Those Who Fall

by Rachael Arsenault

“No,” Tara cut in, surprising me, “she has a point.”

  Emily’s surprise was much more sarcastic and exaggerated. “Oh, I do, do I? Well, I’m excited to see where this conversation goes.”

  “You’re impossible!”

  “I’m really not, actually. I’m quite low maintenance.”

  “How many times do I have to prove to you that I’m here to help you guys?”

  “Until it stops being a lie.”

  “Emily!” I snapped.

  Tara raised her chin with a defiant look toward Emily as she lifted the arm bearing the glittering gold band and its lustrous white jewel. With a flash of light, the serpent-woman appeared beside her. It was only when Emily started shouting profanity that I remembered she hadn’t been introduced to the grey-skinned, purple-scaled monster yet.

  Watching as it slithered down the embankment, Emily finished her tirade by eloquently asking, “Qu’est-ce que le fuck?”

  Tara cut a sideways look at her. “Not everyone gets a dragon.”

  Once the creature reached the bloodied tree, it paused to examine it. Tara nodded, murmuring to herself as she watched, then announced, “It’s still wet.”

  “Do you guys have a psychic bond or something?” I asked.

  She raised her eyebrows at my question. “I’m pretty sure everyone gets a sense of what their creature knows. Don’t you?”

  Ddraig. Maybe I did. I just hadn’t summoned him enough to really experience it.

  “Is there a trail, though?” Emily asked, drawing our attention back to the matter at hand.

  “Hang on — I’ll have her check.”

  The snake woman slithered over the earth, weaving between the trees as she searched for—

  Roots and vines burst to life, lunging at her, entangling her as she shrieked and writhed and fought to break free. It felt like my heart had dropped into my stomach. We weren’t alone, and we hadn’t found the person we wanted. I didn’t know if that was a good or bad sign for Farida’s fate.

  “Dracaena!” Tara yelled. She tried to run closer to her creature, but almost immediately lost her footing on the steep embankment. She caught herself against a thin trunk, the tree swaying dangerously from her impact.

  Below, her creature vanished in a flare of light.

  “Your monster’s weak,” Emily called over.

  “She’s not weak — I called her back!”

  “Why?”

  “Less arguing, more running!” I cried as I started scrambling back the way we’d come.

  Emily caught my arm before I could pass her. “What are you doing? This is the best lead we have!”

  “We’re defenceless!”

  “You’re not.”

  I gritted my teeth. There was no way I could face off against whoever was down there! I was still burnt out from calling Ddraig earlier and I barely knew how to use my magic. Meanwhile, this person had the entire forest to attack us with.

  I glanced over at Tara, who had struggled her way back up the embankment by then. She was breathing heavily as she said, “We’ll scry again later.”

  “Who says there’ll be a later?” Emily said. “We still don’t know who won that fight.”

  She was right. There was no sign of Farida. And there was blood on the trees.

  I turned back toward the incline, sat down, and carefully slid my way down toward the water, ignoring Tara yelling behind me about being an idiot and needing to run. I was glad the thunder of the waterfall overpowered the ruckus of snapping branches and shifting stones during my descent, and hoped being lower to the ground hid me from sight.

  At the bottom of the embankment, the cacophonous falls managed to be even louder and, though I was a fair distance from the fall itself, I was doused in a fine, cold mist. The rocks I stumbled over were slick with moisture. Even under the best circumstances, this was dangerous.

  My next step snagged. Something thorny twisted up my leg, growing, squeezing.

  I bent, trying to pry myself free from the vine of wild roses and only succeeding in slicing up my hands. I needed a knife — Emily usually had one — but she was up top and I couldn’t climb and she couldn’t get down and—

  Somewhere in the midst of my hysteria, I remembered what Emily had consistently yelled at me through every disaster so far: ‘Use your magic!’

  My eyes widened as the memory of that black streak through the field outside Fredericton hit me like a truck.

