He sighed and returned to the letter.
I’ve contacted my father. If I don’t receive word from you… It’s been too long already. I’ll make sure he’s sending you directions or a map or something. And then please, please respond back as soon as possible. I’m worri We’re all very worried about you.
Hunter’s eyes lingered on the last line. He wanted to smile, because her wording, even crossed out, had been something he hoped for. But Finn’s sacrifice weighed too heavily to lift the corners of his mouth.
He unfolded the thick pages of the other letter and spread them over the giant leaf. There were three pages total. The first had writing on it. The second, a slightly more detailed map exactly like the one he already had—which was useless unless he could find the star that said “you are here,” which he didn’t see. The third was blank except for a small, empty circle in the middle.
Hunter,
I hear you’ve run into a bit of trouble.
“Yeah. A bit.”
I don’t know how far you are from Treddian, I only know which direction Tehya thought you were headed. But please consult the map you received yesterday in conjunction with the ones I have provided. I have based my directions upon that information.
Directions? From where? No one knew where he was.
They will be useful to you only after you activate the positioning beacon.
Rub dirt from where you are standing into the circle on the third page until the stain sets in. The page is infused with etâme. It will read out the land signature for you in the form of a topographical map.
Hunter laughed. “Awesome."
It will give you enough information to find your position and follow the directions. Do not delay. The message will have taken more time to reach you than normal. As of this writing, you are due to reach your checkpoint two days from the time you reached Treddian.
Great. He was already three days late.
And Hunter, I do apologize again about the change of plan. Harold decided it was best to split you up after all. He thinks it is safest for everyone involved. At least until they have had a chance to recover from the dagger's affects for a day or so. The others will meet you at Madame Veren's. Good luck. Be safe.
Bardoc
Hunter wasted no time. He scraped some dirt off the frozen ground and smeared it on the page. After a moment, the dirt began to bleed like ink in water, forming a picture of lines and shading. He didn't even have time to be amazed.
He compared the maps, searching for a common landmark. After a moment, he found one.
“Gorse,” he said. “We've got quite a ride ahead of us, Switch.” How had she gotten so far away from the path? Well, she was connected to the wind. Maybe she, quite literally, “rode like the wind.”
"At least you've had a color change, so we're a little bit disguised." He gathered his supplies and climbed onto her back. “Time to show me what you've got,” he said, giving her head a pat. “Let's see if we can make up lost time and keep Harold from killing us.”
Chapter 29
“Fvuetreous Leach!”
Ariana’s eyes snapped open. Sunlight invaded them instantly, forcing them shut as a heavy crash sounded over Killian’s cursing.
"Gorse it!" Another crash.
Ariana pushed herself off her pillow, tried her eyes again. She was on a bed, set below a large window. The sheer white curtains were drawn. She turned to Killian, on the other side of the little room, pacing at the foot of a rickety wooden bed.
He kicked the leg of a small chair tucked under an ailing wooden desk.
“Is this a normal greeting to consciousness in the Fyrennian Family, or are you just throwing a massive tantrum?”
Killian stopped pacing and dropped onto the edge of the perfectly-made bed behind him. He sat uncomfortably, shifting and squirming, and stared at her. But he didn’t answer.
She wanted to smack him. Or at least say something to make him talk. But her mind was sluggish. Best not to make his mood worse until she was able to deal with it.
She studied him for a moment, then looked down at herself. “What happened to us?” she asked. How long have we been in these clothes?
“We drained our energy,” Killian answered, picking at something on the knee of his pants and not meeting her eyes. “Got through the worst of it before we blacked out, but the Subble sustained heavy damage. We barely made it to the surface.”
Ariana pressed her thumbs against the bridge of her nose, forcing the dull throb of a headache away, making the room blur at the edges of her vision. “Where are we now? How’d we get here?”
“An inn in some half-abandoned port village on the western coast of... Deltorra, I think.” Killian stopped picking at his knee and scraped his stubby fingernails back and forth down the length of his thighs. “The Strattons unloaded us.”
He was acting so strange. “Where are the Strattons?”
Killian set his palms flat against the bed. “Helping with repairs,” he responded, his voice monotone.
Ariana dropped her hands from her face. Was that what his mood was about—not getting to help with repairs? “When did they leave?”
Killian’s leg bounced with impatience. “They were gone when I woke.”
Ariana frowned, eyeing the un-slept-in bed. “Then how’d you—”
He thrust a finger in the direction of the desk. A sheet of paper she hadn’t noticed lay on its surface.
They’d left a note.
“They didn’t say when they’d be back?”
“No.”
Ariana huffed, suddenly frayed by his attitude. “What is with you?”
He stood and glared at her, then resumed his pacing. “I need to talk to Harold,” he said, working his fingers into a knot.
The weakness left her, replaced by the buzz of blood racing through her veins, heating with her annoyance. “What’s so urgent that you’re kicking around furniture and acting like you got into a batch of Dragonfire?”
Killian slowed his pacing and eyed her, his expression calculating. He actually looked like he was considering telling her.
“It could be hours before Harold gets back,” she prompted.
His eyes didn’t waver from her face.
