“I can’t go to the hospital,” Tess said. It sounded like a plea.
Sarah put up a hand as if trying to soothe a frightened animal. “Okay, Tess,” she said slowly. “No problem.”
I saw Tess’ shoulders slump.
Sarah looked at the rest of us. “Anybody else unable to pull a night shift? It’s no problem if you can’t. It’s going to be rough on all of us, but if you have a special reason…”
Everyone shook their heads. Miles gave Tess a wary look.
“Well, then, we’re going to have to work out a rotating night shift,” Sarah said with a sigh. “Blade, I assume you’ll be here overnight?”
“You got it, boss,” I said with a smirk.
She scowled. “Don’t call me that. Okay, with Blade and Raven here, that leaves one more for night shift each night. We’ll switch it each day between me, Calvin and Miles. Everybody got it?”
“Sure,” Calvin said somberly.
“You got it,” said Miles.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do this. We’ve already been here too long. We’ll see you guys as soon as we can.”
We descended the tower and found mounts waiting for us at the bottom. Together we rode back to the city walls. I stopped at the gates before entering and turned to look back at the barrier gate. Despite knowing how huge it was, it seemed tiny and insignificant standing there alone. Like a model. Or like a sandcastle waiting to be swept away by the ocean.
A hand found mine, covering it on the saddle. It was Tess.
“They’ll be fine,” she assured me. “At least until we get back.”
I looked at her curiously. The way she’d behaved on top of the barrier gate had very nearly frightened me. Rather, it had made me worry for her. I felt like there was something in her life she didn’t feel like she could tell me, and I just wanted her to pour her heart out so I could help her deal with…whatever it was.
“Everything okay?” I asked, ignoring what she’d said. But I didn’t remove her hand from mine.
Tess turned her head, hiding behind her hair. “I’m fine. I just need to get back. Ride with me?”
I nodded and let her lead me into the city.
I woke up to the sight of bedsprings and wooden slats. The bottom of Calvin’s bed.
I listened carefully. No sounds of movement in the house except for the soft breathing of Calvin in the bed above me.
Slowly I slid out from underneath the bed. I tried to make every movement as quiet as I possibly could. I found my shoes, which Calvin had tossed in his closet.
I crept silently down the hallway, alert for the sound of anyone coming. With any luck, Calvin’s parents were already in bed and I could get out of here without incident.
I went step by step down the staircase into the front hall. I got to the front door and reached out for the handle —
“Going somewhere?”
I jumped, startled, and whirled around. Calvin’s mom was at the other end of the hallway, looking at me with a sad little smile.
“Hi, Mrs. W,” I said, plastering a smile on my face. “Sorry, but I left my phone in Calvin’s room. The front door was unlocked, so I just wanted to get in and get out.”
She cocked her head. “You aren’t staying the night again?”
I shook my head. “No, my house is all cleared out. I’ll be heading back there. But thanks.”
She nodded. “You’re welcome any time, Winston. I mean that. Any time.”
I smiled. “And I mean it. Thanks. You’ve been…awesome. And I’m really grateful.”
And I wish I had a mom like you.
She smiled and made a little shooing motion. “You’d better get out of here, then,” she said. “I hope we’ll see you around again.”
“You will,” I promised. “Count on it.”
She gave a final little wave, and I slipped out the door.
My car was waiting at the curb, just where I’d left it. I jumped in and kicked the engine on, peeling out as I gunned down the street.
I knew exactly where I was headed, but I had a couple of stops to make first.
I killed the headlights just before rocketing into my dad’s driveway and putting it in park. I left the engine running as I quietly snuck up to the door. My watch told me it was about seven o’clock in the evening. If I was right…
I stepped in to find my dad passed out facedown on the couch, a bottle of Jack Daniels in his hand. I stopped dead and watched him for a moment. He didn’t move. Light snores snuck out of his mouth. I snapped my fingers. Nothing. I clapped. Nothing.
