Sister Seeker

by Shelby Hailstone Law

I hadn’t realized I’d been staring, and I flushed. “Sorry; lost in my own thoughts.”

  “I figured as much,” he said. The smile widened and turned more troublemaking as he added, “And seeing as your expression wasn’t changing, I knew you were chasing the rabbit, not talking to your personal Future Seeker.”

  “Oh, shut up,” I laughed.

  “Hey, when I’m right, I’m right.”

  I shook my head at him, unable to stop my smile. I really did love him. Aaron would always be family to me, even if I kept learning more and more about the family that I knew before I met him. Those people hadn’t been born into my family either—I had always made my family out of the people around me, the ones that I truly cared about. At least as far as I could remember.

  “Seriously, ‘Chell. Share with the rest of the class. I’m sure you’ve got some deep, inspirational thought in that head of yours,” Aaron teased, bumping my shoulder with his.

  “You’re putting me on the spot!” I laughed.

  “Sure am.”

  I shook my head at him. “It wasn’t even that deep,” I admitted. “I was just enjoying our family road trip.”

  “Dysfunctional family road trip,” Izzy said.

  “Is there any other kind?” I shot back.

  “With this particular group?” Andrew asked, one eyebrow raised—which got a huge grin out of me and my friends. When we could get Andrew to relax and play with us, that was a good day. Everyone there had seen Person Andrew come out and wrest control of his personality from Soldier Andrew, and everyone there preferred that version of him.

  “Point to the mercenary,” Aaron said before he jerked his thumb my way. “But ‘Chell here is the one with the tricks up her sleeve on how to stave off carsickness, so she’s the current champion of the road trip.”

  “I didn’t know there was a competition,” Andrew said with a quiet smirk.

  “Now I want to see you doing typical road trip things. Play the alphabet game. Sing songs,” Izzy listed off. “My family and I used to do stuff like that before the shipwreck.”

  “Well, if it’s a family tradition, we should keep it alive,” Tony said, a completely open and honest smile on his face that meant none of the rest of us could avoid smiling as well. “That’s the best way to remember the people you’ve lost.”

  Izzy blinked at Tony for a moment, and I could see the gears in her head working as she considered the offer. But, finally, she shook her head and let her gaze drop. “Not this time,” she said softly.

  It was easy to forget sometimes that Izzy had lost more than any of us there. She had been vacationing with her family when they got caught up in the trap of the Bermuda Triangle. Her parents had died, but she’d been kidnapped. With magic forced into her veins, she’d turned into a goblin, and now, she could see magic but had none of her own.

  Seeing that expression cross her face, I reached over and gave Izzy’s arm a squeeze. “That’s fine,” I said. Then, trying to change the subject for her sake, I added, “I only remembered part of a road trip, but I don’t think my old family did much singing. Not the generation I saw, anyway.”

  “Oh?” Elaine turned to me, looking more engaged in the conversation than she had been moments before. “What did you remember? And when did you remember it?”

  Elaine had been incredibly supportive of me and my quest to remember my past, even if I suspected part of her motivation was simply selfish—since she needed a sane, uncompromised ally on her side. But she always made it a point to celebrate even the smallest successes with me. At times like that, I remembered that we were technically cousins, and I felt a connection to my blood family that I simply didn’t feel with anyone besides the memory of my own mother.

  When I glanced around the car and saw that I had everyone else’s attention too, I held both hands up in a gesture of playful defeat. “It’s really nothing big,” I said, though I couldn’t hide the warmth in my tone at seeing my new family engaged in the story.

  “Yeah, but we want to hear it anyway,” Tony prompted.

  I grinned—and then, of course, I obliged.

  Chapter 3: An Army of Little Green Men

  Eventually, the family fun time portion of our trip ended. Santo had taken us far from the main thoroughfares until the car was bumping and bouncing on old dirt roads, and now, it seemed we’d hit the end of even those roads.

