by E. E. Holmes
I shook my head. “No. No, that doesn’t make sense. That can’t happen, it’s—”
My mother laughed, and the sound of it squeezed my heart like a vice. She took several steps toward me. I might have been able to touch her, if I reached out my hand.
“Don’t tell me you still believe in impossible things after all you’ve seen and done, kiddo.”
“I… I don’t know,” I whispered. The sight of her was filling up every aching, empty place where she used to be, those places that nothing and no one else could ever fill.
“Jess, you must be careful,” my mother went on, and her smile faded. “I’m not just here to see you, but to warn you.”
“Warn me? About what?”
“Don’t go to the International High Council. You can’t understand the danger you’re putting yourself in. That you’re putting everyone in!”
“What kind of danger? What are you talking about?”
“Please, darling. Forget what Agnes told you. Forget all of it.”
“Mom, I can’t just forget it. And I still don’t understand. If you’ve been here since the Gateway reversed, where have you been? Why haven’t I seen you?”
“We didn’t want to interfere, sweetheart. We didn’t want to disrupt the life you’ve built for yourself.”
“Who’s… who’s we?”
And from the mist around her, other figures were stepping forward, vaguely recognizable: Pierce. Carrick. Evan. Bertie.
“I… don’t understand…” I whispered, my heart in my throat, my eyes filling with tears.
“Come here, kiddo. Come to me.” My mother held out her arms, and the space within them was the most beautiful, most inviting thing I’d ever seen in my life. I was walking toward her before I even knew what I was doing.
Her arms enclosed around me, and then seemed to lengthen, like tendrils…
Wrapping. Flickering. Tasting.
And then the pain began. Pain so blinding, so intense that I didn’t know where I was, didn’t know who I was. All I knew was that I wanted it to end, even if that meant my life ended with it.
The sound of my own screams filled my ears, along with the ecstatic moans of the creature now gorging itself on every fear, every doubt, every negative emotion and terrible memory I’d ever locked away in the deepest corners of myself. It found each and every one of them, exposing them, ripping away the scar tissue and sucking them dry. Their ecstatic voices rose in a chorus.
Such fear. Such despair. Such a feast. We’ve been hungry for so long. So long…
Through a haze of pain, even as I called out for help, I could see Lira crouching on the ground, watching it all happen. There was an almost feral glee upon her face, as she watched her beloved charges slowly destroy me. I knew in that moment what I ought to have known the moment I laid eyes on her: there was nothing she wouldn’t do to protect the creatures she was sworn to keep, even if it meant the destruction of the entire Durupinen world. If all that remained when it all went to hell was her and her Elementals, well… that was all that really mattered, wasn’t it?
Oh glorious, glorious. It has known so much pain. So much delicious pain. It deepens, even as we feed.
Why was no one coming to help me? Where was Finn? Where were the others? Was I even screaming aloud, or was the screaming only inside my own head? I didn’t know, and I was losing the will to care. I just wanted it to be over, for the Elementals to stop playing with their food and just end it already. What sweet relief it would be, to not feel anything anymore. This thought, as the Elementals got a taste of it, sent them into an even deeper frenzy of bliss. But even in the midst of the torture, at this lowest moment, a small bubble of a thought—where had it come from?—rose to the surface and burst.
At least I’d been able to see my mother one more time.
And then, as suddenly as it started, it was over. A scream that was not my own echoed inside my head, and then seemed to be sucked from my head to echo in the open air. The tendrils that had so tightly bound me were loosening and falling away. The pain was receding from every cell, my fears and guilt and sadness were dragging themselves, bruised and battered, back to the boxes I kept them locked away in. I opened my eyes and found myself on my hands and knees on the forest floor, panting and sobbing, but wholly unhurt.
“Jess!”
It was Finn’s voice that came to me now, his arms that lifted me from the ground and into his embrace.
“Love, speak to me! Are you all right?”
“I’m okay,” I gasped between the sobs that would not let go.
“Everything’s all right now, I’ve expelled them. They’re gone. Are you still in pain?”
