“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say.
“Giving Rhiannon that prism,” she says. “She’s a good girl — and you’re a good kid. Have you spoken to your father?”
I glance at her and shake my head, returning my focus to the lake. “I don’t want to talk about him, either.” My eyes start to water, and the more I try to suppress it, the more it feels like tears are trying to push their way out. “If Drarkodon kills me —”
“He won’t.” She reaches to me and runs her hand against the back of my head, down to my neck. It’s supposed to be comforting. Motherly. But it’s not. “You know what you have to do, don’t you?”
I start to shake my head as I turn to her.
“I can’t. I can’t.”
My mother is Mother Nature, and the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my entire life. Her skin is dark, like the richness of soil that nourishes seeds. Her brown flowing hair covers her shoulders, but this time she isn’t wearing the same vines and leaves I remembered from the morning I died near this same spot. She’s wearing a simple wool shirt, and a plain brown skirt. A natural beauty, but I’d be stupid to expect otherwise. She is Mother Nature after all, and nature was something extraordinary.
She takes my face in her hands.
“Artemis,” she says, “this will end with you two whether you want it to or not. It’s fated. But the journey is yet to be known. Every choice you make, won’t change what happens.”
She pulls her hands away from my cheeks, and reaches into one of her pockets, pulling out a tiny brown pebble, smaller than the size of my pinky nail.
“Put this in your stockstill, then it’ll work.”
I extend my hand and she drops it in my palm.
“You’re gonna help me stop Nova from aging?”
“You need him. This version of him.”
“It’s not against the balance of nature?” I ask, staring at the pebble.
“Not anymore,” she says and points at it in my hand. “Not with that. But you’ll have to freeze it to keep it still.”
“How?”
“Think of something cold. Like the way you’ve been distancing yourself from your friends.” She raises her eyebrow. “You can freeze things, Artemis. But don’t freeze your heart, too.”
I look up at her and close my hand, covering the pebble. I close my eyes. There’s a small burn in my hand, a twinge, but it’s not too bad. Opening my hand, the pebble turned a bright blue, glistening as though it’s encased in ice.
“I did it.” I look up at her, awaiting some kind of approval. But she’s gone.
I stick it in my pocket and turn to face the lake again. I should have known she wasn’t going to stick around.
My parents don’t do that.
“Artemis…”
I don’t recognize the voice this time. It’s not my mother, the voice is different than hers, especially in pitch. It’s lower. I turn around.
“Hello?” I look around, but no one’s there.
“Artemis…” The voice comes again, wavering in and out. Louder, softer. My hand instinctively moves to the handle of my dagger. I scan the area, but I can’t see anything in the darkness.
Movement catches my gaze, just behind a far church building, and I run toward it with my hand still gripping the handle. I don’t pull it from the sheath though, not yet.
“Who’s there?”
“Artemis…” the voice repeats. I catch a glimpse of the whites of someones eyes, before they turn around, running through a cluster of trees just outside of the town. The same trees that Jace ran off in.
But the voice is different, it can’t be him.
“Wait!” I say. Despite my better judgment, I run after him. Whoever he is.
He runs ahead, leaping over raised roots of the trees, but he’s slow enough so I’m able to follow. Sometimes I see him, and sometimes he vanishes. Completely disappearing into thin air. When he’s gone, his footsteps stop too. No twigs breaking or leaves crunching.
Nothing.
When he reappears, he’ll look back at me, like he’s making sure I’m still there. Making sure I’m following. I should be hesitant, I should probably stop. But for some reason, I just keep going.
I stop in my tracks when a cave comes into view. It’s beneath tree roots growing above the ground, the trunk completely lifted in the air. He goes right in without uncertainty. I should trust that, maybe. But it reminds me of Valfield. The same type of darkness; I can almost see the shadowed hands outstretching for me again, reaching for me.
“Artemis…” the voice emits from the cave.
“Oh, what the hell,” I mumble to myself and I follow. It’s not the first dumb choice I made and it won’t be the last.
I look up, half expecting to see the same wispy silver light, but there’s nothing there. No light and no sound but the distant footsteps slowly walking ahead. I grab my dagger and try to focus my energy on it. I close my eyes, and I concentrate.
Light. Light.
My wrist begins to burn and I look down. The veins in my arm are illuminating as they travel toward my hand. The blade starts to glow, like I’m transferring energy.
‘It was like you transferred some of your abilities to me.’
Jace said. That day in the cabin, when he told me about his scar. Maybe that’s what's happening. Transferring. I'm transferring the light.
I wave the blade in front of me, and I watch as the person’s footsteps disappear.
I run after him. My concentration is so focused on his feet, making sure I still see them, that I don’t realize when the cave ends. When I leave it.
I don’t realize where I’m standing either, not at first.
The forest surrounding me is up in flames, thick smoke fills my nose as I hear the cackling of the fire burning through the trunks of the trees. I think of the Pryley eruption first. I was only seven years old when it happened, but the poison in the sky is the same. Poison to my lungs. I lift my shirt over my face, coughing as I struggle to breathe.
