The Crone's Stone

by S E Holmes

“Bear?” I turned to him. “Do you think your minders fade as the Stone grows stronger? Like the process keeping them young is now in reverse?”

  I shrugged, hoping that if I didn’t admit his theory out loud, it might prove false. Chewing my lip, I returned to the chart.

  “Bea also had a husband. Vincent. Killed in the Thirty Years’ War.” I searched for Mrs Paget and had to go way back. “Grace. Approximate birth year 1113. Her proper name is Grainne and she’s been in this almost from the beginning. Married Arthur Paget in 1282. He died in 1303 of an infected wound from a farming accident. None of them ever remarried.”

  “That’s a long time to be without anyone,” Smithy said gently. “Okay. Curiosity satisfied. Let’s go!”

  I followed the inevitable train of thought. “They are the only three remaining from the Order of the Sacred Trinity. And Fortescue is the single outsider to have survived his connection to the family.” The full implications hit home. These weren’t strangers, individuals without any connection whatsoever to me. This was my family tree. “Association with me is a death sentence!”

  “Winnie.” Smithy edged closer. He held out his hand. “Please.”

  “No, get away from me!” I batted his hand to the side. “I’m bad for your health.”

  There were two more names I had to see. Taking a deep breath for courage, my focus dropped to the bottom of the history. There, in ink less oxidised than any others, were the names of my parents, alone on their own line.

  I had to touch, and kneeled to reach, just as Smith lunged to snatch my hand and stop me. But he was a tad slow and my fingertips made contact. Together, momentum carried us into the final minutes of the lives of Shiloh and Isaiah Light. Smithy’s shout of “No!” echoed in my ears as we were yanked into the past once more.

  The young couple were seated at the front of a beaten-up vintage coach with bench seats, its only passengers. Dressed in well-worn jeans and the scuffed hikers’ boots of perpetual travellers, canvas duffle bags rested at their feet. In their early twenties, the girl was closest to the open window. She stared towards a hilltop on her right, the boy next to her.

  Both wore frowns ingrained by constant worry. She had my wild, dark curls tied in a scrap of red ribbon, and he had my eyes, in the exact same shade of green. They squinted through glass at the fading glare of sunlight cresting the horizon, as if searching for something. Seeing them for the first time, my belly constricted with yearning. I’d never before missed having parents.

  Idling at the bottom of a short, steep rise, the bus jutted straight across double lanes from a T-intersection. The driver clearly suffered a momentary blank, his head swivelling either side in indecision as dusk fell. He could take the hill or skirt fields of scraggly brown grassland in the opposite direction. They were in the middle of nowhere, not a stray cow or tumbledown shack in view, just the occasional withered tree in distant silhouette.

  A low rumble cut the silence, growing rapidly louder. And I knew what would happen. I wanted more than anything to pull from the vision, but once in its mental vice, the choice to follow until the bitter finale was already made. She looked back at him, reaching to lift a small locket from beneath her threadbare jumper. Of plain silver, it was not an expensive piece, but the reverential way she handled it told me that this was their most treasured possession.

  Gently clicking it open, they stared at the tiny image within. A sleeping newborn cocooned in a blanket decorated by embroidered sky-blue bunnies filled the oval frame. Bea had a photo just like it on the sideboard in our TV room. My parents and I had shared that picture, at least.

  “She’ll be okay,” he said in a low, soothing voice. “Our little girl is with Bea.”

  “That’s what I’m most afraid of,” my mother said. “No matter how skilful, the Trinity are too few against the Crone and her servants. Who can remain standing in the face of such bottomless spite?”

  “I believe in Winsome.” My father’s answer was resolute. “She will prove the very best of us.”

  With a look of sorrow, his wife closed the locket. “You are right, Isaiah. I should not lose faith. I just wish I could have held her one last time.”

  They tightly clasped the locket in layered fists. My father reached over to slide the window shut, before wrapping Shiloh in a hug with his spare arm, and they huddled together, foreheads touching and eyes squeezed tight, no longer bothering to watch what was coming for them.

  Was that why I wasn’t with them where I belonged? My parents had somehow anticipated their deaths and ensured I wasn’t at risk. I’d always believed I had survived the crash, that Bea had taken me in after. This was an assumption she’d never bothered to correct. The facts told of a deeper, more slippery motivation at work that inspired in me deepest dread.