“No, I’m not,” I managed to reply. “I… I just…” But the tears continued to overwhelm my ability to speak through them. It took me several more minutes to calm down enough to pull my face off Finn’s shoulder and look around me.
The mist had lifted from the clearing. The Elementals—for that is what they had been, not spirits of those I’d lost, just Elementals playing upon my weaknesses—were nowhere to be seen. Abigail stood near the entrance to the hovel, both looking pale and shocked. Ileana and Annabelle had pulled Margaret’s arms behind her back and held the woman pinned against a tree trunk as she struggled to get to her sister. Lira was fighting and flailing like a possessed thing against the grip of Catriona and Lucida, who had, it appeared, tackled her to the ground. It now took both of them to keep her restrained as she kicked and shrieked a stream of incomprehensible ramblings. I tore my eyes from her struggle to look at Finn again, who was looking me over as though expecting to find some wound that needed staunching, something he could bandage or fix.
“I don’t understand,” I said, my breathing still hitched and uneven. “What happened?”
“Lira must have summoned the Elementals. It was a trap,” Finn said. “They lured you out of the shack and attacked you. We didn’t know what was happening until you started screaming, and by that time, they’d already latched onto you.”
“But the Casting Abigail put on us—I thought we were supposed to be protected from the Elementals!” I said, trying to keep the accusation out of my voice but throwing a sharp glare at Abigail all the same.
Finn grimaced and lifted my hair from the pack of my neck. “The rune is gone—wiped away. Lira must have done it when she crawled up onto your back.”
I reached around to feel the place where the rune had been, remembering the shivers up my spine as Lira had twisted her fingers into my hair and wrapped her arms around my neck.
“But how did she do it? How did she summon them without you knowing? There’s a whole Casting that must be performed, just as Peyton did when she left you to the mercy of the Fairhaven Elemental.”
“Lira doesn’t need a Casting,” I told him. “She’s a Caller. A Caller of Elementals, not spirits. Her clan has had the gift for generations. That’s why she’s the Keeper.”
“She Called them?” Finn asked, looking horrified. “But… why? What happened in there?”
“I don’t know,” I said, trying to think back past the pain to the conversation we’d had. “We were talking. She told me about how the Elementals came to be—that they were spawned from the moment the Gateways were stripped from the Geatgrimas—formed from the fear and doubt that’s trapped in the Aether itself. And then she took out a key to give to me—like the one Ileana’s got—but then she asked me… she asked me what I would do if she gave it to me.”
“And what did you say?”
“That I was going to try to save my friend and restore the Gateways. And then I heard a voice and… oh my God.”
“What? What is it?”
The realization had just hit me. I looked at Lira, still writhing on the ground, and understood. I turned from Finn and started walking toward the place where Catriona and Lucida were struggling to restrain her.
“Jess, be careful! Don’t get too close! She may attack again!” Finn hissed, jogging along after me.
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br /> “It’s okay, I just want to ask her something,” I said. As I drew nearer, I expected Lira’s thrashing to grow wilder, but instead, she seemed to calm with every step I took. By the time I was close enough to speak to her, she had gone limp in Catriona and Lucida’s arms. Margaret, too, had stopped struggling and slumped down against the tree, crying quietly and mumbling her sister’s name over and over again.
Lira looked up at me, her sunken chest heaving, pure loathing in her expression. I ought to have hated her for what she had just done to me, but I couldn’t. I felt nothing but pity in my heart for her and the empty, isolated existence she led.
“What happens to the Elementals if the Gateways are restored to the Geatgrimas?” I asked her.
Lira’s face twitched, and her eyes filled with tears. “They return. They return from whence they came.”
“Are you sure of that?” I asked. “Or are you only afraid they will?”
Lira did not reply. Her lip quivered.
“You thought that if you let me go with the key, that I would take them away from you?” I asked.
Lira nodded, tears running down the deep crags in her face.
“I told you I was going to try to save my friend. You were just trying to do the same, weren’t you? You were trying to save your friends.”
