Authors: Brynn Chapman
Jonesy hesitates, the indecision reflected in his eyes which flick between me and the hillside. He sprints in the direction of the fireworks, no doubt to summon Brighton. He will not make it in time. I shall be gone or dead.
We are alone on the back deck, the other patron’s enthralled with the show and the magical lighting of the house.
Father shakes me, hard enough to rattle my teeth. His eyes ticking to take in my face, my hair.
“Thought you could escape me? Thought you could embarrass me? You should have known I would find you. So help me, you had better be intact, Miss Mary Marvel. I not only have an entire tour of Germany and France booked, but I have an equally agreeable suitor ready, willing and able to implant an heir in that useless womb.”
I am struck numb. Like time and space have opened to swallow me whole. “No. No. No. No.”
No tears. I am beyond tears. Awe and horror at what awaits me drive all sorrow from my soul, leaving behind a numb void.
“I am afraid that shall not be possible, Lord Manners. You see, Miss Teagarden now belongs to me. Permanently.” Silas has arrived, flanked by three burly workers. His white cane taps menacingly in his palm.
Father snaps his fingers and four soldiers shuffle out of the shadows, rifles raised.
“Who do you think you are?
You
are nothing.
A peasant
to be squished beneath the toe of my boot.”
Silas lunges at my father and I dive and roll out of the way.
Gunfire, shouts and screams echo amidst the snap of fists pummeling jaws. The deck is chaos and I scuttle away like a crab to the deck’s edge. And consider…jumping.
The pendant burns like never ever before. As if my mother calls.
I gasp as it
lifts
off my chest, pulling toward the crowd.
Hesitantly, I follow the pendant’s pull, crawling through the battle, heeding the call of the metal towards…metal.
My father’s sword clashes with Silas’. My eyes steal up to the blade. Embedded in the hilt is…my other earring.
My magnolia stands out, glistening in the night.
It all but
sings
with the proximity of the other. My stomach free-falls, but I force myself forward into the bloody fray.
Clink, clash
. Slice. “Ah! You fool!”
My father drops the sword and it skids across the deck. In mid-slide it alters course, skidding to a halt at my feet.
My brother leaps before father, shielding him and resuming the fight with Silas.
I rip the chain from my neck and place the earring against the hilt.
The two glow white-hot and fuse. I wriggle, hard, with all my might and it pops from the sword.
Thunder
erupts overhead.
Lightning flashes.
I slide backwards, counting. “One, two, three.”
Lightning strikes. It strikes the guest house. A huge, flaming orange blaze erupts.
The Elementi pond behind the house…
Silas whirls. I am forgotten. His one true love…is burning. “No!”
He bolts through the battle, charging toward the guest house, now completely ablaze.
Father sees me, his gaze instantly assessing my actions, falling to my fisted hands. He crawls toward me, cradling the slice in his arm. Crimson overflows it, leaving a bloody trail across the deck.
“The only way you will ever escape me…is if you follow your mother. In
death
, “he spits.
I raise my fist high and the lightning flashes again. “Five, six…
seven
.” I raise my hand high, like a lightning bolt, daring it to come. As it did for George.
Let the lightning take me.
A hot white bolt strikes the water not three feet from the boat. A tiny circle of fire lights in the bay.
“I would gladly follow her anywhere,” I scream, the tendons in my neck popping out with the fervor.
My strength and confidence return, emboldened by
The Elementi.
Father lunges, clutching me, pushing my head over the deck railing. “Go to her then. Find her in the watery deep. You deserve one another.”
I flail, my boots leaving the deck for a second and I push them back down. The black water waits below.
“Allegra!”
My heart lifts. Brighton’s voice. High overhead?
The festive red and white stripes of the aerial balloon are a bizarre contrast against the battle below.
He throws out a rope. I try to snatch it, but father grasps my fingers.
I laugh. I know he would break them, but he needs them for music. Always for the music.
Jonesy has returned at my side. He grabs the rope and tethers it to the deck rail. The boat moves with the force as the storm wind blows against the hot air balloon.
Father wraps both arms about my chest, pinning me to the railing.
I squeeze my fist tighter around the earrings and…I blink.
A strange, swirling of clouds has begun, directly below the balloon.
The heat in my hand is unbearable, but I clap it firmly closed, picturing a branding iron in the shape of a magnolia against my skin.
Brighton sails into the dark air, almost suspended for a moment before leaping to a crouch on the deck.
One soldier, two, attack. His fist cracks one across the face and he flies backward, crumpling, instantly motionless to the deck.
The other hesitates, but slices his sword toward him. Brighton’s boot connects with his wrist, snapping it instantly so that is hangs like a broken tree branch.
He falls to his knees clutching it. Jones arrives, delivering an uppercut, laying him flat.
“Jones,” Brighton’s voice is thick with emotion.
“
Go
! Go my friend! This isn’t goodbye.” He turns to deliver another punch.
But something in Brighton’s expression makes me doubt.
The lightning is a constant strobe light of flashes and booms with barely a space between. Too many to count.
Brighton hauls on the rope, pulling the basket down beside us.
“Go darling, go now.” His voice is eerily calm.
I don’t hesitate, I scramble onto the railing and my hands find the top of the basket. With a speed as fast as the lighting, Brighton vaults into the basket, hauling me up and in, in a single movement.
Jones lets loose the rope and we rise toward the storm.
