Those Who Fall

by Rachael Arsenault

  Emily’s scrutinizing gaze flicked from me to Farida and back again, though the second time she looked at me her eyes were focused on an area below my face. She raised one eyebrow. “You’re gonna need a new shirt again.”

  I took a proper looked down at myself for the first time since Farida had shown up. There were two ragged, black-edged holes in the front of my sweater, both roughly hand-shaped. Patches of my burned and bloodied skin peeked through the tattered fabric. Admittedly, the sweater had been in pretty rough shape before that. Between living out in the woods for the better part of a week and vomiting all over myself after the car crash, I was disgusting.

  “We’ve got bigger priorities right now,” I said. “Namely, Farida.”

  “We can’t just wait here for her to get better, though,” Tara said. She was looking at each of us anxiously, fidgeting with her armband. “Arman and the people working for him have been tracking all of us, plus there was that Imani chick. I don’t want to get ambushed by any of them again.”

  “You have a point,” I said reluctantly. Would there ever be a time where I could just stay in one place for a while? I leaned my head against the doorjamb, eyes drifting closed as I tried to convince my exhausted brain to come up with a new destination. For some reason, all I could think of was how much I wanted pancakes. It was probably because we had passed a breakfast place on the way to the Owl’s Nest.

  “Um,” Alicia started timidly. We all looked to where she had been standing quietly in the corner; I had almost forgotten she was there, and it seemed like I wasn’t the only one, judging by how startled Tara looked upon hearing her speak. “D-did you still want to try out those new stones, Farida?”

  Farida shook her head. “No — well, yes. I’ll test them, but I’m not gonna use them.” She flashed a quick, tired smile in my direction. “I’ve learned that lesson.”

  “I’m not sure if you should even test them, honestly,” I said (though I wasn’t actually sure what “testing” them entailed).

  “It’ll be fine. I won’t have to use any of my magic. Promise.”

  Alicia opened a drawer to the cabinet that was crammed in beside the little desk. I was immediately reminded of my tour at the Friedman Museum, the memories washing over me tainted with dread and regret. She lifted out a box of jewellery — necklaces and rings and bangles, some polished and glittering, others old and tarnished.

  “Take all the time you need,” Alicia said as she set the tray on the desk.

  Emily and Tara shuffled out of the little room so that Farida could enter. She collapsed into the old, creaky wooden chair at the desk and set to work, picking up each piece and closing her eyes while she held it in both hands before carefully setting the item aside and moving on to the next one. We all watched silently. I couldn’t quell the choking anxiety building in my chest. She had far better control over her magic than me — and, besides, she claimed this wouldn’t even use her magic — but I still associated finding a magic stone with summoning a monster to accidentally wreak havoc and destruction.

  After Farida was over halfway through the box, she sucked in a sharp breath as she held onto a thin silver ring that was set with a faceted, deep blue stone. She turned in her seat, beckoning me with a small smile. “It’s magic. Feel it.”

  “O-oh, I don’t know if I should—”

  “It’s okay,” she said softly. Her expression was so warm and understanding that it was impossible not to trust every word she said. “It’s safe. I promise.”

  I was still hesitant when I approached. Even if I managed not to unleash unholy hell by touching a magic stone again, I wasn’t sure I would know the feel of magic well enough to recognize it. My hands were stiff and too cold in the relative warmth of the room as I reached out to take the ring from her, which suddenly looked impossibly small and delicate, like something that might crumble to dust under my untrained hands.

  It was warm to the touch, though the heat felt more alive than the warmth transferred from someone’s hand to an object they held. And there was a faint ringing in my ears, like when I was younger and I would sometimes notice the subtle, high-pitched whine of an electrical current. The air around me buzzed ever-so-slightly — I could feel it brush against my skin and was surprised when I didn’t see the hairs there raise like they had been exposed to static. There was something invisible permeating the air around this stone and I knew, if I wanted to, I could reach out and pull it into me. The sensation was familiar, bringing a surge of déjà vu. I knew I must have felt some form of this with my own stone, but the intense, visceral experience I was having right then was different. It was incredibly specific and I couldn’t imagine where else I might have experienced it.

