Riot Girls: Seven Books With Girls Who Don't Need A Hero
Page 27
But now, something new—a break in the chain link. It had been cut. And just beyond, brightly lit in the headlights, a small, ugly man, dressed in black. The man smirked at the guard he couldn't possibly see above the blinding headlights and then turned and ran across the dunes, away from the fence, toward the construction office and its surrounding land-moving equipment.
The guard followed behind, the truck bouncing across the dunes while he alerted the rest of security on the radio. As he pulled onto the scene, the intruders broke off in all directions except one, where the small man in black stood and yelled, "They're comin' from this direction, off with ye! Any route but here", and then appeared to disappear.
~*~
They walked for a long time, moving slowly over the dunes because Thomas had to be supported so that he didn't stumble and fall going over the soft, uneven ground. He would be unable to catch himself if he fell with his hands still bound.
Lizbet closed her eyes, trying to remember the exact location where she had stood when she first saw the tree. She sighted off the shape of the grass-covered dunes to her left and right: yes, this was the place. She hoped that the site security was fully engaged now with the protesters and that they were treating them gently.
She stage-whispered to James, "It's here. We can stop."
They lowered Thomas so that he could sit on the sand. He crossed his legs and glowered at them.
Lizbet set her backpack down and removed the small piece of bone she had tucked up in a plastic bag. She then unpacked the golden cup.
When James removed the black ski-mask covering Thomas's face, Lizbet almost asked him to put it back on. Every time she saw Thomas's face clearly, memories of him as a child flooded her mind. And then, the murder came flooding in behind.
"Please take the tape off, too, James. Morgan will want to speak with him."
James pulled hard and fast, and he winced along with Thomas as the already damaged skin under the tape began bleeding in a few places, creating small beads of red around the captive's chafed mouth.
Lizbet pulled the final items from her bag: a roll of gauze and medical tape. She couldn't kill Thomas. She couldn't be what he had been. She hoped that what she could be would be enough.
~*~
Through the long-range night-vision lens of the video camera, Angus saw a very different scene than he'd expected. He described it for his companion.
"I don't think this is protesters. 'Pears to be a young girl, a lad, and there's someone sitting on the ground. She's wavin' a knife at him."
"Let me look."
"No, wait—grab the night vision glasses from the bag. You'll not believe this. I think he's tied up."
The bulky cameraman and the immaculately made up reporter watched as a petite girl dropped to her knees in front of the man who sat cross-legged on the sand. There was a cup in a medieval style set in front of him. When she stood again, she handed something to the young man beside her. He appeared to argue with her, and then he moved off a short distance along the dunes as she stood before the kneeling figure, the knife grasped tightly in her right hand where it lay against her leg. She looked to the sky and began talking loudly, sing-song. Snatches of her words were audible before the soft snick of sand pushed along by the growing winds drowned them out. Angus couldn't make sense of them anyway. They definitely weren’t English.
"Should we go over there and see what's going on? This isn't what we signed up for."
"She's got a knife. A great scary one, too. I'm not going over there."
They stood where they were, and the camera lens never wavered.
~*~
Lizbet took a deep breath. She thought hard about the words she'd memorized—did she have them right? She thought she did. And the ritual itself? The bone, the blood, the knife?
Thomas interrupted her thoughts, "You won't kill me, little girl. And even if you do, do you really believe you can undo this? You can't. What's done is done. Kill me, so that I can laugh at you from the other side."
Lizbet dropped to her knees and looked directly into his blue eyes, so much like her own. It was Morgan who spoke, "You were my dearest joy when you were born. I could not get enough of you: your wee hands that held mine, your solemn, intelligent face. But you were always driven, single-minded, even as a child. Nothing in all my lives has hurt me more than what I feel in having to destroy you. You will never laugh at anyone from the other side. You will never have the chance to understand that lasting magic cannot be sealed with unwilling blood."
The moment was between Morgan and Faolan. Lizbet felt like an outsider. Then, as Morgan rose and looked away from her grandchild, Lizbet felt the separateness of Morgan's memories slipping away into her own thoughts and feelings. All the whispers, the butterfly lives, suddenly calmed and assimilated. They'd stopped fighting her for dominance.
She was firmly in charge now. And with Morgan's final words, she understood everything, including the importance of a leather cord.
She set the cup and knife on the ground in front of her. Next, she took the plastic bag with Myrddin's remains out of her pocket and dropped its contents into the cup. When she picked up the knife again, it felt so very heavy in her hand. Finally, she began the chant, and the first, fat raindrops fell.
~*~
A drop of rain splatted on Eamon's prominent nose, and he knew it had begun. He shot away toward where the tree would be if he were in the fae realm. He could fade across to watch the ritual with his own kind, but he didn't want to see his mistress's glee as Lizbet took the final steps to free them. He was glad of what Lizbet did, but he feared that, in the end, it would bring her only grief.
