by Kathryn Moon
I scrambled up to my feet, trying to place myself between Isaac and the Hollow but I was too late. The smoke scratched over Isaac’s right cheek, and into his hair. His eyes winced and a moan escaped his parted lips and his knees buckled. My arms were around him and he fell into me, the Hollow continuing to ooze over the ground on its way past us. It hissed and spat with laughter and the dark clouds over the sky cracked and drummed and rain came spilling loose as I sank down to the ground with Isaac gasping and groaning in my arms, red and gray and white streaking across his cheekbone.
“No, no, no, no,” I whispered. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
His chest heaved and rain turned his white shirt translucent. I looked down at the ground beside us where I had wasted time, and my word was being spattered and spoiled under the falling drops. I dug my nails and fingers into the chalk, scratching and tearing until the word became nothing more than a white smear, streaks of red mingling where I had ripped at my skin.
“I picked the wrong word,” I said, as motion stirred around me.
Aiden landed on the ground, warm hands on my cheeks, and I pulled away. My eyes were blurry with tears and my words came out in hiccuping sobs.
“I picked the wrong word. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
“Callum!” Aiden shouted, but Callum was already reaching us, with Tatsuo and Bryce.
Bryce grabbed Isaac out of my arms with more strength than someone their size ought to have had and I shouted, reaching for him. Tatsuo stepped between Callum and Bryce and I thought it might come to blows. Isaac moaned in Bryce’s hold and we all surged forward.
“Wait,” Gwen snapped from behind us. “Wait, Bryce can help.”
Bryce held him up, legs limp, and lifted one of their hands to his face, covering the marks made by the Hollow. They shined gold again, and there was a hum that felt like ringing in my ears but I refused to look away. Aiden’s arms squeezed around my waist and Callum strained against Tatsuo. Isaac’s breath was ragged and he hissed and squirmed in Bryce’s hold for a long moment. And then he went soft, relaxing and turning quiet.
Tatsuo released Callum and Bryce passed Isaac to him. “Take him to medical,” Bryce said, green eyes bright and yellowy.
Aiden stood, his hand clasped around mine. I clamped my lips shut and choked down the remains of my sobs.
“Take her back to the house?” Callum asked.
I could see the way Aiden’s shoulders drew in but he started to nod.
“No,” I said. I stood on shaky legs. “No, you should both go.” Callum’s forehead knotted and Aiden looked resigned, prepared to argue for Callum. “I’ll stay with the others,” I said.
“She’s safe with us, you know that,” Gwen said.
“Go,” I said, flattening down tears that wanted to break free and the anxiety rioting in my gut. “I’ll find you later.”
I couldn’t tell if Callum was angry or worried or hurt or if he simply didn’t want to waste the time arguing when Isaac needed care. But he left with quick steps. Aiden pressed a hard kiss to my forehead that left me queasy with guilt and then hurried after him.
“This isn’t your fault,” Hildy said gently, taking my hands.
“It is actually,” I said.
I felt numb with the truth of it. I had been curious and careless and even if it had all been an accident, it was my hands that let the creature out. And if I had not, Cecil Pincombe would have been alive and Isaac would have been safe and the woods wouldn’t be dying and the sun probably would have been shining too for that matter.
“Joanna,” Hildy murmured.
“Better get to the library,” Bryce said, taking my elbow in their hand.
I sagged with a kind of relief. Bryce, at least, would not argue with me.
22. Joanna
It rained for days.
The campus kept busy coming up with magical means of keeping the flood at bay. And in the library we watched the rain break against the patched hole in the roof.
Isaac came back to the house sleeping and I volunteered to keep the night shift of watching over him, shooing Aiden out of the room when he offered to sit up with me. I left early in the morning and came back late at night with excuses about the library. Callum and Aiden watched me passing through the house but I found corners to hide around when I thought they might be looking for me.
At night I kept vigil in a chair by Isaac’s bedroom window and wrote in my notebook. Put it back. The Hollow is in its cage again and cannot come out. Everyone is safe. But every morning the sun rose, dark in the sky, and the vice squeezed tighter in my chest.
Isaac slept like the dead the first night, the red mark bright on his cheek with the faintest glow above it, either from the healers or Bryce. The next night was fits and stirring, and I sat on the side of the bed, wiping sweat off his brow and letting him crush my hand in his grip. Finally on the third night he settled, breath deepening. I leaned my head against the window, glass cool on my skin, and let myself drift off.
I woke choking on air, hands on my arms as I tried to fight them off.