Breathing a sigh of relief, I crept carefully up to his sleeping form. His wallet slid easily from his back pocket. Inside was two hundred bucks. I pocketed a hundred of it and dropped the wallet on his back.
“See you later, pops,” I whispered.
I got back in my car and hit the road once more, stopping a minute later in a convenience store. I headed in and loaded up a hand basket with all kinds of food — potato chips, pop tarts, beef jerky, anything that was cheap, light, and would last forever. All told, it was about forty bucks of dad’s money. I shoved it into the Mustang’s back seat and drove off again.
My last drive of the night was a little longer. I headed up the long stretch of road that wove into the forests surrounding town. The road grew dark as streetlights disappeared. It curved more and more as it wound through the trees, their dark brown trunks painted in my headlights.
I saw the road sign. I turned off into the dirt.
I first started coming to the Holiday Acres campsites six months earlier. Sometimes my dad was just a little too angry, a little too insistent on smacking me around. So I’d go to the campsites. They were secluded, private, and quiet. They gave me a place to hide, but more importantly they gave me a place to think. To calm down. To let go of the burning rage in my chest before it turned into something uglier.
I wound my way through the campsite’s narrow roads until I found my favorite spot. I parked the mustang below the boughs of an old maple and killed the engine.
Then I kicked the driver’s seat back and closed my eyes, willing my body to go to sleep.
MILES
“MILES GRAVE?”
THE IRRITATED TONE of the teacher’s voice snapped my attention out of my head and to the front of the classroom.
“Here,” I said, raising my hand. I could hear the exhaustion in my own voice.
I must sound so out of it.
It obviously wasn’t from lack of sleep. I’d been in Midrealm for the past thirteen hours, and my body was reveling in the sleep. But I was mentally exhausted from the fighting, the stress.
Not just the stress of battle in Midrealm. The stress over there was easy. Plain. Simple. There were bad guys. They had weapons. They tried to kill me. I stopped them. I killed them back.
I blinked hard, watching bright spots of light burst behind my eyelids. My racing mind stopped spinning for a moment as pain lanced through my head.
It wasn’t so bad when I could stop thinking about it. But it was so hard to stop thinking about it.
In Midrealm, the danger was obvious. Here, it was excruciating. Here, I wasn’t standing on the barrier gate. I wasn’t dodging splatters of regurgitated chaos. I wasn’t keeping an eye out every second for a stray arrow that could strike me in the chest.
I didn’t have to deal with any of that at school. What I had to deal with was not dealing with it. At least in Midrealm, if we failed, if Chaos broke through, I would know why, how and when.
But when I was in school, my life was in the hands of other people. They were there on the barrier gate, holding back the tide. Raven and Blade and…who was it today? Calvin? They were fighting with magic against an enemy so evil that it didn’t even really know why it wanted to kill us.
But if they fell…if they lost control of the battle…I could drop dead right here on my school desk and no one around me would know why. My parents wouldn’t know.
It could happen in an hour. It coul
d happen now. What if it was about to happen? What if my body in Midrealm was surrounded by Shadows right this very second? What if in Midrealm a knife was being raised over my heart, and I was going to die in three…two…one…
Without meaning to I jumped up from my desk, my chair skittering backward and bouncing off the table behind me, where it clattered to the floor.
Mrs. Dobbs looked up at me from her desk at the front of the room. I felt the eyes of the other students in the classroom turn to me. But I could barely see them. I could barely think. My breath was coming hard and fast, making me feel lightheaded.
“Is something wrong, Mister Grave?”
I tried to steady my breath, but it came faster and faster. I heard blood rushing in my ears. I felt tears stinging my eyes. I looked wildly around, seeing the confused faces around me. Staring at me. Like the Shadows below the wall. They followed my every move, waiting to strike —
No. These were students on Earth, not Shadows. I closed my eyes again and shoved the heels of my hands against them as hard as I could. Stop. Stop seeing them.