He wished that he could serve Lizbet, who had so much in common with Morgan when she was young, rather than the bitter fae his Morgan had become. She had suffered too much: her great love murdered, her human side long gone, only half a woman now, and that half was wholly fae.
Eamon pushed away his useless thoughts as the storm began to build. Wishing had never set him free. Why should it be different now?
Eamon stopped to stand silently next to James who stood a short distance from Lizbet and Thomas. He watched the wee lass raise the knife as her chant continued, and the storm began to build.
James didn’t look his way, but he spoke to him as he kept his gaze on Lizbet. "It occurred to me today that if you were always able to find Morgan when she was born again because the amulet started glowing when she was born, and the glow got brighter when she was near, how would Thomas, who didn’t have her amulet, know where to send the monks? How could Thomas find her without her amulet to guide him, Eamon?"
"Do I have to tell you, laddie? Because I think this may be one of those rhetorical questions you’re askin’ after you’ve already figured it out…"
~*~
Lizbet's arms were raised to the storm as she repeated the last words of the spell over and over again, more loudly each time, gathering her courage, daring herself, tears running down her face but obscured by the rain:
What was taken, must be given freely
Blood cries for blood
What was taken, must be given freely
Blood cries for blood
What was taken, must be given freely
Blood cries for blood
What was taken, must be given freely
Blood cries for blood
Lizbet dropped to her knees slowly and reached across the cup to Thomas, whose confident smile never wavered. She pulled him toward her firmly by the braided leather chain around his neck and moved the knife close.
With a great slice, she severed the cord and pulled his amulet free. Thomas's eyes briefly filled with horror, and then he simply crumpled forward, his empty head hitting the soft sand soundlessly.
Lizbet dropped the amulet into the chalice, then quickly, before fear could set in, she sliced deeply across the inside tip of three of her own fingers and let the blood flow freely down, falling on the amulet and the bone.
When she
felt sure she had given enough, she stood and raised the chalice above her head. A bolt of lightning lit the sky, racing straight toward her offering.
As the lightning struck, Lizbet felt a tearing pain near her shoulder blades. She looked around, craning her neck to see what was making her hurt.
Her last conscious thought was "wings…that's new."
EPILOGUE
Another Horizon
ANYONE WHO LATER saw the video—and that was anyone with a working set of eyes—said it was a miracle the girl survived.
As the lightning struck, a gigantic, glowing Tree, ringed around by the most fantastical beings, appeared behind her and wrapped the girl in its own light.
As the lightning dissipated and the thunder roared around them, the girl lay still on the ground, but the strange beings around the Tree ran away. More accurately, some of them ran away. The rest flew off or simply disappeared as though they hadn't been there at all.
The only ones left were one rather tall man and one very small man who hurried toward the unconscious girl at the base of the tree. The tall man scooped the girl into his arms, while the small one bandaged her wound. They stayed with her, sheltering her from the storm, until she stirred.
Later that night, a group of tall, slender men with long hair and pointy ears returned to the dunes to remove the chain link fence that separated the Tree from the rest of nature. They rolled the fence up in sections and kept their backs turned on the cautious media who had arrived to film them as they worked. At dawn, the workers stood looking out across the sands toward the ocean.
Dragons—actual dragons—arrived to pick up the sections of fence and drop them into the sea. Security left the site and refused to return. The company got their machinery out in the afternoon and decided to write off the land as a business loss. Papers to donate the land to the National Trust were drafted before the end of the day.
~*~
Lizbet drank a hot cup of tea at the local police station while she used James's phone to text Tanji.
"Turn on the TV it will fill u in."
"I dont nd 2."
The next send from Tanji was an image. It was a selfie from the side, her hair pulled behind her ears. She looked gorgeous, as always, and at first, Lizbet couldn't figure out what she was supposed to be looking at. Then she realized there was something different about Tanji's ears: they were vaguely spock-like. Elvin ears.
"Wr u @ the tree?"
"Langoureth ws."
It made sense, if anything made sense. Whenever Morgan and Myrddin had been alive together, they found each other, even though Myrddin didn't know why he was drawn to her. She assumed it was the same with Langoureth. They had a bond, and they found each other. It explained why free-spirited Tanji would put up with someone as unrelentingly normal as Lizbet.
Lizbet peered back over her shoulder at her iridescent wings. Maybe I'm not so normal anymore.
She still had a headache and an irritating buzzing sound inside her head that began when the lightning struck her. The aspirin she'd taken didn't touch it.
The policeman who'd talked to her that first day was very nice. He thought it was unlikely the three of them would be charged with anything. The video clearly showed she hadn't harmed Thomas in any way, and no drugs had been found in his system that would explain his passing out. Although he had amnesia, his doctor judged him to be perfectly healthy except for some mild abrasions around his mouth and wrists that Thomas was unable to explain due to the memory loss.
It was also unlikely she would be charged with vandalism. Growing an enormous tree from nowhere to make a building site unsuitable for building? Not a chargeable offense.
