by Sarah Jaune
“That’s a brilliant idea,” Pablo laughed. “Come on, let’s get painted up.”
It was weird wiping mud over Ivy’s features until only her green eyes shone around the dark streaks. For whatever reason, Eli couldn’t pull his gaze away. He grinned.
“It’s a good look for me, right?” Ivy said with a small smile.
“We’re ready,” Pablo said quietly to the Bigfoot.
Yung grunted and pointed to the door, then smashed his closed fist into his hand. He pointed to Eli.
“I think he wants you to magically break the door down,” Oliver said thoughtfully.
Yung nodded and pointed again. He crouched down, almost in a sprinters position and waited.
“I do not like this,” Eli admitted as he stood and moved to get a clear line of sight of the door.
“It’s not your call,” Pablo reminded him. “On three. One, two, three!”
Eli threw his hand out and the door of the cabin flew inwards, splintering off its hinges as Yung ran forward with a bellow of rage towards the cabin.
Three massive blasts sounded from inside the cabin, and Yung stumbled to a halt before falling to his knees.
“No!” Eli screamed as he ran for the cabin, and in less than a second he was inside and tackling the man with the gun. The weapon flew from his hand and hit the wall while Eli punched him hard, knocking him unconscious in a single blow. He sensed, more than saw, the men behind him, but he didn’t even turn as he threw them back against the walls with his magic. Eli rose slowly and turned to them. He didn’t see the terror on their faces, or see anything else about them. All he saw were seven men who had shot a Bigfoot.
Rage, red, hot, and raw flooded his vision as he raised his hands, sending them higher up the wall.
“No!” Ivy skidded into the cabin and ran up to him. She grabbed his face and made him stare at her. “Drop them. You’ve made your point, and we have to get out of here.”
For a terrifying moment he shook with anger so violent that Eli wasn’t sure he would be able to stop. Then Ivy put her hands on his arms and gently pushed them down. The men didn’t drop immediately. He didn’t need his hands to make the magic work, but he let out a sigh and let go.
“Hear me, now,” Ivy said as she turned to them. “This forest belongs to the Sasquatch and to the other creatures. If any human comes back out here and tries to mess with the forests, they will be destroyed. It will be nothing to us if you are dead and gone. Am I understood?” She sounded so fierce, so commanding, Eli was left speechless and in awe.
One man struggled to rise, but Eli flicked his fingers and knocked him back to the ground. “We aren’t playing around with this. We’ve undone everything that the Overseer has done to destroy this land. If he comes back in here, we will destroy him, same for the rest of you. There will be no mercy. You will stay out of these woods or risk the penalty.”
He didn’t mean it. Eli was lying through his teeth, but it was a good enough lie that he saw they believed him.
“You will wait here for ten minutes, then you will leave and go back to Portland,” Ivy ordered them through clenched teeth.
Ivy moved from the cabin and quickly over to the fallen Bigfoot, but Eli knew immediately that it was too late. Pak made to lift Yung, but Eli stepped in. “Please let me.”
Pak, who didn’t appear steady, nodded with a grunt of what Eli thought just might be thanks.
Eli raised his hands and the fallen Bigfoot floated into the air. He directed him forward as the group set off in silent grief.
They walked for most of the night. They weren’t in a rush, and to Eli, it felt like a walking trance that kept them putting one foot in front of the other. After her outburst in the cabin, Ivy didn’t say anything. None of them did.
He didn’t even know where Pak was leading them to until they came upon a cleared field in the middle of the forest that Eli would have never guessed was there.
In neat rows, and evenly spaced columns, were stones set at the heads of small mounds of earth. Some were covered in grass, but as they continued on down the field, Eli saw several that were merely dirt with only a few sprigs of life blooming through the soil. They were spaced at fifteen foot intervals lengthwise and about ten feet apart. Eli gently set Yung down just as the sun rose on another day and rays of tauntingly cheerful light began to peak above the trees in the distance.
The Sasquatch moved as one to begin to dig a hole at the end of one row where no stone was placed. Eli made to step forward, to help them as they dug by hand and with sticks, but Pablo stopped him.
“This is for them,” he told his son. “Let them have this moment. They have traditions.”
Eli, Oliver, Pablo, and Ivy stood as silent sentinels at the edge of the clearing. Eli bit down hard on his cheek when the Bigfoot began a wailing, calling chants when they lowered the body into the ground. Ivy leaned into him, and he put an arm around her as they called out in melodic, hauntingly beautiful melodies as the earth was gently lowered into the hole.
Ivy turned more fully into him and clutched at his tattered shirt while she buried her face into his shoulder. He felt some of the scraps of mud from her forehead that hadn’t yet fallen off. It felt real, raw, and alive, but he knew she wasn’t crying. Ivy didn’t cry, and maybe this was how she held the tears back now because Eli knew that all he wanted to do was break down sobbing.