“I need to go to the nurse.” I didn’t wait for Mrs. Dobbs to answer before I booked it for the classroom door and pounded out into the hallway outside.
I tripped, sliding on the linoleum to crash against the lockers. I threw myself up into a sitting position, staring both ways down the hallway, no longer sure where I was. I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry. I wanted to fight, to smash something to bits. Anything.
The classroom door opened, and Mrs. Dobbs poked her head out.
“Miles, are you all right?” she asked, anxious.
“I need to…I need to…”
Nausea slammed into me like a torrent. I slammed my mouth shut, clapping a hand across my lips. I leapt up and fled down the hallway toward the restroom.
Thirty seconds later I was kneeling in the bathroom, my head hanging over the toilet rim, flushing away the last of my breakfast. I heaved again and again, but there was nothing left to come up.
I stood like an old man. My limbs felt weak. I hobbled out to the sink and splashed cold, clear water across my face. Then I rubbed my cold, wet hands across the back of my neck.
I closed my eyes and tried to slow my breathing, tapping into the calmness I felt when I meditated. I drew my mind away from the fears, the thoughts of danger. I pictured myself on the track, my legs pumping away as I ran quickly, steadily, peacefully.
I could nearly feel the wind in my face. My heart stopped thundering. My breath came easier. Deep, even breaths.
I’d heard about panic attacks. This felt like that. But I didn’t know how to stop it. I didn’t know how to keep my thoughts from drifting to my slumbering body in another universe, constantly in danger, vulnerable at any moment if the Shadows came in and —
No. The track. Running. The wind in your face.
I’d been keeping up the schedule for two days. Everyone had. Every morning I woke up at the last possible second, scrambled out of the house and fought to keep my attention on school all day. Then I raced home and fell asleep as soon as I could still my body’s beating heart enough for my brain to shut down.
I didn’t know where Blade was, but he wasn’t at school. It seemed like the guy was hardly sleeping on Midrealm at all. He was there when I got there. He was usually there when I left. Sometimes he’d disappear for a few hours in the middle of the day, but he’d always return before I left the wall.
Meanwhile, Raven was in the hospital. My mom wanted to take me there, too, but I’d held her off so far. Immediately I decided not to tell her about what happened at school today. She’d drive me straight there and wouldn’t let me out no matter what I said.
But wouldn’t that be easier? Wouldn’t that take care of so much?
No. I couldn’t do that to them. They’d be worried sick every second. Plus, staying in a hospital for days at a time was ridiculously expensive, and I had no idea how long this was going to last. We weren’t broke, but it wasn’t like my parents had some massive fortune, either.
No. I was going to have to do this myself. Without my parents noticing. I was strong. I could do this.
I stayed in the bathroom for another twenty minutes until the lunch bell rang. Once the hallways were full of students, I made my way to the cafeteria. Almost as soon as I walked in, I saw Calvin. That meant that Sarah must have been the third one on the wall. Calvin noticed me enter and gave me a halfhearted wave. He looked as haunted and ragged as I felt.
I made my slow way through the lunch line, not talking to anyone around me. I paid the cashier and found an empty table to sit at, happy to have some relative quiet to allow my mind to rest.
A tray slammed down next to mine, making me jump. I looked up to see Clarissa.
I used to love seeing her. Now I associated her face with an impending fight. Today was no exception. Her eyes were frosty, and her mouth wore a stern expression that I was now too used to seeing.
She took her seat on the bench next to me and began eating without saying a word. I was happy to let it stay that way. My mind was racing too fast to keep up any kind of decent conversation. Every word was a tapdance, and I didn’t have the mental capacity to hit my steps.
But as we kept eating, the silence grew colder and colder. It became harder and harder to put another bite in my mouth. I felt the tension ratcheting higher and higher until it threatened to set my heart racing again. I had to do something to disperse it.
“How’s it going?” I asked noncommittally.