  “Holy shit,” I whispered.

  Still smiling, Farida gently pulled the ring away from me and set it aside, separate from the other jewellery. She quickly and quietly worked through the rest of the box, but nothing else turned out to have magic. Alicia gathered up the discard pile and put it all back in the cabinet.

  “What are you gonna do with all them?” Tara asked, gesturing toward the cabinet. “And how did you even get them?”

  “We’re a jewellery business specializing in the antique and the eclectic,” Alicia said, drawing herself up a little straighter. I got the sense that this was her pitch-delivering voice. “We use the business to gather as much stock as we can — it’s not easy. A lot of what we’re seeking is tied up in museums or family heirlooms. The latter we can sometimes bid on at estate sales and the like, but museums…” Her cheeks flushed a deeper shade of pink than usual. “Well, we have some connections. I never ask how they get the items. I just ask the price. Then, we bring whatever we’ve managed to acquire to be checked over by Masika — er, well…” She blinked rapidly, posture sagging. After a few seconds, she shook her head a little and continued, “Farida. They’re checked over by Farida now, and any that aren’t magical are sold by the store so that we have income to buy more stock with or otherwise fund Mas— Farida’s search. Food, gas, phone minutes — whatever they need.”

  “Is there a company car we can borrow?” Farida asked suddenly.

  “I — w-well, we have some cars at our disposal, but I only drove one out here.”

  “Where are the rest?”

  “Moncton would be the nearest.”

  “That’s not far,” I said. To Farida, I asked, “You thinking we need a car again?”

  “Yes. No. I—” She broke off, seeming to struggle with her words and with meeting my eyes. “I just… I was thinking… We need somewhere to recover and regroup, right?”

  “Right. But being in a car isn’t any safer than traveling on foot. They can still follow us.”

  “Not necessarily,” Tara said. “I mean, maybe. I’m not sure. Their tracking might work differently, but there’s some sort of limit on how far away I can be from whoever I’m trying to scry on.”

  “How far are we talking? And why didn’t you mention this earlier?” Emily asked with obvious suspicion, crossing her arms as she glared down at the other girl. They were both standing in the doorway now, having traded places with me and Farida.

  Impressively, Tara didn’t shrink away in such close proximity to Emily’s glare. Maybe repeated exposure was making it lose effectiveness. “Like I said, I’m not sure exactly, but when I was on PEI with Amber’s parents I was too far to scry on Farida. And I didn’t tell you before because there was no point — the goal was to find Farida, and that meant we couldn’t focus on putting distance between us and Arman’s little minions.”

  Emily frowned, but didn’t say anything.

  “Well, if PEI’s out of range, then why don’t we go there?” Farida said. “We would definitely want a car for that, though.”

  I turned to her, eyes wide. “Wait, what?”

  “I can give you a ride if that’s more practical,” Alicia said, apparently unperturbed by my shock.

  Farida shook her head. “No, that’s way out of your way. I know you alre
ady have a lot to take care of here.”

  “It’s really not a problem. I actually was considering making time to travel there this weekend — there’s a fairly large auction happening and I thought…”

  “There could be stones?”

  She shrugged. “The online listing showed some old heirloom jewelry. It’s hard to tell for sure how old it is just from photos, but things have turned up in stranger places before.”

  “So we go to PEI, then,” Farida said. She smiled up at me. “We can check on your parents while we’re there, too.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa — this is a bit rushed. We still barely know what we’re dealing with or if being far away will help. Or if we can even get that far away while everyone’s following us.”

  “I know you said your parents are safe,” Farida said, “but I think you’d feel better if you actually got to see them in person. I know I would. Plus, we might be able to collect more stones, which is still an important goal in the midst of all this.”

  “That still doesn’t help with anything else, though.”

  “It does put us in a completely different police jurisdiction,” Tara said. “I mean, completely completely different — I don’t even know if PEI would be on the alert for you guys yet.”

