Chasing Power

by Sarah Beth Durst

  “Then explain to us,” Daniel said.

  Abruptly, as if something had upset her, Marguerite walked to the window, clasped her hands behind her, and looked out. In a quieter voice, so quiet that Kayla had to strain to hear, she said, “I hate thinking of Evelyn all wrapped up in this again. She came so far in escaping her past. Your father was good for her. So different. Shame he died. If he hadn’t, she might have stayed focused on the future, instead of turning back to the past.” All trace of the affected persona was gone, and Kayla felt as if she was seeing a rare glimpse of the real Marguerite.

  “You knew my father?” Daniel asked. “What do you mean ‘wrapped up in this again’?”

  “Oh, her history with those stones goes way back,” Queen Marguerite said. “And it should have stayed history. Told her she should have left it alone. Smart enough to do anything she wanted, that girl. But no one ever could tell Evelyn what to do. Never could, once she got an idea in her head. Led her into trouble once. Looks like it led her into trouble again.” Cutting herself off, she bustled back to Kayla and poured her a glass of orange juice. “You ask her about it when you find her.”

  “The more you can tell me …”

  “It’s not my story to tell. And anyway, it won’t help you in your search.” She tapped Kayla on the forehead. “Stay focused. Don’t be distracted by the past. Eat food, and then go. You are running out of time. Your enemies speed toward your destination, and your mother needs you.” She vanished before Kayla or Daniel could ask her more questions.

  “Why do I feel like she knows more than she says?” Daniel asked.

  “Because she obviously knows more than she says.” Kayla pushed herself up to sitting. Stretching out her legs, she pointed and flexed her toes. Everything seemed to work okay. She even felt less tired than she had, perhaps due to the magic-induced sleep. “But so long as she wants what we want, it doesn’t really matter.” Pushing the blanket off her, she examined her leg where she’d felt the bite. Two red-brown scabs dotted her calf. She hadn’t imagined it.

  “Used to wonder what my mother would have been like if my dad hadn’t died,” Daniel said. “She switched to anthropology then. Got her PhD. If she hadn’t done that, if she hadn’t kept that notebook, if she’d never heard of the stones … What ‘history’ with the stones?”

  “You can ask her when we find her.” She put an emphasis on the word “when.”

  Daniel exhaled loudly but didn’t say anything else.

  Kayla looked around. Queen Marguerite had left her a tray with a few croissants plus a jar of blackberry jam. It was balanced on an upside-down barrel. The room they were in seemed to be for storage. It had shelves filled with jars, bins, and boxes, labeled with the names of powders, herbs, and roots. A few skulls sat on one shelf, decorated with feathers and black paint. Symbols from various religions were nailed to the door.

  “We’re in the back room of her shop,” Daniel said. “It’s impressive how much she’s fixed already. Except for the missing glass on the display cases and a few broken shelves, it’s like it never happened. I don’t know how she did it in such a short period of time. I think there’s more to Queen Marguerite than meets the eye.”

  “I think you saved my life,” Kayla said.

  “Couldn’t remember a hospital well enough. But I knew here.” Leaving the window, he crossed to her and took her hand. He caressed her fingers. “How do you feel? Really. Because I’ll take you home. Right now if you say so. Forget what Queen Marguerite said. This is none of her business.”

  She smiled at him. He sounded like he meant it. “They’re speeding toward our destination, she said. Can you jump again, or do you need to rest?”

  “I’m all right. But you—”

  “Let’s get this over with. I’m rapidly losing my desire to travel.”

  “You’re an amazing girl, you know that?” His eyes bored into hers as he held her hand, his hand so warm. She thought his eyes seemed damp, as if he’d cried, and she wondered how close she’d been to dying.

  They jumped back to Central America.

  Reappearing with Daniel next to the remnants of their fire, Kayla sent her mind through the camp, searching for the snake. It wasn’t there. “All clear. But be careful anyway.”

  Quickly (and carefully), they reclaimed their supplies and continued on.

  Rain forest.

  A turquoise lake.

