by Casey Herzog
“Whatever took over your body decided to use you against my mother. I don’t know how you got here when the terrain is quite treacherous, which my father and I can attest to. We almost lost our lives a couple of times; hanging by a thread was not one of our finest moments.”
Julian was standing, but he was teetering back and forth like the ground wasn’t steady underneath his feet.
“I don’t mean to be the bearer of bad news, but we can’t possibly carry her like this. She can’t go very much further without whatever is keeping her here holding her hostage. What you have done certainly does leave a lot to interpretation. We’ll take her with us, but we need to fashion something to carry her. I’m going to leave it up to the two of you.”
It was obvious he blamed me for this even though I had nothing to do with it. I wasn’t sure how to convince him otherwise without sounding like I was trying to hide something.
Julian went with me and we found some trees with long branches to make a sled. He helped me carry the bigger pieces of wood, but it looked like he had a lot of questions and not very many answers.
“Do I even dare to ask how your mother can be alive after everybody believed she was dead?”
I would’ve had the same question, but there were no easy answers. I told him what my father had said, and my recollection of what my mother had gone through left him speechless.
“I do have to wonder if your suspicions about your mother might have merit. She has been gone a very long time, and for you to put your trust in her so implicitly is foolish.”
He did make a valid point and I was going to have to give it some thought.
My father was kneeling by my mother’s side, and she had not come around, which I was sure did not exactly endear me to him. He helped us to get her onto the makeshift sled, and then he took ahold of it by both sides and began dragging it down the icy slope behind him.
“I would really like to hear these voices you have been hearing, Gillian. You might believe them, but I don’t have any reason to without something convincing me. I don’t think it’s right to accuse your mother of something she probably didn’t even do.”
I couldn’t give him what he wanted and it resulted in an impasse.
“If Gillian isn’t going to come to her defense then let me be very clear so there is no misunderstanding. I don’t know what happened, and I wasn’t aware of any wrongdoing on my part. I know it’s hard to understand, but you only have to look at your daughter to know anything is possible.”
The shrouds were silent, not even a peep to indicate they were even there. Whatever my mother did had the desired result of leaving them unable to fight on their own behalf.
“Gillian does not need you to fight her battles for her, and I don’t want her to have to depend on any man. She listened to the wrong people and felt influenced by their very words. She should’ve been leery of that kind of power landing in her lap.”
They were fighting over me, and this heated debate was making tempers flare.
“I was branded by evil to do its bidding, and I lost a lot more than just the trust of the people. I have to constantly concentrate to keep the evil from coming back out at the most inopportune times. Do you have any idea how hard it was to see mother suffering and know there was something I could do? I tried to get her to take me up on my offer, but she was reluctant to put her daughter in harm’s way.”
I didn’t know what else to say. It wasn’t like I had any kind of blueprint to tell me what to do and how to act.
“I know you blame me, and believe me, there’s not a day that goes by I don’t blame myself. That’s no reason to lash out at your mother over something you can’t even substantiate. We have to give her the benefit of the doubt. She deserves more after everything she has gone through.” He was blinded by the lost love coming back into his life and I was right there with him having my mother back.
“I think you both have valid points which should be addressed. Madeleine was a part of both of your lives in very different ways, and only the both of you should be able to see something is wrong. I might be a little biased, but I know there’s something not quite right. It’s not from personal experience, but I think it comes from the phantom of whatever took control of me.” Different forces were working against us, but the shrouds were honest to a fault.
“What exactly are you suggesting, Julian. Out of the three of us, you might be the only clear head, which will help us to determine what to do next. My father might be resistant, but you are the tiebreaker in whatever decision we make about what we do with my mother.”
There was no sign of the shrouds, and their presence in my head was virtually nonexistent. They had said a lot, and my mother had apparently taken exception to some disparaging comments about her character.
“The only thing we can do is wait until she comes around and question her further. Being here for any length of time can warp any mind, even one as strong as your mother’s. Cautious is not unreasonable when you’re dealing with things out of the ordinary.”
This feeling was gripping me by the throat, like some foreboding shadow ready to swoop down and cover us with certain pain. This mountain had become one obstacle after another. Even my mother had turned into a curse instead of a blessing.
“She can probably use her rest; her head injury needs some time to heal. I still don’t agree with any of this, but I will compromise for the good of our relationship.”
My father was trying to be magnanimous and see both sides of the story without making any snap judgments.
“It might’ve been easier to have her walking on her own steam, but this is a lot safer for all of us. If what the voices said is true, then we need to be extra vigilant when we’re dealing with my mother.”
I was too close to all of this, and my father could be accused of the same thing. I could only take it as a good thing Julian that had shown up when he did.