Oliver sniffed suspiciously, but Eli didn’t glance his way. It wasn’t the time for that.
When they were finished, when Yung was interred in the ground, they began again. Pak led them again, on through the forests until they reached a river. Eli didn’t know which river it was, and he was, frankly, too exhausted to care.
Ivy called fish from the water, and they ate as soon as it was cooked, then without comment, all of them dropped off to sleep.
It might have been twenty-four hours before Eli awoke again, but he rather thought it was a mere two or three. The food and the little bit of sleep were enough for them to continue their march back to the Sasquatch encampment. They were victorious. They had done what they’d set out to do, but it was hollow in the face of their loss.
There was a mother whose son would not return.
They didn’t make it back to the rest of the Bigfoot group until the next day. They walked through the night, again, no doubt fueled by their grief and remorse.
The sound Yung’s mother made was a sound that Eli would never forget.
He sat with Ivy and his family by the fire as they cried out and grieved around them. He felt like an intruder, and an unwelcome reminder of why things had gone so wrong.
Pak spoke to the pods during the evening meal. He told the story of what they had done in a language that Eli didn’t understand, but with signs that kept them aware of where he was in the tale. Finally, at the end Pak told of the cabin, and Yung’s bravery as he stormed towards the cabin.
Eli wished, again, that he’d gone in first. He wished that they’d allowed him to take point. Not one of the men they’d threatened had been magical. They had no real defenses except that stupid gun; the gun that had ended Yung’s life.
He heard singing and glanced around to see the group in chanting, the same as the others had done by the grave. Even the younglings sang along, out of tune and not in time, but they moved with their people in a show of mourning.
They went to sleep morose and downcast.
When the sun rose the next day, the pods began the work of tearing down their encampment.
“I think they’re going back to their own territories in the forest,” Pablo explained as they gathered up the supplies that the Sasquatch had given them for the journey home. “They will do better when they aren’t bunched up.”
“How do they know that the people are really gone?” Oliver wondered.
“They’ll know,” Pablo replied cryptically. “But it smells like they are. I can’t detect another human for at least twenty miles to the west.”
Pak sent them off with g
ravity and thanks. He didn’t say as much, but he held a hand out to Ivy to shake in a gesture that was not normal to the Bigfoot, then he did the same for Eli, Oliver, and finally Pablo.
“If you need us again,” Pablo promised earnestly, “we will come at once. Just come find us.”
Pak grumbled out a reply, and they set off with heavy hearts on exhausted feet.
They didn’t speak for at least twenty minutes after they started their homeward journey south.
“How many days will it take us to get home?” Oliver asked their dad.
“Five,” Pablo replied evenly. “Maybe six. It smells like a storm is coming, so we might be holed up for a day, but I know of a cave where we can hide.”
Eli glanced at Ivy, but she seemed completely lost in herself as she focused on the ground at her feet. If she sensed the rain, she didn’t say anything. She hadn’t said much of anything for the last day.
They found the cave by nightfall, and Eli made the fire while Pablo hunted up a couple of rabbits for them to eat. The cave was small by Sasquatch standards, but would work well for them. Best of all, the opening was small and blocked most of the elements from blowing in. The storm that Pablo had smelled rolled through at around midnight. There wasn’t any lightning this time, only winds that gusted so loudly it sounded like a line of trucks driving by. The rain drove in torrents through the forest around them, soaking the world in much needed water.
It woke Eli from his fitful sleep, and he rolled over to see if Ivy was awake, but she slept on, curled almost completely in a ball with her head pillowed on her arm. The fire still burned in the middle of the cave, keeping the space warm and dry. It was the best they could have hoped for in the circumstances, but it didn’t help his guilty conscience any.
They stayed put the next day as rain continued to lash the countryside around them. They ate from their provisions, and talked little as they watched the trees whip around, and leaves fly through the air.
“We did the best we could,” Pablo said as night began to fall again. They had nearly run out of wood, but Pablo had retrieved more from the forest, and Ivy had forced the water from it so they could continue to keep the fire going.
The cheerful fire didn’t help Eli’s mood at all. “It doesn’t feel like we did enough. I wouldn’t have died if I’d gone in first.”
“You don’t know that,” his dad said wearily. “You have no idea what would have happened, Elijah. You aren’t perfect, you make mistakes, and you can’t fight every fight on your own.”
“I didn’t say I—” Eli fired up, only to be cut off by Ivy.
“Don’t diminish Yung’s sacrifice,” Ivy said at barely above a whisper. “He died for us. Don’t take that away from him.”
Stung, Eli shrunk back against the wall of the cave until his back hit the cool rock. “I’m not, I didn’t—”
“It’s not all on you, anyway,” Oliver agreed evenly. He gave Eli a sad grin. “You could have gone in for him, sure, but their alpha said no. So, it’s more Pak’s fault than yours, or we could say it’s the guy who had the gun’s fault, too. But I think it’s also the Overseer’s fault since he was the one who started this whole mess, but it’s over now. We can’t change what happened; we just have to live with it.”
