by Daryl Banner
It’s Athan who suddenly says, “You should join our family for middle-night dinner! It begins at midnight, but I might arrive thirty minutes prior, to be sure.”
Janna looks at her brother as if he’d lost his mind. “Athan …”
“You two seem to be getting along quite well,” Athan points out. “And I would love to hear more about—”
“I’m sorry,” Link cuts in with an apologetic wince, “but I fear I really must be getting home.” He clears his throat. “After my time at the gym, of course. After my … my work.”
Janna’s eyes Link’s chest, pursing her lips. She looks annoyed.
“Nonsense,” exclaims Athan with a broad, charming smile. “You can join us. Your family won’t mind at all that you’ve been kept to enjoy a lovely meal with a Lifted family, I’m sure of it.”
Janna remains silent as Link stammers for a response.
But Athan won’t have it. “We will leave you to your work now. Come by Broadmore Manor at eleven-thirty. We’ll set a place for you. It’s a pleasure, Shye. Oh, and take care with the chest press,” he adds with a light chuckle. “The weights seem to be miscalibrated.”
With that, Athan and his sister are off, Janna only giving one brief, sulky glance over her shoulder before they disappear.
And then it is Link who disappears as Kid reclaims his hand. “I am so sorry,” she says at once.
“It’s fine, it’s fine, we’re safe.” Link lets out a nervous chuckle he was likely keeping in him for quite some time. “Well, that was fun, wasn’t it?”
Kid notices he’s still watching after where the brother and sister had gone. Her brow wrinkles up. “You aren’t attracted to that Janna girl, are you?”
Link snorts and eyes Kid. “Are you kidding? She looks younger than you.”
Kid frowns, staring at him suspiciously. “I still haven’t decided yet whether you’ve aged at all, or if … if I’m the only one who ages between us.”
Link brings her in for a hug right there at the doors to the Eastly Gym. A gentle afternoon breeze unrests her hair, blowing the most of it into Link’s face.
“You need a cut,” Link mumbles.
“So do you, shaggy boy,” Kid retorts.
But when middle-night arrives, it isn’t Broadmore Manor they find. Neither is it Faery at long last, nor some top-secret hiding place for Goddesses conveniently labeled by a big, pretty sign.
Instead, they find a school called the Windstone Academy.
And a certain boy in its basement.
“It’s him,” whispers Kid as they stand outside the door, which has affixed in it a small glass window through which they see the black-haired, pale-faced boy seated on a chair. No; restrained to the chair, with thick iron bolts over his wrists, ankles, and neck. The room is bare save for a squatty white bed, a small metal table for one with a single chair (the one the boy is locked into), and a broadcast attached to the corner wall across from him. The wall has cuffs on it too, which he’s likely restrained by from time to time. The bed, too.
“The Weapon of—?”
“His name is Kendil,” states Kid with force.
The Cold Boy looks up from his chair, his neck only barely shifting, as if he just heard her voice. His eyes—black and cold as a deep winter scene in the dead of night—flick toward the door expectantly. After a moment, he looks away. He has no expression on his face. He’s as dull as the walls that surround him on all sides.
It breaks her heart, to see him for the first time after so long a while, and in such a condition. But the boy she knows from her own time is a few years older … and a few years colder. This boy looks less confident, less angry. He looks lost. He looks lonely. He looks …
Kid lowers her voice to barely a whisper. “He’s so helpless.”
“Never underestimate the helplessness,” Link quietly states. “It just would take one slip of the authorities’ care for all to go wrong. And we must be most careful of all … for that Kendil boy could be our key. He’s yet another treasure Sanctum hides from the public eye, is he not?”
“Yes.” She stares back through the window. “He looks so much younger. He … He looks fuller. In his face. Healthier.”
“We’re only two years in the past now, maybe a lot less.”
“The Broadmores aren’t going to be happy you didn’t show up for middle-night meal,” taunts Kid, turning her eyes on Link.
Link smirks down at her, amused, then brings his eyes up to the window. “I think we ought to watch this one awhile. I think …”
“Yes?”