  I shifted concentration, drawing on the pool of magic inside me, the process more familiar, less straining. A thin black mist flowed from my palms. I grabbed the vines again, which immediately wilted and became brittle. It was nothing to snap through them.

  Striding forward, I kept my poison at the ready, blackening each and every root or flower or branch that tried to impede me. The steady ache of my body intensified and my limbs grew stiff and twitchy, but I pushed on. I needed to. For Emily. For Farida.

  Farida…

  The blood on the tree gleamed a foot away from me. Smeared. A hand on the tree bracing against collapse?

  Farida…

  In my mind, I saw her smiling and singing, the sunset behind her turning everything ablaze as we drove toward the dark horizon. And then I saw her angry, crying, blood-stained and mud-stained as blackbirds burst into existence around her.

  I wanted her back. I wanted to make her smile again. I wanted to help her through this nightmare, no matter how hard it got.

  I didn’t want to think of what state I might find her in among these trees. I didn’t want to bury anyone else.

  If this person had… If she was…

  The poison flowed freer. All around, bushes and trees and flowers withered as though recoiling from my anger. A path slowly cleared itself just ahead of me, soon revealing the source of the blood.

  It wasn’t Farida.

  They looked young and androgynous. Round-faced, with short hair a black too stark to be natural, which was confirmed by the telltale caramel brown roots. They were cowering against the trunk of a tree, eyes wide and breathing laboured as they held their shaking hands up defensively. An armband of dull, heavy metal wrapped around their bicep, set with a bright green stone. Their paper-pale skin was streaked with blood and mud.

  My last memory of Farida flooded back to me again.

  “Where is she?” I demanded.

  The kid was coughing, gasping. Belatedly, I remembered why the plants they controlled were shrinking away and dying. It was hard to rein in my poison when I was so angry and afraid for Farida, but, with a few deep breaths, I managed.

  “Where is she?” I asked again, calmer this time. “Where’s Farida?”

  “I — I don’t know.” Their voice was high and rough from coughing.

  “Bullshit!”

  “I don’t know! Sh-she got away. I thought I had her cornered when we got to the falls, but then all those birds appeared and I — I couldn’t fight them off.”

  Birds. Her new stone — of course. Now I remembered that the birds had emerged from puddles that first time. Water must have been the key there.

  “Do you know where she went?”

  The kid shook their head, tears cutting through the grime on their cheeks. Now that I was properly looking at them, I realized just how young they looked. Maybe fifteen. They really were just a kid. What were they doing working with someone like Arman? Tara had said something about him finding people at their most vulnerable.

  “How old are you?” I asked softly.

  “S-seventeen.”

  “And how exactly does a kid like you end up mixed up with Arman?”

  “Amber?” Emily’s voice called in the distance, straining to be heard over the roar of the waterfall. “Amber, did you find her? What’s going on?”

  The kid’s brown eyes widened, then narrowed. Voice quivering on a sob, they whispered, “You’re Amber?”

  “I am.” I smiled, trying to sound as gentle and non-threatening as I could when I said, “And I’m not gonna hurt you.”


  There was a flash of light. Something small and soft flew at me, latching onto my face. I stumbled, shrieking, trying to pry it off, but I couldn’t get a good grip on its fur. Feathers? Both — the tiny body was covered in a mix of both.

  Then, just as suddenly as it appeared, the creature vanished. The accompanying flare of light directly in my face temporarily blinded me. When I managed to blink the spots out of my vision, the kid was nowhere the be seen.

  I let out a string of profanity that would have made Emily proud.

  Chapter Twelve

  “How are you doing?”

  I looked over my shoulder. Emily had moved out from under the haphazard lean-to I’d managed to construct. The surrounding trees framed her in dark shadow, our only light coming from the moon peering through the treetops. The woods were alive with the sounds of nighttime.