I try to wave the smoke away. There’s a charred bridge up ahead, and the smokey ruins of a town — and the destroyed fence. I cough more. Tears begin to well up in my eyes.
It’s Newacre.
I trudge forward, nearly stumbling over my own two feet. The bridge is still smoking, I don’t touch the rails. I put my dagger away, unable to pull my gaze from the ruin.
The roofs of houses have caved in, walls are broken through. Tarps that once covered the marketplace and the Salvation are ripped, tearing from their ropes as they whip in the wind. Electric sparks fly from the wiring, starting small fires around surrounding wood.
There’s an older woman digging through rubble. Her stringy hair is a mess, clothes are tattered and burnt. I step closer — it’s Ferris’s mom.
I stop in my tracks when she looks at me. She squints, narrowing her eyes, like she doesn’t know who I am.
“Wh — what — what happened?” I ask, my words trip over one another as they spill from my mouth. She doesn’t answer right away. Instead, she stares at me, coldly. Blankly.
“You.” She stalks toward me. “You did this to us.”
I frown. My shirt slips down from the front of my face. I don’t understand what she means. How did I do any of this? I start to shake my head.
“I don’t understand, how —”
An explosion comes from beneath the rubble of one of the homes nearby, throwing debris into the air, interrupting me in the middle of my sentence. I jump at the startle, tripping over rocks and broken bricks. People begin crawling out from the rubble. Faces I recognize, faces I grew up around. These are people I know.
People I knew.
Stumbling backward, I fall flat on my back.
“You will pay for this,” they tell me. Their voices come at random, but the
y all say the same things. “This is your fault, Mae.” They keep going. “You’ll deserve what you get.”
I close my eyes. Crossing my arms over my face, I wait. I deserve it. This is my fault — I left.
Only nothing happens.
I peek through my arms and lower them slowly. There’s no longer smoke clouding the sky, streaming up from blaze.
I’m no longer in Newacre.
I sit up in bed, I can feel my heart thumping loudly in my chest.
Back in the cabin.
“Artemis! You’re awake!” Rhiannon slides off of Jace’s bed and jumps to her feet. She looks terrible — her eyes are sunken in — she no longer has that vampiric glow. Her skin looks pasty. I look away from her and attempt to get out of bed, but my feet are tangled in the sheets. “We found you passed out on the bridge,” she continues. She grabs my arm and steadies me until I can stand on my own. “You’ve been unconscious for days. Alekoth said you’d be fine but I was so worried.”
Awake.
The rest of her words, I hear them but they mean nothing to me. I’m awake. I shake my head. It couldn’t have been a dream. It felt so real, it all looked so real. But so did my dream when I saw the Grim Reaper. The wound it left on my head was very real.
“I have to —”
I start patting myself down before looking at my clothes. I’m not in the same clothes I was wearing at Nevressea.
“Where are my clothes?” I ask.
She frowns.
“In the drawer —” I move toward them. I need to find the pebble my mother gave me. That couldn’t have been a dream, not any of it. “This was in your pocket.”
I turn around. The pebble is sitting on Rhiannon’s palm. I grab it and walk to my desk, looking for the stockstill I was working on.
“Is something wrong?”
“How old is Nova now?” I ask, ignoring her question. I find the dragon book tucked into a drawer and pull out the pocket watch. I pop off the face of the clock — I don’t know where to put the pebble. “How old, Rhiannon?” I say again, a little snappier than I mean to.
“Early twenties,” she says finally.
Frustrated, I smash the pebble into the center and snap it shut, cracking the face of the clock.
“F —”
I throw it onto my bed, tightening my fists. I broke it.
“Artemis —”
“Can you just get out?” I clench my jaw. “Please.”
She takes a step back from me and nods, excusing herself from the room without another word.
I climb back onto my bed. Leaning against the wall, I fumble with the stockstill. I can’t stop thinking about Newacre. If I still had the pebble Mother Nature gave me, then what I saw couldn’t have been a dream. At least not entirely.
When did it stop being real?
I let go of the stockstill and look for a Thirondel charm. According to my dad, I should be able to dematerialize on my own — I should be able to do a lot of things on my own — but I don’t exactly know what I’m doing.
Or maybe I’m just scared if I disappear, I won’t be able to make myself reappear.
When I find the sack, I stick a couple into my pocket and dig through the drawer for the Heliosi. Staring at the other time pieces in the drawer, I slam it shut. I don’t know what the rest do anyway. I drop the sundial into my pocket and turn around. I notice the stockstill is glowing now, emitting the same blue light the pebble had when I froze it.
When I pick it up, I peek through the front holes of the cover. The inside has fused together. I could’ve sworn I broke it.
I open the door, and Nova is standing there, his hand is up like he was about to knock. He is a lot older than I remember. Hearing Rhiannon say it was one thing. Now he’s standing right in front of me.
“Hey — you are awake,” he says, his voice is deeper than I expect. “Rhiannon said you were acting… weird.”
“Wow, you are old.” The words slip out.
“Excuse me?”
I close my eyes.
“I mean — I’m still getting used to that — look —” I open my eyes, “when I saw you last you were around twelve and now you’re —”
“Twenty-four,” he says, he’s frowning a little.
