by Chloe Jacobs
She glanced at Isaac. He was the one she was worried about the most. Yes, they’d made it here on the bus mostly unnoticed, but this was different. This was a small town, and word of the lost daughter’s return would attract attention. It would only take one person to notice his ears, or his eyes, or the sheer size of him, and people would start asking questions. Everything could still backfire spectacularly.
Siona was able to disguise her pointed ears, much like Greta had disguised her rounded human ones in Mylena by covering them with her hair. But Isaac stuck out like a sore thumb no matter what they tried. Even if they got him a hat—which would look ridiculous this time of year—he was a lot bigger than any human boy his age, and he couldn’t downplay that royal arrogance even if his life depended on it.
“How do we come up with a plan, when we don’t even know if we can go back?” Wyatt said.
They had learned within the first two nights that Isaac’s gift for visiting her dreams didn’t work in the human world. At first they’d wondered if it was a side effect of his having been Lost, but then Siona admitted that she felt the lack of magick, too, like an emptiness in her soul.
It’s this place, Siona had said. This world.
In Mylena, she’d been able to sense the magick in everything and everyone, but now there was nothing but a cold silence from within the earth, suffocating the essence of every tree and blade of grass.
“If there’s no magick here,” Siona said, “there will be no way to open a portal. If we have to sit and wait for another Lamia to come around and do it, we could be waiting forever.”
They’d been having the same argument for days; Isaac insisting they must find a way to return and save his people, while Wyatt and Ray warned him it might not happen.
Greta had searched for a way out of Mylena for four years until Agramon used his blood magick to open a portal. Magick would work. But there was no magick here. Agramon wasn’t in this world, and the Lamia who’d opened the portals to grab humans for him weren’t in this world. When it came to sending anyone back to Mylena, they had yet to figure out what to do about it…or how to defeat Agramon, if they even managed to get that far.
“First thing’s first. We have to tell the adults something and get the boys back to their families.” She couldn’t look at Isaac. Didn’t want him to see her growing uncertainty. “I think I should be the one to do the talking.”
Chapter Two
They all went downstairs. Thankfully, Drew wasn’t there. Greta’s father had noticed his nervousness and run him over to the neighbor’s house to stay with their kids for a sleepover while things got sorted out.
After seeing the fear in her brother’s eyes, she had to wonder what he’d told their parents about what had happened to him…and how much they’d believed.
The four years she’d been stuck in Mylena, she’d thought he was safe at home. Right up until the moment she’d entered the special chamber in Agramon’s fortress and saw him there, transformed into stone and positioned in the magick circle to be used as a sacrifice to feed the demon’s spell.
Thank God she’d managed to break that spell and send him back through the portal, but she’d always wondered how much he had seen before leaving, and if he’d made it home to their parents.
Greta and the rest had all been shown into the living room, like they were important guests. Her mother quickly excused herself to make tea, but everyone was so quiet they could hear the whistle of the water boiling in the kitchen. “We’re both so relieved to finally have you back,” her father said after Greta’s mother returned.
“Thank you,” Greta said tightly, accepting a steaming mug with a polite smile that felt too tight on her face. “I guess I probably shouldn’t have just shown up on the front step like this with a bunch of strangers in tow.”
She could see all of the questions clouding their eyes and bracketing their lips but sensed their deep hesitation, too.
Where have you been?
Maybe they hadn’t asked yet simply because of the “mixed company,” but she didn’t think so. She thought they were holding back because they knew the answer was going to be bad, and they were afraid to hear out loud just how bad.
Wyatt suddenly stood. “Excuse me, sir, but do you think I could take the boys out back into the yard? Charlie here noticed earlier that there was a swing set, and I’m sure they’d all like to check it out.”
As far as excuses went, it could have been better, but Greta’s father nodded quickly and motioned for Wyatt to walk through the kitchen. “Of course, please be my guest.”
Everyone got up to go with him except for Jacob. He was sitting so close to Greta that their legs touched, with his hand tucked in hers. She glanced nervously at her parents for their reactions. Her mother’s face was pale as she looked at both of them.
“It’s okay, magpie,” Greta said softly. “We’re safe here. I promise.”
“I know,” he said, looking up at her. His mouth pulled into a baby version of a clucking hen, and his little hand lifted to smooth the crease in her forehead that she hadn’t even known was there. “I was going to tell you that because you still look worried.”
She let out a long breath and forced a smile. “Thank you. I think I was worried, but I’m feeling much better now.” She patted him on the arm. “Why don’t you go with Wyatt and play for a few minutes.”
He looked confused by the word play, and her heart lurched. Out of everyone, he’d been in Mylena for the shortest amount of time, but it had still been long enough to forget so much.
As he went to meet Wyatt at the door to the kitchen, she twisted to look up at Isaac, who hadn’t taken a seat and had placed himself to the right of her chair with his arms crossed like her own personal bodyguard. She decided not to push her luck.