A look of wonder passes over his eyes. “I think one is the key to the other.” He turns to Kid. “I think he may help us find Faery.”
Just then, a door down the hall opens, and Link and Kid quickly flatten to the wall in preparation of anything. It could be a guard. It could be a doctor. It could be a professor from the Academy or some special authority come directly from Cloud Keep. Kid clings to Link’s side to ensure the pair of them stay unseen, ready for anything.
But they were not ready for him.
The young man that comes down the hall still has a face burned and seared by a fire from his past—just as Kid remembers him. But in addition to the patches of ruined skin across his face and neck and side of his arm, he also now bears a scar slicing straight across his neck, as if he was beheaded sometime over the years and had his whole head sewn right back on. Despite his disfigurement, he wears a silky, prestigious white tunic, sky blue pants that are crisp and seen most often upon Lifted businessmen, and white slippers. His hair is dark and parted neatly to the side, which gives the sinister, near-dead look in his eyes an even starker contrast to his appearance. He moves briskly and with purpose.
The young man stops at the door—not inches away from both Kid and Link—and studies Kendil through the glass. He produces a small gadget, upon which he seems to scribble a few notes with just the tip of his finger upon a narrow screen.
Then, as if caught by a sudden sound no one hears, the young man lifts his eyes toward the wall opposite him.
Right where Link and Kid stand.
There is a moment of absolute stillness. The young man doesn’t blink, nor move a muscle.
Quietly, ever quietly, the young man whispers, “Is that you …?” His tone carries a hint of malice, his lips curled, teeth bared almost like a rat facing off with an adversary in the Waterways.
Then, quicker than lightning, the young man thrusts a hand out.
He grips nothing.
He grips nothing because Link and Kid slid aside just in time, unheard, unseen, each holding their breath.
The young man retracts his hand, and then a look of great pain and frustration crosses his face. All the fury of a moment ago fades, and all that’s left is sadness.
“Fuck …” he breathes. “Get the girl out of your head, boy … Get her gone. She’s as good as dead to you. As good as dead.” His words are nearly calm, like this is some mantra he repeats to himself too often, a daily chore to bring peace to his unstable mind. “And if she isn’t dead, then she will be soon. And so will he. So will he. To dust …”
With those words, he pockets his gadget with resolve, takes a breath, then moves back down the hall with intent. Kid and Link watch until he pushes through the door, and it swings shut at his back, closing with a soft, unassuming click.
It is now that Link and Kid seem to take their first breath. And then, soft as the flap of a butterfly’s wing, Kid breathes, “Ames lives.”
0291 Wick
For the third time this week, Wick comes between two men at odds, arguing over servings of lunch, and mediates their protests. In a handful of minutes, peace is restored, and the men shake hands. In even a few more minutes, the two men are laughing, as if the fight they had was a silly thing of the past.
After one such quarrel is resolved, Wick finds himself settling back on the steps of a porch that isn’t even his, exhausted. He hears the noise of whittling wood in the cabin behind h
im, an older man from the seventh with a hobby for it. It’s barely the evening and he already feels the talons of sleep closing in on him. Perhaps it’s a good night to turn in early.
But that opportunity is soon taken from him. “She’s gone.”
Wick looks up at Rone, who stands there in just his pair of low-hanging tattered jeans, shirtless. “Who?”
“Eerie. She isn’t in her glade.”
“So? She’s likely out hunting for a snack. You said she does that from time to time.”
“Yes, but … well, she was gone this morning. I checked on her a few hours later, and she was still gone. Now the sun’s setting and she still hasn’t returned.” Rone shakes his head. “No, this isn’t like her. I can sense it. Something’s wrong.”
“You can’t sense anything, Rone. You’re not magically bonded to her or something.”
“Wick, I’m being serious.”
“So am I.” Wick wipes a hand over his face, trying to rub all the sleepiness out of his eyes. “She’s a creature of the wild, and you—”
“Yeah, yeah, everyone’s said it, I don’t need you saying it, too.”
“Maybe she’s hunting the rest of those feral dogs,” Wick points out with a shrug. “Just the other night when I slept, I could’ve sworn I heard their howls through the trees.”
