft carpet of pine needles and rotten trees, and saw the waves rolling in to the rocky cove, I understood what the Valkyrie meant. We were in Maine. It made some sense that the mission was in America, Kaia was one of the best English speakers I had met in Inter-realm.
“Kaia, what are we doing here?” She had been resistant to questioning the whole time we prepared, which, to be fair, wasn’t more than a couple of hours. But I hoped that now that we were on site, she would let me know more about the mission. Seeing that we were in my own realm, and in the very region where I grew up, I figured that I deserved a further explanation.
She nodded, as if agreeing with my unspoken argument. “There has been a killing. A man. Torn apart and partially eaten. According to my source, it has the marks of something from, well, not from around here.”
I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach. Perfectly safe? We were tracking down some kind of monster. Even though I was closer to home than I had been in over a year, I suddenly felt a strong desire to return right back across the Veil and straight into Baev’s training yard.
“Come on, I need your help getting oriented. We need to find witnesses, people who knew the victim, any stories of strange occurrences. The closest town is called,” she pulled out a leather-bound notebook and flipped through a couple of pages. “Friendship. You heard of it?”
“I think so, I haven’t been there though.”
“Good enough, you know the people around here, you’ll do fine.”
Either she didn’t sense my reluctance, or she didn’t care. Kaia turned and tramped off through the woods. I trailed along in her wake. A man torn to pieces and eaten by some kind of creature, we didn’t have a clue what, exactly. Quite a homecoming.
I thought back to my childhood.
Forests just like this were my playground. We lived a long way from any other children, so I ran and climbed for hours with my imaginary friends. But they weren’t imaginary, were they? The thought stopped me dead in my tracks.
Kaia’s contact was a middle-aged man who ran a gas station just north of Portland. We had arrived in the woods just behind his shop. From behind the counter, he handed the Valkyrie the keys to a pickup truck that was parked out back, which she then tossed to me.
“Take care of it. Please. I don’t want a repeat of that thing that happened last winter.”
“Not a worry, Herb. Skylar here will be driving, this time. I won’t even touch the steering wheel.”
The man’s fleshy, stubbled face adopted an expression of relief. He ran his fingers through his thinning hair and leaned back against the wall of cigarettes and vaping supplies.
“Are you here for that thing up near Friendship?”
“Herb, you know I can’t tell you anything,” Kaia said, smiling. “But just for curiosity’s sake, what have you heard about it
?”
Herb swallowed hard, his eyes darting around the convenience store as if he were doing a mental inventory of the bagged chips, beer, and stale donuts.
“It was bad. Ugly. Local cops are treating it like an animal attack. They haven’t done much of anything, far as I can tell.”
“Has anyone out of the ordinary been seen around the area lately? Someone from out of town, maybe?”
Herb’s face stiffened, and I could see fear grip him. Like a cold finger running up his spine, his whole body went rigid.
“No, haven’t heard anything about anybody new around. Not ‘til I saw you, of course.”
“Ok, Herb. You know how to contact me if you need help, right?”
The man nodded. Kaia motioned to me and we headed out the door towards the pickup. The vehicle was well past its best days. The unrepaired evidence of numerous minor accidents covered the side panels and paint was flaking off most of the hood. But when I turned the key, the engine roared to life. I left the gearshift in park and turned to my companion.
“Kaia, why was he lying about seeing new people in town?”
“Well spotted,” she smiled. “He was hiding something, but I’m not certain why. Herb is a good man, but not a brave one. He used to run a website about mysterious creatures, claimed he had seen them himself. Most people thought he was crazy, of course, but TRIP reached out to him. We gave him, validation, I suppose you could call it. And in return, he supplies information about anything of interest going on in the region.”
“I thought TRIP was trying to keep all of this quiet, keep the truth of the other realms and creatures secret. Why tell him?”
“Well, think about it. He was already telling everyone he could what he believed to be true and nobody really listened to him. Now, he knows it is true, and still nobody listens to him. He’s a kook, a nut. If anything, having him talk about it makes it easier to keep the truth hidden.”
I pulled out onto the highway. It was cynical, I guess, but it made sense.