They’d decided upstairs that it was probably safe enough to use his name. If he couldn’t enter Greta’s dreams in this world, he probably couldn’t enter anyone else’s, either. “I’d like Isaac to stay,” she said.
Neither her mother nor her father seemed to know quite what to make of him and had given him a wide berth so far, but she couldn’t tell if that was because of his odd physical characteristics or simply his size.
Once the four of them were alone, her father dragged his chair closer. He looked as if he wanted to reach out and take her hands, but after a brief pause, he leaned his elbows on his knees and clasped his hands together instead. “Can you tell us what happened?” he asked. “You and Drew went out into the forest that afternoon and didn’t come back. When we found him—”
“You did? When?”
“The next morning. He was picked up by a search and rescue officer who’d spotted him wandering around outside near a cave.”
So she had been successful in saving him that day, and the Lamia had come back for him later? She didn’t want to ask about it now because it might sound strange, but she made a mental note to find out more details.
“Then what?” she said.
“He was stunned and confused. We tried to ask him what happened, but he would only say that you’d fallen into a hole and…”
“And what?”
“That you burned up in the fire,” Greta’s mother finished in a thin voice.
Her father’s expression said he knew how absurd that sounded, but that hadn’t made it hurt any less. “The only evidence we found of any fires was in the cave near where Drew had been found,” he said. “But nothing to suggest that there’d been anything other than a small campfire there, and there certainly wasn’t any reason to think that our daughter had been…burned alive.” He cleared his throat. “The police believed the fire had probably been set by a drifter or squatter who was trying to keep warm.”
They both looked at Greta meaningfully. “Was that who took you?” her mother asked. “We stayed in Germany for months searching, but…”
How horrible it must have been to never know. To find no clues and get no leads. She realized how wrong she’d been all alo
ng. She’d imagined her parents would have looked for her for a respectable time period, maybe even months, but then they would have reluctantly given up and moved on with their lives as the memory of their missing daughter faded.
But she could see now that there had never been any way for them to move on completely. The unknowing would have been like an open wound that constantly trickled blood. Even after scabbing over, if you moved a certain way, it would break open again and remind you of how much pain it could cause.
She took a deep breath. This was it. The moment of truth…and lies. If she told them she’d been abducted, they would want details about her attackers, and the police would renew their investigation. Harder, probing questions would be asked of all of them. She didn’t want to hurt her parents by making them think that she’d run away, but they deserved to know as much of the truth as she could believably say, even if it wasn’t sunshine and roses.
“I wasn’t abducted. I ah…I left.” That seemed the easiest way of explaining being shoved through a portal into an alternate world. And really, if she’d known what would happen when she pushed Drew out of the witch’s fire—that it was a portal into another world—she still would have done it to save him, so in a way, it was true.
“Why? How could you—” Her mother’s voice broke. “You never even called to let us know you were okay.”
This was going to be the tricky part.
“I never meant to leave for so long, and I wanted to let you know that I was okay, but I got into trouble pretty much immediately,” she admitted. Not really a lie. “I was lost and confused, and I didn’t know what to do.” Also, not quite a lie. “It took everything I had just to survive, and after a while I…I felt like I couldn’t call anymore, that maybe you wouldn’t want to hear from me after what I’d done.” Very much the truth.
Her mother’s hand fluttered at her throat. “All this time, I thought you must have been taken. It tore me apart inside to imagine what might have happened to you.” A deep frown creased her forehead. “But to hear you say that you just left…I don’t know what to do with that. I should be happy that at least you weren’t in danger, but…”
“I never wanted to hurt you guys, and if I could do it over, I definitely wouldn’t do it that way again,” she repeated, silently begging them to understand and forgive. “But I learned a lot about myself in the last four years. Things that helped me to survive and helped me bring these kids here, because I knew that you could help me reunite them with their families.”
It was good to get that out in the open, but she knew she had a lot of work ahead of her if she was going to make up for four years of fear and worry.
After that, her father did call the police, and forty minutes later they were all talking to a uniformed officer and an investigator in a dark gray suit.
Greta managed to come up with some more details that were conveniently vague in certain areas but separately corroborated by all the kids. They said they’d found one another mostly by accident. They’d banded together and slowly started to make their way back home as a group. Greta admitted that it hadn’t always been easy. When the police officer asked why nobody called for help, they said it was because they’d run into some bad people early on and didn’t know who they could trust.
When it came to explaining Isaac and Siona, whose accents and looks were so very different, Greta said they were brother and sister—not too much of a stretch—and that finding their parents might be more difficult since they were probably in another country. She also said that the two of them had gone missing at such a young age, they didn’t remember the details or their families, and they couldn’t provide any contact information.
The police officers told Greta’s parents that they would post Isaac and Siona’s descriptions in whatever database handled international missing children’s cases and see what kind of hits they got in the next few days.
