Greta and the Lost Army (Mylena Chronicles Book 3)

by Chloe Jacobs

  When she opened the door to her bedroom, the window was open, and Siona was perched there, waiting.

  “How much did you hear?”

  “Enough,” she admitted.

  “Does Isaac know?”

  “That we’re leaving now?” She nodded. “He waits outside.”

  This was it, then. “If they check on me before they go to bed, they’ll call the cops, and the whole neighborhood will end up searching for us.”

  Siona raised a brow. “Are you worried that they will find us?”

  She shook her head. “I just wish it didn’t have to be this way. Sneaking out like a criminal in the night.”

  Siona touched her shoulder. “You tried. They may not be ready to believe such a fantastical story could be the truth, but as the years go by, and you do not return, your explanation may actually bring them some comfort. At the very least, they will be able to accept that you chose your own path.”

  She moved to the desk and pulled out a pen and a sheet of paper from the drawer, scrawling a brief note. There was still so much she could say, but nothing more that really had to be said.

  I’m sorry if leaving again will cause you sadness, but it’s my choice this time. You shouldn’t look for me. Greta.

  With that, she followed Siona out the window. She paused with one leg over the sill and spared a final glance back. Her perfumed stuffed bear was perched on the rocking chair, and for half a second she debated going back for it but didn’t. It was part of another life, and if that was all her parents were going to have as a reminder of their daughter, she didn’t want to take it from them.

  A sliver of regret and doubt wormed its way into her aching chest, but then she looked down and saw Isaac waiting for her on the grass below the window. Her chest expanded with love. He didn’t encourage or discourage her in any way, and his expression was impossible to read in the darkness, but just seeing him reinforced her confidence in the decision she was making.

  This was the right choice, the only choice.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “I think we should try to get back to the cave where we stashed our weapons,” she said after she’d made it down to the ground. She was careful opening the back gate so that it wouldn’t creak. “But after all the attention we’ve gotten from the police, if we go down to the bus station, we’ll probably be recognized.”

  A figure she hadn’t even noticed suddenly stepped out of the shadows. “I can get us there.”

  It was Wyatt, sneaking up on her just like he’d done the day they’d met. “How do you do that to me every time?” She punched him in the arm, both stunned and relieved to see him. “Is that why nobody’s seen or heard from you in days? You were on your way here? How long have you been waiting?”

  His gaze was on Siona. “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t just let you guys figure this out alone, as if it stopped being my fight,” he said in a low voice. “I can’t walk away. I had to come back and see it through.”

  Siona tensed. “Are you certain?”

  He nodded. “I’m not leaving until I know you’ve made it safely through the portal.”

  “How did you get here?” Greta asked. It was over a day’s drive from his home in North Dakota.

  He jangled a set of keys with a cheeky grin. “I borrowed the car.”

  She groaned. The police were looking for that car then. “Since when do you even know how to drive?”

  He shrugged. “It wasn’t that hard to figure out. You put your foot on the gas, stop appropriately, and stay in the right lane.” He motioned for everyone to follow. “Hurry. We’ve only got until morning before my parents realize it’s gone.”

  “I hate to tell you this, but they already know you’re missing,” she said. “The police wasted no time calling here.”

  Siona blushed. “I worried when I did not hear from you.”

  “Sorry,” he said and shrugged at Greta. Jerk.

  Her chest lurched. “Damn it, now everyone under the sun is going to be looking for us.”

  He snorted. “No matter what, we weren’t going to avoid that. You think your family is just going to let you go again? It won’t be a stretch for anyone to guess that we’re together, and it’s not the car they’re going to be concerned about.”

  She groaned. “All right, let’s go.”

  They crept down a few streets to the deserted mini-mart parking lot where Wyatt had stashed the light blue Sonata so it wouldn’t be spotted outside her parents’ house. She jumped in the front seat to help with directions, but it turned out he didn’t need them. He drove a heck of a lot faster than the bus had on the way here four weeks ago, too.

  “Are you sure this is the spot?” she asked when he pulled off the highway onto a narrow dirt road. It was just after two in the morning, and they’d passed Stroudsburg about forty-five minutes back. There hadn’t been much in the way of landmarks when they’d walked out of the woods four weeks ago, and at this time of night it was impossible to tell one bend in the road from another. There weren’t any streetlights to make it easier.

  “I’m not really sure of anything,” he muttered, following the driveway a good enough distance so that the car wouldn’t be seen from the road by anyone who might happen to pass by. “But we can’t just keep driving, or we’ll end up in Canada by the time the sun rises.”

  When he stopped, Greta got out of the car and looked around blindly, as if she could actually see farther than the glow of the headlights. They weren’t going anywhere on foot.

  “We could bed down here in the car and rest for a few hours. It won’t be comfortable, but we’ve all slept in worse…except maybe the one of us that’s royalty,” Wyatt said with a raised brow in Isaac’s direction.

  Courtesy of the car’s interior lights, she could see Wyatt standing in the open door of the driver’s side with both arms on the hood. He was facing Siona, who stood on the other side of the car and very purposely did not look at him.

