The Gateway Trackers Books 3 & 4

by E. E. Holmes

  I stared at her, and something in the gleam of her eyes made the decision for me. I was a lot of things, but I was no coward.

  “Okay, fine. I’ll do it. Let’s Rift.”

  20

  Broken Things

  FINN AND I WATCHED the preparations with nervous fascination. Mairik and Fennix worked quietly over the fire, measuring and cutting herbs and grinding them together with a mortar and pestle. Jeta and Mina produced a set of tiny ceramic pots, which they lined up on a large, flat rock. Then they poured a small amount of a floral-smelling oil into each pot and began to stir them. I peered over their shoulders and saw that the inside of each pot was a different vibrant color.

  “For the runes,” Mina explained, looking up at me and grinning broadly.

  Once the paints were mixed, we all sat in a circle around the fire, all except for Laini, who continued to watch the proceedings from her perch in the tree, smiling like the Cheshire Cat at my preparations to fall down the rabbit hole.

  “Take your jacket off,” Jeta instructed me. “And your gloves.”

  I did as I was told, folding my coat and gloves into a little pile behind me. The leaping flames licked at my bare skin with ripples of warmth, fending off the wintery chill and sending it retreating into the surrounding woods.

  Jeta pushed up the sleeves of my flannel shirt, exposing my forearms. Then she dipped a very fine-tipped paintbrush into the pot of blue paint and began to apply it to my arms.

  I watched, fascinated, as a pattern of runes and flowers and vines began to blossom across my skin from the tip of her paintbrush. She worked quickly and silently, with broad, practiced strokes, wiping the brush on a rag she kept draped across her knee each time she needed to use a new color.

  “This is beautiful,” I murmured, more to myself than to Jeta, but she smiled anyway.

  “There’s a magic in it,” she said.

  “But there is skill, too,” I said, and my eyes traveled up to her tattoos. “Did you design your tattoos as well?”

  Jeta nodded. “I do everyone’s tattoos in the camp. It’s my gift.”

  There was a note of pride in her voice, a contentment that I envied. It was as though she knew exactly who she was meant to be, and had never even felt the urge to resist what the universe had laid out for her.

  “Maybe you could do a tattoo for me before I leave,” I said, my eyes falling from Jeta’s face to the designs now swirling from my wrists to my palms.

  “Tattoos are stories . . . our stories,” Jeta said quietly, tilting her head to the side to examine her handiwork. “If you truly feel you have another chapter to add to yours before setting out, I will gladly record it for you. There. You’re done.” She held my arms up in front of my face. “Rift-ready.”

  “Uh, great. Thank you,” I said.

  Jeta touched a finger to her head in a kind of salute and then turned to Mina who held her bare arms out in front of her, awaiting her own turn.

  Despite the intricacy of the artwork, it took Jeta only a few minutes to complete it on everyone who wanted to Rift, including herself. Finally, Mina, Jeta, Flavia, Fennix, Mairik, and I all sat around the fire, each holding a small bowl of herbs. Finn settled himself against a tree stump a few feet behind me, looking both anxious and expectant.

  Flavia sat beside me. Her eyes were aglow with excitement. “Are you ready?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never done this before. You tell me,” I said, barely able to keep a hysterical edge out of my voice. I was already doubting my decision, wondering if I was a fool to rise to Laini’s obvious baiting, but I wasn’t about to back out now. I had way too much stubborn pride for that. And if there was any chance, any chance at all that I might be able to understand that prophetic drawing, to heed its warning before it was too late . . .

  Mairik circled the fire, handing each of us an instrument that looked like a long-handled tea strainer, except instead of tea, the little metal basket on the end of the handle contained glowing embers from the fire.

  “I’ll say the Casting,” Mairik instructed us all. “When I’ve finished, hold the embers under your bowl. When the herbs begin to smoke, just put your face right over it and breathe it in as deeply as you can. When you feel the Rifting begin, just put the bowl down and lay back.”

  “How do we know when the Rifting begins?” I asked.