I was still trying to contact the shrouds, hoping my voice would be the one thing to wake them. I didn’t think they were dead because killing them was too easy when suffering had become a way for her to play with their lives, or so they said.
“I still don’t condone these actions, and I doubt your mother would feel very kindly to the way you have treated her. I will refrain from addressing this injustice until we learn more,” my father said without looking at me, like he was ashamed to have me for a daughter.
I didn’t feel very good about what I was doing either, but feeling their pain was something I could never forget. I knew she was responsible, but the question of why. What could possibly be her motivation to hurt them? I didn’t know if they were dangerous and somehow making them pay was her way to change the behavior of the shrouds.
The flower was still in my father’s custody, and I was tempted to ask him to have a look at it, but I knew it was only the evil inside me begging for one more chance.
“Whatever took over Julian’s body might have had the right idea, but only time will tell. I don’t like this any better than you do, but this is no reason to splinter because of differences of opinion.” I could tell he was still fuming but decided to keep his feelings in check until he was able to prove to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that my mother was nothing more than the victim.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Without my mother, we were pretty much on our own to find our way in the winter wonderland surrounding us. The one thing I noticed was that it was easy to get lost with the snow obscuring our vision and keeping us from seeing where we were going. It wasn’t snowing, but the wind was blowing enough that it was making visibility nonexistent. I wanted to suggest to my father that maybe we should stop and rest for a while, but I didn’t want him to turn around and give me those eyes all over again.
“You can’t blame your father for the way she’s making him feel. She was lost to him for a long time, and finding her after everything you’ve all been through has to be a miracle,” Julian said, touching my shoulder and making me lean against h
im for moral support in these troubling times.
A few hours had elapsed, and there seemed to be a storm on the horizon. The ominous clouds and the darkness enveloping us were giving voice to the tension in the air.
“If I were to put myself in his shoes, then I would be feeling the same thing. It shouldn’t be like this. My trust for my father might’ve been shaken, but at least I got it back. I never thought I lost his trust, but how could he have no doubts when I became something I didn’t even recognize.”
I didn’t tell Julian and my father about the voices slowly awakening from whatever my mother had done to them to keep them quiet. I wanted to ask my father about any flaws on her body that he made notice of, but to do so would only make him level his icy stare at me again. I took a moment when I was close enough to look at her face and I tried to remember the photo I kept of her by my bed. There didn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary, but I couldn’t be sure when my mind could be playing tricks on me.
“It might sound trite, but time is the only thing to heal wounds going this deep,” Julian said, staying close and keeping my spirits up with his words of encouragement. It was really the only thing keeping me from losing it. Having these voices speak of my mother like she was evil had certainly been an eye opener.
“Just when I think everything is normal, things change. I guess I should be used to it by now. I seem to be a magnet for inexplicable things; it must have something to do with the evil still residing within me,” I said, watching for anything to indicate this was the path most traveled. If I didn’t know any better, I would swear my mother was trying to purposely lead us away from safety.
“I don’t want to worry you, but I have been losing time. By my calculation, I have to assume I have been away from the school for at least a full day.”
I didn’t want to mention what happened with the animals; it didn’t seem to be a good time to bring up the kind of power it took to make them into a confetti spray of ashes. I had to say something, and this was certainly something of a concern. I thought I was the only one able to wield the power it took to do something like that, but it seems there are others.
“It appears we all have issues we are dealing with, but your susceptibility to whatever this force is must have some kind of underlying reason. Is there something weighing down your consciousness that would allow for the possibility of something to get inside you? There were animals attacking us, and something came to our rescue. Then, I saw you standing nearby in the snow.”
My revelation took him by surprise, and he looked down at his hands, wondering what other insanity might befall him.
“I wish I could tell you something more than just conjectures, but I feel like I’m living in the same nightmare you did. The only difference is, I don’t seem to recall what happened, which makes me less likely to embrace the darkness willingly.”
Julian had never been judgmental, and his disappearance when I was suffering had never been fully explained.
“Let’s go back to when you had to leave the village for the outlying areas. I know you said you were helping someone, but could you be any clearer than that. It’s a little vague. I’ve been reluctant to speak to you about it for fear of sounding accusatory, but we can’t avoid it any longer.”
I felt like I had aged and had maturity unlike other people my own age.
“I was hoping you weren’t going to bring it up, and I fear you won’t like the answer. I remember it like it was yesterday, but it feels like it happened to somebody else. I can’t explain it, and if I were to try, I would have to say it feels like somebody else’s memories.”
Things were starting to make a little more sense, but there were still a lot of questions and not enough answers.
“I know this can be hard to handle; I’ve been there myself in a different way. The power seems familiar, but there is something strange about it. If I were to hazard a guess, I would say all of this began when you disappeared when I was going through my trials with Jasper.”