  “They will be when the New Brunswick RCMP figure out we’ve left the province.”

  “No, I think Tara’s onto something,” Emily said, crossing her arms. She did not seem happy about agreeing with the other girl, but pressed on anyway: “We can try to talk to RCMP on the Island, explain to them what happened. Or at least parts of what happened. Your parents are there and can vouch for the fact that Arman kidnapped them and you tried to save them.”

  I sighed. “I see what you’re saying, but if that doesn’t work out then I’m just getting us all arrested.”

  “To be fair, you could be pretty hard to arrest if you wanted to be.” She grinned mischievously. “Hard to cuff you if you’re flying off on the back of a dragon.”

  “Yeeeah, I don’t think doing that would be good for us in the long run.”

  “It’s an idea we should at least consider,” Farida said. “There are a lot of positives to this plan: You get to see your parents and have peace of mind that they’re safe, we can check out an auction and see if there are potential magic stones there, and we can maybe clear your name with police so we don’t have to watch for them to whole time we’re travelling.”

  “And I’ll scry on everyone I can on the way there,” Tara said, “that way we’ll know as soon as we’re out of range of them.”

  Emily snorted, crossing her arms. “So we’ll just know the exact moment we turn blind.”

  “Well, we can fly.”

  “Not all the way to PEI,” I said. “I can’t keep Ddraig out for that long. And…” I hesitated, unsure how to phrase my next revelation to Farida.

  “I don’t like the sound of that ‘and’,” Alicia said from her corner by the filing cabinet. “That does not sound like a good ‘and’.”

  I looked down at Farida. She was watching me with a frown, her expression caught between curiosity and concern. I didn’t want to tell her — she was still healing from the loss of Masika. Reminding her that she also had to fight her own cousin was pouring salt in old wounds. But she needed to know, and it was better to tell her than to let her find out accidentally. “Imani has a new stone. And it has a dragon, too.”

  Her already sallow cheeks grew even paler. Her mouth fell open slightly, searching for words but unable to find them. Eventually, barely above a whisper, she breathed, “A dragon?”

  “Yeah. It’s different from mine, but it’s definitely a dragon of some sort.”

  “But she’s never flown after us with it,” Tara said.

  “Yet.”

  We were all silent for a long moment, huddled together, lost in our thoughts and our worries. I was replaying the scene with that dragon over and over, wondering how long it would be until I was forced to face it again. I hoped Ddraig was up to the task. I hoped I was up to the task.

  “You should probably mention the even worse news,” Emily said. When Tara and I shot her confused looks, she rolled her eyes. “You know — Arman? The rifts? The really big, huge problem you’re supposed to be worried about?”

  I was only a little embarrassed to realize that my fixation on helping Farida and relief at having her back whole and well (or, at least, well enough to recover) had temporarily forced Arman’s plans completely from my mind. My cheeks burned slightly as I turned to Farida. The stones were something she had been raised to protect, and keeping the rifts closed went along with that. It’s what Masika and the Ivory Circle had fought so hard for. It was a legacy worth upholding.

  “Arman plans to reopen the rifts.”

  She sucked in a small, sharp breath, eyes wide and alert and more than a little panicked. “What? How?”

  “We don’t know,” Tara said. “But he’ll probably figure something out soon. He knows a ton of stuff we don’t.”

  Silence settled over us again, albeit more briefly. There was a lot for everyone to process and no ideas on how to deal with it.

  “Regardless,” Farida said eventually, her voice a little shaky, “we can’t stay here. We need somewhere to rest. I think…” She bit her lip, warring with some internal dilemma, before she blurted, “I think we should listen to Tara.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Emily snapped.

  Tara, meanwhile, looked a little deer-in-the-headlights, as though she hadn’t expected this outcome so quickly and wasn’t sure what to do now that she was faced with it. “Oh. Um. Thanks? Okay.”