  “You’ll know,” Mairik said confidently. “Now when you’re in it, it’s a bit like lucid dreaming. You can make choices, decide where you are going to go and what you want to do. And remember, you can’t get hurt, so do whatever the fuck you want!”

  Fennix let out a whoop of exhilaration, which was met by laughter from the others.

  “And when you want to come out of it, just walk out the door,” Mairik finished.

  “What door?” I asked. I tried to sound nonchalant, but my voice came out shrill.

  “Wherever you go, whatever you do, there is always a door,” Mairik said. “It won’t always look the same, but if you look around for it, it will always be there, and it will always be open. Just walk through it, and you’ll wake up.”

  I turned to Flavia. “What if I can’t find the door?” I muttered.

  She shook her head and smiled at me reassuringly. “That’s not how it works. There’s always a door.”

  I swallowed back a wave of panic and nodded. Okay. Find the door. Even as I thought it, a memory floated to the surface of my mind, a memory I only revisited if I absolutely had to. When I went through the Aether and closed the Gateway from the other side, I had drifted through a kind of dreamscape, but there had always been a door to lead me to the next place. And, in the end, it had been my choice to follow Hannah’s Call and walk back through a door that had lead me home again. I took a deep, steadying breath. If I could find my way back through that door, I could do this.

  Mairik’s voice pulled me back. “Everyone ready?”

  Voices rose all around the fire, a chorus of assent. I added my own, weakly and a little late. I threw one last look at Finn where he sat nearby. He nodded solemnly to me and I felt a tiny part of my anxiety melt away. I might be about to take some kind of journey, but he would be right there, watching over me, like always.

  Mairik began to chant; even in my mounting panic I noticed a strange mixture of Romany dialect and scattered Gaelic words. It was a jarring, unmelodious mixture, like the same song being played in two different keys at once. As Mairik’s voice rose and fell, a tingling began in my arms, and I looked down at the runes and designs Jeta had painted there.

  They were glowing.

  I stared in utter fascination as a shimmering golden light snaked its way through the designs, lighting up each rune one by one, until my arms looked like a luminous map of constellations.

  “Jess! Light your bowl!” Flavia’s voice hissed at me, startling me. I was so fascinated by the runes that I hadn’t realized that Mairik had stopped speaking. Hastily, I held the glowing, smoking embers underneath my bowl and watched as a fragrant, purplish smoke began to curl up from the contents. I leaned my head directly over the bowl and inhaled deeply.

  The first breath of smoke was hot, sweet, and cloying in my throat. I fought down a cough, trying to relax my body so that the smoke would travel downward unimpeded. The second breath, though I felt it go down into my lungs, seemed to also travel upwards, filling my head with a dizzying sensation, obscuring my nerves and leaving in their place a stealing, creeping feeling of relaxation, like a sedative was now coursing through my veins. I lost all sense of the others around me. With the third breath came a lightness, an almost weightless feeling, and it was with only the vaguest awareness of the ground beneath me that I managed to lay my head back upon my jacket.

  And then there was no jacket. There was no ground beneath me. I was sinking. Sinking straight downward, floating like a molted feather. I felt no fear that I seemed to be falling through space. The descent, I knew instinctively, would not hurt me. The Rifting had begun.

  I landed su
ddenly, yet gently. I felt grass beneath me, and a warm breeze on my face, I inhaled, and the scent of the herbs was gone, replaced by a rich earthy scent like petrichor. Full of anticipation, I opened my eyes.

  I blinked. I was sitting in the very same spot where I had laid down. In front of me, the fire crackled and popped. I looked to my right and saw Flavia lying on the ground beside me. Her face was twitching and her eyes were moving rapidly back and forth beneath her eyelids. Her bowl of herbs lay beside her limp hand, its contents scattered like ash. I looked to my left and saw Jeta likewise motionless on the ground.

  “Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” I muttered to myself. “What am I, immune to Rifting?”

  I stood up and walked around the fire. All the rest of the Rifters were deep in their trances, insensible to my presence. I knelt next to Mairik and shook his shoulder gently.