  Gnarled trees with brown fruit next to a house made of blue cement blocks.

  More jumps. And more. At last, they reached a field of yucca-like plants with green mountains in the distance. Here, they stopped. Kayla plopped onto the ground. Rubbing her neck and shoulders, she watched Daniel consult the photo of the parchment. He looked pale but not in immediate danger of collapse.

  One jump left, if she’d been counting right.

  She watched him breathe in, steady himself, and then exhale. She wanted to say something, but she wasn’t sure what would help. She couldn’t tell him to stop. Not when they were so close. “What’s the first thing you’re going to say to her when you see her?” Kayla asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Do I need a ‘first thing’?”

  “Guess not.”

  “Whatever it is I say, you don’t need to be there to hear it. Once we have the stone, you’re done. I’ll tell the voodoo queen you repaid your debt.”

  “But she wants all three stones.”

  “I don’t care what she wants,” he said. “I want—” His voice cracked, and he looked at the mountains. Several of them had serrated points, as if they wanted to slice the sky. Clouds drifted in wisps around them.

  “Daniel … this is going to work. We’re going to save your mother.” She didn’t know when she’d switched from thinking he was the biggest jerk ever to actually caring about what happened to him, but she wanted, more than anything, to banish the hurt look that always haunted him. Saving his mother would do that.

  “I know. And it’s thanks to you. You’re the bravest person I’ve ever met. Fear doesn’t stop you.” He looked at her with so much admiration in his eyes that she felt her cheeks heat up.

  She changed the subject. “So, where are we? Do you have any idea?”

  “Peru, if I calculated correctly.”

  “Seriously?” She might be lousy at geography, but she knew that was far from Guatemala. “Are those the Andes?”

  “Yeah, I think so. The jumps have averaged about thirty to fifty miles each.”

  “Cool. Let’s finish this.” Standing, she crossed to him.

  Daniel was facing the mountains again. “What if the stone’s not there? What if this is the one that the kidnapper already has? Or if someone found it already and it’s elsewhere? Or what if we’re wrong about the parchment? Or if I jumped wrong? If I got even a single jump too long or too short—”

  Kayla put her hand across his mouth. “Shut up and jump.” She lowered her hand and held his arms. He put his hands on her waist. Looking into her eyes, he jumped—white, black, gray. Kayla stayed in his arms as the world switched and shifted.

  Daniel loosened his grip but didn’t let go. Kayla looked around them at the rocky mountainsides. Stiff plants like yucca clung stubbornly to the shattered rock face, making the rock walls look striped. Above, green vines and thick mats of leaves hung over the cliffs. Orchids were bright spots of color in the green and gray—bits of fragile beauty in a hostile landscape. All around them were mountains of rock and, in the distance, ice.

  The air felt cooler and thinner. She took one deep breath after another. “Now what?” Kayla asked.

  “I don’t know.” He wasn’t looking at the mountains; he was looking at her. At last, he released her, as if he were letting go of a life raft, and he turned to see the view. They were on a mountain, above a valley with a winding river.

  Kayla scanned the cliffs. She didn’t want to admit out loud that he could be right—he could have easily miscalculated one or more of the jumps … Then she saw it. “It’s the
re.” Kayla pointed high, impossibly high, up on a mountainside on the opposite side of the river. There was a structure, clearly man-made, tucked under a cliff. No path led to it. It was simply embedded into the side of the mountain.

  It looked like a one-room hut made of yellow and brown bricks. It was decorated with a stripe of stones laid in a triangle pattern and painted yellow and red. Two statues with elongated faces flanked the doorway, suspended on the sheer mountainside.

  “I know where we are,” Daniel said, hushed.

  “Where?” Kayla asked.

  “The tombs of the Chachapoya, the People of the Clouds. My mother wrote a paper about them last winter. I jumped her to Lima, and she hired locals to lead her through the jungle. She said she reached the tombs by dangling on a rope from above. No one knows how the Chachapoya built them so high up. Or why. But she was fascinated by them.”

