The Gateway Trackers Books 3 & 4

by E. E. Holmes

“Please, sit!” Flavia said, scooting over on her rickety wooden bench to make room for me.

  I sat, though a quick glance around the group seemed to suggest that the invitation did not extend beyond Flavia herself. The rest of the group was staring at me with a suspicion that bordered on hostility. There were three other girls and two guys, all—if I had to guess—around my own age.

  “Jess, I’d like you to meet my friends,” Flavia said, and pointed each of them out with her spoon as she said their names. “This is Jeta.” The girl sitting closest to Flavia nodded at me. She was buxom and beautiful, with full lips that sported two gold piercings and a thick, dark braid of hair that fell all the way to the small of her back. “This is Mina.” Beside Jeta, a slight, mousy girl with a pointed nose and a scar running the length of her cheek narrowed her eyes at me from above the rim of her coffee cup. She sat on the knee of a broad-chested young man with a pock-marked face and a mane of dark hair pulled into a bun, to whom Flavia pointed next and said, “This is Fennix. He’s my cousin. And this is Mairik.” From the bench opposite, an extremely tall young man sitting with his legs stretched out in front of him smirked at me, picking his straight, white teeth with the blade of a Swiss Army knife. He winked at me, which made Flavia roll her eyes before she finished, “And last but certainly never least, this is Laini.” Just behind Mairik, a girl with a spiky, pixie haircut sat cross-legged on a worn, old stump, tuning a fiddle. She was so slim and slight that she could have been a twelve-year-old boy, but her face was far too beautiful to mistake her as such. One of her eyes was so deeply brown that it was almost black, while the other was a vivid, grass green. I could tell that she was silently acknowledging the moment that I noticed her eyes, relishing the mild astonishment on my face, and basking in the stunningness of her own appearance before her expression closed off with the same suspicious detachment with which the others were now regarding me.

  “Nice to meet you all,” I said awkwardly. No one returned the sentiment.

  “As you can see, they’re all really friendly and not at all rude,” Flavia said with a sardonic smile, which I returned.

  “So, Northern Girl,” Mairik said without preamble, flicking his toothpick into the leaping flames. “You’re here for the Walker’s trial, is that right?”

  I swallowed back my annoyance at yet another casting off of Irina’s name. Didn’t anyone, even her own people, recognize her as a person? Well, she may not have been able to stand up for her own name at the moment, but I could certainly stand up for mine. I plastered on a smile. “Yeah, that’s right. And you can call me Jess.”

  “No, I don’t think I can,” Mairik said, after a moment of mock consideration. “You’ll always be Northern Girl to us.”

  Flavia rolled her eyes. “Stars alive, Mairik, do you have to be such an insufferable jerk all of the time?”

  Laini nodded. “He does. It’s chronic.”

  “Incurable,” Jeta agreed.

  “I’m just being honest with the girl,” Mairik insisted, raising his hands as though in surrender.

  “You know, what? Don’t even worry about it,” I said as Flavia made to open her mouth again. “Call me Northern Girl all you want. But you should know that it doesn’t even make sense. I’m not from the North. I’d never even visited the North until three years ago. You’re more Northern than I am.”

  Mairik looked like I’d slapped him in the face. “Me? Northern? There is absolutely nothing Northern about me.”

  I laughed. “That doesn’t make sense. You literally live here. Do you need someone to draw you a map? This,” I gestured broadly around me, “is about as ‘northern’ as it gets.”

  Mairik was too busy sputtering and looking aghast, so it was Fennix who answered. “We are Travelers. We don’t define ourselves by locations, the way that Settlers do. We could never be Northern or Southern or whatever. Our identity is in our wandering, and in the tribe with which we wander.”

  I briefly considered telling him about my nomadic childhood—about the whirlwind of suitcases and dark interstates and strange apartments in which my mother and I never really unpacked our boxes, but kept them half-full, ready to tape up again at a moment’s notice. I’d never had roots in my life, nor barely a tribe to cling to. But then I decided that they did not deserve to know those parts of me. Nothing I could tell them would make a difference in how they viewed me, so what was the point? I swallowed it all back down.