She held her breath, waiting.
His expression shifted and he finally spoke. “There’s nothing you can do.”
Ariana straightened, shrugging off her disappointment. “I’m not injured,” she said, lifting her arms and looking herself over. She flexed, then nodded at him.
Killian shook his head, his mouth narrowing into a grim frown. “You wouldn’t understand.”
Ariana planted her feet on the floor and stood, willing her legs to be stable. Her knees wobbled only for an instant. She locked them into place. “Try me,” she said, crossing her arms.
She waited.
He flicked his wrist so the pendant he kept tucked in his sleeve, its chain looped around his wrist, swung loose and dropped into his palm. His knuckles turned white as he squeezed it.
Ariana’s stomach turned with unease.
He sighed. His eyes met hers. The grey overpowered the brown, as chalky as dried mud. “Hunter has the Onyx Vial.”
“I already know that.”
“But he stopped following Harold’s directions.”
Her arms fell to her sides. Several questions crowded at the front of her mind. The most important being: whose directions was he following now? And, “How do you know that?”
He shook his head. “I told you. You won’t understand.”
“Not unless you tell me how you know where he is. Are you in contact with him?” He couldn’t be.
“Not exactly,” Killian answered.
Ariana stepped toward him. “What do you mean, not exactly?”
He leveled his gaze on her. “I mean I know where he is, but I can’t speak to him.”
“How? Are you tracking him?” The idea was absurd.
Killian sighed heavily. “No. I know where he is b
ecause I can see what he sees. But only when I'm asleep,” he admitted. “Or at least out of my conscious mind…” he added, half under his breath.
“That’s not possible.”
“It is. And it’s the same for him with me.”
Ariana didn’t trust herself to blink, certain the lie would show itself the instant she did.
“We’re identical twins, Ariana,” Killian insisted. “I didn’t believe it myself, at first. But Xalen…”
Xalen. Master Dae? What did Asrea’s father have to do with—Oh. Suddenly, she realized what she’d been missing when they readied to use the portal book. “Jace and Oren. They can do that, too.”
Killian nodded.
“That’s how they knew about Harold’s arrival in Bolengard. Oren was there at the entrance."
“Yes.”
“And Xalen told you about them. When?”
“The first time I met him,” Killian answered.
“Why did he have to tell you at all? Hadn’t you and Hunter figured that out a long time ago?”
Annoyance played over Killian’s face as he looked off toward the window. “Hunter still hasn't figured it out. And Xalen told me because I didn’t know Hunter existed.”
A humorless laugh escaped her. “You expect me to believe that?”
“No.” He turned to look at her again. “But that doesn’t mean I’m lying.”
Ariana bit her bottom lip to keep from retorting. He had to have known his identical twin existed. He had access to everything. Surely there was a file somewhere. It wasn’t like he was one of the rest of them—one of the millions of oppressed people scattered across the Nine Worlds.
"My father found out where he was hiding and tried to kill him," Killian admitted.
Ariana stayed silent, though this news shook her. Hunter was from Earth. A closed world. He couldn't have faked that because she'd seen the book. If he was hiding, that would have been the place to do it. Still, how had he gotten there without Killian never knowing he existed? And why would Falken want to kill him? "What does this mean for us now? Where's Hunter going?”
The pendant slipped from Killian’s palm to between his thumb and forefinger. The Fyrennian family crest glared at her from the skin of his wrist. “It means we need Harold. Hunter is on his own and he shouldn’t be. Following a map from a man named Bardoc to some Veren place.”
Ariana gasped. “Bardoc Edan?”
Killian shrugged. “Could be. I don’t know the last name.”
Disregarding her suspicions, Ariana took another step forward. “Was Hunter traveling with a girl?”
“Gorgeous? Hair the surface of Helede?"
Ariana nodded.
"Yes.”
Tension left her shoulders. “Then there’s nothing to worry about.”
“No?” He was skeptical.
“That's Tehya. She's my best friend. Bardoc is her father,” Ariana explained. “If Hunter is following a map Bardoc gave him, then it can’t be a bad thing.”
Killian shook his head. “Bardoc lied to him.”
“Lie? Bardoc?” She narrowed her eyes. “You’re mistaken.”
Killian stepped toward her. “You are mistaken,” he whispered. “That man used Harold’s name to lead my brother astray.”
Ariana bristled. She’d learned to deal with the fact that Killian was the arrogant son of the tyrant king. That she would have to work with him despite his murderous past. She’d dealt with his infuriatingly acute awareness of her thoughts. She’d restrained herself from saying and doing so many things she wanted to say and do to him. But accusing her best friend’s father of stooping to behaviors akin to a Huntsman was too much. She wouldn’t stand for that. “Did the Strattons leave a postal quill?”
He stared at her as if she was null. “You think if they had I’d be telling you any of this?”
Ariana pushed past him and headed for the door. The innkeeper would have one.
“Where are you going?”
“To prove you wrong,” she answered, swinging open the door and stepping into the hall.
"Wait."