  But overriding all else as events converged was despair for everything my parents had lost. Like my ancestors who’d suffered an untimely end, they were so young. I gritted my teeth and swore blackest vengeance upon the foul creature to blame, and any who chose the Crone’s side. Over the lip of the hill, roared a white tow-truck. The coach driver belatedly wrangled the gearstick in a panicked grind of cogs, attempting to put his bus in reverse.

  The distance was not so great that the headphones and closed eyes of the joyriding youth at the wheel of the truck were not obvious. I saw his acne-scarred cheeks and a muddy-brown fringe combed to one side, his exposed eyebrow pierced by a barbell. His seatbelt hung limp and neglected by his shoulder. I couldn’t help willing him to look up, despite the certainty this was history and had already come to pass. Some other-worldly influence ensured that he wasn’t vigilant. He tapped the dash in frenetic rhythm to whatever song had doomed my parents, piloting his missile in oblivion.

  Until it was too late.

  On some impulse the youth finally attended to the road, eyes snapping wide when he sighted the immovable obstacle blocking his path. He clutched the wheel and stomped the brake. The truck careened onwards in a plume of screeching burned rubber. The bus driver finally managed to get his vehicle in reverse, inching back for the safe haven of the road where he should have been from the outset.

  All his effort achieved was to better align his human cargo with their onrushing fate. The impact made a thunderous boom that rolled over the barren land, the truck’s engine ripped from its mount to breach the cabin and crush the youth’s body from the top of his hips to his knees, his mouth a stunned ‘O’ at the fatal twist his day had taken.

  In response to the abrupt halt, the top half of him whiplashed ahead, pounding his forehead onto the windshield hard enough to leave a bloody, cracked star. He was thrown back into his seat and with a final huff of breath, his eyelids slid together, never to part again. The tinny bleats issuing from headphones skewed about his neck, now competed with the pinging of traumatised metal and glass hitting the asphalt in a shattering cascade. The radiator hissed and the stench of baked oil filled the air.

  Bile flooded my throat. The insult had only just begun for my parents. Images of the carnage within the coach were relentless and, although it was futile, I clamped my hands over my eyes. The collision speared the bus from its wheelbase, flinging it onto the side. Carving a bounced, spinning skid along the road, a fountain of shrieked sparks trailed its wake.

  The interior landscape was utterly wrong, like a camera lens recording from a crazy tilt. The driver had died instantly, half his face caved in. Belted to his now-horizontal seat, he flailed violently on each jolt of his vehicle meeting the road’s resistance, blood spatter decorating the roof. Unrestrained, Shiloh and Isaiah didn’t fair so well.

  Confronted by the extended brutality of their end, my senses finally recoiled. The curtain descended for a blessed period of nothingness, but not before a final lingering image of wreckage strewn far and wide. A red ribbon fluttered across the paddock on a whirl of smoke.

  I woke flat on my back, staring overhead at a ceiling of flaked cream paint. It took several moments to reorientate myself, the awful tru
th of my parents’ death bringing a wave of grief. Sitting up, a ragged howl rose up my throat.

  Next to me on his knees, Smith cupped his head in his hands, murmuring, “I didn’t want you to see that.” Strangely, my foremost thought was relief he hadn’t impaled himself on those stupid arrows when we fell. He raised his head and peered at me. “I’m so sorry, Bear.”

  I failed to choke back a sob, melting into the comfort of his extended arms. “You tried …” I hiccupped, burying myself against his chest, “—to stop me.”

  But any solace was all too brief. The proximity alarm flared to life for the second time that morning, and no matter how desperately my imagination conjured a lost pizza-delivery boy, there was no denying the reality of an intruder on our doorstep.

  “We’re out of time,” Smith declared, his voice turned to steel.

  Twenty-One

  We were up and sprinting before the tears had dried on my cheeks, vaulting down the stairs for the elevator tucked beneath their base in the creepy section of the display. Smithy kept himself bodily between me and the front door the whole dash, his expression of dogged seriousness forecasting the gravity with which he viewed this latest threat. I was less certain; that barrier to warehouse entry was thicker than any I’d ever seen. Of