  “We’ll continue on foot from here,” Santo said. He turned to face us, looking perfectly serious, with one eyebrow raised. “I have to warn you: part of the reason we’ve hidden where we are is that we’re surrounded by an enclave of goblins. If anyone wanted to find us, they’d have to fight their way through them first.”

  At that, Izzy leaned forward almost unconsciously, her interest clearly piqued. She had only recently learned about what being a goblin meant to her, and I could see the morbid curiosity in her, the worry about the kind of monster she could turn into if she kept sucking the life force out of people and stealing more magic to survive. “Really?” she asked in a bare whisper

  Santo couldn’t possibly have known what was going through Izzy’s mind. So, completely misinterpreting her sudden interest, he gave her a warm, reassuring smile. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We deal with these guys all the time. As long as you can keep them from getting a hand on you—or biting you—you’re perfectly safe.”

  Izzy blinked at him, and I could practically see her trying to switch from curiosity to a polite response to Santo’s warmth before, at last, she simply gave him a tight smile, nodded, and leaned back in her seat with a muttered, “Thanks.” I could tell she was disappointed in the answer, but faced with reassurance instead of explanation, what else could she do but let it drop?

  We all piled out of the car and strapped on our backpacks. Not a word was spoken about how we’d arrange ourselves, but even with the silence between us, I was glad to see that everyone had more or less coalesced around Izzy and Aaron. And I felt better knowing that my friends were safe in the center of the group as we made our way off the beaten path and into the rainforest.

  I wasn’t sure if the goblins would come after them, actually. Izzy was technically one of them, and Aaron had no magic to give. But then again, a life force was a life force, and I didn’t know if goblins en masse might actually take life from even non-magical beings. I didn’t know nearly enough about goblin lore, I realized.

  Could anyone blame me? With so much else to learn about magic as it was, I still felt like I understood maybe half of what had been explained to me.

  Still, I made a mental note to learn more about this kind of thing. I wasn’t entirely sure who I’d ask, since even Andrew had considered goblins to be more or less the witches’ version of the boogeyman: a story that his older siblings told him to scare him at night. Until he met Izzy and realized that those stories were true.

  (To be fair to Andrew, I was starting to get the idea that if a thing didn’t apply to fighting or protecting Elaine, he knew pretty much zilch about it. And that was thanks to the way he’d been raised. He was still, in witch years, relatively young and with plenty to learn, and his family had trained him with such a single-minded focus that I could see it impacting the rest of his life in more ways than one. I hated that for him, and I kept trying to help him get past it, even if he didn’t always appreciate my efforts to make him into more of a person than a soldier.)

  But for as nervous as I was about the warnings of roving goblins, I couldn’t keep my focus on that looming danger—or even on the fact that I should really learn more about them, since one of my only friends in the magical world had turned into one. I was too taken aback by the beauty of the forest around us. The deeper we walked into the forest, the denser the life became, the more untouched and wilder everything looked.

  And I could hear it, too.

  I was always aware of the world around me so that I could reach out to it if I wanted to and draw from the elements for spells. There had been times that I felt the world nearly spea
king to me, as if nature and I had come to a mutual understanding on a basic, instinctual level that I couldn’t replicate if I tried. (Usually, I had to get either extremely upset or desperate, so I didn’t exactly want to try to replicate that connection, either.) But at other times, something so vast, like this forest, had such an overwhelming presence that I couldn’t ignore it. I didn’t have to reach out to feel it when it nearly suffocated me on its own.

  The ocean felt that way, too—huge and unknowable and unconcerned with the puny witches and humans that it could snuff out with one crashing wave or one powerful current if it wanted to. I still could hardly believe that Elaine talked so easily with the ocean. She so effortlessly came to understandings with something that, to me, was not only unknowable but terrifying.

  Then again, I had another obstacle to dealing with such a huge body of water when I immediately panicked anytime I had to swim. My father had repeatedly drowned me when I’d been captured—before he’d forcibly removed my memories—and I wondered sometimes if he’d chosen that method of torture purposefully so that I couldn’t connect with the vast ocean as easily as I’d like.

