“Yes, Petr, Gretel is fine. She’s on her way here.”
“There? Why?”
“It’s about her mother.”
Petr knew instantly that Anika Morgan was dead.
“She’s dead, Petr. She...well, you should come home too.”
“Okay,” Petr whispered, and then closed his eyes, squeezing in the tears that had begun to fall. He hung up the receiver without another word and then slid slowly to the floor, settling into a sitting position on the stone tiling, his back flat and tall against the kitchen wall beneath the mounted phone.
Anika.
The woman had become a mythical figure to Petr over the years, her bravery and resolve unlike anything he’d ever heard of before or since. She was a legend now, not just in the Southlands, but throughout most of the New Country and, likely by now, beyond.
But Petr was so close to the story of Anika and Gretel that he sometimes forgot how remarkable the two women really were, though he was reminded almost daily in the dining hall at dinner, or regularly on Saturdays, when Petr was with Gretel, noting how the stares and pointed fingers still followed her. Even after being at the university for over a month, her notoriety lingered.
She was Gretel Morgan. Witch slayer and daughter of Anika Morgan, the amazing co-heroine of a story that included kidnapping and imprisonment, magic and murder, and the betrayal of her own family.
And Petr’s family as well.
Petr also realized the pointing fingers on campus were sometimes aimed at him. He had played a part in the infamous story, and though he’d been instrumental in Marlene’s downfall, his father had conversely been instrumental in her rise. And aficionados of the Anika and Gretel story knew it. When the Morgan tale was spun by New Country folk, Anika and Gretel always came out as the heroes. Petr’s final label, however, was a bit more ambiguous, and he was sure he often fell on the wrong side of the ledger.
But now Anika was dead, and Petr could hear in Mrs. Klahr’s voice that the circumstances surrounding the death were troublesome. He knew intimately of Anika’s struggle with the potion, of her addiction to the concoction that had brought her back from the brink of death. He had seen the change in her over the years, and the madness into which she had descended. It was the main reason he had insisted Gretel come with him to school. He loved Gretel, of course, and he wanted to marry her and spend the rest of his life with her, but more than that, he needed her to be safe and away from the toxicity that had developed at home. He knew what he was doing to Hansel by taking her away, but it was a sacrifice Petr had been willing to accept.
He stood and grabbed the keys and walked to Mr. Klahr’s old truck. The old hunk of metal roared right to life, and Petr thought of Mr. Klahr, his mentor and adoptive grandfather, for most of the ride home to the Back Country.
PETR HAD NEVER INTENDED to come home so soon, and considering the circumstances, he felt the strain build in his stomach the moment he reached the Back Country limits. But as he pulled into the driveway of the Klahr property—his property now—he could smell the aroma of the apples drifting from the orchard beyond the house, and he closed his eyes and smiled.
He thought of the days before the collapse of his childhood, when he and Gretel worked side by side until the sun went down, loading buckets of fruit and laughing until Mrs. Klahr called them in for dinner. It was the happiest few months of his life—there was no period that was a close second—the culmination being that day at Rifle Field and the first kiss from the girl he loved.
Petr opened his eyes and saw Mrs. Klahr standing on the porch, her hand over her mouth in a frozen gasp. As the truck slowed to a stop, she descended the steps slowly, her free hand desperately gripping the railing, her eyes focused on each delicate step. She looked so frail now, Petr thought, and he knew instantly that whatever event had unfolded here, whatever tragic incident had led to Anika Morgan’s death, it had somehow involved Amanda Klahr.
He opened the truck door slowly and walked to her, this woman whom he loved as much as any person in the world, greeting her at the bottom of the porch stairs and placing his arms around her. He embraced her without a word. The story would come later; right now Mrs. Klahr just needed to feel solace.
After several moments, Petr pulled away and asked, “What happened?”
Amanda reached up and cupped her hands on her adopted grandson’s cheeks, her eyes sad, exhausted. “She’s down by the lake,” she said. “She knows what happened to her mother, I’ve told her everything, and what she doesn’t, I will fill you in with the details later. Just go to her now. Be with her.”
Petr hugged Mrs. Klahr again and kissed her forehead, and then walked to the back of the property and down past the fruit trees to the lake. Gretel was standing at the edge of the water, her hands atop her head as she stared across the lake at the only real home she had ever known.
“Gretel?”
Gretel neither turned nor spoke; she simply gave a slight dismissive shake of her head, a motion which Petr interpreted as aftershock.
“What happened?” Petr closed his eyes and shook off the question. “I mean, I know that Anika is...dead.”
At this last word, Gretel dropped her hands from her head and looked to her right down the shoreline.
“But what happened?”
Gretel said nothing at first, continuing to shake her head slowly, ruefully. And then, just as Petr was about to speak again, she asked, “Do you remember the day when all of this really began?”
She looked back toward the center of the lake, her eyes focused again on her former home.
“It began right over there. It was the day Marlene killed my father, the day she revealed herself to us for the first time, at the top of the porch. It all started for my mother months earlier, I know that, but for us, for you and me and Hansel, that was the day it really began. Do you remember?”