Rone huffs with impatience, crosses his arms, then huffs again. “Nope, I’m going after her. I’m gonna go look.”
“You only have half an hour of sunlight at most.”
He gives Wick a look. “I’ve survived with less. I’ll manage.” And then Rone is off, cutting between the cabins and heading toward the woods. Wick is gifted the sight of Rone’s two firm buns as he goes, a tiny bit of his crack visible over the low-hanging jeans.
Wick clenches shut his eyes and looks away. I’m so starved for affection, I’m doing that thing again where I notice stuff about my own best friend. He could laugh about it, except even that takes too much effort. He’s fucking tired, and he doesn’t have patience for much else.
Not ten minutes later, he’s in his cabin on his bundle of linens and cloth with a makeshift pillow, and he closes his eyes and hugs himself. A bug buzzes near his ear and he slaps it away, annoyed. A tree sways near his cabin and does that annoying thing where it taps on the roof, startling him, then taps again, tap, tap, tap. A group of people gathered in the cabin next to him burst into laughter.
Now he can’t fucking sleep.
Perfect.
Soon, water starts to tap along the roof. The rain grows, and soon the wind with it, and then his world is drowned in the noise of a storm.
It’s the first storm since that day he and Dran were confronted with the feral dogs and the Wildercat—the day Rone came back into his life. Wick, under the tumult of the rain outside, feels emotions rush back into him, emotions he hadn’t felt since that day. He feels the fear. He feels the excitement. He feels the love and the tears.
Then he hears screaming.
Wick rises from his bed at once. He listens, ears perked. For a second, he wonders if he actually did drift off and was dreaming.
Then he hears the scream again followed by shouts.
Wick rushes to the door of his cabin and stares outside.
Horror floods him at what he sees.
In the midst of the pummeling rain, he sees four creatures in the clearing between the cabins. At first, he doesn’t know what he’s looking at, only that he knows they are feral dogs. It’s like the beasts leapt out of his mind and brought his nightmares of that day right to him, the way a dog fetches a bone once thrown.
A man rushes toward them with a lumber axe, swinging it at the beasts madly. The one he threatened parries, and the others start to circle him, growling, baring teeth. Another man rushes forward to join his friend, and he seems to be channeling his Legacy, a hand on the ground. It’s a second later that Wick realizes it’s Rychis, who is trying to move the ground, but to what end, Wick doesn’t know.
At first, Wick is too afraid to move. Some people have retreated into their cabins, shutting their doors and staring through windows to avoid the threat. Others are joining the first two men with clubs and staves and flint blades. Soon, it becomes a gathering of eight men versus the four feral dogs.
The ground beneath his feet trembles from the push of Rychis’s power, but just as quickly as it starts, one of the feral dogs charges at Rychis, and he’s too slow to lift his weapon. The full weight of the dog takes him to the ground where he screams out and wrestles the beast.
At once, a great and terrible quake pushes through the camp, causing someone in the cabin next to Wick to scream. The more the feral dog bites at Rychis, the more the earth shakes.
Perhaps that is what causes Wick to move. He rushes back into his cabin, swipes his dagger off a table, unsheathes it, and hurries toward the fray.
Rain blasts his face at once, but he pushes through, determined. He trips once, then rights himself and rushes toward Rychis and the beast he still wrestles with. In the dark, Wick has no telling whether Rychis is bit, wounded, or still successfully fending off the dog.
He’s no time to care, either. Wick plunges forward and thrusts his dagger straight into the dog’s back. The dog emits a wheezing cry that sounds like the whistling of storm winds, and as the dog peels itself off Rychis, it takes Wick along with it to the muddy ground. The dog wrestles away from Wick in seconds and runs off at once, taking the dagger with it, still embedded in its back.
The earth stops trembling as Rychis grabs his arm, shouts in pain, and backs away to the nearest porch where he collapses over the steps.
“Rychis!” cries Wick.
But then there’s a scream behind him. Wick spins to find yet another beast having joined the fray.
Eerie herself.
