by Emery Blake
The town of Friendship, Maine was a little over an hour away on the highway that ran along the coast, dodging in and out of the heavy forests that ran all the way to the shore. It also ran past my parents’ house.
I hadn’t seen my parents since last winter break and it was already August. I had told them that I got an internship with a non-profit and I was travelling around Africa. That explained why I didn’t come home for the summer and why I only contacted them sporadically.
But school was starting again soon, and I would have to tell them that I was going to be putting off my senior year. I had been avoiding the inevitable for a while. I supposed it wasn’t necessary to stop, but I didn’t know when my next opportunity to be this close to them would come again. If I ever completed my training, my first posting as a field agent could be to any number of realms.
“Kaia, we need to make a stop.” I wasn’t looking forward to it, but it was something I had to do. I hated lying to my parents. Facing down whatever had eviscerated that man in the woods was a more pleasant prospect. But I couldn’t tell them the truth. Not that they would believe it, anyway. They would probably try to have me committed.
“Where are we stopping?”
“Brunswick. My parents live there.”
The truck rolled ponderously down the highway. I wasn’t used to driving something so big. I almost wanted Kaia to say no, to tell me that we didn’t have time to stop or that it was too risky to visit my parents. But she didn’t say anything. I took the exit for Brunswick. Muscle memory guided me to my parents’ street.
They had moved since I was little. My mother was a professor at Bowdoin, so they bought a smaller place close to campus after I went away to school. But I had spent the past few summers there, and Brunswick wasn’t such a big town that I could really get lost. I brought the truck to a stop just up the street from their house and turned off the engine. I couldn’t bring myself to open the door.
“Do you want me to come with you?”
I turned and looked at Kaia. I was surprised by the genuine concern on her face. There was a sensitivity that I hadn’t ever seen in her. Everything with the Valkyrie was either laughter or violence. Sometimes those two went hand in hand. But I had never seen this side of her.
“No, I’ll be ok. I just, it’s just hard to know what to say to them. I don’t like to lie.”
“You’ll do fine. Just keep it simple.”
“Thanks,” I said, opening the truck door.
“Besides, if you let anything slip, they’ll just think you joined a cult or something.” The smiling, mocking Kaia was back. I stuck my tongue out at her and slammed the door shut to cut off the sound of her laughter.
My parents new house was small, but well-kept. My father was an excellent gardener. I had never been able to keep anything green alive. As a joke, he had given me a little cactus for my dorm room when I’d gone away to college. It lasted until the end of my sophomore year.
I rang the doorbell and listened to the musical chime. It was some piece of a Verdi aria that I couldn’t identify. My father said he always regretted that I never developed an ear for classical music. I struggled with piano and violin lessons when I was little, but eventually my parents gave in and stopped making me go. I heard footsteps approach the door and saw my mother’s slight frame refracted through the cut glass panels on the side of the frame. I took a deep breath to steady myself as the door swung open.
“Skylar! My god, what are you doing here?”
“Hi Mom, sorry I didn’t call first.” I absorbed a crushing hug. My mother was small, but surprisingly strong. “I was in the area and I wanted to see you guys.”
“Well, come in. Your father is out back planting something or other. You look fantastic! How have you been?”
Her positivity and enthusiasm made it even harder to deceive her, but I knew I had to. Besides, they hadn’t believed me when I was little and I told them about the things that I saw. My friends, the little creatures that they told me I had made up.
Maybe I was still feeling raw about that, self-protective. Not only was it dangerous for them to know the truth, but I was also not eager to open myself up again. The last thing I wanted was my own parents telling me I was crazy. I mean, I could show them, but veilwalking in front of humans was explicitly forbidden. After all, part of TRIP’s whole mission was to prevent evidence of the other realms from becoming common knowledge on Earth. It was one thing if a kook like Herb knew, nobody took him seriously. But people like my parents? There was no way I could risk telling them what I was really doing.
“Munchkin!” My father’s voice boomed in from the back door. I endured another breath-expelling hug as he lifted me clear off my feet. The opposite of my mother, my dad was a bear of a man, broad-chested and tall. The years had turned some of the muscle to fat, but he was still a formidable presence. The few boys who took me out in high school were all too scared to take things very far, something I blamed my dad for even though he was nothing but polite to any of them.
My mother appeared with a tray of lemonade and baked goods that she had apparently conjured out of thin air. I wondered whether you’d gained the skill to make food appear when you became a mother, or whether mine was actually magical. We sat down in the living room. I took a high-backed chair and nibbled on one of the scones. They both stared at me, smiling and expectant. When I didn’t immediately begin talking, my father stepped into the void.
“Well, we are so happy to see you, Skylar. But why didn’t you call to let us know you were coming? I didn’t even know you were back in the country. The last time we talked you said you were in, where was it…Gabon?”
“Gambia,” my mother whispered. She had an annoying habit of always correcting my father. He didn’t seem to mind, but it bothered me.
“I am only here for a couple of days, I wasn’t planning on coming by, but when they told me I had to go to Maine, I decided to surprise you.”