  After the plant kid had vanished, we had searched for any sign of where they had gone — footprints, blood trail, evidence of plant life being manipulated. Nothing. It was like they had literally vanished into the air. After that failure, we had walked on for a while in hopes of find another sign of Farida, but that hadn’t panned out, either.

  Emily had made her usual demands and accusations against Tara, who insisted she still didn’t know who the kid was. Not really. After I had described them to her, all she could tell us was that they sounded familiar but she had only seen them maybe once or twice and was pretty sure they were a “they”, not a he or she, but even that she didn’t know for sure. And she had no clue what their name was.

  Eventually, we’d all been too tired to continue walking or arguing, so we stopped to make camp.

  “You’re supposed to be asleep,” I told Emily.

  “I had a cat nap,” she said. “Hard to sleep comfortably with my arm still so sore.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: It’s not your fault.”

  I turned away, hugging my knees to my chest. “It certainly feels like it is.” Then, in a half-hearted attempt to lighten the mood, I added, “Shame your protection stone didn’t work.”

  “The malachite in the glove box?” She snorted. “It totally worked.”

  I glanced at her, raising my eyebrows.

  She smirked back at me. “We didn’t roll, did we? That would have been way worse.”

  Well, she wasn’t wrong.

  A pause. The mix of branches, leaves, and pinecones underfoot crunched and snapped as she moved closer to sit beside me, wincing with every movement that jostled her arm. “You didn’t answer my question.”

  I shrugged. What was there to say? I was on the run from the cops, Farida was still nowhere to be found, Masika was dead, and my best friend was recovering from having her shoulder dislocated with no way to seek proper, ongoing medical care. And we were camping in the middle of nowhere. It was not a good point in my life.

  “A lot’s happened,” she said eventually. “You know you can talk to me? Like old times.”

  I let out a breath of laughter. I didn’t know how to talk about any of this. I didn’t know where to start. Usually when I hashed out my feelings with Emily, it was about my parents getting on my nerves, or school stress, or all the cute girls being straight, or Mitch being an ass.

  Just thinking of his name sent an unexpected stab through my heart. How was I still upset about this? How could he even be on my radar as a subject to care about after everything that had happened since we broke up?

  “Did you see Mitch on the news?” I asked.

  Emily snorted. “Oh yeah. What a dumbass.”

  “I just don’t understand how he could do that to me.” Not for the first time, I was struck with the sense of grieving the relationship all over again. “I know we broke up, but… I thought he loved me. He said he loved me.”

  Beside me, Emily shifted and sighed softly. I glanced over; her brow was furrowed with thought as she mulled over how to respond. Eventually, she said, “It’s not that he didn’t love you. He just never really got you.”

  I frowned at her, confused. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, he cared about you and he liked you, but his perception of you was always…” She trailed off, gaze drifting to the sky. “How do I put this? He was… biased, I guess? I think that’s the closest word for it.”

  “That still doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I guess an example would probably work better. Remember third year? When he took you out for your birthday?”

  “Yeah — we went out dancing.”

  “And you hate dancing.”

  “He was trying to get me out of my shell,” I said, perhaps a bit defensively. Broken up or not, Mitch had been a good boyfriend.

  “He’d taken you out to clubs about a dozen times before that and you hated it every time. He should’ve known you wouldn’t enjoy yourself — and it was your birthday, so it should have been about what you wanted, not what he wanted for you. If he really got you, he would’ve taken you glow bowling or marathoned the Harry Potter movies or something.”

  “I guess I never really looked at it that way…”

  “Right. Because you never really got him, either.”

  I stiffened. “Excuse me?”

  “Amber, come on. It’s shitty that he’s putting out the idea that you could be a terrorist, but it’s not a huge surprise.”

  My jaw dropped.

  “He assumes! All the time! You should know that.”

  “Name one time.” I crossed my arms, lifting my chin indignantly.

  Emily smirked. “When he met me, he assumed I was a drug dealer because I’d gotten my first tattoo and had my eyebrow pierced.”

