by M. Leighton
When we surfaced, Jackson didn’t release me right away. We simply drifted in the gently stirring water, facing one another, his arm draped loosely around my waist.
In the sunlight, his eyes were the clear, pale blue of a cloudless sky and they were focused sharply on mine. It was as if he was searching for something, but I had no idea what. I only knew that they made me feel both weak and strong at the same time. They made me feel confused, yet never more certain; fragile, yet more capable than I’d ever been. He gave me butterflies, yet there was something about him that was more comfortable than my favorite pair of pajamas.
In the midst of all that emotional turmoil, my lips began to tingle, crying out in want of a kiss that I’d felt only once before. As if he could hear them, Jackson’s gaze flickered down to them and then quickly back up to my face.
“Come on. We’d better get back to shore.”
I nodded and we both struck out across the water, swimming in a slow, rhythmic freestyle toward the beach. Jackson tempered his strength to maintain a speed that didn’t push me. He stayed right by my side, never once pulling out in front of me, although we both knew he could easily have left me behind if he so chose.
We moved in unison, our strokes such a smooth mirror-image of one another, our swim felt like a choreographed dance.
When the water had grown nearly shallow enough for us to touch bottom, Jackson slowed.
“I’ll be back,” he said just before he shot out to my left, swimming parallel to the shoreline, away from me.
He didn’t even give me time to answer, much less to ask a question, so I just watched him swim until he ducked beneath the water and didn’t resurface.
I felt the tingle of my scales receding and then my legs separated, no longer joined by the thin webbing. I stretched until my feet touched sand and I walked out of the surf, my dripping uniform hanging heavily from my shoulders.
Aidan and Jersey approached me.
“That was freaking awesome!” Jersey exclaimed excitedly.
Aidan was smiling as well.
“I have to admit that was pretty cool, James.”
“Eh,” I said, waving them off casually as my cheeks stung with the blush of their praise. “Nothing to it.”
“Yeah, right,” Jersey said, rolling her eyes. “I’ve never seen anything like that!”
I just shrugged, for some reason bothered by her statement. She didn’t give me much time to ponder it, though.
Bling, bling, I heard.
Jersey grinned widely and Aidan shook his head in exasperation.
“What was that?”
Bling, bling, I heard again.
Jersey held up her hand, where she gripped a bicycle bell that some unfortunate kid had apparently lost on the beach.
“Isn’t it cool?”
“It’s a toy, Jersey,” I said wryly. “From a bike.”
“I know,” she admitted, no less excited. “Isn’t it awesome?”
Bling, bling.
I rolled my eyes. I could see where this was going. She was going to ring that bell, day and night, until I would be forced to either steal it and hide it away or ram it down her throat until she choked to death on it. Otherwise, I’d go slowly insane.
I was happy to see Kellina step forward just then.
“So, it’s all true?”
I nodded.
“It’s all true.”
“So what does that mean for me?”
I could tell by the frightened, bewildered look in her eyes that the full weight of what I’d told her had settled like an unwanted, leaden mantle across her shoulders.
“Well, now that you know, you can help us to find the Wolfhardt descendent before…well, soon,” I said, not wanting to scare her any more than she already was.
“But how? How can I help? I don’t know anything about…anything.”
“You’ll be more help than you know. Like telling me about the flowers this morning. That was huge. Huge! Information like that could blow this thing wide open.”
“So, what do I need to do then?” she asked nervously.
“Live your life, just like you have been,” a low silky voice suggested from behind me. A ripple of pleasure made its way between my shoulder blades and down my back. “We’ll be watching you very closely in the meantime.”
While I was having a very physical reaction to Jackson, Kellina was still digesting.
“Watching me? Who will be watching?”
“Sentinels.”
“What are Sentinels?”
“They’re sort of like soldiers. Mer soldiers. I have several assigned to you.”
“Already? You’ve got people watching me already?”
“Yes.”
I could tell that Kellina wanted to put up a bit of a fuss, but she thought better of it. Wise girl.
Kellina looked casually behind her and then asked, “Where are they?”
“They’re around.”
“I didn’t even know.”
Jackson’s lips pulled up at the corners in the hint of a grin. He was proud of his stealthy band of not-so-merry Mer.
“And you won’t.”
Kellina’s brow wrinkled a tiny bit, but she said nothing else. No one liked being watched, especially when they couldn’t see who was doing the watching.
At Jackson’s urging, we made our way back through town toward campus. Jackson, Jersey, and I went one way, leaving Aidan and Kellina to say their goodbyes and make plans to meet later.
In our room, Jersey chattered about her bell and the duck. Her rhetorical musings allowed my mind to wander off, toward thoughts of Jackson, as usual.
I wanted to thank him for saving me, for risking his safety for mine, but I knew what he’d say. He would assure me that it was his job—nothing more, nothing less—and that would make me feel…depressed. Disgruntled. So, I kept my gratitude to myself, along with all the other myriad Jackson-related feelings that secretly tortured me.
“Madly!”
Jersey was calling my name, quite loudly I might add.
“What?”
“Were you even listening to me?”
“Sorry, I must have missed that last part. What were you saying?”