Smooth, I thought ruefully.
“Fine,” said Clarissa. “You?”
I shrugged. “Been better.”
“What happened yesterday?” she asked carefully. I could tell she was trying to keep her tone polite. I appreciated that.
“Couldn’t wake up,” I said, shrugging. “Mom got pretty freaked. But I feel better today.”
“Well, you’re awake,” she said.
Silence again.
“Did you want to do anything this weekend?” she asked.
I swallowed a mouthful that tasted like cardboard. “Not sure. I mean, yes, I’d like to. But with this thing…”
Clarissa stabbed a fork into her salad just a bit too hard. One of the plastic tines snapped off and skittered off the table to fall off the other edge.
“Yeah, it really seems like this thing is kind of taking over your life,” she said. “I mean, what with missing school, and spending all your extra time with other people who have it.”
I forced myself not to answer for a moment. “Clarissa, I told you it’s really hard on me right now. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, I get it,” she said, exasperated. “But do you have to let it become your everything? I mean, when a person has cancer, they don’t spend all day every day around other people who are dying from cancer. It’s just depressing. Can’t you carve out a chunk of your life for…I don’t know, the rest of your life? It’s not like Sarah and the others are the only people you can talk to.”
I glared at her. There was one thing I could tell her that was absolutely true. “You have no idea what it’s like for the six of us. You have no concept of what our lives are like.”
She glowered right back and sniffed. “How could I? You never talk to me any more.”
She stood, taking her tray with her. “I think I’ll eat somewhere else today. Let me know if you ever want to talk to me again.”
I watched her walk away and forced my racing heart to slow back down.
I woke up in Midrealm to a feeling of immense relief.
I was in control again. Or at least I was aware. No one was going to stick a knife into my chest when I couldn’t do anything about it.
I lay there in bed, enjoying the moment of relative peace. There was little enough of it to go around these days. There certainly wasn’t any peace when I was fighting at the gate. And peace was gone from my life on Earth now.
It was weird, being less worried here than I was back home. Thing was, no matter ho
w bad things were on Earth, even if my mom took my body to the hospital right this second, it was okay. Because I wasn’t going to die. And meanwhile, I was here. I was working to save the world.
The moment passed, and I got up to don my robes. I stepped out into the hallway and was surprised to find it empty. Melaine must still be resting. She certainly deserved it. She’d been running as rough a schedule as I had, maybe a little rougher. I knew she still watched over me for part of the time I was sleeping.
I went down the hallway toward the stairs, nodding at Darren. He was leaning against the wall outside Calvin’s room, looking dead on his feet. He bowed as I walked past.
“No need, man,” I said tiredly. “I’ll see you at the wall.”
“Melaine should be in her quarters,” he responded. “I can fetch her if you wish.”
“I’ll get her,” I said, waving him off. “Thanks, though.”
I went down the stairwell slowly. The great hall was empty. A servant stepped forward, a kindly old woman who I saw around often.
“May I fetch you a meal, my Lord?” she asked softly.
“I’m going to go get Melaine,” I said. “We’ll eat together. If you could grab two plates, that would be awesome.”
She smiled gently. “Of course.” But before she turned to go, she suddenly seized my hand in both of her own, squeezing it tightly. “And my Lord, I just wanted to thank you. Please, if there’s anything else I can do for you, please let me know.”
I smiled, suddenly embarrassed. “It’s all right. It’s what we’re here to do.”
She gave my hand one more squeeze and walked away. I saw the other servants in the hall, as well as the two Runegard standing watch at the front door, watch her go with a mixture of hidden smiles and scandalous shock. Her kind of behavior wasn’t particularly common.
I went to the hallway that lead to the Runegard quarters and found the door that I knew led to Melaine’s room. Most of the Runegard slept in bunks, and we’d found out with some shock that they were co-ed rooms. But when Melaine and the others had been promoted to the Deathwatch, they’d each been given their own room.
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