Petr scoffed. “Of course I remember.” His voice was nearly a whisper, nearly choking on the last syllable. The day Gretel had just excavated contained a tapestry of revelations, one of which was about his own father’s betrayal and death.
“I remember about your father too,” Gretel replied, seeming to acknowledge Petr’s silent thoughts, once again reinforcing her supernatural abilities. “But before any of that, before Marlene and my father came outside, Odalinde, Hansel and I had just returned from my grandfather’s house. And you were sitting there on the porch, waiting for us. And before the truck had stopped moving, I exploded out and ran at you, crazed, screaming at you about how you had lied to me about what you knew regarding my father and Odalinde’s engagement. Which, it turns out, was true, you had lied.”
“Gretel, I...”
“At that moment, and only for a moment, I hated you. I had grown to become very fond of you up until then, but when I knew you had learned of my father and Odalinde’s plans to marry, and that you had kept it to yourself, and acted like you didn’t know...” Gretel broke off the final thought, not finding the words to properly express it. “Anyway, when I saw you sitting there that day, I wanted to kill you. And I mean that almost literally. It’s how I feel about you right now, Petr. I don’t want to look at you because I don’t want to feel that way about you again.”
Petr felt a surge of defensiveness rise in him. “I’m sorry about your mother, Gretel, but I didn’t do anything. What did I do?”
In spite of her prior words, Gretel turned to Petr, the pain on her face causing Petr to grimace himself.
“Nothing, Petr. Of course you’ve done nothing. And of course it’s not fair for me to feel this way about any of you, or to blame you or your father or The System for all that’s happened over the past couple of years. It’s no more your fault than it is Mrs. Klahr’s or Hansel’s. You were all just caught up in this, just as I was at first.” Gretel paused. “But at a certain point, I could no longer say that. I became very much to blame for how the story began to unfold. And now she’s dead. And I am responsible.”
“That isn’t true, Gre
tel.”
Gretel frowned and nodded. “But it is. At the very least I’m responsible for the way she died.”
“But if you hadn’t...”
“I know, Petr!” Gretel snapped, and then lowered her voice immediately. “I know if I hadn’t given her the potion that she would have died anyway. But it doesn’t change what happened. Mrs. Klahr gave me the potion, and I gave it to my mother to save her. And in the process, I killed her and created...whatever it was she became.”
Petr couldn’t argue the facts as Gretel had just laid them out, and perhaps Gretel needed to go through this stage as part of the grieving process. So instead, he steered the conversation back to the present. “How did she die?”
Tears began to fall from Gretel’s cheeks in a steady flow. “Hansel.”
Petr wanted to follow up on the particulars, but at speaking her brother’s name, Gretel covered her face and leaned forward, her head out over the water as she sobbed. Petr placed a hand on her back but she shivered him away.
Slowly, Gretel composed herself and stood upright again, wiping the last of the tears away and taking a deep breath. “I left him here alone with her. I told him to leave, but I knew he wouldn’t. He still loved her so much, and he still believed it was possible for her to get better. But I knew it was hopeless.”
“And you told him that. You did what you could do.”
Gretel shook her head. “I shouldn’t have gone away. It wasn’t fair of me. Not the least bit. I told myself it was for my future, but it was a lie. And I knew it at the time.”
“It was for your future. It still is.” Petr now felt a hint of blame being cast his way, for being the impetus behind Gretel leaving. That was true, of course, and he had given a pretty tough sell on the idea of her entering school early.
Gretel shook her head slowly. “I was a coward. And I was tired.”
Petr said nothing for a few beats, allowing the confession its proper marination. Finally, he asked, “How is Hansel?”
Gretel ignored the question. “I’m going to be leaving, Petr.”
“Yeah, of course, Gretel. Take the rest of the semester off. This was all just to get a head start anyway. You’ll come back in a couple months and start up again, and be right there with everyone else. The departments will understand. I’ll even talk to the heads if you like.”
“No, Petr, I’m leaving. For more than a semester.”
Petr felt a knot rise in his gut. “Where? For how long?” He paused. “Why?”
“This land, it...it doesn’t feel like my home anymore. It feels...wicked now, like it’s been polluted to a point where it can never be clean again.”
“That’s why you need to come back to school. Away from here. Away from this destruction.”
Gretel was shaking her head before Petr had finished speaking. “I’m not just talking about the Back Country. This whole place is contaminated. The Back Country and Southlands is where it all unfolded, but Marlene came from the Northlands. And it was the Urbanlands that sent The System. Dodd and...and your father.”
Petr closed his eyes and turned his head as if slapped.
“I’m leaving for the Old World.”
Petr opened his eyes again, his expression flat and resigned, his vision now blurred from the moisture of nascent tears. “I’ll come with you,” he said, but his attempt at persuasion sounded perfunctory.
Gretel gave a flat smile. “I won’t be gone forever, I can promise that. But...I also can’t tell you when I’ll be back.”
“What about Hansel?”
Gretel turned away from Petr again, and this time took a deep breath. “He’s the other reason I’m going. I know I’m to blame for this, for Anika, for her death, but every time I look at him, I’ll blame him. At least for a while. And I don’t want to do that. Which is why I need to get away from him too.”