Telling the adults that the younger boys; Jacob, Charlie, Niall, and Leo, had run away from home would never have worked, but thankfully nobody needed to lie for them. The boys told the truth as they knew it—which was simply that they couldn’t remember what happened, except that they’d suddenly been alone and lost and couldn’t find their way home again until Greta had come to help them. If they left a few of the finer details out of it, well, they weren’t the only ones.
Everyone seemed to realize there was more to be told, but they didn’t press too hard, at least not yet. Greta had a feeling her parents were still reeling over the revelation that their daughter had run away—and stayed away for four years—rather than trust them with whatever had been bothering her as a thirteen-year-old girl. She answered their questions as closely as possible so that none of it felt like a lie, and so far, the questions were easy. Who? What? When? Where? No one asked about the why.
But later, the social worker would come. And she would ask about all of the hard emotional truths Greta had avoided for the last three years.
The social worker introduced herself as Janet Davidson. She asked if she could speak with each of the children for a short time, separately.
When it was Greta’s turn, she went into the dining room. The woman sat at one end of her parents’ dinner table with a laptop in front of her, and she looked up from the screen with a friendly smile.
“Come on over and have a seat, sweetie,” she said brightly. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”
Greta shrugged and sat, keeping two chairs between them. She didn’t say anything.
The woman didn’t say anything else, either.
Good. Greta had worked herself into a ball of knots trying to imagine the kinds of probing questions she’d be asked, questions designed to dig into her mind and soul. She was glad for the apparent reprieve, but the longer they sat there with the social worker tapping at her keyboard, the more Greta’s stomach twisted.
She’d faced ghouls and demons. Surely she could outlast a simple social worker.
After a few minutes, Ms. Davidson finally looked up and said, “Whenever you’re ready.”
That was the thing. She might never be ready. Not for this.
Greta swallowed. “You know, I should probably help get the boys settled in for the night in case they’re nervous since it’s a new place and all. So, if you didn’t really need to talk to me about anything right now, then maybe I could—”
“I was hoping that perhaps you’d like to do the talking,” she said gently, finally folding down the laptop screen.
Greta shook her head and crossed her arms. “It really isn’t necessary.”
Ms. Davidson nodded. “I understand. You’ve taken care of yourself for a long time now. All the boys told me that you were their protector and kept them safe.”
She slid down low into the seat and prayed the woman didn’t mention demons or faeries. But if any of the boys had gotten that truthful, the discussion would likely have started very differently. “I just did what I could to get them home to their families.”
“But why did you come here?”
Greta paused. “Excuse me?”
“You could have dropped them off at any police station along the way.” Ms. Davidson pushed the laptop aside and leaned forward on the honeyed oak table. “Did you only come back because of the little ones?”
Greta shrugged.
The social worker looked at her, and with each passing second, seemed to see into Greta more deeply than even her parents had. Finally, she said, “Maybe you came back because being alone wasn’t quite what you thought it would be.”
She swallowed. “I wasn’t alone.” As much as it had felt that way until she’d met Isaac and found the boys.
The woman’s gaze softened, as if she’d seen right through Greta’s words to the loneliness and fear that she’d felt for so long. In a soft voice that was surprisingly judgment-neutral, she said, “I’d like to know what you went through.”
No, you really don’t. The choked laugh came out before she could stop it, and she sw
ore under her breath.
“Maybe if you told me what it was like, I could help you process your feelings about it.”
I don’t need some psychologist to dig around in my head. I need a witch to open a portal.
She didn’t say that. Obviously.
“Talking about my feelings isn’t what kept me alive the last four years,” she snapped, then squeezed her mouth together in horror.
Ms. Davidson stretched her arm across the table toward Greta as if she wanted to console her, but she was a little too far away to actually take her hand. “Listen. The last thing I want is for you to be uncomfortable with me. I’m here to help in whatever way you need. If that means we just sit here so you can have a few moments of quiet, then we can do that, too.”
Her gaze dropped, and Greta let out the deep breath she hadn’t even realized she was holding.
“Okay,” Greta murmured.
“I’m going to return tomorrow to talk to the younger kids. Do you think we could get together again? Maybe we could talk about the next step for you.”
“The next step? What does that mean?”
“Like going back to school.”
School?
Great Mother, she hadn’t even considered that they would send her to school, at least not so soon. How was she supposed to search for the portal? “I don’t know if school’s really a good idea. So soon, I mean,” she scrambled. “I don’t want to leave the boys.”
“They’re in good hands, I promise. You don’t need to protect them any longer.”
She was going for reassuring, but Greta’s chest still clenched. “I promised each one of those kids that I’d stay with them until they didn’t need me anymore, and I’m sorry, but until their families show up, you don’t get to be the one who says they don’t need me.”
It was evident from the sharpening of the woman’s gaze that Greta had surprised her. What? Did she really think Greta could have spent four years on her own without knowing how to stand up to strangers?
The psychologist didn’t push. She was good at her job, and her concern for Greta and the boys felt genuine.