Ariana halted. Something in Killian's voice had changed. She turned around. Killian wasn't looking at her. Instead, he was looking at a small black dragonfly with red wings hovering in the light of the window, its little body bearing the weight of a small tube of paper.
Her heart fluttered. "Is it for us?"
"Strattons probably," he answered. But he reached out a hand to the tiny beast anyway.
To their surprise, the dragonfly alighted on his palm and unloaded its burden.
Ariana came toward him as he stepped to the desk and laid the paper on it, quickly unrolling and flattening it. The dragonfly climbed up his arm and onto his shoulder as they put their heads together and read.
Harold Stratton | George Stratton
dc: Ariana Emory | Killian Fyrenn
Initial Contact Unresponsive. IS Main Contacted Directly: 2 Failed Checkpoints.
Action required.
M. VanDaren
"Initial contact. That was Bardoc," Killian said.
Ariana hated to admit it, but he was right. "Why would he be unresponsive?" she wondered instead.
"Does it matter?"
"Of course it matters," Ariana snapped. "He could be hurt."
"He could be on the run."
"But why?" she insisted. "What is his motive?"
Killian hissed a sigh, clearly frustrated. "Again. Does it matter? Either way, he's put my brother and myself in danger."
"In what way? It wasn't his idea to go off course."
"We don't know that. I didn't see what happened to make Hunter lost, I just know that he is."
Ariana glared at him. "Convenient, for your argument, then, isn't it?"
Killian didn't respond. He just stared at her, his expression one of zero amusement.
To see him this upset about Hunter's predicament... The wall she'd erected around her heart inched down. Perhaps he was telling the truth. "Alright. Let's ask him."
She stalked to her bag and removed her fountain pen and a sheaf of paper. "Give me the gorsed dragonfly," she said.
"Not Hunter," he said. "He doesn't know enough. It would be a waste of the dragonfly."
She sat back on her heels.
"Do you know anyone who might know where Bardoc is? Who the Shadows might not have thought to contact?"
Ariana thought of her mother. But it was unlikely she had seen anything Then she thought of William. "Possibly. If he hasn't left already, Tehya's brother should be at the house."
Killian nodded and lifted the dragonfly off his shoulder, offering it up. "That could work."
She smiled grimly and took the little creature. She didn't want to admit it, but she couldn't deny it; she was starting to trust him.
Chapter 30
Hunter reached the bend in the road and slid off Switch’s back, landing in a knee-high drift of snow. “Oh, great,” he muttered as the cold wet snuck into his boots.
He nudged the Mustang over, shuffling his feet until he broke free, sending a flurry of flakes over the muddy and trodden road. He pulled Master Edan’s map from his pocket and studied it once more.
“Okay, Switch. It looks like Madame Veren’s house is over that hill…”
He turned to face the direction the map indicated, and groaned. The road turned right. There was nothing to the left but a field covered in a pristine two-feet of snow. And that, of course, was the direction he was meant to go.
He eyed Switch’s back. The thought of mounting the horse again so soon after two days' hard ride turned the throbbing pain and soreness in his legs into something far more acute.
"Nearly there," he muttered, attempting to cheer himself on. But he wasn’t looking forward to trekking through a thigh-high field of snow. Especially on an empty stomach.
The still winter air churned a breeze. The snowflakes yet to pack together danced off the surface of the drifts and twirled in the air.
A thrum
erupted in his chest like the heartbeat of a hummingbird. Yet his own heart beat slow and steady.
He cracked a smile.
Switch loosed her power over wind and he could feel it working, though it wasn’t working with him like it had the other night. Now, it was as though he was tuned into a radio frequency, except that the waves of sound were swirls of etâme he felt rather than heard.
The breeze increased to a gale and its focus narrowed. Snow flew everywhere, forcing Hunter to cover his eyes. Several minutes later, the wind ceased and Hunter removed his hands. When he looked at what Switch had done, he laughed out loud.
A narrow channel cut through the snow—wide enough for Hunter and Switch to walk along.
“Thanks.” He sighed in relief and massaged out the worst of the aches in his thighs before stepping onto the windblown path. He walked as quickly as he could manage, his muscles screaming in protest. They crested the hill, passed through a stand of trees—the limbs weighed low with piles of glittering snow—and were met by the sharp corner of a hedge wall more than twice Switch’s height.
“What in the…”
The corner appeared to be the tip of a spade-like shape. The wall curved out and away on both sides before curving back and disappearing, only to reappear several hundred yards past the curve in a much flatter, abruptly ending plane.
Hunter wrestled the map free of his pocket and splayed it open. But this was where the directions stopped. He’d reached the star that marked Madame Veren’s house. His destination. But as he peered closer, the star looked more like a five-point leaf. Stem and all.
Either Bardoc was a terrible artist, or, “Is this part of it?”
He supposed there was nothing to do but follow along the hedge wall and hope there was a doorway or the house on the other side.
He moved close enough to the hedge that his hand touched the soft leaves, where the snow was only ankle-deep. He peered to the left, then to the right. But there was no indicator of which way he ought to go.
He stuffed the map back in his pocket and took a step to the right.
The Onyx Vial (Shadows of The Nine Book 1) Page 31