“If leaving him before wasn’t fair, how can it be fair to leave him now?”
“Because it is!” Gretel said immediately, simultaneously blasting a look of scorn toward Petr, who received it without a flinch. “It isn’t the same now,” she continued, “Anika is gone.”
Gretel was speaking quickly now, her pitch high, as if trying to convince herself of her own words.
“And Hansel has the orchard to run now. And Mrs. Klahr is still here. They’ll look after each other for the next few years. After that...”
“After that, what? Your plan is to be gone for that long? For the ‘next few years?’”
“I don’t have a plan, Petr. I don’t know. I just, I feel like the Old World is where I belong. I knew it the minute we first landed there and began our search for the answers to Orphism. The whole time we were there I begged Anika to take us home, back here, because of how much I missed Mr. and Mrs. Klahr. And you, of course.”
In spite of himself, Petr drew a trace of a smile.
“But I also knew I belonged there. I won’t be able to explain it exactly, except to say that I feel a connection to that world that I don’t feel here anymore. I used to feel it quite strongly, but now...”
“What?”
“As perverse as it sounds, I haven’t felt it since Marlene. She was a monster, and she needed to die, of course. But she also tethered me to my heritage.” Gretel frowned and took a deep breath, and Petr could see that she was unsatisfied with how she was expressing her feelings. “I just have to go.”
Petr closed his eyes, still not quite able to accept what he had just heard. It was a crushing rupture in a life which, over the last few months, had been nearly perfect. Not only had he been accepted to the University of the Urbanlands, where he had thus far been excelling both academically and socially, but he had also convinced the girl whom he intended to one day marry to join him there. And though Petr expected things for her to move a bit more slowly at the college, she, too, seemed to be taking to her new life without serious difficulty. She was still prone to the occasional mood lapse, and seemed to disappear from the conversation when she found herself in large groups of people, often sitting silently while her friends’ stories and laughter erupted all around her.
But otherwise Gretel had seemed to move on from Marlene. Slowly she began to leave behind the topics of her family’s ordeal. Even Orphism, the book by which she’d been nothing short of consumed, gradually disappeared from her bedside table, eventually earning a permanent place high atop her dorm room bookshelf.
And it was during these months Petr and Gretel had become lovers.
Sex was a topic that he and Gretel rarely discussed previously, except as it pertained to other people, and usually as they were portrayed in books and movies. They had become physical a few months before Petr left for school, but it was still of the adolescent variety, the kind of intimacy that occurred only with lights and clothes on.
But then Gretel had joined Petr at school, accepted to attend pre-semester classes, and by that first weekend, before Petr’s housemate had arrived for the semester, and just after Gretel had finally freed herself from the stress and tragedy of her deteriorating mother, they were sleeping together.
That first time, Gretel had come to Petr well after midnight; her arrival was without notice, after having walked from her house to the other side of campus, two miles on a chilly fall night. Petr answered his door to an overcoated Gretel, her face and hair made up subtly and beautifully. Her head was cocked slightly to one side and she wore the smile of a buccaneer.
Within minutes, the two were naked in Petr’s bed, and Petr could only laugh along with Gretel when it was all over in seconds. But he would rally nicely, and that night they made love four times, with each time Petr experiencing a new level of pleasure.
“I will miss you,” Gretel said, again seeming to sense Petr’s thoughts. “And me leaving doesn’t have anything to do with you.”
Petr shook his head and pursed his lips. “No, of course not,” he said.
Gretel picked up one of the oars lying at her feet, and walked to the rowboat which sat beached on
the bank, just to her right.
“You’re going to row to the Old World?” Petr joked, the humor not at all diminishing the emptiness eating away at his intestines.
Gretel smiled. “You know I would if I could. But for now I’m just going to take a scull.”
Gretel locked the oar into the oarlock, matching it to the one already fitted on the opposite side, and then launched the boat as she had done a thousand times. She sculled two giant strokes, her body facing Petr as she did, drifting quickly away from him, her eyes focused on something not present, something much further away than him or the lake or the Back Country.
At about the halfway point, she deftly turned the canoe left and headed down toward the s-bend, in the direction of Rifle Field. With each stroke, Gretel grew smaller in Petr’s vision, and just as she was at a distance beyond recognition, Petr saw her smile and wave. She was always happiest on the lake, he thought, free of the enormous burdens that had weighed on her for as long as he knew the girl.
Petr lifted a hand and held it out in a motionless wave. “I love you,” he said. It was the first time he’d said the words aloud, though he had felt that way about her for most of the time he knew her.
He watched her disappear behind the thicket of trees at the bend, and then turned his attention to the house across the lake and the porch where he first saw Gretel through the kitchen window on the night they first met. It seemed like twenty years ago.
He looked to his right now and something on the screened porch caught his eye. There was movement. Petr wiped his eyes and stretched his cheeks, clearing away any lingering tears, considering that perhaps the prism of glisten had created a reflection.
He moved a step closer now, dipping the toes of his shoes into the water and craning his neck up. His eyes were clear, and since the porch windows had no glass and were covered only in mesh, there was no glare to trick him.
Anika Rising (Gretel Book 4) Page 2