  “Uh, Mairik? Mairik, can you hear me? I, uh . . . I did something wrong. It didn’t work.”

  Mairik didn’t respond. The muscles in his face were twitching, reacting to whatever marvelous flights of fancy were happening behind his eyes.

  “Damn it,” I murmured, and stood up. I looked around to where Finn had been sitting and blinked in surprise. His seat was empty. He was gone.

  “Finn?” I called.

  No response.

  I called again and again, circling the fire and casting my eyes out into the gathered darkness of the woods, but Finn did not reply.

  I felt my pulse begin to speed up. This was strange. He’d been sitting there only moments before, and he promised he would stay until the Rifting was over. But . . . had that only been moments before? How long had that falling sensation lasted? Maybe I’d been falling for hours and just hadn’t realized it?

  A sudden sharp note sounded from a fiddle. I jumped and yelled in shock, spinning to find the source of the sound. A figure sat in the tree nearby.

  “Jesus, Laini, you scared the crap out of me.”

  The figure in the tree let out a soft chuckle.

  “Which was probably your intention, of course,” I said dryly. “Well, you can take a moment to gloat if you like. You were right. I obviously don’t have the ‘Sight’ or whatever. I Rifted right back to consciousness and didn’t see or hear a single thing. What a waste of drugs.”

  Laini didn’t answer. She just laughed again. The laugh was strange. It felt . . . wrong.

  “Laini?”

  “Try again.”

  “What?”

  “I am not Laini. Try again.”

  The figure laughed again. The laugh and the voice were silvery and high, almost like a child’s.

  “Who is that? Who’s there?”

  I took a cautious step forward toward the figure, but the light from the fire would not penetrate the branches, would not show me who was sitting there. I took another few steps, hesitantly, but it wasn’t until I had left the protective ring of the fire that I saw it.

  A door.

  It seemed to have been carved right into the living wood of the tree the figure was sitting in. It was covered in vines that nearly obscured the hinges and mossy green handle, but there it was, like something out of a fairytale.

  The realization hit me. I hadn’t woken up at all. I was Rifting right now. The journey—or whatever it had been—had dropped me right down into an exact replica of the place I’d already been. I looked back at the fire. Flavia, Jeta, and the others had vanished.

  I turned back to the figure in the tree. It had picked up the fiddle again and was playing upon it, a slow melancholy tune this time. I approached cautiously now, a mixture of fear and excitement bubbling in the pit of my stomach.

  I reached the base of the tree and looked up. The song came to an abrupt, screeching end. I sucked in a startled breath.

  “Mary!” I gasped.

  The Silent Child stared down at me, her sooty face grinning mischievously. I never saw her smile like that when I knew her, trapped on earth.

  “Mary, what are you doing here?”

  “Me? I’m always here.”

  “But . . . you’re not trapped in the Aether, are you?” I cried. “I thought . . . when I saw you . . . I thought the spirits trapped in the torch were able to Cross!”

  “Do not fret. I am at peace. We remain connected, that is all,” she said cryptically.

  “But why are you—”

  “We remain connected,” she repeated.

  I stared at her. She stared back, utterly at her ease. That was as close to an answer as I was going to get, I supposed. Still, the sight of her sitting there, her little bare feet swinging playfully, left me feeling unnerved.

  “What are you doing here?” she countered.

  “I’m looking for something, I guess.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “I’m . . . not really sure.”

  Mary cocked her head to one side, staring at me curiously. “How can you find it if you don’t know what it is?”

  “Good point,” I said. “But Mairik told me that this was like a lucid dream and that I could control things, so I would like you to point me in the direction of some answers, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Oh, answers,” Mary said with a sigh of relief. “Why didn’t you say so to begin with? Answers can be found down those two paths.”

  I squinted into the trees where she was now pointing a tiny, grubby finger. There were two paths winding off through the trees.

  “Which one do I take?” I asked her. “If you say the one less traveled, I will shake you out of that tree.”