  “Suit yourself. I’m only here a few days and then I’m off. Call me what you like,” I said.

  Rather than seeming placated, Mairik looked disappointed that we weren’t going to spar any further. He tried a new tack, smiling obnoxiously at me. “So, you planning any more apocalypses while you’re here?”

  I groaned. “Aw, shit, I knew I forgot to pack something. Maybe next time.”

  Flavia laughed. Fennix snorted into his coffee.

  “What are you, jealous, Mairik?” Jeta asked, pouting.

  Mairik’s smirk turned to a scowl as he turned around. “Jealous? Of what?”

  “Northern Girl here rains down fear and destruction wherever she goes, and you can’t even pass your first year of Novitiate training,” Jeta cooed.

  Mairik shrugged nonchalantly. “I can. I just choose not to. There’s a difference.”

  “And you’re sure it’s not just because you’re an incompetent bou?” Laini asked seriously. “Because that’s the assumption we were all working under.”

  Mairik cursed at her in rapid Romanian and chucked a tin plate at her head. She deflected it with an almost lazy jerk of her hand, as though plates flying at her head was not only a regular occurrence, but a boring one.

  “Mairik has a point, though,” Laini said, her eyes back on her fiddle. “The last time you waltzed in here, you brought fear and destruction and violence the likes of which we had never seen in our camp.”

  “She didn’t bring it,” Flavia said sharply. “The Necromancers did.”

  “The Necromancers were following her,” Laini said, pointing at me with her bow. Horsehair dangled from it in a bushy skein. “We suffered greatly because we sheltered her here.”

  “And it was nothing to the suffering the living and spirit worlds would have endured if we had not sheltered her here,” Flavia snapped. “Don’t blame Jess for your refusal to understand the wider implications of a prophecy beyond all of our control. Our sacrifices were as nothing to the risks she took on our behalf.”

  “If you say so,” Laini murmured, and shrugged off Flavia’s argument as though she didn’t believe a word of it.

  I pulled my hood up around my face and picked up my mug. “Maybe I should just—”

  “Are you crazy?” the girl called Mina suddenly blurted out, holding her cup up in front of her face as though she were keen to keep some kind of object between us as a buffer. Her protuberant eyes did not blink as she stared, waiting for my answer.

  I stared back at her, pulled up short. “I . . . what?”

  “Irina is crazy. Are you?” Mina repeated.

  Before I had recovered myself enough to respond, however, Jeta rounded on Mina. “What the hell kind of a question is that?”

  Mina shrugged, looking totally unabashed. “They say Walkers are driven mad when they separate from their bodies. I want to know if it’s true.”

  “Yeah, but who the hell actually just asks it like that?” Jeta said, rolling her eyes.

  “Well, how else am I supposed to find out?” Mina countered with a shrug. She sipped her coffee again.

  “Do crazy people even know they’re crazy?” Fennix asked the group at large. “Like, that’s the mark of a crazy person, right? That they don’t even realize they’re crazy?”

  Flavia turned to me, looking apologetic. “I’m sorry, Jess. I can catch up with you later. They told me they’d behave, but they obviously can’t control themselves.”

  “No, it’s fine,” I said, squeezing her hand. “Being gawked at like a sideshow attraction is kind of my thing.�
�� I looked around at the others, their eyes narrowed, their expressions curious and yet wary. Miles away from Fairhaven, and I was still an object of horrified fascination. And, I realized suddenly, I would continue to be one until I demystified myself. I wasn’t doing myself—or Hannah—any favors by allowing our reputation to spiral into the stuff of legends. If I wanted people to stop staring and start listening, I guess I better start talking. I sighed.

  “Okay, look. I don’t really feel like being gawked at and whispered about for the next few days. I get enough of that at Fairhaven. You all obviously have questions about the Prophecy, so let’s have them. Step on up. You ask me, I’ll answer.”

  They all looked at each other, as though silently wondering if it was a trap.

  “Seriously?” Mina asked breathlessly after a few moments.

  “Seriously.”

