Astral Tide (The Otherborn Series) (14 page)

The second shadow, a male, replied.
“We won’t. We’re close.”

“Not close enough.”

“We’re closing in on them. They know it and they’re afraid. I could feel her fear, taste it in the air, like a bitter fragrance. You have to be patient.
They
have to be patient.”

The first shadow took a step away, as though thinking, and a shaft of light fell across her pale face. Si’dah drew in a desperate breath and curled her toes for balance. The paper thin skin, the throbbing green veins, the silky brown hair. All features she knew too well. This was Avery…Avery mixed with something else.

“I have been more than patient, but you try me. I’m not so sure it was worth saving you. I don’t think you appreciate the magnitude of what I’ve done for you. And I’m not convinced you’re over her. All this time you’ve been claiming to help us, to love me…I think you’re just stalling.”

“Don’t say that,”
the male voice responded through clenched teeth.
“Haven’t I proven myself? Haven’t I given enough, done enough, to prove otherwise?
They
believe me. Why can’t you?”

“Why were you on her then? That wasn’t by my command. I would never tell you to get that close. You wanted to see her, to touch her. I’m not a fool, Rye.”

Si’dah felt bile rising into her throat but she pushed it back. She couldn’t afford to get sick now. They would hear. They would see.

“I wanted to strangle her with my own hands; that’s true. I wanted to squeeze the life out of her like a constrictor. But it was fury, not love, that drove me to get so close.”

Stinging tears filled the black wells that were her Traveler’s eyes. Si’dah’s heart tripped at this statement and recoiled. They were talking about her, about the attack. She knew it.

“It was desire. Desire that spurned your love and now your hate. I should have known I’d never be enough for you.”

Rye stepped nearer to Avery and the light splashed across his own features, so strong and stark next to hers, a mingling of both he and Roanyk.
“Avery, you’re all I have now. You’re all I want,”
he said as he caressed her face with tender hands.

“And you love me? You don’t miss her?”
Avery asked, her eyes misty and light.

“Never. I love you now. Only.”
He leaned down and planted a soft, plaintive kiss on her whitewashed lips, which looked like they could tear from too much force.

Si’dah leaned forward, disbelieving, and nearly fell off her perch. She clung tighter to hold herself and the leaves of her branch rustled slightly.

Avery broke instantly from the kiss.
“What was that?”

Rye glanced around but Si’dah was crouched low so as not to be visible.
“Nothing,”
he reassured her.

“Someone is spying on us,”
she said, her eyes wildly searching.
“It’s one of them.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. They don’t even know about this place. This is ours, remember?”
He wrapped tight arms around her and she relaxed in his embrace.

“You’re right. I know, you’re right. But let’s go back just the same. Coming?”

“I’m right behind you,”
he answered.

Si’dah raised herself slowly and carefully until she could see Rye alone in the clearing. Avery had already stepped away, moving back, apparently, to London’s world. She never saw, as Si’dah did, when Rye lifted the hem of his shirt and wiped brusquely at his lips.

SI’DAH STUMBLED BACK, eyes blinded by tears, vision blurry, tearing through branches, vines, and limbs until she found herself on the narrow avenue and again the verdant Midplane meadows she knew so well. She didn’t wait this time for the bee to lead her, but left it behind in her haste to get away from everything she’d seen and heard.

This time, Hantu was not waiting for her and she curled herself into a ball in the grass, warping the blades around her until they stretched and wove themselves into a cocoon sheltering her body. There, in the little Astral womb she created, she cried until she at last fell asleep.

LONDON AWOKE ABRUPTLY, her mind foggy with the details of her travels. Around her, lights twinkled and the shadows of her friends could be seen moving in her periphery. She sat up and rubbed at her eyes until her vision cleared.

“How long have I been out?” she asked, blinking.

“A while. You must have been pretty tired. We all woke up hours ago,” Tora said from a chair across the room.

London scratched her head. She remembered the bee and the forest of one tree, she remembered cradling herself in the Astral and crying. And then everything went blank. She must have dozed off there and in that state, naturally found her way back.