  “I — well—” I sputtered, scrambling for a counter-argument that didn’t exist. Because she was right. He had said those things.

  And then I was remembering when he had met my parents for the first time and, afterward, had confided in me that he was surprised when my mom turned out to be well-spoken because I had mentioned that she lived on a farm as a little girl. Or when he had mistakenly assumed one of his classmates was gay because the guy wore black nail polish sometimes and ended up creating a rather embarrassing scene when he tried to set him up with another queer guy we knew.

  Oh, god. Had Mitch been a shitty guy all along and I’d never realized it?

  My somewhat despairing realization must have shown on my face, because Emily sighed and said, “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to make you feel worse about all this, and I’m not saying you don’t have a right to be upset. I’m not even saying that Mitch is an irredeemable asshole — although he is definitely an asshole. I just…” She paused, worrying her lip as she chose her next words. “I don’t think this type of breakdown could’ve been avoided for you guys. Maybe it wouldn’t have happened for a few more months or years but, eventually, some sort of big stress or life change would’ve come up and you guys would have seen the ugly sides of each other you’d never noticed before. It just unfortunately ended up broadcast on TV.”

  I smiled, though it was probably more of a grimace. “I guess that explains why he broke up with me when I decided to do my Masters.”

  “Exactly! What kind of asshole does that?”

  “Thanks.”

  She shrugged her good shoulder, then winced and hissed air when the movement apparently jostled her healing shoulder. “Ow. Ooh, okay. Shrugging is still bad. Very bad.”

  “I mean it. Thank you. Talking it over helps.” And it did. Even though Mitch hadn’t been actively on my mind in a while, that emotional weight had been lingering, unacknowledged, in the background. Now it was a little lighter and I knew, with time, it would be as good as gone.

  “I do what I can,” she said, offering a small smile.

  “Now go back to bed. At least try to sleep — you’ve got those painkillers if you need them. We’ve gotta be well rested for tomorrow.”

  “Fine — but that goes for you, too.”

  “You want me taking your p
ainkillers?”

  She laughed, rolling her eyes and giving me a playful shove. “You know what I mean.”

  I waved her off and returned to my watch of the woods. I knew I needed sleep, but it wasn’t easy right now. Emily refused to let Tara keep watch, and I refused to let Emily keep watch. Maybe they could stay up together while I caught a little shut eye, but that was almost as likely to end in catastrophe as all of us going to sleep. There was a flicker of forgetfulness where I thought to myself, ‘I’ll sleep in the car while Emily drives,’ but then I remembered where I was and why and what had happened to the car.

  We were in such a mess. But we were so close. I knew it. We’d almost caught up to Farida today. Just a little longer, and we would finally find her. I hoped. Life could go back to normal, then, or at least to whatever normal had started to become.

  Just a little longer.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “It’s hard to say,” Tara said the next morning as she came out of her scry, eyes fading back to their usual brown. “She was at some kind of… abandoned house. I didn’t get to see much around her, but I think it might have been part of an old farm.”

  The description was similar enough to where Masika had died that my heartrate immediately spiked with the irrational fear that Arman was near Farida. I told myself to be sensible — Arman had long since left that place. There wasn’t any reason for him to want to go back there. Besides, I didn’t even know for sure that it was the same farm.

  ‘But she seems to be retracing her steps,’ I thought. ‘First the bridge, then the campsite. Now this.’

  But why? There wasn’t anything for her at that dilapidated mess, either. Nothing except horrible, horrible memories.

  “I think she may have been on the phone,” Tara continued, oblivious to my internal debate. She had started scratching at her forehead, itching the scab there. She winced when it came open, swearing quietly as she pulled her hand away to study the spot of blood on her hand. Part of me wanted to tell her to stop picking at it before it became infected, but I couldn’t focus my mind on anything except Farida and the abandoned farm and the memory of Masika’s death.