by Frankie Rose
If this is all in Aldan’s mind, why wouldn’t he make sure the weather was beautiful all day, every day? The chilled wind ruffled my hair and penetrated the gaps between my clothes as I stomped towards the cottage. Wild hair and another monsters of rock t-shirt greeted me upon entry. Aldan thrust a scalding cup of hot chocolate into my hands before I could even take a breath to say hello.
“So you came,” he said.
I slumped in the empty chair closest to the fire blazing in the hearth, relishing the warmth, and placed the mug down on the table to spare my fingers from blistering. “I guess so. I was pretty mad about what happened with my… father.” I said the word slowly, the texture of it foreign and alien in my mouth.
“I don’t blame you,” Aldan told me, “It was a mean trick. I would never have considered it under normal circumstances. But these days, there is no normal. We have to be able to bend ourselves a little without compromising our morals too much.”
He didn’t sound too sorry. In fact, he sounded quite happy. I didn’t feel brave enough to request an apology, though, so I just stared at my hot chocolate and sulked. The wood continued to snap and crack heartily in the hearth. I could feel Aldan’s amused eyes on me, studying my pout.
“Alright, then. That lad’s been in here with a face about as gloomy as yours so I daren’t ask what’s happened there, but I hope in time you’ll forgive the two of us. In all honesty, we had no idea that Elliot could affect you physically in your dreams. We would never have let him in if we had. We thought he would wheedle some information out of you and then hightail it, but turns out he’s a lot stronger than we thought. I promise you this much: he’ll never get in again. I’ve sealed you right up.”
I had no choice but to take his word for it. “You think Elliot believed me?” I asked.
“There’s no way for you to lie to him. Not in there. He could make you confess your darkest, nastiest secrets, the ones you’d never normally tell anyone, and there’s not a thing you could do about it. I just snapped your conversation short before he could ask something we didn’t want him to know.”
“Yes, but now he knows we have no idea where the talisman is, and that we have no plan to stop them. Surely we’d want them to think the exact opposite?”
“Well…not really. You don’t understand creatures like this. If they think we have everything we need to implement a plan against them, then they’ll come down on us so hard we won’t have time to tie our shoelaces. If they think we’re stranded in open water with no life line, we buy ourselves some time, you see?”
It did make some sense.
“The thing is we do have the talisman,” he continued. “It’s just broken.”
My head snapped up. “You have it?” Adrenaline coursed through me, turning my stomach ice cold. If they had the talisman, did they expect me to play my part in the prophecy?
“Without it being fully operational we need time to work out another plan. We’re almost there, though. Trust me, you wouldn’t like the original blueprints, anyway.”
“Original blueprints?” I frowned. “What does that mean? Please, I’m tired of riddles. Just be straight with me.”
He looked at me and shrugged again in that easy-going Isn’t the weather nice? fashion. “In short, to destroy the Immortals, I would have to drain every last drop of life force out of you. I would have to take your soul, and you would have to die.”
I choked on my mouthful of hot chocolate. Was he serious? Yes. Yes, he was serious. “You’re right. I don’t like that plan at all.”
He laughed gruffly and nudged me with the toe of his boot under the table.
“You see? So it’s a good thing we secured ourselves some time to dot the i’s and cross the t’s on our other ideas. I’m truly sorry that we didn’t fill you in on everything. Believe me, I wanted to, but Elliot’s no idiot. He would have sensed it in two seconds flat if you were trying to hide something from him. You couldn’t know.”
Now that I knew the truth, I had to admit that there was logic to their plan, but it didn’t change much. I was still angry.
“Don’t worry, in a couple of days we’ll be able to move on our backup plan. Hopefully we’ll be successful.”
“What’s your backup?”
“Well, the idea is to repair the talisman and go in with the element of surprise. They’ll be too shocked to react in time. We’ll deal them a blow they won’t recover from.”
”What are your odds?”
“Honestly?” Aldan sucked his teeth. “I’d say about seventy-thirty.”
“Seventy-thirty! Those are terrible odds! You mean to say if you can fix this talisman, then there’s a thirty percent chance your plan won’t work?” They were insane. To risk their lives when there was such a huge possibility they would fail was madness.
“No, Farley, seventy-thirty against.”
My jaw dropped. “You can’t be serious!”
“Oh, it’s not all that bad. I’ve done the math, and I’m probably erring on the cautious side.” He cracked me a lopsided smile and I just stared at him. How could he be so calm?
“You’re crazy! There’s no way you should take a risk like that. You’ll all die!”
“That’s a possibility, but what if we succeed? Wouldn’t that be a kicker?”
“So what, you guys are just gonna go in there guns blazing and hope for the best?”
“Pretty much.”
“I’ve got to say that’s the worst plan I’ve ever heard. And where is the talisman, anyway? Do you even know that it can be fixed?”
“It’s right here. And I hope it can. It’s going to cost us a lot, but everything depends on it working. All we can do is have faith.”
His words barely penetrated the mass panic that was taking place inside my head. If their plan didn’t work, then they would all die, and that included me along with them.
“I still don’t understand. This talisman better be, like, a nuclear bomb or something.”
Aldan chuckled. He took a deep swig from his hot chocolate and grinned at me. “I have been told I can be quite explosive,” he said, winking.
“Huh?”
“Yeah. It’s got to work, Farley, because it’s me. I’m the talisman.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Trying to Get In