“Have you been replaced by a shape shifter?” Eli asked his brother in amazement.
Oliver shrugged as poked at the fire with a stick. “Aren’t you always telling me I’m a jerk? Maybe I’m sick of it.”
“The point is,” Pablo interrupted before Eli could reply. “Yung did what he felt called to do. Right or wrong, it happened. I’m sad over what happened. I wish we could change it, but we can’t. The most important part is we’ve set right what was broken. Anything else has to wait.”
“Are we going to have to move out of Portland?” Oliver questioned.
Eli jumped in alarm. “No! We can’t move!”
“We might have to,” Pablo said quietly, “but I don’t think we need to. They don’t know who did it. They don’t know that there are magical kids here in the zone. Ivy didn’t show her powers, so they can’t link it to her. I mean,” he hesitated, “he might eventually realize she had to be part of rerouting the rivers, but we could have done that with more manpower and large blasting equipment.”
“I don’t want to move,” Eli protested as he stole a glance to Ivy.
Ivy finally raised her eyes to his and he saw the sorrow there. “That might be out of your control, but we have to see what my father does. If he follows true to form, it will likely be nothing, but we’ll see. I doubt he’s ever lost a major project like this.”
CHAPTER 28
THE ROAD HOME
“You can come with us if we go,” Eli said after a minute, then he glared at his dad, unwilling to negotiate on that. “Ivy and I are a team.”
Pablo’s smile held understanding and something else that Eli couldn’t define. “I would never ask you to go without her, Eli. It won’t ever come to that.”
Oliver shook his head and said, in disbelief as he stared at their dad. “Really? That’s all you have to say about that?”
Pablo shook his head as he grinned at Oliver. “What’s the point in saying more?”
Confused, Eli glanced between them as Oliver opened his mouth to retort, then shut it again. “Forget it,” Oliver muttered.
They left the cave the next morning to the smell of damp earth, a bright blue sky, and the world around them greener than it had been in days.
“You did well,” Pablo said to Eli as they continued their journey home. “I know it doesn’t feel like it, but you did a heck of a lot in the last several weeks.”
Eli thought about his baby siblings who were now, hopefully, settled in with Cole and his wife. He hoped that Becca and Jonas were doing well. “My sister, Becca, she didn’t talk much.”
Pablo pointed to Oliver. “Neither did he, and now he won’t shut up half the time.”
“Hey!” Oliver glared at him in mock indignation.
“My point is that things can get better, Eli,” Pablo reminded him. “You’re living proof of that.”
He remembered that moment in the cabin, when he’d been so angry that he’d nearly done something stupid. If Ivy hadn’t stepped in, he might have. “I’m not perfect, like you said. At least I remember it when I lose my temper now.”
“It’s because the memory of losing it is no longer so damaging that you have to block it out,” Pablo explained as they hopped over a low stream of what looked to be runoff rainwater. “It used to be that that sort of thing was devastating to you. Now you see it as a mistake that you can learn from.”
“It’s not a reflection of who I am as a person, more that I am a person who makes mistakes,” Eli summed up as he felt some of his guilt lessen.
“Exactly.”
The next two days were completely uneventful. They saw a few animals, skirted several more sinkholes, and became thoroughly sick of eating fish.
“If I never eat another fish again it will not make me sad,” Ivy sighed when they were about two days out from Redmond.
They were filthy, all of them. Ivy’s hair wasn’t even blonde anymore, but a weird dirty brown. Eli couldn’t see his face, but what he saw of his arms told him that instead of his normal olive complexion, he was closer to true brown. Ivy had told him just that morning that his darker skin made his pale eyes even more startling.
Unbelievably, most of Oliver’s acne was gone. He was left with one lone zit hiding under the layer of grime.
They were eating regularly, but all of them had lost weight. He almost wished the white wolf would show up again and give them a ride back home, but it never came. What Eli found most disconcerting, was that Ivy didn’t seem to notice or care about anything. She wasn’t reclusive, but neither did she join in with them much when they talked. She helped, she walked, she said a few things, but otherwise she kept to herself.
It was weird and left Eli feeling like he was off balance. They’d co
me to a kind of understanding when they had been with the Sasquatch, but now it seemed like there was a wall between them, and he didn’t know how to get around it.
He thought about Naomi and how she’d hated to see him angry. Ivy had not only seen him lose it with the men at the cabin, but she’d been the one to stop him from doing something he’d deeply regret. If Eli had scared Ivy away like he’d done with his big sister, he had no idea how he’d live with it. But what he did know was that he had to know. He had to know what Ivy was thinking or he might go insane. If she wanted him to leave her alone, then he wanted to hear that straight from her.