  Greta gauged the tension between them and grinned. She grabbed Isaac’s hand. “You guys get caught up, or rest, or…whatever. We’ll be back in a little while. We’re going to explore the area a bit.”

  Wyatt looked up. “Explore what? There’s not even a full moon to see by, and we’re in the middle of the woods. There could be mountain lions, or—”

  “I’ve got a goblin king with me,” she called over her shoulder. “He can see in the dark just fine.”

  She giggled as she took off at a run down the dirt road away from the car. Giggled.

  Isaac obligingly gave chase and caught her without any trouble at all. It might have had something to do with the fact that he could see her, and she couldn’t see a foot in front of her face, which made running pretty damn silly.

  Or it could be because she always wanted to be caught by him.

  It was fun and carefree. Even with a world in peril and everything that that entailed riding on their shoulders, she felt liberated. She’d made the right decision, and now that it was done, she gave up feeling guilty about it.

  The air was crisp and fresh. He pulled her around to face him. She squinted up to see his face and laughed. His eyes gleamed, even with so little light.

  “You are the most alive that I have ever been,” he whispered, arms slipping around her as if she might dance away out of reach.

  Didn’t he know by now that they were joined? By circumstance? By blood? By that inexplicable thing someone had coined as love, but felt so much stronger than that?

  “We have a few hours until morning.” She went on tiptoes and spoke with her lips against his cheek. They tilted up in a smile that felt good and right, a smile that defied fate to cross her. “I think we ought to make the most of it.”

  He looked around, then took her hand and led her off the dirt road into the woods a little bit. He nudged her shoulder for her to duck at one point, and she narrowly avoided a branch across the face. It was even darker under the canopy of trees, but she didn’t protest when he guided her down, and she si
ghed as she felt the bed of soft moss under her fingers.

  She thought he would kiss her, but he seemed to want to go slow. His hands traced lazy patterns on her back and upper arms as he simply held her against him. His body radiated enough heat to keep them both warm in a blizzard, and she snuggled close with a sigh.

  “I will miss this time with you,” he murmured.

  “You mean the uncertain looks from humans? Having to bed down in a basement? Or the stimulating arguments we’ve been having?” she said teasingly.

  “I am grateful for the turn of fate that brought us here, so that I could learn this softer side of Greta the bounty hunter.”

  She bristled, and he squeezed her shoulders to keep her from edging back.

  “There’s no reason for defensiveness. You are as capable a warrior as you have ever been, ready and willing to take on the world.”

  “I haven’t changed, but it’s nice to know that I can let down my guard sometimes.” She understood what he meant. It was exhausting being a hard ass all the time.

  She felt him nod. “I only wish that Mylena were the kind of place that would allow you to be as free as you are here,” he said.

  “There are limitations here, too. Different ones, but no less significant,” she said, thinking about the epic fail she was as a high school student, and how the idea of getting through it for the sole purpose of finding a job in a sterile, concrete building so that she could buy her own square box in a neighborhood with other square boxes that were almost exactly the same made her want to tear her hair out.

  If she hadn’t been through the portal to Mylena and embarked on a completely opposite path, she might never have thought of it that way, but now…

  “Assuming we’re right about how this portal thing works and we make it back, this time it’s my decision to go and I know what I’m getting into. There’s freedom in having the choice…and even more freedom in having you at my side. Together we’ll make Mylena what we want it to be.”

  “If we defeat Agramon.” She heard the uncertainty and worry in his voice.

  She was just as worried about how things were going to shake out when they stepped through the portal. There was freedom for him in this world, too. Here, he didn’t have to struggle against the pull of the moons or take responsibility for a whole species of people.

  Would he go Lost again when they returned to Mylena? He’d said that it couldn’t happen, but there was no way he could be sure. Bringing him back from the moons once didn’t mean he was immune. And what if she couldn’t do it again? What if he was right and the entire world went Lost? What if she failed to kill Agramon, or the faeries used their magick against them?

  And all of this was assuming the portal would open. She was putting a lot of faith in her hunch that it would, but what if it didn’t?

  She squeezed her eyes shut and told herself to stop. They were having a moment here, and she wanted it to last. What ifs would consume them and leave them both frozen with fear and uncertainty. That was the one way to fail even before they got started.

  “We’ll handle what comes,” she whispered. “And when we win this war, there’ll be room for softness again.”

  He tipped her head up and kissed her. The taste of him was electric. “And what about right now?” he murmured.

  Her breathing hitched. She lifted her hand between them and found his jaw, then smoothed her fingers over his sharp cheekbone and up the bridge of his nose to the creases in his forehead.

  She took her time, using touch to see in the dark. When she reached his mouth, she dragged her thumb across his bottom lip to test its fullness. He stayed very still, but she sensed his restlessness growing. When she started to drop her hand he grabbed it and brought her fingers back to his mouth, giving the pad of her thumb a gentle nip with teeth that were sharper than any human’s but had never left so much as a scratch on her.

  She leaned in and kissed him, letting the sweetness of the moment expand into another, and then another.