“It’s me, it’s me, Joanna,” Isaac whispered.
I reared back in the chair and caught my breath. Isaac’s hands stroked at my sides, his eyes half-lidded with sleep and the scar on his cheek shiny but pale.
“Come to bed, love,” he said.
“You should be sleeping,” I answered.
“I will. Better with you next to me. Come rest.”
I let him pull me up and then ducked under his arm as he swayed in step. “Do you want me to get Aiden or-”
“I want you to come lay down with me, Joanna,” he said, words weary as we stumbled back to the bed together. “I just want to hold you.” Isaac pulled me into his side under the covers, arm across my back and fingers in my hair. “Quit punishing yourself,” he mumbled against my forehead.
I hummed and he squeezed me gently. Everyone had tried telling me similar things. Even Bryce had said, ‘It’s only a problem that needs solved.’ It didn’t soothe the heaviness at the back of my head or the clammy feeling under my skin or the guilt that lay bricks in my belly every minute. And Isaac’s soft snores brought tears to the corners of my eyes rather than helping me drift into sleep.
Over and over in my head it ran in a loop.
If I hadn’t come here to Canderfey.
If I hadn’t sent the charmed application.
If I hadn’t met Aiden or Isaac or Callum.
If I hadn’t called Gatekeepers back from whatever safe hole it had been moldering in.
Everyone would be safe. The Hollow would be in its cage and Cecil Pincombe would be alive and Isaac would never have been hurt.
It was my fault. It was my fault. It was my fault.
Hildy answered the door in the morning, before the dark sun had finished rising in the sky. I was already soaked through my coat and my boots, just from the short walk to the house.
“Joanna, come in,” she said. Her face was clean and tired and she looked surprised to see me but I thought it was probably beyond Hildy not to be welcoming when it was called for. “What do you need? Gwen is already at the library.”
“I was hoping Tatsuo was home, actually,” I said, ducking into the dry warmth of the house.
“Of course, we’re just having breakfast.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, covering my hands over the sick clench in my stomach.
“No, don’t be silly,” Hildy said with a wave of her hand before gesturing me to follow her. “You’re welcome at any hour, you know that.”
Tatsuo was drinking tea, bare chest pale under his bathrobe, and his eyebrows raised as I entered the kitchen. Bryce sat opposite him and barely glanced over their shoulder at me, unsurprised by my arrival or simply not awake enough to care.
“I…” It seemed silly now, to have come while they were busy having breakfast. “I wanted to ask about…trance writing.”
But Tatsuo’s eyes lit up at that and Hildy snorted, going to her spot at the tab
le while he rose up from his.
“Absolutely,” he said, as if it were a natural question for breakfast at dawn. “Come to the reading room and I’ll show you some of what I’ve been working on.”
There was a fire going in the reading room, dark daylight coming in through the windows and brightened quickly by Tatsuo turning on lamps. He offered me a seat and then fluttered busily around the room, gathering up stray pieces of paper and heavy books. He brought them back, pulling up another chair and laying it out over the table with a flourish. I glanced down at the scribbles, cryptic scrawling messages in strange directions, and bit my lip.
“I had a few…specific questions,” I said.
Tatsuo clapped his hands together. “Yes, please, ask away!”
“The trance, is it hard to- to fall into?” I asked.
He leaned back in his chair, hand lifting to stroke at his chin and I could tell it pleased him to have someone here, asking him questions. It brought me something almost like cheer until I wondered if Callum would hear about this later, that I had come to Tatsuo to form a plan. And then I remembered that he probably wouldn’t care after what I had done and I blinked quickly down at my lap.
“I suppose it may be, for a beginner,” Tatsuo said. “It requires emptying one’s head, making room for the openness needed in a trance. Sometimes though Bryce will drone for me and then it takes no time at all.”
“Drone?”
“Mmhm, it’s like singing but it leads almost directly to hypnotism for most people,” he said. He took a breath and I realized he was about to launch deep into the new topic so I hurried to keep him on track.
“Is trance writing a way of discovering a true name?” I asked.
Tatsuo’s eyes narrowed at me for a moment at that, the excited collector of knowledge replaced with someone shrewd and intelligent enough to know what I was fishing for.
“It could be. Certainly of the symbolic portion of a true name. But not of anyone or anything. It would have to be your own, or the name belonging to someone you share a connection with. And it is widely acknowledged as being the kind of thing better left unknown. Knowing a true name allows for the opportunity of it being discovered by the wrong hands.”