“Coffee. Berlin and Aken. You’re still going, right?”
Crap! I’d forgotten all about our agreement to meet for coffee today.
“Of course.”
“Well, since you took a swim, don’t you think you need a shower before we go?”
As I looked down at my still-damp clothes, stringy strands of blonde hair fell forward as if to illustrate Jersey’s point.
“I suppose I do. What time did you say we’re supposed to meet?”
Jersey’s lips thinned as her frustration increased. She punctuated each word with an angry ring of her bell.
“I. Told. You. Six. O. Clock.” Bling. Bling. Bling. Bling. Bling. Bling.
“Am I going to have to take that bell and beat you to death in your sleep with it?” I forced through gritted teeth.
Jersey pulled the bell back out of my reach.
“Don’t you touch my bell.”
“Ring it again and I’m chewing off a finger.”
She humphed and turned toward the closet, flipping idly through clothes, the bell clasped securely but silently in her hand.
“You should wear this,” she said, pulling out a deep blue-green tank with sequins at the top. “It brings out the aqua in your eyes.”
“We’re going to the coffee shop, not the red carpet.”
Jersey made a face at me.
“Grumpy,” she said under her breath as she turned back to the closet. “Go shower. I’ll find you something else.”
Biting my tongue, I grabbed the necessities and headed for the shower. I silently fussed about Jersey as I deposited my things on the bench in the bathroom and turned on the water.
My irritation with her didn’t last long, though. The instant I stepped beneath the warm spray of the shower, I felt my ire melt away as if it had never b
een.
I was lathering my hair when I felt a shift in the air around me. It was like a subtle cooling of the ambient temperature.
Cautiously, uneasily, I parted the shower curtain and looked around the bathroom. It was still as empty as it had been when I’d arrived only a few minutes before.
I closed the curtain and turned back toward the spray. That’s when I felt something cold climbing up my legs.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Like thick tendrils of black smoke rising from the shower drain, the Seer seeped into the stall. I watched, mute and immobile, as his dark, diaphanous body filled the tiny cubicle.
I looked up into the empty holes where eyes should have been just as it wrapped its barely-there fingers around my wrists and started to pull.
My heart pounded so erratically inside me I felt it against my spine, as if at any moment it might burst through my back and land on the wet shower floor. Despite my fear, however, I was helpless to stop it when the Seer dragged me down, down, down as we followed the water into the drain.
I felt something inside me separate as if the part of me that made me me was being ripped away from my body. I looked back and I could see me standing beneath the spray of water, still and quiet, like a very realistic, life-like mannequin.
And then I saw nothing. I felt the dips and sways of travel, but my eyes could not perceive anything but blackness.
Then we burst through…something, and the Seer was pulling me through the sky high above the waves of the ocean. Night had fallen now and it was raining. We drifted through the precipitation as if we were part of it, as if we were gliding from one fat drop to the next, making our way through the world.
I looked down and saw land come into view. We were flying across Slumber. I recognized Atlas Drive, the main road that traveled parallel to the shore. I could see the group of buildings where Transport was located, and the Town Square with its perfectly manicured rectangles of grass. I saw the quad in the center of campus as we zipped over it. And then I saw tree tops come into view and knew we were nearing the forest.
We slowed as we reached the trees, gradually descending until we passed through the canopy of leaves and hovered just above the ground, drifting in the heavy mist.
I looked at the Seer, who raised one ghostly arm and pointed out into the forest. My eyes followed his long finger.
At first, I saw nothing more than what I would expect to see in the forest at night. But then, as I watched the occasional raindrop disappear into the wet leaves, I saw something move.
I focused sharply on the spot and nearly missed the ethereal shape as it climbed around the side of a tree and stopped, clinging to the bark just below a thick, twisted branch.
He was so wispy, so nearly-transparent, I could barely make out the features of the creature. He was small, not much bigger than a raccoon, and he was barrel shaped. His spindly arms were warped and knobby like the tree branches above his head. His face was deeply wrinkled and boasted a sharply hooked nose and two glowing yellow eyes that stared at me through the fog.
Impaling me with his eerie orbs, the creature opened up his tiny mouth and made a hissing sound that caused my skin to crawl. With the noise, I saw movement erupt all around me, teasing my peripheral vision. I looked left then right and upon every tree that I could see was another of the creatures, watching me with those gleaming yellow eyes.
“What are they?” I whispered.
I wasn’t really expecting an answer, considering the company I was keeping. But one came nonetheless. It was neither verbal nor physical; it was more implied, as if something impressed the knowledge upon me, planted it somehow. It simply appeared in my brain that these were the dark spirits of the trees. I wondered if that was the Seer answering my question.
A silvery brightness broke through the treetops and drew my attention upward. The wind had parted the foliage and, through the break, I could see the perfect circle of a full moon.
I was just admiring the beauty of it when a crashing sound brought my eyes back to the ground. All the scary faces of the tree spirits were turned in one direction, a direction that was straight ahead, in front of me. So, with a little niggle of apprehension gnawing at me, I too watched the dark forest. I wasn’t absolutely certain that I wanted to know what could catch and hold their attention so completely.