  Sweetness became heat and urgency as they fumbled with each other’s clothing, and when that moment became a desperate explosion of sensation that turned the darkness into a fireworks display behind her eyelids, she held onto Isaac as tightly as she could and prayed for the Great Mother to watch over them.

  After a while, Isaac relaxed with his arms around her, and the measured pattern of his breathing slowed into sleep. She knew he hadn’t been sleeping well; she sat up beside him with her knees drawn up to her chest to keep watch so that he could rest.

  Later, he stirred and reached for her, and she let him pull her back down. She tried to tell herself to stay awake but must have dozed a little, because when she awoke, the sky was starting to lighten. The sun peeked over the horizon, bathing the world in a glowing beauty that took her breath away.

  “Maybe this world does have magick in it after all,” Isaac said, echoing her thoughts almost exactly as they walked hand-in-hand back down the narrow, deserted road to where the car was parked.

  She reluctantly peeked through the windows. Wyatt and Siona were sprawled out in the backseat with their arms around each other. Siona’s eyes opened, and she nodded to let Greta know that she understood it was time to go.

  “Do you think we should hide the car before we start hiking?” she asked about twenty minutes later, after she and Isaac had returned from a scouting mission and determined that they were actually really close to the cavern where they’d left all their stuff. “We could push it off the road and cover it in branches.”

  Wyatt tucked the car keys under the visor of the driver’s seat. He shook his head as he handed out energy bars and bottled water from a backpack. He’d also brought rope, flares, and winter coats. Thank goodness someone had planned ahead.

  “If something happens to me, I want it to be easy for the police to find the car. My parents need it,” he said.

  “Nothing’s going to happen to you, because you’re not staying,” she said firmly. He shrugged and looked away. “Wyatt? Did you hear me?”

  He gazed pointedly at Siona. “Yeah, but I’m not going anywhere just yet.” Part of her wanted to argue with him, but it wouldn’t do any good, and she understood why he needed to help.

  There was nothing left to do but get moving.

  Chapter Fourteen

  They returned to the “Cave of Arrival” and retrieved their weapons. The sword felt good in her hands, and she was confident enough to acknowledge the reason why. Her time back in the human world had taught her a lot about who she was…and who she wasn’t.

  Greta would never be a perfect daughter or a star pupil, but her true destiny was equally as important, and telling her parents about it had helped her to realize that she was no longer afraid of it. No longer ashamed of it.

  Wyatt and Siona slipped into the cave together, and Greta stepped away for some time alone, too. It was close now. That feeling was getting stronger, so strong that all she had to do was close her eyes to see Agramon’s sick, eager grin. He was there. He was waiting, just like her.

  No more doubts. The portal would open. It would open for her, because he was coming for her.

  She chose the spot. A clearing near the cave that was open enough to give them room to move, but surrounded by forest to keep the fight contained—if it came to that, but she didn’t think Agramon could come through, not until he’d physically gotten his hands on her.

  They just had to make sure that didn’t happen.

  She spent three hours practicing with her sword until she was sweaty and achy. “Come at me,” she called to Isaac when he found her in the clearing.

  He raised a brow and gave her blade a pointed look.

  “I won’t cut you.” The grin twisting her lips felt almost as good as the sword in her hand.

  He moved so fast. She’d barely registered the change in his position before he was right in front of her, forcing her to go on the defensive.

  “You could at least pretend to be rusty,” she groused. He lunge
d again without warning. She blocked.

  Nope. No worries about cutting the goblin king, because he was already shifting to attack from another vantage point before her sword could make contact.

  He seemed to be in a dozen different places at once, effortlessly. She was pulling her punches to a certain extent because she couldn’t afford to let her sword slip, but he was still absolutely amazing.

  When she called for a breather, she told him so. “I’ve never seen you fight like that. You have so much power and control.”

  “A benefit of the lack of magick in this world, but once I return to Mylena, maintaining that control will be at the cost of power and speed.”

  Her eyebrows drew together.

  “Don’t worry about me, my tough bounty hunter,” he said with a determined smile. “I will have more than enough strength and control to do what is necessary to save our people.”

  Our people. Isaac would never jeopardize her or the people of Mylena. When the time for battle came, if he felt like he was getting too close to the edge, then he would warn her. He would not go Lost again. She had to trust him on that.

  She tossed her sword end over end until it landed point in the ground near the edge of the clearing. “Come at me again.” She assumed a ready stance.

  His eyes gleamed as he moved in. Without her weapon she didn’t have to hold back, and they fought until she had a scrape on her cheek, he had one on his arm, and both of them were breathing heavily. She didn’t know what time it was, but the sun had gotten much lower in the sky. She threw him over her shoulder one last time.

  He grunted as he landed flat on his back. “Impressive,” he said with a groan.

  Her body hummed with adrenaline, and she couldn’t stop grinning. She held out her hand to help him up. “It’s all about balance and transfer of energy,” she said smugly.

  He snatched her arm and tugged her down on top of him. “No fair,” she said, landing across him with a grunt that managed to be a laugh at the same time.