  “Do you think she’s been here before?” Kayla asked. She didn’t voice the follow-up question of whether his mother had already found the stone.

  “There are tombs like this throughout the eastern Andes. She was a lot farther south.”

  “Maybe she knew the stone was here but not exactly where?”

  Daniel drew away. “My mother wasn’t looking for the stone.” His voice was sharp, as if she’d insulted him. “The Cloud People had rituals that she was studying. She studies cultures all over.”

  “Okay, fine. And that notebook she burned just had pictures of kittens. Can you jump us to the opening?” She shielded her eyes from the glare of the sun. “Looks like there’s a ledge for the doorway. Just don’t lean backward when you arrive. We can fall inside.”

  He didn’t answer.

  Kayla looked at him. He’d paled. His hands shook. He was breathing heavily, and not just because of the thinner air. “Hey, you can do this. You did it at Tikal. That’s not so different.”

  “Yes, it is. It’s like jumping onto a balance beam.”

  “Okay, yes, it’s skinny, but—”

  “The temple had a landing that was several feet wide. This has inches. If I miss …”

  It did drop away to a sheer cliff beneath the tomb. It could crumble under their weight. “Keep hold of me,” Kayla instructed. “If it seems at all unstable, then jump us back here, and we’ll think of something else.”

  “Can’t jump when all I’m thinking about is how I could fail.”

  “Then think of something else. Distract yourself.”

  His mouth quirked into a sad half smile. “You make it sound so easy.”

  “It is easy! You just jumped us across all of Central America. We’re on a new continent! Don’t you have any idea how amazing that is? How amazing you are? You can do this!”

  He shook his head. “My mom thinks I’m a freak.”

  “What?”

  “I heard her talking once, on the phone, to someone. A friend. Someone who knew. And she was saying how she didn’t know what to do with me, that I was born as wrong as someone with a genetic disease and it was her fault for having me in the first place. I never told her I heard that conversation.”

  “You don’t know the context,” Kayla said. “Sometimes people say things for reasons you don’t know.” Still, it must have hurt for Daniel to hear his mother say that. Every time Moonbeam told her not to use her power, as if it were something shameful and wrong, as if she were wrong, Kayla felt herself shrink inside. “Anyway, she’s right. You and me, we are freaks. But we’re freaks who are going to do this!”

  He was shaking his head. “It will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. I can’t stop thinking about missing the ledge and falling. It’s like trying not to think about a pink elephant when someone tells you don’t think about a pink elephant—”

  Kayla put her hands on his cheeks and drew his face down to hers. She pressed her lips against his and kissed him.

  An instant later, he was kissing her back.

  His lips were soft, and his hands held her as if to keep her from falling. He tasted like cinnamon and a little like sweat. She felt his heart beating against hers. Wind blew around them, and she heard birds call, their voices caught and spun away by the wind. She breathed with him, and they kissed as if it could anchor them to the earth.

  Breaking apart, Kayla said, “Do it.”

  White. Black. Gray.

  Chapter 12

  Don’t move. Don’t fall. Don’t breathe. Her vision swam—she saw gray, only gray. She felt wind hit her back … Behind her was the cliff and open air. Forward was the tomb.

  Pitching herself forward, Kayla pulled Daniel inside with her. He collapsed onto his knees just inside the opening and panted. “I. Hate. Heights.”

  “Noticed that.” She untangled herself from him, then got to her feet. It was darker inside, shadows washing out everything. Slowly, her eyes adjusted.

  The tomb was small and shallow. Just a single notch in the stony mountains, skinnier than Selena’s walk-in closet. Along one side, bundles of sticks were lashed together with ropes—three of them, each taller than Kayla. Spears lay next to them, crossed as if ritualistically. Other objects filled the tomb: pottery, half-disintegrated baskets, frayed blankets, old ropes. One of the bundles was wrapped in burlap-like fabric and then lashed with braided ropes. At the top, the ropes had been sewn in the shape of a face: eyes, nose, and mouth.