Tora peered at her. “You didn’t…you weren’t in the Astral, were you?”

“No, no,” London lied a little too quickly.

Zen was visibly trying to ignore her and Tora shot him a suspicious look.

“Zen,” Tora said. “You were supposed to stay with London, remember? If she travels, it’s your job to travel with her.”

Zen shrugged smugly. “She didn’t tell me. How was I supposed to know?”

Tora clucked her tongue at him in exasperation and turned back to London. “Did anything happen? I mean, everything okay?”

“I’m here, aren’t I?” London replied, being evasive. She rose and stretched and pulled on her shoes. “Where’s breakfast?”

“Don’t know,” Kim said with a sour expression. “Looney Toons isn’t up yet.”

“Don’t call him that,” London said with a scowl.

“Sorry,” Kim said in a mocking tone. “Someone woke up on the wrong side of the pallet this morning,” he added under his breath.

London looked from Kim to Zen and suddenly the room felt too small for the both of them plus all their secrets. “I’m going to look for Elias,” she said and started toward one of the mysterious doorways.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Kim told her. “You don’t know what’s back there.”

But London just shrugged him off. “We gotta eat, don’t we?”

She turned toward the nearest door and took a few steps into the rocky tunnel until the light of their shared space was behind her and only darkness lay ahead. When the tunnel curved a little and she knew she wouldn’t be heard, she stopped and leaned against the cool stone to catch her breath. She didn’t want her friends to see her upset and she didn’t want to give Zen the glum pleasure of thinking it was because of him, though their fight still weighed on her. But right now, she was flooded with all the feelings her Astral espionage had produced and she wasn’t yet sure how much she wanted to tell anyone else, if anything at all.

Silent tears slipped down her cheeks and she let them fall to wet her shirt. She gave herself these few moments before wiping her face and starting down the tunnel again. The hum grew louder and more insistent and London’s curiosity began to take over where her broken heart had overwhelmed her only moments before. Whatever generated the noise was somewhere ahead and she was getting closer.

With careful steps, she pushed onward, letting her hands glide over the rocky surface around her and inching her feet over the unstable floor. She was so close now that the vibrations rattled through her nervous system and drowned out the incessant doubts that plagued her mind. She didn’t care anymore if Elias was back here, she had to know where that sound was coming from.

Something darted past her in the darkness and then seemed to turn and fly by again. Something small and hovering, a dot of a shadow in the dim hall. A faint light glowed up ahead and in it, she could see several more tiny things moving in a flash of motion, sweeping by each other and winging in and out of a large cleft in the rock.

She squinted as she neared and the brightness of the light grew and the fresh, warm, dry air wafted in from outside. The cleft was to her right, and left of that, just round a bend, the hall opened up into the desert morning. She neared the edge and peered out. She was standing at a precipice several stories up on the mesa. All around her zinged the busy, racing bodies of active bees.

London turned away from the bright daylight to face the long cleft. It was darker in there and she peered into it as she scooted closer. The sound of the bees was deafening.

“Elias?” London called, her voice drowned out by the hum. She leaned into the cleft, took another step, and let her eyes adjust. What came into focus horrified her.

Before her stretched a massive honeycomb, taller and broader than she by more than double. Honey bees covered it, crawling and crossing its surface and one another in a teeming glob. It was like a living thing, a giant monster of bees and stingers.

And before it, huddled down in a heap on the floor at its base, rested Elias…or what
was
Elias. His entire body, once slick and dark as oil, was now covered in the crawling network of bees as they swarmed over him. All London could think was that he was dead, that they were eating him somehow.

She opened her mouth to scream, when his head raised and a reverberating voice said to her, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

London snapped her lips shut and stumbled backward, confused, as the bee-covered figure of Elias rose slowly to its feet and towered before her. His eyes stared out at her from the wall of insects that covered him and he began moving in her direction, saying, “Keep very still and very quiet. Calm yourself. They can sense your fear and will grow agitated. They will protect their own.”

