Aster Wood and the Blackburn Son (18 page)

She sat across the table from me, smiling at me as though I had never left.

Mom.

Her hand reached towards me and I put mine into it. Warmth flooded through me at her touch. I was safe. All of my fear gave way to trust. She spoke, but I heard no sound. I wanted to hear, but the only sound was the gentle rustle of wind through the leaves outside, the creaking of the house as it settled around us, the sounds of the farm as though we weren’t there at all.

My father walked through the front door silently. He came to the table, placing a hand on my shoulder. I started and looked up at him, then gaped as he sat down next to me. He didn’t belong in this place, here in my fantasy. Something was wrong.

Grandma offered him a plate, but he refused it. My mother placed her hand on his arm, too, speaking in words that hung silent in the air, unheard by us all as though we were in separate rooms.

But he ignored them both, staring at me with immediate, urgent eyes. I didn’t want to meet those eyes, didn’t want him here. But something was different in them. I stared, trying to figure out what the change was.
 

He opened his mouth, speaking only to me. But again, no sound. I moved in closer, dropping my fork, dropping my mother’s hand, thinking that maybe if I just got near enough to him I would be able to hear. Why had he come? He leaned in close, cupping both hands around my ear as he spoke into it. His shortly stubbly whiskers scratched the side of my face.

“Run.”

It was almost a whisper.

I sat back, confused. His clear eyes stared back at me. Lucid. Sane.

Then, the bomb went off right at the dining table, the house, my dad, my mom and grandma, everything burst apart, pushed away from me. A million scraps of what had been my life ejected from the spot where I sat. Tiny pieces of my world caught the wind and blew away like confetti. Obliterated. My hair blew in a stiff wind. I stood up from the chair, which had remained, stuck now in the acidic mud where the house had once stood.
 

I turned around and around in a circle, searching for the cause. But my family was already blowing away, now part of the dried bits of paper that were already headed for the horizon.
 

Then the rain came.

The first drop hit my cheek. Then another drop on my arm. The tip of my ear. My head. My flesh sizzled, and I opened my mouth to scream.

I ran.

I had to get to shelter. But I couldn’t move at the speed I had become accustomed to. Instead, the weak, limp gait of my body back on Earth was the one that propelled me forward. Quickly, my heart started beating too hard, my breath started catching in my throat and my chest contracted painfully. I felt the sting of the rain on my exposed arms and neck. The open expanse of abandoned farmland lay before me in every direction, and the little vegetation that had grown since the last rain shriveled and died on the stalk as I staggered past.
 

Beside me, a great, armored boot as long as my arm splattered the mud. Rough spikes stuck out of every side, making a weapon out of each inch of the metal. I craned my neck back and saw the beast hovering above me.

He seemed to be part air, part human, part monster. Black smoke swirled around his form, which towered twenty feet above. On his long, dark face, flickers of a man’s face, hollow and gray, fought for control. Eyes rimmed red with malice darted across the landscape, searching like a hunter for prey he couldn’t see. For me.
 

He doesn’t see me.

I turned, running faster. But my feet were sticking in the mud now, and there was nowhere for me to go. None of the old farmhouses that used to dot the countryside still stood, long since eaten away by the force of the corrupted elements. The flesh of my arms burned red, and small blisters began to form with every new, stinging drop.

I pulled my feet out of my boots, sinking fast now into the earth, and ran barefoot across the fields. Behind me the sound of the Corentin’s pursuit raged, rattling the inside of my skull. I ran like this for hours, days, or maybe only moments. He stayed right behind me the whole time, forever searching, smelling the air like a wild animal, his huge, muscled arms occasionally swiping at the space my body had occupied two steps before. I couldn’t stop. There was no rest.
 

Then, suddenly, he was gone. The wind stopped, the rain disappeared, and the hot breath of his pursuit was no longer crawling down the back of my neck.
 