  “You mean we can ask you whatever we want? About the Prophecy?” Jeta asked.

  “Sure. If it doesn’t get too personal, I’ll answer it.”

  “How do we know if you’re telling the truth?” Laini shot at me.

  “You’ll just have to take my word for it,” I said. “If the word of a Northern Girl carries any weight around here, that is.”

  Laini narrowed her eyes at me, but on every other face, incredulity turned to delight, and the floodgates opened.

  “Does it hurt to Walk?”

  “No. It’s disorienting, but not painful.”

  “Do you Walk, like, all the time? For fun?”

  “Nope, not even once. Haven’t done it since I went through to the Aether, and I won’t ever do it again, if I can help it.”

  In a matter of seconds, Flavia’s friends had transformed from a suspicious pack of interrogators to a cluster of eager kids at story time. Even Mairik dropped his confrontational air and listened, fascinated, as I explained what it felt like to fly through the Aether, and the twisted dark Castings the Necromancers had used, and the unprecedented power of Hannah’s gift. Their guards dropped one by one as my own walls came down, and what had started as a necessary chore turned out to be surprisingly cathartic. Only Laini remained stony-faced and silent, tinkering with her fiddle, though I could tell she was listening carefully to every word.

  The crowd around the fire dwindled away around us. At one point, Jeta poured a steaming mug of coffee and handed it wordlessly to me as I talked. Finally, after nearly an hour, Flavia’s friends had exhausted their well of curiosity and lapsed into a relaxed silence.

  “Wild,” Fennix whispered as I drained the last of my coffee and set the mug down on a stump.

  “Wicked,” Jeta agreed in a murmur.

  “Does that about cover it?” I asked. “If there’s going to be a second round, I’m going to need more coffee.”

  “I think you’ve told us much more than we deserved, given how rude we were to you when you sat down,” Flavia said, looking sternly around at her friends, a few of whom had the good grace to look sheepish.

  “We’re nosy and suspicious by nature,” Fennix said to me. “Don’t hold it against us.”

  Mina nodded seriously. “Like vultures on carrion when it comes to outsiders.”

  “You’re the most interesting thing to walk into this camp since three years ago, when you were the most interesting thing to walk into this camp ever,” Jeta added.

  “Interesting is certainly one word for it,” said Laini, and she played a long tremulous note on her fiddle. It startled us all and echoed like a lamentation around the clearing.

  Flavia leaned over to me and whispered, “Ignore her. Her brother was killed in the Necromancer attack on the camp, and she still hasn’t accepted it three years later.”

  I nodded and looked over at Laini, fighting a rising tide of guilt I knew I didn’t deserve to drown in.

  Fennix pulled a battered old pocket watch out of his back pocket and swore softly.

  “Mairik, we gotta go,” he said, holding it up to Mairik’s face so that he could see the time. “If we’re late again, Dragos will scalp us. We’re all going to have to pick up Ruslo’s slack today, the stupid wanker.”

  Mairik yawned widely, scratching at his stomach. “I ate too much. I need a nap.”

  Mina grinned. “Just go tell Dragos that. I’m sure he’ll understand.”

  Mairik kicked some dirt over her shoes and stood up with Fennix. “You want to hang out tonight, Northern Girl?” he asked.

  “Hang out?” I repeated in surprise.

  “Yeah. Music and general shenanigans at the Scribes’ wagon around ten. You in?”

  I must have looked wary, because Jeta nudged me with her elbow.

  “You should come,” she said encouragingly. “It will be fun. Well, as much fun as we can scrounge up around here.”

  I tried to think of a legitimate reason to refuse, but drew a blank. What other plans could I possibly have at ten o’clock at night in the middle of the goddamn woods?

  “Okay, sure,” I said. “On one condition, though.”

  Mairik frowned. “What condition?”

  “Can we do something other than sit for an hour and interrogate me?”

  Several of them laughed.

  “Traveler’s Honor,” Mairik said, raising his hands in some kind of salute.

  “That’s swearing on nothing, that is,” Fennix said, sticking out his tongue impishly.

  Mairik punched him repeatedly on the arm and they ran out of the clearing.