“Of course,” I said.
Bryce had not told him then that I already had a kind of connection with the Hollow. It was stealing my dreams and I had let it out of its cage. That may not be enough but it was more than I wanted and it was the best—or worst—anyone else could boast of.
I quizzed Tatsuo on the ceremony of the practice, filling in my real questions with aimless, harmless ones that sent him rattling in new directions. I kept him for an hour, saying goodbye to Hildy as she left for work. I hoped that he would forgive me later for pumping him for the information. I hoped that I would be around to receive the forgiveness.
But it was my fault and I needed to be the one to fix it. If I could. If anyone could.
“I should get to the library,” I said, as Tatsuo finished an explanation on different kinds of plant based inks. “Thank you for humoring me.”
“My pleasure, I love hypotheticals after breakfast,” he said, gallant as ever, even in his dressing robe.
“I’ll walk you.” We both turned to see Bryce lingering in the doorway. “It’s not safe out.”
“Thank you,” I said. I repeated the words to Tatsuo with a hug and then met Bryce in the hall. They walked me to the door, pulling a long black umbrella out of a stand.
“You can’t do it alone,” Bryce said as they shut the door closed behind us and passed me the umbrella.
I fiddled with it first, opening it out and waiting for Bryce to stand under the cover with me.
“I know,” I said, quiet as if someone might be listening.
“I will help,” Bryce said. The nerves in my stomach mingled with relief. They looked to me, eyes narrowed. “It was one of my kind once.”
I had wondered as much. It didn’t change the fact that I trusted Bryce completely to help. “Do you think it will work?” I asked.
“It will work or we will be eaten,” Bryce said shrugging. “Does that suit you?”
I almost laughed but it was laced with panic and came out like a squawk.
“I suppose,” I said.
I lingered late at the library, a queasy feeling hanging in my stomach at the thought of heading home. Home to the little staff house for the first time in weeks. And this time no one would come to fetch me back to the coven house.
Callum had explained that he had placed wards strong enough to keep the Hollow out of the small house before they managed to convince me to stay with them. It was why mine was still standing, unmarred, and my neighbors’ homes were rubble.
But the neighborhood had made it out at the first sign of the sky turning dark. Isaac was the only one hurt that day.
I didn’t want to go back to my house. It was small and empty and I had loved that it was mine and mine alone, but now the thought of it made me lonely. I wanted to put my cheek against lush fabrics and let my eyes soak up the color of bright walls. I wanted to fall asleep next to someone and wake up in a crowded bed.
It was a waste to crave that tall tower house, and the people inside, so badly now when I had given all of it up.
I snuck past Gwen to the main doors as the sun started to set. I didn’t want to stay with her and the others either, not while where I really wanted to be was within easy sight.
The rain hadn’t stopped once and the sidewalks were drowning, water up to my ankles that splashed and ran into my boots with every sluggish step. There was no busy traffic outside with me now. I wasn’t even sure if classes were still in session or if students and faculty were in hiding together. I lifted my chin, shivering in my thin coat, and letting the tears wavering at my eyes roll over, mingling with the rain stinging at my cheeks. If Bryce and I were successful, would I leave campus? Quit the library and wander back to Bridgeston again? It would be too hard to see my…my men. Not that it was right to call them that now.
“Joanna!”
My heart skipped in my chest and my feet skidded in the water. But I clamped my eyes shut. “No,” I whispered. Why hadn’t I written Forget me. Or We never met. I didn’t want to see them again. Didn’t want to offer an explanation or-
“Joanna, stop!”
I didn’t mean to listen. I didn’t want to hear the crack in Callum’s voice. I covered my face with my hands and my feet stilled beneath me. For a perverse moment I wanted to be going a little crazy and imagining hearing him. Wet splashes pounded behind me, footsteps kicking through the deep puddles as they caught up to me. My street was within sight and I wondered if I could run there faster, hide in my small little house and refuse to look back.
“Don’t do this,” he whispered, words blending into the whistle of rain. “Please don’t do this to us.”
I stifled a moan behind my hands as they slid down to my cheeks. I turned and he was there, getting drenched in rain, hair sticking wetly to his forehead. He pulled his glasses, spattered and wet, off his face and tucked them away and I could see the injured wince on his face. Aiden and Isaac were behind him, a little farther off but Isaac looked pale and was leaning into Aiden’s side.
Why? Why had they come? It had seemed like a such a simple thing to do. Write myself out of their lives. It shouldn’t have even mattered. Not to them.