She charges at the feral dogs, who were snapping their teeth at anyone who came near them, one or two making a quick dart for a man or woman, only to be backed away or thwarted by the swing of a club or a blade. To Eerie, however, they are far less brave. As she charges forward baring her fangs, two of the dogs lose all their nerve and race off in the wrong direction, charging farther into the camp. The snappy-jawed one that remains makes a reckless, stupid lunge at the Wildercat, and upon its neck the Wildercat’s jaws close, snap, and give the feral dog a vicious, violent shaking.
Wick zeroes his eyes past Eerie and her new wolf snack, and he spots the slain carcass of the dog he’d stabbed, apparently having bled out, its body near the foot of the porch across the way.
How can he see it so well in this blinding, rainy darkness?
Legacy, he deduces, yet knows not from which person he is drawing the power.
No sooner than he looks the other way does Eerie free herself from the dog in her jaws—now dead—and chases after the two that charged deeper into the camp. The men and women, once brave and armed, now back off, fearful of the Wildercat.
Wick hurries to the porch where the feral dog breathed its last, flips the beast over, and frees his dagger from its back. Then, feeling brave with his newfound improved vision, hurries toward the two remaining wolves and Eerie.
When he reaches them, he finds not only Kraag, Barley, and Chief Korah facing off with one of the wolves. Eerie is atop another, biting at its face. It snaps its jaws back unsuccessfully at her, biting only air and rain as it struggles beneath her, but it is smaller, and she is much, much bigger, and it isn’t long before the wolf’s struggles come to an end.
Meanwhile, Korah and Barley each take turns lunging at the remaining wolf with giant wooden clubs. The wolf parries expertly, but then is quick to note the death of its mate beneath the Wildercat. As if arriving quickly at a decision, the beast takes off at once. Barley hurries after it only until he reaches the edge of the east woods, then stops, shouting at it through the rain. The Chief watches, lowering her club. Kraag hurries to the porch of the cabin nearest them—the medic cabin—and shouts at Puras to get back inside, who stands at the door watching with a loo
k of frozen horror.
Wick’s full attention is on the Wildercat as she tears at the flesh of the wolf, mad with her hungry bloodlust, growling and snapping as she feasts. As Wick watches, he feels a confusing surge of dread.
Then her eyes flick upward and focus elsewhere. At once, Eerie abandons the corpse of the feral dog and leaps forward.
She lands on a human.
“EERIE!” Wick screams. “NO!”
The cry of agony that emits from the person is nothing short of blood-curdling.
Wick charges at the backside of Eerie, his dagger brandished.
Then another shadow as quick as black lightning charges from the blinding sheets of rain and slams, full-weight, into the Wildercat.
She lets out a bone-chilling hiss as she leaps off the body, then desperately tries to rid herself of the nasty fruit she was just smacked with. Her teeth and face are full of blood, but the back of her head and neck drip with Dream Tear juice, made more glossy by the rain that wets her coat of fur.
Her wild eyes search through the rain and find Wick standing there, then flick to a presence at Wick’s side.
Wick, too focused on the nightmare that just played out before his eyes, now notices the person standing at his side as well.
Rone. The one who threw the Dream Tear.
A look of betrayal and resentment flickers over Eerie’s face. She hisses once, then paws at her own neck unsuccessfully, hisses again, then flicks her giant, golden eyes back at the human body.
“AWAY!” shouts Wick, growing brave as he takes a step forth, his dagger brandished. “LEAVE! AWAY!”
The Wildercat hisses at Wick. Then the sound of a distant howl alerts her, and in an instant, all of them are forgotten as she races away into the east woods herself, vanishing from sight.
With the rain still heavy on their backs, Wick looks down at the body lying akimbo in a rain-splattering mud puddle, swirling with blood and torn tissue.
It’s the most grotesque thing Wick has ever seen.
The whole of the man’s abdomen is …
His neck and part of his shoulder, also …
Wick clenches shut his eyes, then bursts into tears right there. He drops his dagger and slaps a hand over his face, hiding himself from the scene. No matter what the darkness behind his eyelids shows him, he can’t escape the image of the gouged body of Kraag lying face-up and lifeless in the mud.