  “You’re the only one of us who has any experience with magic used to track people,” Farida went on, “so I trust your hypothesis that the other stones have limits on how far they ‘see’, as well. We need somewhere we can lay low to heal and figure out what we’re doing next. PEI is a good place for that — it’s far away but not hard to travel to, we have a place we can stay there, and it has the added bonus of offering us reassurance about the safety of Amber’s parents and the possibility of finding new stones.”

  “And if this doesn’t work?” Emily said. “We’ll be leading Arman straight to Amber’s parents. Again.”

  “We’ll keep an eye out,” I said. “If it ever looks like Arman is getting close, we bail.”

  “Still doesn’t help us against Imani. She can fly and she’s immune to Tara’s scrying.”

  Farida looked stricken. “What? Really?”

  I nodded. “It’s like the scry gets flipped back around on Tara. I’m not sure what we can do to get around it.”

  Farida looked thoughtful. She was running her fingers in some sort of pattern over her jeans, though I couldn’t quite follow it. Finally, with a little shake of her head, she let out a soft sigh and said, “Imani might be able to find us, but she won’t be a threat to Amber’s family. Imani’s not cruel like that. She would try to take our stones. That’s all. As long as we don’t let the fight start in the house, or we make sure your family gets away, they’ll be safe.”

  “That… That sounds doable, I guess.”

  Emily muttered something that probably involved a lot of swearing.

  “So we’ll fly?” Tara asked.

  I shook my head. “Too far. I can’t go all the way like that.”

  “But you could go part of the way,” Farida said. Her chair creaked as she turned to Alicia, asking, “Would you be able to drive us to Moncton? We can get our own car there, drive it toward the Island, and then pull over and fly the rest of the way.”

  Alicia frowned a little. “I-I guess I could… But that would involve abandoning a car on the side of the highway.”

  “Not exactly the best use of assets,” I said. “And I don’t really see why we wouldn’t keep the car. Er, if that’s okay?” I glanced at Alicia, who offered an uncertain shrug of one shoulder.

  “Driving hasn’t been working out well for us recently,” Farida said. “And I don’t wa
nt to turn a huge expense back on the company if the car we borrow gets wrecked; their resources are better spent elsewhere.”

  “Well, why don’t I just drive you?” Alicia said. “You can get out where you need to, and then I’ll come back to Fredericton to finish up here.”

  “I like it,” I said. “It’s probably better if we bypass Moncton, anyway. Less opportunities to get intercepted and stuck in a fight.”

  “Well…” Alicia flushed bright red. She started fidgeting with a drawer that wouldn’t sit right in the filing cabinet. “I actually have something I need to give to Farida in Moncton. If it’s not too much trouble. It would be a very quick stop, I promise!”

  “That sounds lovely, Alicia,” Farida said, smiling warmly at her.

  I turned toward the doorway, where the only remaining detractor stood scowling at everyone. Emily looked like she wanted to argue more but, after grinding her jaw for a moment, she rolled her eyes and said, “Fine. Let’s just get this disaster over with already.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  The “company car” wasn’t anything flashy or extravagant — just a simple black sedan, the fanciest thing about it being the heated seats. The only reason the business had such cars was because their stores had begun expanding across eastern Canada and it made it easier to coordinate visits to the various stores and write off the expenses associated to a company car versus somebody’s personal car. Plus, they could use it for trips to estate sales and auctions where they might pick up new merchandise.

  Even though everything about the business had been discussed in very legal-sounding terms, I couldn’t help wondering how much under-the-table work was happening. I mean, obviously some had to, given that Farida and Masika hadn’t bought any of the stones they collected. Just thinking about all the careful paperwork and cover-ups that must have been involved made me feel a little sick. No wonder Alicia acted so nervous all the time.

  There was some fumbling and arguing over who should sit where in the car. There were five of us, so we had no room to spare. Alicia was driving, obviously, and (despite her protests) we put Emily up front so no one would be crammed in against her healing arm. I sat in the middle between Farida and Tara. We weren’t on the road very long when Emily and Farida both conked out, their need for rest and restoration finally catching up with them.