Lira curled herself into a fetal position and completely broke down, all the fight gone out of her. Feeling slightly sickened with myself, I reached down and pulled the ancient key out of Lira’s clasped hands. She gave it up to me without a hint of further resistance.
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “But we both know I’m meant to have this, and I have to take it with me. I wish there was another way.”
Now that it was clear that Lira was beyond attacking anyone else, Lucida and Catriona removed their restraining hands and stepped back from her, both panting with the enormous effort it had taken to restrain so small and old a creature. As soon as they moved out of the way, Margaret came hurrying over to Lira, bending over her and shielding her with her body as though expecting an aerial attack. She began shushing and singing softly to her sister, rocking and crying in tandem with her.
“Let’s leave them,” I said to the rest of the group, who were all standing around looking shell-shocked. “There’s nothing else we can do for her. We’ve caused enough damage.”
I was surprised to hear the authority in my voice, and even more surprised when no one questioned me, but turned their backs on the squalid little hovel and its traumatized residents and set back off through the woods. We walked in silence for several minutes, Abigail taking the lead, before anyone finally found their voice.
“She was old,” Catriona said, her voice full of shock and revulsion. “I… I thought she was a child until we had to restrain her.”
“So, did I,” I admitted. “But then she lit the candle inside the house and I realized the truth.”
“What happened in there, Jess? Why did she attack you with the Elementals? What did you say to her?”
“She realized that if I delivered my message to the High Priestess of the International High Council, that would likely be the end of the Elementals,” I said. Now that my shock was wearing off, I was shaking like a leaf. I clenched my fists to stop the trembling in my hands.
“How does she figure that?” Annabelle asked.
“I’m not sure. It had something to do with the origins of the Elementals. But my words from Agnes were a trigger for her. She’s spent her entire life with them. She has nothing else. She saw me as someone who wanted to take away her purpose and her calling.” Which, I realized, was how even my own sister had felt at first. And was likely how many other, very important Durupinen would feel as well. Would they listen, or choose to silence me? This message I was carrying was more dangerous than I knew.
“And why… Jess, why in the world would you let those monsters come anywhere near you? Why didn’t you run?”
“Because,” and I was ashamed, although I knew Finn would never fault me for what I had done, “because it pretended to be my mother.”
“It… what?!” Finn’s expression was devastated.
“I know it was stupid, but I couldn’t help it. It… it took the form of my mother and told me she had come to warn me not to go to the High Council. Then others appeared, in the forms of other people I’ve lost—Carrick, Pierce—and I was just too confused and emotional to make a rational decision. I didn’t realize it was a trick until it was too late. I’m sorry.”
“Love, what in the world are you apologizing to me for?” Finn asked, exasperated. “Surely you don’t think you owe me or anyone else an apology for being subjected to something like that? The Elementals played on your deepest pain and twisted it to their advantage. Anyone would have been vulnerable.”
“I was such an idiot,” I said, hot tears springing into my eyes and rolling down my cheeks before I could stop them. “I knew my mother had Crossed. I knew that. And the others, too. But I couldn’t stop myself from hoping, just for a moment—”
“You can’t blame yourself, Jess.”
“Watch me,” I grumbled.
“That’s not fair to yourself, love.”
“How the hell did those Elementals know how to get to me, anyway?” I asked, the question bursting from me suddenly, like a projectile. “How did they know what form to take? How did they know what to say?”
“All Elementals were born of the same darkness,” Finn said. “They’re all connected to each other. Once the Elemental at Fairhaven fed itself on your pain and fears, all the Elementals had a taste of it. They knew your weaknesses because they’d tasted them before.”
Every bit of the aching longing and sadness that had filled me at the sight of my mother and the others had drained away now, and the space had been filled with gnawing anger and guilt. I’d set myself up as an easy target. Every time I opened myself up to being vulnerable – to missing someone, to loving someone, to letting someone in—life turned around and sucker-punched me right in the face. It was enough to make the whole hermit-in-the-woods lifestyle look appealing.