“We are just happy to see you, Skylar.”
“I’m happy to be here. I still miss the old house.”
We sat there in silence for a moment. My parents were beaming. I suppose I hadn’t ever really spent much time considering how they felt about me. It’s tough with parents, imagining them as people, as full, emotional beings. When I was little, my parents were always just there, always present, like stone monoliths. I thought about them the way most children did, as resources to help me or obstacles to getting what I wanted.
Children are all selfish, it is their nature. And I know I should have been more grateful to them. Not for anything they did in particular, but just for being there. I had a lot of friends whose mother or father, normally their father, left when they were little. And I knew there were a lot of people whom I’d never met with parents so bad they’d be better off if both left. I was fortunate to have my mom and dad. Now, having lived apart for several years, I could see how much they loved me, and how important I was in their lives.
It made lying to them that much harder.
Chapter Nineteen
I was dreading this, but it had to be done.
“Umm, so, Mom, Dad, I need to tell you something.”
“What is it, Munchkin?”
Part of me wanted to blurt everything out, to tell them the whole story of my new life and the enormous, beautiful, extraordinary world I was now a part of. I wanted to share my adventure with someone who saw me as something other than an outsider. But what would they say?
You can’t just drop that on someone. ‘Hey Mom and Dad, all the creatures from folk tales are real and I joined a cross-dimensional police force to make sure they don’t cause trouble. Oh, and I can walk through portals and go to new worlds in a few steps.’ They would think I’d gone insane. If I hadn’t seen what I’d seen, I would think so too. Sometimes I still do.
“I am not going back for my senior year.”
They exchanged a look, my mother’s expression turning dark. She pursed her lips so tight they turned white ar
ound the edges. My father, always the calmer one, spoke.
“I don’t understand, Skylar. What are you going to do?”
“The internship, they’ve offered me a job, starting right away.”
“But what about your degree? Wouldn’t it be better to start a job once you’ve finished? I’ve never heard of a college internship that didn’t want you to graduate college.”
“Just what is this organization you are working with?” My mother unglued her lips enough to spit this out. “No, you are finishing your degree. Do you know how hard it is to come back to college after you take time off? And what happens in six months when you decide you don’t want to work there anymore? You’ll be in the middle of the semester and then what?”
“Mom, I know you think college is important…”
“Of course, I think it is important! Do you have any idea what your options will be like? A young woman without a college degree? I can’t agree to this, Skylar.”
“Well, I’m not asking your permission. I have accepted the position. There are more important things than finishing my degree, ok?”
“Sweetheart, what your mother is trying to say is that if they want you this bad, the job will probably be waiting for you after you finish, and then you will have more options. Having more options is never a bad thing.”
That clearly was not what my mother was saying, but my dad had a way of softening some of her harder edges. Still, this was going even worse than I’d hoped. I needed to salvage something. I didn’t want to leave them on such an unpleasant footing.
“Mom, I promise, if things don’t work out, I will come back and finish my degree. Maybe I can even take some of my courses remotely? I will talk to my boss and ask him to give me some time to do my classes online. Ok?”
I had no intention of doing that, of course. I am not sure why she was so obsessive about me getting my degree. I mean, I was studying mythology. It’s not like I was going straight to Wall Street. I think she always harbored the dream that I would follow her into academia, but I’m not sure that was ever my path. Even before the voidnik attacked me, I was hesitant about a life as a researcher and teacher. She saw more of herself in me than I did. It made me wonder if she really saw me at all.
“That sounds like a good compromise, munchkin.” My dad reached over and patted my knee. I squeezed his hand and smiled at him. My mom let out a long breath and visibly softened.
“I just hope you don’t regret it. We will be here for you, no matter what, of course.” For all her abrasiveness, my mom was still my mom, and I was still her only daughter.
“Just, trust me, ok? You guys raised me to think for myself and make my own decisions. I’m making the right one.”
I hoped I was, anyway.
The doorbell rang and my father got up to answer. It was Kaia. Nearly of a height with my father, she strode behind him into the living room. My parents both seemed struck dumb by her presence. I didn’t blame them. The Valkyrie was an impressive figure.
Her posture was relaxed, but in the manner of a hunting cat. The kind of relaxed that suggested the potential for sudden violence. I had grown so used to her, and to other, more dangerous, creatures, that I barely noticed it. But even my father seemed daunted by the blond warrior in tight fitting jeans and wool jacket.
“I’m so sorry, but Skylar and I have to go.”
“So soon? But sweetheart, you’ve only been here a few minutes.” My mother recovered her voice. My father was still staring at Kaia.
“I’m afraid so. We have an important meeting that we cannot be late for.”
“Can’t it be rescheduled? Who are you meeting with in Maine, anyway?”
Kaia looked at me as if to tell me it was up to me to come up with an explanation.
“We are meeting a potential donor. He has a summer house up the coast.”
The answer seemed to satisfy my parents who both nodded.
“When are we going to see you again?” My mother’s earlier outburst was now a distant memory. For her, at least.