“Do you want to stay twenty-four?”
He leans against the frame of the door and crosses his arms. “What do you mean?”
I give him the stockstill. Actually, I kind of shove it against his chest. He moves his hand to catch it before it falls to the floor.
“I’m pretty sure this will stop you from aging.”
“I don’t have to go through puberty ever again?” he asks, fumbling with it.
“At least yours only lasts three days.”
“And it repeats every year.” He puts the chain around his neck, and continues to fumble with the stockstill. The broken, glowing pocket watch. “Am I supposed to feel different?” he asks, examining it between his fingers.
“I don’t know — but I have to go.”
“Where?”
“I just — I need to check on something.”
“Okay well, try not to pass out again, yeah?”
“Yes — I will do my best,” I say, as though it’s something that’s actually in my control. I hadn’t even known I passed out the first time. I wasn’t even aware of it when it happened.
How exactly am I supposed to prevent it?
I pat him on the shoulder and slip past him. I look back and he’s still fumbling with the stockstill that’s hanging beside the triskelion pendant around his neck.
I feel bad for him. He looks so innocent. Just last year he was cursed, and who knows what happened to him in the iron realm of Mithlonde. Considering what they did to me — and they didn’t even know who I was — I couldn’t begin to fathom. I shake my head to shake the thoughts.
I run into Rhiannon when I’m half way down the stairs. She just presses her back against the wall, and allows me to pass. I open my mouth to apologize, but words don’t come out and she passes me before I have the chance to say anything.
I’m sorry.
She doesn’t turn around. She disappears down the hall once she reaches the top of the stairs. Right, she can’t hear my thoughts anymore.
I step into the living room, rolling the Thirondel charm between my index finger and thumb. I hear footsteps coming from overhead, and slip out through the front door instead. Using the charm in the living room would draw too much unwanted attention. My dad didn’t hang around much after showing me Jace’s footprint. I don’t know where he went and I never asked. Amelia came and went too. My stomach begins to flip. I still feel guilty for what happened.
I wonder if she saw it too. I wonder if I made her relive those memories by accident. It would explain the look of horror that came on her face.
The way she backed away from me.
I furrow my brows. Maybe my dad saved her too, the way he had saved my friends, from themselves and each other. Maybe he got her out of Barrowhaven, and maybe Jace was right. I’m being too hard on someone who lied to me, but never left me.
I lied too. Funny, when you lie to not only protect yourself, but those around you. They get hurt anyway. Jace said he was pissed, but he didn’t take it out on me.
I can’t seem to forgive my dad.
I close my eyes for a brief moment, stopping in my tracks. Taking a deep breath, I open my eyes as I let the air out of my lungs. Newacre first. I can worry about the rest later. I have to see how much of that dream was reality.
Most of the snow in the woods melted, but the ground remains saturated. My boots sink into the mud with every step I take. I pick up a rotten apple while I walk, and ripen it in my palm as I further in.
I climb over broken tree trunks laying in my path, and spot the dead deer to the left of me. I look away
, pressing my sleeve to my nose. Rhiannon must have gone hunting. She did seem to have her subtle glow back when I passed her on the stairs, but I had been in too much of a hurry to make the realization. She wasn’t eating because of me.
I tighten my fist around the Thirondel charm. I stop and look back, but the cabin is far out of sight now. I might as well just continue without her, I’ve come this far.
I scan the ground for a rock or tree root hard enough to crack the Thirondel charm.
Though I’m alone, I roll it between my index finger and thumb, taking any and all precautions, just in case.
I throw the charm against the rock and whisper 'Newacre' while the ground begins to crack beneath me.
I manage to land almost on my feet, but I lose my balance and fall onto my knees. I stand up and dust off my pants. I stop as soon as I look up.
Canarywarts creep over my skin — it’s just like I remember. In ruin, broken buildings. The Woodlands are smoking, scorched and destroyed from a forest fire. The smoke isn’t as thick now, wind must have blown it away from the grounds, but still it lingers in the air, blending with the ash that stayed from the Pryley volcano.
I don’t want to look at this, but I can’t bring myself to look away. This time, Ferris’s mom is nowhere in sight. There’s no one, in any direction that I turn. The only people I see — lack their skin. I look away from skeleton remains on the ground. I can’t tell if they were killed from the fire — or something else.
After what I saw in the Whispering Woods — in Edgewick — anything was possible.
No one’s around to blame it on me and yet the it’s still weighing on my shoulders. This is as bad as it gets, but the farther I walk into town, it only gets worse. It’s quiet, smoke emitting from charred clothes.
Little socks, little shoes.
I take a step back when something squishes beneath my boot. When I look down, I can’t look away fast enough.
I drop down to my knees, and slowly pick up the tattered, stuffed toy bear on the ground. My stomach is doing flips. I feel like I’m going to throw up. My face is getting damp, water is spilling from my eyes and I can’t stop it.
Zoirin’s dead.
I press my hand to my chest, wheezing is coming from my throat. My chest is tightening, my heart is thumping so hard I can hear it in my head.
The Midnight Strider (The Chronomancer Chronicles Book 2) Page 5