I slowed, clutching at my chest, heaving, crying out in sobs too dry for tears. The fields were suddenly as empty as they had been when I had started my flight. I felt a strange tingling sensation on my skin and, looking down, saw that the burn marks from the rain were disappearing. Thin wisps of poison slowly leached from my body, evaporating into the hot summer air, infecting it. For a fraction of a second, relief flooded me as the agony was slowly taken away.

A sudden, searing pain hit me across the forehead. I staggered backward and fell to the ground. There above me stood the Corentin, straddling his massive body over me on two legs the size of tree trunks. He breathed in the air that came off my skin, and his nostrils flared, in pleasure or pain I couldn’t tell.
 

My head swam, tendrils of black creeping in around the edges of my vision. Slowly, I faded out of consciousness. But right before I vanished into that dark, empty place, I saw the monster above take one last breath before he crouched over me, his mouth open, ready to strike.

He had found me.

I opened my eyes.
 

Gravelly earth pressed into my cheek, which was raw as if I had spent a week in the sun. My heartbeat was strong, steady. I was alone.

How long had it been?

Behind me, the shallow waves of the ocean sucked at my boots, pushing me forward with each approach, pulling me back with each retreat. If the water had its way, I would be snatched from the surface and dragged beneath it, meat for the animals below.

I rolled over, dizzy and confused. A pain shot through my forehead, and I gripped it. My hands came away bloody, the relief brought by the Watcher gone. Twenty feet away, low, jagged cliffs bordered the sea. In the fading light, sea spray danced in the last rays of the sun.

An image of bits of paper floating on the breeze like snowflakes flooded my mind, stopping my breath.
 

She’s gone.

No. Wait. She wasn’t gone. It had been a dream. Hadn’t it?
 

I have to get back to her. I have to go now.

I started to stand, but then couldn’t. The closer I got to upright, the more the world spun me back upside-down. I crawled across the soft sand towards my things, amazed that they were still with me at all. I reached out for the staff, but then hesitated. I was frightened, desperate. How would the wood react to these emotions? The hope I had felt yesterday seemed to have vanished, and I was concerned that I couldn’t remember the last half of my journey to the other side of the sea.
 

Another pang gripped my head, and I grasped the staff, desperate for relief.
 

As I had feared, my fingers clung to the wood like velcro. I tried to focus, but it was made more difficult from the pounding in my brain.
 

Jade. Think of Jade.

And I did, but it wasn’t the Jade full of hope and life and promise. I chose to think of her, but my subconscious made the decision about how she would come into my thoughts.

It was the monster I thought of.

Her face flickered in that same, unnerving way the face of the Corentin had, back and forth from her human form to her possessed one. And then I remembered. My dream, or was it fantasy? I pressed myself back into the sand as her face morphed with that of the great beast, bearing down on me now, here in this place. Above me I saw those red-rimmed eyes, and on my face I felt his hot, stinking breath.

“You gotta let go, boy,” a voice I didn’t recognize echoed in my head.

I was distracted again by the smoke pouring off the skin of my attacker.
 

I felt something warm and soft and wet in my hand, and it confused me. Then, with a great whoosh, I was thrust backward away from the nightmare, and found myself back in the sand. The vision faded away, and my hands gripped uselessly at the tiny granules of the beach, trying to latch on to something that would steady me.
 

Above me someone hovered, but it wasn’t the Corentin. I squinted up, trying to recognize her face. She looked like someone I knew once, only I couldn’t place where from. Her long, gray hair hung down in matted curls, draping across her shoulders. And her eyes, a steely blue that seemed so familiar.

Suddenly I was knocked backward again, but not by a spell or dream. A giant animal had tackled me to the ground, and now its tongue was lapping at my face. I tried to fend it off, but its attack was relentless, and in my confusion I didn’t understand.

“Crane!” barked the old woman. “You stupid dog. Get
off
!”

“Larissa?” I croaked, collapsing back into the sand now, letting Crane do his worst. His giant tongue bathed my face, and a string of whines came from his throat. Behind him, his long, thick tail wagged back and forth and around without a shred of dignity.
 