  Still, the Amazon didn’t feel at all like the ocean did. The ocean was intimidating, unrelenting, and cold—not in its temperature but its temperament. Sure, plenty of creatures lived in the ocean, but large swaths of it were simply empty; and it seemed to like that emptiness, so it rebelled against intrusions, especially at its surface where it was already fighting with air and land for dominance.

  The rainforest, on the other hand, felt welcoming. I got the impression that the forest enjoyed all of the life that filled it to the brim, though that might have been because the forest itself wasn’t a large body of water but an interconnected labyrinth of life that had joined together until it formed a consciousness of its own above and beyond the life forces of the individual pieces.

  Because of that, the forest was ever-changing. At times, it felt like a hostess, inviting us in and welcoming the addition of more life. At others, it felt hostile, defensive of the life it already had and wary of intruders that might do any damage—a fair fear, considering how much humanity had already chipped away at it.

  “Can you feel that too?” I asked Elaine under my breath.

  She turned toward me with one eyebrow raised, but when she saw my expression, she paused, closed her eyes, and then nodded. “It has a mind of its own.”

  I nodded my agreement, though I kept myself from asking why she hadn’t noticed it until then because I saw that she had Andrew’s hand in hers and realized she must have been focused on him instead. After all, their relationship was still so new that there was every reason for them to get lost in each other like that.

  So instead of saying anything, I simply smirked and shook my head and put my focus back on following Santo deeper into the forest, pointedly not looking Elaine and Andrew’s way. They always seemed to be better at expressing their affection when no one was watching—not that I blamed them. For decades, they’d been trying to pretend they weren’t madly in love, so that urge for secrecy was an engrained response: they had to keep from being too obvious about their feelings. Not everyone in the Rendezvous was as supportive as I was—or Tony was. Even Elaine’s father had made it clear that he wanted Elaine as far away from Andrew as possible, so secrecy had become their motto.

  But I wanted them to actually enjoy each other, and if looking away to let them have the privacy they still so desperately needed would help them, I was more than happy to do it.

  Of course, turning my attention ahead of me only meant I was watching another couple, though Aaron and Izzy were still young enough that they were dancing around it—and probably still worried about my feelings as well. Watching them, I found myself thinking of Jacob and Charlotte and how I’d watched them fall in love, doing that same sort of awkward dance.

  It was strange, feeling simultaneously old and young. Sometimes, I felt an almost motherly protectiveness toward my friends, all of whom were younger than me; and then, sometimes, I felt like a child myself, still lost and innocent and in desperate need of a guiding hand.

  That’s another reason we call you ‘The Balance,’ Lila pointed out in my head, referring to the name the Future Seekers had for me. You walk a line between different worlds, different lives, different ages, different loyalties.

  Yeah, for the record? I hate being The Balance.

  Most people who are the subject of prophecies hate the role Time gives them, Lila admitted. It’s part of why so many people don’t like Future Seekers. She paused. And it’s a big part of why Elaine in particular doesn’t like Future Seekers. She knows that her family—your family—is the subject of so many prophecies, and she would rather fight against those prophecies than let them dictate her life.

  That, and she and Time don’t get along very well, I pointed out.

  Lila’s desire to laugh very nearly had me laughing too. That’s true, she admitted. But it’s more than that. She knows your father believes strongly in destiny and that he went to a Future Seeker before he began his coup. She knows that he also believes the prophecy about you, and she’s constantly worried about what he’ll do to get a victory out of you and to minimize the defeat you’ll bring him.

  I still haven’t heard the full prophecy, you know.

  I know, Lila said. And some of it has been corrupted with retelling, to be honest. But I think it’s better if you hear it from the source. I wasn’t the one who gave the prophecy either, so I don’t have all the right words. And words do matter for things like this. The placement, the emphasis—it’s better to hear it aloud.

  Good to know, I said, though I was distracted from the conversation when I noticed some movement in the undergrowth farther out from us.