This was the first time I had mentioned his name, and I tried to leave it out of the conversation because the subject matter was something I wanted to forget.
“I had a feeling you might say that, but I was hoping there might be another explanation. I didn’t believe it myself when I told you I couldn’t be by your side because of something else coming up. You mean more to me than an afterthought, and I would never have chosen someone else over you.”
I thought the same thing, but his gesture for helping others was not something I was going to question extensively.
“I was helpless, and I surrendered to the dark side with the poison of the evil seeping into every part of my life. I was almost lost, and the corruption of my soul had tainted everything around me. The only thing getting me through was the thought of you and those I considered family.”
I’d told my father some of what I had gone through, but I left out crucial pieces of information because they were too embarrassing. It was a tragic game, and I was on the losing side. I carried the load for the magic community and the weight on my conscience was too much to bear.
I heard thunder, and the words of the shrouds were whispering too low for me to hear what they were saying. They needed to gather their strength before we reestablished communications. Apparently, they were using each other to make themselves whole again. I attempted to reach out with my mind, giving into their influence and inviting them to speak to me. They were not open minded enough to take the leap of faith.
“If I could’ve been there, you know nothing would have kept me away. Maybe we should both give each other a break. Our friendship is an unbreakable bond; it would take something extraordinary to pull us apart when we need each other the most.”
I felt the same way, and I hung onto the belief we could weather any storm together. My father, on the other hand, had welcomed with open arms the peace without fully understanding the price we all had to pay for it.
“In my heart, I know what you say is true, but it still sticks with me regardless of the circumstance behind your disappearance. We need to get to the bottom of what happened to you. I fear things are going to get worse before they get better.”
It seemed I was saying that a lot, but at least I had these few months to compose myself. I was still weak, fighting the influence of the evil, but I’d found a way to cope with something not many would be able to.
“Gillian, you have always been all I needed. If I thought I had a chance, I would gladly put my name on the list of suitors. Our love is eternal and we always help each other to stand when we can’t do it ourselves,” Julian said, his words conveying a wisdom and guidance I lacked when I was facing the evil. I didn’t know what else to call it, but it seemed fitting considering how I was easily manipulated. I had to thank Damien for his continued belief and solidarity. He was the one who did stand by me and paid a high price.
The one thing Jasper did which I regret the most was to offer me a partnership. It was complicated, and one taste made me want to do bad things to those people who cared for me the most. It felt good, and the evil could come back the moment I allowed it to have power over me.
“I’ve always known how you felt, Julian, and I wish I could’ve returned the love I felt coming off of you in waves. You know how important you are to me, but I love you as a friend and brother.
“During the crisis, I was out of my mind. I couldn’t even begin to explain to you how good it felt to let the pain wrap me up in a blanket of warmth.”
I loved the pain and it was like a drug that was still growing inside me to this day. The happiness I had with my beloved, William, was still threatened by how easily I could succumb to a force beyond my own understanding.
“I can’t possibly know what you went through, and this might pale in comparison, but I need you to help me to figure this out. It seems like a big coincidence for this to be happening to me when your mother just came back into your life. There’s always a pattern; you only have to look to fin
d it,” Julian said, leaving me with more than enough to deal with, but at least, I had him here to ground me to reality.
“This thing with my mother has me wondering if I truly knew my parents. They obviously had lives without me, and I never did feel a need to bridge the gap between us. Their stories were probably fraught with dangers. I’d always believed my father was my hero until mother died.”
It was nice to have somebody to talk to even though the suspicious circumstances of Julian’s arrival were still very much a mystery.
“You can’t expect someone to reveal all of their secrets. I’m sure there are things I would rather keep hidden in the dark corners of my mind. Everybody has demons they want to have excised from their lives. Your parents would be no different than any of us. That might be hard to hear, but they are, after all, human,” Julian said, using a stick he had in his hand to help push through obstacles in our way.
“You have no idea how much it means to me to have you here, Julian. I felt like I lost my best friend, and I guess I still have some lingering resentment for how you abandoned me when I needed you. It’s a touchy subject, and I regret ever doubting the strength of your friendship.”
Abandonment was something of a theme in my life, including when my mother died, and then, my father deciding to hide and make me believe he was dead.
“You have the right to your feelings. I did nothing to convince you we would always be in the thick of things together.”
I was glad he was here with me, but I was also a little hesitant considering what he had done with the animals and to my mother. There was no point in trying to unravel the time he had lost until we were back on sacred ground.
“I wasn’t in my right mind; that force bled into me was because I made it possible. I opened myself up because the pain of losing my father was too much. I should’ve been stronger in the face of adversity,” I said, looking for the silver lining and thankful my friend was here.