“I don’t know, I will try to get some time off in a few months.”
Kaia arched an eyebrow at me, but I ignored it.
“Try to give us more warning next time.” My father laughed.
I smiled back and hugged them both. I couldn’t tell them that I had no idea when I would be able to see them again. I was here only by happenstance and was not in any position to choose where I was going to be sent. Even though I had learned to step across incomprehensible distances and over insurmountable barriers, I still had no control over my destination.
The pickup truck rattled over an uneven stretch of pavement, jolting me out of my reverie. Kaia had picked up a newspaper with a description of the attack and the body. The victim was a fifty-five-year-old resident of Friendship named Don Harper. He had gone fishing at a river a few miles outside of town, as he did regularly on the weekends. But when he did not return that night, his wife became worried. She went to look for him herself and found his body in a copse about fifty feet from the riverbank.
“The paper doesn’t go into much detail, nothing useful anyway.” Kaia folded it in half and tossed it down to the footwell. “They are calling it an animal attack, black bear.”
“Could it have been a bear? I mean, how do we know it was something else?” In part, I was curious, but I also was nervous. It had felt weird, saying goodbye to my parents. Not knowing what I was about to face, only that it was very dangerous, made me worry that the parting risked being permanent.
“Unlikely. But that is what we are here to find out.”
I sank back against the seat, my hand resting on the bottom of the steering wheel. I swallowed hard. The rolling tires were bringing me closer and closer to my first real mission. Despite what I had told my parents, I wondered whether or not I was really doing the right thing. Nearly every day in training ended with a prediction of my imminent grisly death.
“How far are we from the town?”
“About fifteen minutes, I think.”
“Ok. Let’s go over our plan.” Kaia spoke as if she had discussed her plan with me at all. “What I need from you is just to talk to people. I’ve never been great at interviews. Interrogations, I’m ok. But we need the locals here to volunteer information. You never know what might be important, so keep your ears open. You are from here, you will be able to get them to talk more easily than me.”
I wasn’t as confident as Kaia about my ability to connect with the people in town. I was never the most social person when I was growing up and I hadn’t exactly fit in among the hiking, fishing, and hunting crowd in the smaller towns in Maine.
“Just talk? Are you sure that’s all you need me to do?”
A wolfish grin spread across Kaia’s face. “I will handle whatever it is that killed our victim. You just help me find out what it is. Ok?”
I nodded and turned my eyes back to the road.
“Now, we need to have a cover story. We can’t just show up out of nowhere investigating a mangled corpse, right?”
“Yeah, people around here can be suspicious of outsiders, especially ones that are too nosy.”
“Ok, then. What do you think we should be?”
I thought for a moment. There weren’t many occupations that would justify showing up in a small town and asking about a recent death. We were going to invite distrust and suspicion no matter what. A reporter could do a story on an animal attack, but why send two? And it would be easy to check if we were really from a news outlet. Outside law enforcement was a non-starter. Again, it would be too easy to check. Besides, there was no way I looked like a cop.
“We can say we are researching a book.”
“A book?”
“Yeah, something about ‘the last remaining wildernesses of America’ or something. It is an impossible story to check and people around here won’t have the same resistance to someone writing a book as opposed to a journalist.”
Kaia nodded. We drove the rest of th
e way in silence.
Chapter Twenty
The Town of Friendship barely deserved the title. One main street lined with a few shops. Houses scattered on large properties. The woods dominated. Deep forests lurked everywhere. The evidence of human settlement dwarfed by the ever-present wilds. We pulled up to a stop on the main street. There were a handful of other cars parked, but nobody was out walking. The town looked empty.
“We should split up, talk to more people,” Kaia suggested. “I will go to the tavern over there. You check in the shops; store clerks tend to hear a lot of gossip. Meet me at the tavern when you are done.”
I thought about objecting to the arrangement. I would have preferred to go to the bar and do my investigation over a pint of beer, but Kaia was my superior and it was her call. Besides, with the kind of clientele that would probably be in a small-town tavern in the middle of the afternoon, perhaps it was best to let her be the one to go in alone.
I slammed the truck door shut and walked across the street to the nearest shop. A second-hand store, its windows filled with the detritus of hundreds of lives. I loved places like this. The mish-mash of items, collected from people who had either gotten tired of them, moved away, or died.
It was fascinating to see the things that people had chosen to acquire and then discard. The item remained the same, its utility or desirability shifting only with the owner. And then on the shelf in a little shop like this, it could be resurrected and given new life and new meaning in someone else’s possession. Every visit to a second-hand shop was like a treasure hunt, and a reminder that value is only a matter of perspective.
A bell jingled when I opened the door. The musty smell hit me immediately, the familiar feeling of closeness, of air that was not allowed to circulate, like the store was hermetically sealed, keeping its treasures isolated from the outside world. The image of a tomb flashed into my head. A dark, close space underground, littered with the grave goods that were supposed to accompany the dead on their next journey. Except they didn’t go along with the dead. They ended up here, to be recycled into someone else’s life.