I heard the sound again, just before I saw a black shape weaving between the trees, making its way toward the space where the Seer and I hovered.
My pulse pounded in my ears as I watched it draw nearer. In the darkness, I could see the mirrored flash of the moon reflected in its eyes as it looked around the forest like a predator searching for prey.
As it padded silently over the dappled forest floor, it passed through beams of moonlight that glittered in the pelt of a fur-covered spine.
When it was nearly upon me, I held my breath, afraid that it might hear me breathe, but it passed by as if it had no idea that I drifted in the air so close. I saw the lengthy nose of a muzzle and the long, pointed ears of a wolf as the creature walked in front of me. It was walking on all fours, but I could see by its form that it could easily stand up and walk upright.
In my heart, I knew that this was no dog, no wolf, no typical wild creature. This was the Wolfhardt descendant and I was watching him stalk the woods.
As I saw the thick tail swish by, I thought that I’d like to follow him, see where he goes. And just like that, I was moving along easily behind the creature.
He took a circuitous route through the woods, keeping his nose to the ground most of the way. It was when the trees began to thin that I recognized where we were, where the wolf was going.
Kellina’s. He was going to Kellina’s house.
I gasped just as a light flicked on in one of the upper rooms of the graceful old house that loomed in the clearing. A shape passed in front of the window and the wolf growled. It was a low, deep, menacing sound.
He watched the window unblinkingly. He growled a second time and I heard hissing break out all around me in response to it. I looked and saw that the tree spirits were watching. Their yellow eyes were trained on one thing, but it wasn’t the house. They were watching the creature.
The wolf quieted suddenly and I looked back to him. He crouched low, as if readying himself to spring into action. I glanced back at the house.
A shape was standing in front of the window. It lowered, as if sitting down, and then the light died.
With no other warning, the wolf sprang into motion, leaping from the cover of the trees and running full speed toward the house.
A scream bubbled up in my throat. I wanted to warn Kellina, but the hold of the Seer had me paralyzed and mute.
As the wolf circled around to the back of the house, my heart sped up, thrumming heavily against my ribs, almost painfully. Before I could think of a way to free myself and run to help Kellina, however, the Seer started pulling me backward, back into the deeper parts of the forest from which we’d come.
Every silent, motionless fiber of my being strained to go back to Kellina, but the Seer was relentless in his control. Back, back, back we went until we were once again ascending into the sky and retracing our journey, returning to the ocean.
Just as it had before, the world went black but for the feeling of movement, and then I was back in my shower stall, the warm water coursing over decidedly chilly skin.
I looked at my feet and saw the Seer disappear into the drain, his hollow eyes the last thing to go. His absence left the stall warm and steamy, as if something cold and dark had never come to take me away.
Shaken, I looked around, parting the curtain once more to look out into the bathroom. There was a small, frosted window toward the ceiling that let in minimal amounts of natural light. Through it, I could see the orangey glow of a fading sun.
Disoriented and confused, I thought of the rainy, nighttime scenery of my trip through the town. Then, just as the knowledge of the tree spirits had become apparent to me in the woods, no
w came the certainty that the Seer had let me glimpse what was to come. He’d shown me something priceless—something I could use to help Kellina, something I could use to prevent the attack, to change the outcome. He’d shown me the future.
Finishing up my extended shower, I toweled off and dressed hurriedly to make my way quickly back to our room. When I burst through the door, I saw that it was empty. Jersey was gone. She’d left me a note, though. It was short, but the words painted a picture that was crystal clear to me.
Nice, Madly. Very nice.
I looked at the clock. Nearly an hour had elapsed since I’d gone to get in the shower. Jersey must’ve thought I was just avoiding her, avoiding our double date.
With a sigh, I sat on the edge of the bed. I wondered if she’d come into the bathroom looking for me. What had she seen or heard? Or, worse yet, what had she not heard? Had she spoken to me and my lifeless body simply ignored her?
Pushing the thoughts aside, I reminded myself that I had more important things to worry about right now than Jersey’s hurt feelings. I had to tell Jackson so we could figure out a way to save Kellina, capture Wolfhardt and get Jackson into Atlas.
As I piled my wet hair atop my head and inserted clips to hold it in place, I thought how perverse it was that only the last part of that plan made my stomach knot with dread. It seemed that I wasn’t nearly as fearful of catching a killer as I was of letting Jackson sneak into Atlas and fight a small war all by himself.
When I surveyed my reflection in the mirror—my stylishly messy up-do, my low-riding jeans, my cap-sleeved Wild Cat t-shirt—I found that I was presentable enough to go get Jackson. My face was scrubbed clean of makeup, but he’d seen my almond-shaped aqua eyes mascara-free before, so…
Rather than bursting in as I’d done on more than one occasion, I knocked on the adjoining door and waited for Jackson’s reply. When none came, I knocked again.
This time, I could hear low voices, one of which was feminine and vaguely familiar. It was followed by the opening and closing of a door. A few seconds later, Jackson opened the adjoining door.
His dreamy blue eyes skimmed me from the crown of my head to my hiking boot-shod feet, quickly making their way back to my face. I felt tingly everywhere his eyes touched.