But my brother rushes the rail, reaching it at the last moment to snatch the dangling rope in the air, halting our ascent.
“Help me!” he calls as four soldiers rush to his aid.
“Go Jones. Now is the time.”
Jonesy’s black eyes are uncertain, but Brighton nods and he nods back…and turns and is gone. Running toward the dock.
Toward Sarah. Toward Lucy.
My brother has managed to secure the rope to the railing once again. His lithe body now slithering up the rope toward the basket.
The balloon shakes and lurches to and fro in the wind and from the weight of him putting it off balance. It tips dangerously and I cry out.
I open my hand to show Brighton The Elementi.
They glow like the white in his father’s eyes. He quickly plucks them from my palm to gently place them in my ears.
The glowering sky shifts, the odd churning dropping into the bay below.
His eye light with revelation. “Of course.”
“What, I don’t understand.” Images flick across the small, tight circle in the water below.
“The earrings. They are forged with the highest amount of the element.”
I stare into the water. My brother moves up; ten feet, six feet, four feet away.
“Your mother. Your dear mother understood what I could not. With great concentrations, the lightning and voltage are far less important. The element forms the doors. With this much in one place, you may open a door in any water, no matter how trace the amount of the element. She knew. She had these made for you, intending to take you with her. So you could always find your way home. To her.”
I chew my lip, working through it. “These were her fail safe. To draw me to her, or to a better life, a different life, if something went wrong.”
He nods, vigorously. Triumphantly.
He gestures below.
The balloon lurches hard as my brother’s hands appear on the basket’s rim.
I swallow and nod to the churning, whirl of water and wind below. “A door?”
“A door. Do not be afraid my love. I shall be with you.”
The earrings burn as if answering my question.
Brighton pulls off a sandbag, wrapping one first about his leg, then one about mine. We shall…sink beneath the waves. Very, very quickly.
Thunder and lightning call above.
He hoists me to stand on the baskets edge as I clutch the rope. He does the same.
My father catches sight of us. “You cannot!” He screams.
He believes we shall take our lives, like the Romeo’s and Juliet’s before us.
My brother falls into the basket on the opposite side.
Brighton takes my hand. “Now, my love.”
I clasp it and we leap.
For a moment, we free-fall and all time halts.
The sandbags hurtle before us, hitting the water with a
splaaash
.
For a moment my life whizzes past in music, through the frolic of childhood and quickly to the present requiem of impending death.
But it mourns for the passing of
this
life.
Surely, if we drown, if the door does not open—there is elsewhere, something better. Something more to come.
Where Elementi’s are prevalent as the flowers of this earth.
We hit the water. The cold. But Brighton’s hand and the element are both warm against my skin. We sink, farther and faster.
Above the surface of the water, the lightning stops. The winds cease.
A gentle breeze blows across the bay as the balloon takes flight in a billowing festive red and white puff, blowing across Fire Isle.
I feel the pressure. The cold. And keep my eyes on Brighton as my chest begins to constrict.
Epilogue
Am I dead?
Blackness. The all-consuming pressure of the sea against every bit of my body. My lungs next to bursting.
The creaking of sunken ships.
The far off call of whales, lamenting to one another, humming throughout my deadened skull.
Water. Brighton. The balloon.
I feel a pressure grip my fingers and I slowly turn to see Brighton’s pinched, pale face for a second only, because with his free hand he is struggling madly toward the surface, his massive strength propelling him upward as if he had fins.
But still, I am holding him down. I must have lost consciousness—but he held fast to me, risking his own life to carry me through.
I release his hand and he halts, fear heightening his expression—but seeing I now swim of my own accord, he resumes his furious kicking toward the light. Our salvation.
Colors like I have never seen cast across the surface above. I would weep at their beauty were I not below water.
Voices. Voices call, filtered and murmured and altered by the layers of water which blanket us.
“
Brighton
!”
Sloshing through the shallows. Boots, both masculine and feminine. Three pair.
The light is brighter, air is very close. I command my legs to kick harder.
Brighton reaches down and grasps my hand, giving me a final lift and shoving me upward.
The water parts, breaking across my face and I instantly relish the sun against my cheeks and suck in a five second
gasp.
Nothing has ever felt so good. I cough and sputter and blink, trying to see.
I blink and the world, this world, comes into view. Everything looks the same, but different—more vivid, more beautiful, more perfect.
“Brighton! Oh thank Providence, Brighton!” The voice is sonorous, deep, like the sound of my cello.
Brighton has reached the shallows and stands on shaky legs. “G-George?”
His voice is full of pain and wonder.
His younger brother rushes forward, grasping him in a bear-hug. “I cannot believe you are here. I never thought I would be so fortunate twice.”
“G-George?” Is all Brighton can muster.
His diction is perfect, no trace of confusion or abnormal muscle tone exists. He looks like the most perfect specimen of mankind I have ever seen.
“George. Oh, Georgie.” Brighton is weeping. Weeping like a small boy.
“Allegra.”
My head turns, slowly. Like time has frozen.
I know the voice, but I can scarcely believe. Scarcely hope.
“Momma?” My heart bursts apart in my chest and I rush through the shallows.
She runs toward me, looking ten years younger.
I drop to my knees and cling to her wet skirts and howl into them as I feel her hands smooth the top of my head. “Shh. Shh, my darling.”