  Santo had noticed it too, and he stopped, one arm thrown out to stop the rest of us. Unsurprisingly, Andrew had picked up on the problem too and already had his weapons out, with a shimmering shield erected around us as we waited.

  The forest itself was silent—a sure sign that something was going on when there had been plenty of insect noises a moment ago. And then, all of a sudden, an ear-splitting shriek rent the air, and a veritable mob of goblins appeared out of nowhere, melting out of the trees and the greenery all around us.

  The goblins looked a lot like the ones I’d met in the Bermuda

  Triangle—but more so, somehow. The Triangle goblins had only been in the beginning stages of their transformation from humanity into something else entirely. Those goblins were weak and dying and starving and skinny; these goblins also looked thin and sickly, their skin nearly falling off of their bones, but they looked far less human. They weren’t like zombies; they looked like mummies. Their skin was pale green, like they had painted themselves a bright green that had faded over the years until it turned nearly yellow. They were skinny enough that their faded clothes—what little was left of them—showed their ribcages clearly, and their eyes were almost as dirty and yellow as their sharp, pointed teeth.

  Andrew’s shield stopped them from immediately getting to us, but it didn’t seem to deter them too much. Instead, once they had more or less bounced off of the shield, they threw themselves bodily at the barrier. It was disconcerting to look around and see dozens of pairs of yellow eyes, to hear the shrieks and screams all around us as the goblins kept coming back, again and again, trying to break through the shield.

  At first, the goblins’ actions looked like pure desperation on their parts as they dug in their fingernails and bit at the shield, like wild animals trying to break through a fence. But the more goblins bit into the shield, the more I noticed: they seemed to be filling up, some of the color and fat returning to their bodies.

  Andrew fell to one knee, looking pale, and Santo spun around to face him with wide eyes. “Drop the shield!” he hissed out. “They’re feeding on your magic. Don’t give them pure energy to work with!”

  Andrew didn’t need telling twice, not when he could actually feel them using his spell
to get to him. He dropped the shield, and the goblins swarmed us en masse, their long fingernails biting into our arms and legs as they tried to grab hold of any exposed skin. The air around us cracked with cackles as well as the sound of a few explosive spells as my friends and I tried to keep the goblins back not with prolonged shield spells but ones that were quick and meant to throw the goblins away from us.

  “Weapons only if you can,” Santo called out, and I saw that he had two long daggers, one in either hand. “Make them work for any magic. And don’t let them touch you or they’ll just keep healing!”

  “Not a problem,” Aaron said, his own gun in hand—though I noticed that, for once, Izzy wasn’t the one springing into action beside him. Aaron had stepped slightly in front of her, probably noticing her reluctance, but even with his protective stance nearly blocking her view, she seemed mesmerized by the goblins.

  Not that I could blame her. If I saw that swarm of little yellow-green monsters and knew that could be my future, I’d be frozen too.

  Still, as understandable as her hesitation was, we didn’t have time for anyone in our group to be a sitting target, so I reached out to the ground and asked it to please get Izzy’s attention. In response, the mud beneath Izzy’s feet shifted until it formed a copy of Izzy that politely tapped on her shoulder and then gestured toward the goblins, as if to say, “Are you fighting or not?”

  And that, obviously, prompted my competitive friend to dive in with even more fervor than before. She never could resist a challenge, and we both knew it.

  Even though there were seven of us fighting against the group of goblins, there were dozens of goblins biting and tearing into us as much as they could, so we struggled to do more than simply hold the line and keep them from getting any farther into our defenses. And it didn’t help that every time one of the goblins would manage a bite or get their nails into our skin, we could all feel our life forces literally draining away.

  It hurt.

  I’d experienced something like this before, when Izzy had asked Ivan to kill her so she could get out of chains enhanced with a spell that diverted magic and rerouted it as pain. At the time, I’d asked Lila if Izzy could survive something like that, and she had explained the basics of how goblins work: they didn’t have their own magic, but as long as they had access to a source of magic, they could heal and live long lives, almost like witches. Almost, but not quite.