  Belatedly, Kayla realized they weren’t bundles of sticks. They were bodies, wrapped in cloth and sticks. Dead bodies. Mummies. “Great, more nightmare fodder.” If she’d still hated Daniel, she would have added that to the list of things he owed her for. Instead, she merely looked away, scanning the tomb for the spell stone.

  It was easy to find stones. Rocks of all sizes, shapes, and colors littered the tomb floor. The walls themselves were uneven stone, as if the tomb had been made by someone hacking away at the mountain with a pickaxe, which may have been exactly what happened. “Do you know what the stone looks like?” she asked.

  “My guess? It’s hidden in a way only you can find it.” He smiled at her, a sunny smile, happier than she’d ever seen him. It made him look as if a halo surrounded him. She wanted to fall into that smile. It made her want to frolic through fields with him, and Kayla had never frolicked through a field in her life. Oh, good grief, am I falling for him? How completely prosaic.

  “Quit looking at me that way,” she snapped. “I can’t concentrate.”

  He kept smiling. “What way?”

  “Like you want to spin me around and sing Disney songs.”

  He held up one finger. “Spinning here might be dangerous. Could hit a corpse.” He held up a second finger. “I don’t sing. Much less Disney songs.”

  “Never? Not even in the shower.”

  “Not even in the shower. Unless it’s a really good song.” His expression turned serious, and he took her hand and kissed her knuckles. “Come on, Kayla. Save me. Save my mother. I know you can do it. This is why she told me to find you.”

  Taking a deep breath, Kayla closed her eyes and tried to concentrate. Daniel was still holding her hand. She liked the way his palm felt against hers, the way his fingers curled so naturally around her hand, the way it made her arm feel warm all the way up to her shoulder. She’d thought she’d never want to see him again after this was over. Maybe she should reconsider that. Stop thinking about him, she ordered herself. She shook away his hand, opened her eyes, and sent her mind out.

  Her mind ran over the rocks and the walls. It skittered over the corpses. The cloth wrappings “felt” brittle, and the ropes so dry that they were mostly air. She reached up toward the ceiling—and in the far corner, she found a fissure.

  Her mind flew up the fissure. It was a thin shaft, not unlike the one she found in the temple. She touched the sides of the rocks. Several feet up, she felt glyphs, Maya glyphs, beneath a ledge. “Gotcha,” she whispered.

  “Do you have it?” Daniel asked.

  “Don’t get your hopes up. It could be another parchment.” But her heart was pitter-pattering i
n an overly optimistic way. Reaching for him, she squeezed his hand, and he squeezed hers back. She reached up with her mind onto the ledge … and felt a triangular stone. “Yes!” She tried to pull it out. Immediately, her brain felt as if it were stabbed by sharp sticks. She stopped. “Ow. No, too heavy.” Leaning over her knees, she rubbed her forehead.

  Daniel’s face was ashen. “So that’s it? We came this far and fail now?”

  Lifting her head, she gave him a withering look. “I swear you’re more melodramatic than my mother. It just means that we have to get it down in a more clever way. Gravity will help. Things want to fall. We just have to convince the rock that it’s one of those things.” She scanned the tomb, looking for what she could use. “I need that rope.” She pointed to the braided rope around one of the mummies.

  Immediately, he crossed to the closest mummy. Ancient, priceless pottery crunched under his feet. She contemplated saying something, but … priorities.

  “Here, cut it off with this.” She flew the razor blade out of her pocket and dropped it into his open hand. He unwrapped it from the tinfoil, then sawed through the rope until he had a length of several feet. He tossed the rope to her. She lifted the razor blade and the tinfoil out of his hand, rewrapped it in midair, and flew it back into her pocket.

  The rope was as light as she’d hoped, made of long-dried plant fibers that had lost most of their weight when they lost their moisture. She tied one end into a noose.

  “You’re going to lasso it,” he guessed.

  “Bingo. Give the boy a gold star.” She laid her hands flat, the rope draped across her palms. Even as light as it was, it was still heavier than the thread she usually used. As she concentrated, bright spots of pain sparked across her mind. She exhaled, shook her head to clear it, and then tried again.