London backed away from Elias’s strange, ominous figure. She knew the voice to be his and yet it was different, as though made up of the hum of the bees themselves.

“Stay back,” she managed, bumping into the bend behind her and feeling her way around it. “Oh god, are you hurt? Are they hurting you?”

“No. But they will hurt you,” he continued, slow and steady, and as he drew closer to her, it seemed the bees were dropping off of him more and more, and taking flight, winging out past London into the bright sunlight.

London stepped back again, feeling wind and sun at her back, knowing she was running out of ground. She had unwittingly backed onto the precipice and cornered herself.

As Elias’s bees dispersed, more of the man showed through, but London was still revolted and terrified. He reached a hand out to her, his thin fingers and split yellow nails clutching, stretching out of a sleeve of angry bees. He gripped her shirt and several of the bees began to pour onto her.

London panicked, backed up more and swatted at Elias’s hand, forcing him to let go, but the bees kept on coming for her. This time, the scream tore through her throat before he could stop it as she jerked away from his advance. The last thing she remembered was the sensation of falling.

LONDON HIT THE dirt with a thud, knocking the wind out of her, and rolled over, nearly sliding right off the rocky ledge that jutted out beneath the precipice where she’d been standing only a moment before. Her right foot dangled precariously over. A quick glance validated that it was still a long way down. She got to her knees and looked up. The precipice humming with bees was only about seven feet above. Elias stood at its edge, only a few bees remaining on his shirt and head, and watched her.

“Are you alright?” he asked, his voice more normal again.

“Fine,” London called up, dusting her pant legs with both hands. “I didn’t realize this was here. I didn’t see it earlier,” she said of the ledge that had saved her.

Elias grinned down at her. “That’s because it wasn’t there.”

“What are you implying? That it just appeared out of thin air?” London scrutinized him. He didn’t seem so frightening now, with his hide of bees gone. She’d panicked before, but she was going to need his help to get back up safely.

“No. That I made it…to save you.”

London narrowed her eyes. He dreamed. He prophesied. He seemed to know things about them. And now he had created an entire rock ledge where there wasn’t one before, and all in the space of less than a second. As far as she could deduce, that could mean only one thing: Elias was Otherborn.

Synapses fired in London’s brain and she began to see the connection between last night’s mysterious guide and Elias, the
Beekeeper.
“It was you…wasn’t it? Last night. You were the bee.”

Elias nodded.

“But…but how?” she called up to him, squinting in the sun.

“You needed a guide. I was obliged to be of service.”

London looked around her at the desert spread. She had a bird’s eye view of the arid, sun-kissed horizon, laid out in tawny streaks. But she was ready to get back on stable ground. Heights weren’t really her thing. “Thanks,” she said with a question in her voice to Elias. “But could you have made the ledge a little higher? How am I supposed to get off?”

Elias beamed a blinding smile at her, his eyes scrunching in a friendly way. “I’d rather hoped you could handle that.”

She knew precisely what he was doing. He was challenging her, forcing her to use her abilities, to expose herself. There would be no denying what they were, what they were capable of, after this. But what choice did she have?

London closed her eyes and remembered Tora’s smooth, calming voice as it had been in the truck that day. This time, the peace came over her quickly and all at once, like a curtain dropping, and the brilliant gemmy green of the Midplane portal was before her suddenly. She had only to reach in and pull out what she needed: stairs.

Just as she rounded the last, rocky step and Elias took her hand, Kim, Tora, and Zen all stumbled around the bend and into the sunlight.

“Whoa,” Kim said, blinking like a fool. “We heard a scream. Thought maybe you were hurt or something.”

London frowned. “Fat good you would have done, showing up this late to the party.”

Kim thrust a thumb at Zen. “Don’t look at me. It’s his fault. He kept saying you went through a different door.”

Zen scowled, but London had already seen the look of relief flood his face when he saw she was alright. Inside, her heart quickened at the thought, even if he was being a stubborn ass.