“Yup,” she answered, approaching me and peering down. “I was watchin’ ya, but there wasn’t nothin’ I could do to help. The ocean…I never seen it do anythin’ like that before.” She turned and looked out over the water, slinging my pack over her back.

“I have to go,” I said, trying to get up. “I have to get to her.” The world spun again and I was on my back.
 

“Go where?” she asked.

“Home,” I croaked. “Earth. I have to get—”

“How do you expect to get back to Earth?” she asked, her face incredulous. “You got gold?”

My heart sank. No, I didn’t have gold.
 

“No, but she’s in danger,” I argued. “I have to.” I tried again to sit up.

“Who’s in danger? Someone on Earth? How do you know that?”

“I—” I paused, trying to sort out the swirl of thoughts. Everything felt so mixed up. “I just thought that—” But I couldn’t finish the sentence. Had it really been just a dream?

She waved her hand impatiently in front of me, and I took it. She hoisted me up, and I gripped onto her with both arms. She looked at my forehead.

“We gotta get somethin’ for that,” she said. “You’re delirious.”
 

Was she right?

She starting to walk away, dragging me along behind her, one hand holding me up, the other holding my staff, which she had wrapped in a cloth. Each step sent a jolt through my skull, but after a while, some of the dizziness subsided.
 

“Where are we going?” I asked. Everything looked distorted. But my panic slowly started to subside as we moved up off the beach.
 

“I got a place,” she said.

“What did the ocean do?” I asked, trying hard to think clearly.
 

“It chased ya,” she said. “Like it was tryin’ to swallow ya up.”

“How did you know I would be here?” The pain in my head was a sharp reminder of reality. I tried to shake off the last of the nightmare.

“Didn’t,” she grunted. “I been travelin’ round these parts for a time. I was about to move on, but then things started changin’.” She looked up to the sky, where thick clouds billowed high in the atmosphere. “Decided I better stay for a bit, just a little while, to get a better read on what was goin’ on.”

“But how?” I asked. The last and only time I had met Larissa, it had been made clear that she had no way to make interstellar links. Kiron, her brother, had made sure of that before we had jumped from the mountaintop she called home.

She blew a long, angry breath at my question.

“I ain’t no idiot,” she said. “My dear brother might think different, but I was close enough already to figurin’ out the spell without him. Mind you, I been takin’ a beatin’ on the jumps I’ve made.” She indicated a long, fresh scar down the side of her neck. I shuddered. I knew what Kiron’s inexpert links felt like to use. What had Larissa’s own, hacked versions done to her?

I knew about link-making, and I wondered how she had managed it all on her own. I stopped, suddenly wary.

“Who helped you?”

She pulled on my arm, but I stood firm. She turned.

“Nobody helped me,” she said. “Story of my life, kid.”

“But where did you get a frame?” I asked. “Or gold?”

Her eyes narrowed at such specific questions. She put her hands on her hips, releasing my arm. The world spun.

“Well, look who knows everything,” she said.
 

I started falling backward again. Despite her anger, she reached out and steadied me before I hit the ground.

“Come on,” she said, dragging me along again.
 

I followed. I had little choice.
 

“My pa left me a frame, if you must know,” she snarled. “He never told Kiron about it. Or if he did, Kiron never let on that he knew. He says he’s so convinced that pa didn’t want me makin’ links, but like I always said, he didn’t know what I knew.”

“He’s just trying to do what he thinks is right,” I said, concentrating hard on putting one foot in front of the other.
 

“You think it’s right to rob your sister of her birthright, do ya?” she spat. “He’s got it wrong. That man don’t trust no one. Not even his own blood.”

It was true. Kiron had shown again and again his mistrust of others. Though, for whatever reason, he always seemed to trust me.

“I know what you mean,” I said, remembering his treatment of Chapman when we had first come to Stonemore. Crane trotted along next to me, occasionally snuffling at the spot where my forearm disappeared into my shirt. “But he’s changing. He’s made friends. I’ve met them.”

She snorted.

“If you think a hundred and fifty-six year old man is gonna change his ways in just a few months, you’re a bigger fool than I thought.”