  Rather than answering me straight away, Mary sawed a few more chords on the fiddle. They rose from the strings not just as sounds, but as vibrant, twirling strands of color. As I watched them, the bright smoky tendrils twisted themselves into words:

  Why don’t you ask the path?

  I stared up at them, mouthing them. “What do you mean, ‘ask the path’? Paths don’t—”

  My question died in my throat. Mary was gone. The tree was empty, save for the fiddle, which now seemed to be made of embers that were glowing and curling into powdery ash.

  “Okay, then,” I murmured to myself. “Thanks for your help.”

  I turned to the two paths in front of me. Both were overgrown with tangles of low-growing vines and creeping groundcover. I swallowed and stepped forward, so that I stood at the very place they split apart, feeling, as I did so, that I had fallen into a videogame.

  “Uh, hi,” I called into the stillness. “I want to know why I keep getting the vision of Annabelle. Can you please show me which path will lead me to the answer?”

  I wasn’t sure what I expected would happen? One of the nearby trees to point a branch like a gnarled finger in the right direction? A little furry woodland creature would hop into sight and beckon me forward with a paw? If one thing was for damn sure, even in a drug-induced vision, I was no freaking Disney princess.

  I took a step forward and called my question still louder. No answer. No hint. No clue that I could see.

  “Okay. Okay, think, Jess,” I said to myself. “You can figure this out.” I looked around me for inspiration. Mary’s colorful words made of music still hung in the air near the tree where she’d been perched.

  “Music. Music doesn’t have a color,” I muttered. As I looked at the words, thinking, I noticed something glinting in the tree just beyond them. An apple, rosy and red, dangling temptingly from a branch.

  With a surety that took me by surprise, I walked over, plucked the apple from the branch and took a bite.

  The familiar taste I was anticipating did not come. Instead, my ears were filled with musical sounds that sang of sweetness and juiciness and crunch.

  “Okay,” I said slowly, thinking it through as I chewed and swallowed the song. “Sounds are color. Taste is music. My senses are out of whack. It’s like . . . like drug-induced synesthesia. I’m expecting to hear an answer, but maybe the answer won’t be a sound.” I dropped the apple on the ground. It sank through
the grass and disappeared. Almost immediately a plant began to grow where it had fallen, a tiny tree sprouting leaves and blossoms before my eyes.

  I turned my fascinated eyes from its progress and faced the paths again. I hesitated, wondering what sense I should try. Should I pick a rock up off one of the paths and . . . lick it? I shuddered. Even though I knew the rocks and twigs weren’t real, I hardly wanted to start snacking on them. Then another idea occurred to me.

  I knelt down and placed my open palm onto the right path. Instantly the feeling of the dirt beneath my hand filled my nostrils with scents I knew: firewood, mahogany, books, coffee, Hannah’s mild, fruity perfume. Our room in Fairhaven lay down that path. I pulled my hand back and the smells vanished.

  Next, I placed my foot on the left path. Immediately I was overwhelmed with another profile of familiar scents: candlewax, incense, musty old books, ginger tea, cats, even a faint whiff of formaldehyde. My heart broke into a gallop.

  Annabelle’s shop lay at the end of this path.

  I did not immediately break out into a run. Did the other path have answers for me, too? Answers to other questions I didn’t know to ask yet? Was there something I needed to know about Fairhaven? About Hannah? I pushed the thought away. That wasn’t why I was here. I was here about Annabelle, and I couldn’t let myself be tricked or lulled back to the familiarity of home just because I was scared that the truth about Annabelle might be just as terrifying as my vision.

  I stood up, took a deep breath and set off down the left-hand path. Though the ground beneath my feet was littered with dead leaves and twigs, I made no sound as I followed it through the trees and around a bend. I looked around me in fascination as the trees became shelves, and the leaves and branches morphed into a quirky collection of spiritual and paranormal curiosities.

  Within a few moments, I was standing in the cramped, offbeat quarters of Madam Rabinski’s Mystical Oddities. I’d never seen it so empty. Behind me was the door, propped open. Its tinkling little bell that usually heralded the arrival of customers was silent and still.