  “See you tonight, Jess!” he called back over his shoulder.

  I smiled to myself. I’d earned my name back, at least.

  “Actually Jess, I do have one last question,” Jeta said, leaning in conspiratorially.

  “Okay,” I said, a bit warily.

  “Is your Caomhnóir single, and can you introduce me?” she giggled.

  I followed her gaze across the fire to Finn, who had finished his breakfast and settled himself against a rock with one of his little black books in his hands. He must have felt my eyes upon him, because he glanced up and gave me just a shadow of a smile before settling back to whatever image he was weaving out of words with his stump of a pencil.

  “No on both counts,” I told her.

  19

  Rifting

  THE DAY DRAGGED BY, with no word from Annabelle, despite my constant harassment of Milo, who promised me that they would keep trying to get her on the phone. I half-wished that Irina’s trial had continued that day, just to get my mind off my crippling worry, but Dragos informed us that the Council would not convene to hear my testimony until the following afternoon, once it had dealt with the fallout from Ruslo’s attack.

  “Is . . . how is Irina?” I asked him after he relayed us this information outside the wagon.

  He frowned at me as though I had asked something offensive. “What does that matter?”

  “It matters because she is a human being,” I shot back. “Can you answer the question or not?”

  Dragos looked as though he’d rather not answer the question, but obliged anyway. “She remains in her wagon. The protective barriers around her have been reinforced. No one is allowed to stand guard alone, and the perimeter has been widened. She should be unable to hurt anyone else for the time being.”

  He had not really answered my question at all, but I wasn’t about to push the matter.

  “And Ruslo?” Finn asked.

  “Suspended from duty pending a disciplinary hearing,” Dragos said through gritted teeth. “His injuries will heal. His reputation may not.” He turned to me and added, curtly, “The Council expects you in the High Priestess’s tent promptly at noon tomorrow.”

  “I’ll be there,” I said to his already retreating back.

  As evening faded into night, with still no word from Annabelle, I lost the capacity to sit still. To stop myself from pacing, I pulled my sketchpad out and flipped past the image of Annabelle, trying not to look at it. With a clean page in front of me, I cast my eyes around for something to draw and my gaze fell upon Finn, recline
d in his bunk, tapping a pencil against his lips as he pondered a poem in his little black book. He had unbuttoned his shirt in the warmth of the fire. The glow rippled across the muscles of his stomach and chest. Smiling a bit, I picked up my own pencil and started to sketch.

  After a few moments, he felt my eyes on him and looked up, frowning.

  “Why do you keep looking at me?”

  “Because you’re just so gosh-darn adorable,” I replied.

  “Are you . . . drawing me?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Is . . .” I hesitated. “Is that okay? I probably should have asked you first. Sorry.”

  “No, don’t apologize. It’s fine. Do I . . . do I have to do anything?” he asked.

  I laughed. “Nope. In fact, the less you do, the better.”

  We sat in silence for a few moments as I sketched. He seemed to have taken my suggestion to do as little as possible as a directive to turn himself to stone.

  “Has anyone ever told you that you are weirdly good at holding still? It’s actually kind of creepy. Is that a Caomhnóir thing?”

  “I’m choosing to ignore the ‘creepy’ bit and take that as a compliment. And yes, it is a ‘Caomhnóir thing.’ Standing inspection, staying hidden, masking our emotional affect in public—these are all skills that require a similar measure of control.”

  “I’m sure you never considered it before, but it makes you an excellent subject to draw,” I said. “And sorry about the ‘creepy’ thing.”

  “Why do you like it?” Finn asked suddenly.

  “Why do I like what?” I asked, eyes still on the sketch. The curve of the jawline still wasn’t quite right. I turned my head, examining it.

  “Drawing? Why are you drawn to it, if you’ll pardon the pun?” he asked.

  “I will not pardon that pun. Take it back immediately,” I snorted.

  He smiled but didn’t reply, still waiting for my answer.

  “I’m not really sure. I started when I was really young, because something to draw with and something to draw on were two of the only things I could count on no matter where my mother and I ended up next.”