Finn reached out and took my hand. I had a momentary impulse to pull it from him, but the impulse melted away as he squeezed my fingers gently. I looked up to see him looking at me with an expression that took my breath away, and I knew that he would always love me in these moments I couldn’t love myself. I interlaced my fingers with his instead, locking his hand in place. My other hand I kept tightly wrapped around the key that I had taken from Lira.
The walk out of the woods went much more quickly than the walk in. Before I knew it, we had arrived back at the clump of bushes where we had stashed our belongings. Everything was still there, just as we had left it, with no signs that it had been disturbed. It was with obvious relief that Finn re-armed himself and slung his readiness pack over his shoulder. We saw not a single hint that anyone other than ourselves had ventured into the woods that night—no freshly abandoned campsites or still smoking fires, no fresh tracks in the muddy path that we rejoined and led us out of the woods and back out into the adjoining field. Perhaps the ordinance the village had put in place was indeed working—or perhaps the sounds of my own screams had kept the thrill-seekers at bay. If anyone nearby had doubted the Screaming Woods were aptly named, they would have no doubt now, and it was with distinct relief that I left them at my back, hoping I would never have to enter them again. From the looks on the faces of my companions, I could tell that the feeling was mutual.
“So, what do we do now?” Annabelle asked. “What’s our next move?”
I faltered as six pairs of eyes all turned expectantly toward me. I tried to wrangle my scattered thoughts into a concrete plan of action, but my exhausted brain wouldn’t cooperate. I sighed. “We sleep. I don’t think we can formulate next steps without getting some rest first—at least, I don’t think I can.” Now that the adrenaline was wearing off, I was feeling more and more like I was mentally and physically made of gelatin.
“Yeh�
��ve been through an ordeal that few have lived to tell about, being attacked by them Elementals,” Abigail said sagely, her ancient head bobbing up and down on her spindly neck. “Abigail has got just the remedy for that. Just leave it to me, lass.”
We followed Abigail back around the outskirts of the village, now silent and still in the last hour or two before dawn. Back inside the Milkweed Teahouse, she set to work, and within a few minutes had brewed up an herbal tea of sorts that smelled horrible and tasted even worse.
“Once the Elementals get into yer mind like they do, it can be a right struggle to pry them out again,” she explained, thrusting the cup at me. “And that can make for a devil of a nightmare when yeh close yer eyes. Get that straight down yer gullet, now, and it’ll give yeh a bit of peace while yer dreamin’.”
I gave the tea a suspicious look, but honestly, after what the Elementals had put me through, I’d try almost anything to put it behind me, including drinking what looked and smelled like rotting produce. I threw my head back and downed the tea in three large gulps, feeling it scald my throat all the way down and sear the insides of my nostrils with its pungent, spicy fumes. I coughed and sputtered a little, but succeeded in not spraying tea all over the room.
Everyone else stood around awkwardly for a few moments, wondering if they were going to be forced to withstand the tea as well, but when it became clear that I was to be its only victim, we all turned and started for the stairs. Only Ileana remained behind, settling herself in a chair by the fire and pulling a book from the nearby shelf. She nodded her head at me, and I couldn’t be sure if the gesture was meant to reassure me that she would watch over things while we slept, or to shame me for succumbing to such a human weakness as sleep. I decided I didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to care. Each step up the staircase was more difficult than the last.
I lay in the darkness with Finn beside me, the full weight of what had happened that night pressing down upon me like weights. My thoughts inside my brain felt like rocks in a clothes dryer, clunking loudly and painfully around inside my skull. Thankfully, I did not have to open the connection and add even more chaos—while I washed up in the bathroom, Finn had texted Hannah to fill her in on everything that had happened in the Screaming Woods and asked her to hold off on trying to contact me, so that I could get some rest. I had no idea if he had told her about the Elementals taking the shape of our mother. I hoped he hadn’t, just to spare me a bit of humiliation and an unwelcome dose of pity.