The young officer leaned close to her and whispered, "Don't tell anyone, but I'm glad the developers will be movin' on. We've got a much more interesting local tourist spot, now."
She hoped that the police would be done with James and Eamon soon. She wanted to get a couple of rooms and sleep. They'd been up all night and well into the day now, answering questions. Every time they thought they were done, another official showed up to ask them the same things, for which the answers never changed. She thought they probably just wanted to gawk at Eamon, who’d dropped the glamours now that the fae were revealed.
A good sleep would help bolster her for the celebrity that was bearing down on her, thanks to Eamon's less than helpful intervention with the media. The video went viral worldwide within hours of the event. As she understood it, her picture was everywhere. She knew why he'd done it: it was meant to be protective of her. It showed exactly what had happened that night so that nothing could be taken out of context. But still…like so many things Eamon hadn't told her about, she wished she'd known what he was planning.
At least her parents sounded like they were trying to be understanding. She thought they might be experiencing a little shock when she spoke to them earlier. Her mother's conversation wandered back to the same thing over and over, "Gnomes, real gnomes…"
~*~
Nearly a week after what became known in the press as Fae Day, they were given permission to leave and return back home to the United States. Eamon’s status was questionable in either country, but Lizbet didn’t think he would have difficulty getting around that given that he’d never mentioned his power of disguise during questioning. The local authorities had satisfied their curiosity about them, but the reporters who hounded them outside of the front lobby of the hotel had not.
Eamon jumped out the window of Lizbet's room and returned in an hour with a length of rope as an alternative to leaving through the front door. Once the rope was secured firmly to one of the legs of the radiator, kindly old Granny popped down to the lobby to settle the bill as James and Lizbet carefully climbed down from the second floor.
A taxi waited for them in the parking lot. Louis Jr. burst out of one of the doors and greeted Lizbet with a gigantic smile, "Now everybody believes, Lizbet. Isn't it great?"
"It is," Lizbet said as she crushed him with a giant hug.
"Can I touch your wings? What do they feel like? Did it hurt when they grew?"
Lizbet laughed. She didn't mind at all answering the questions of an excited, curious, little boy. It was nothing compared to what Bobby would put her through when she got home. She could hardly wait to see him.
~*~
They stopped for a final look at the Tree on their way out of town. James and Lizbet held hands as they walked behind Eamon, Louis, and his father across the dunes. Louis skipped and jumped and ran ahead, laughing and exclaiming back to his father about this and that as it struck his fancy.
James stopped suddenly and tugged on Lizbet's hand so that she stopped, too. "I have to tell you something."
Lizbet turned to face him, "What is it?"
"You know how I've been visiting Thomas?"
"Yeah, I know. I'm sorry I never went with you. It was too hard with all of Morgan's memories still in here."
"I know. It's not like Myrddin's memories don't affect me…" James crossed his arms in front of his chest, then uncrossed them and shoved his hands deep into his pockets, "The truth is, I feel sorry for Thomas. He's this utterly blank slate. The monks, his brothers, came around and they plan on taking him back. I don't think that's right. He doesn't remember them, and they’re not the good guys they want people to think they are. Thomas finally has a chance to live only this life. I want to make sure that he gets to take advantage of that."
"What do you mean?"
"It means I'm staying here until he's settled. He's riding back with us to London. Louis, Sr. invited us to stay for a few days until I can find something else. I kind of feel like Thomas is family and that we owe him."
"But…"
"Yeah, I know. But what happened to him in this life was because of Morgan. Thomas didn't kill Myrddin. Maybe he was the kind of person who would have, but how do we know? Eamon slapped an amulet on him before he had time to become anyone. He seems harmless enough, and remember…when the realms rejoined, he r
eturned to being one quarter fae. His magic split off as what Eamon says the fae call a ‘wisp’, sort of free floating magic that was unable to coalesce into a full magical being, so it didn’t bring him back any of Faolan’s memories. Eamon says he'll have natural magic. I'd rather he learns to use it from Myrddin than from experimenting with his brothers."
James felt sure she wouldn't argue although he watched her face transition through many feelings as he talked. She'd seen what magic could do close up, and she'd told him that she'd been having small experiences she was sure were caused by magic of her own: things that were misplaced suddenly appeared where they hadn't been the moment before, and her clothes had all magically re-tailored themselves overnight to accommodate her new appendages. She’d even described a near-flight experience when she'd tripped and felt herself almost taking off as she stumbled.
"Eamon explained the wisp thing to me, and I’ve seen a couple floating around here or there that didn’t have anybody to go back to when the realms rejoined. I guess I understand, but…I’ll miss you. I mean, I’ll really miss you." Lizbet looked so sad. He almost wanted to change his mind.
"Lizzie, it'll be six months, tops. After that, the British government kicks me out anyway because I don’t have a visa. Eamon will go back with you because someone needs to keep an eye on you. I don't fully trust Eamon, you know that, and I have my reasons, but I also don't trust that the fae Morgan just merged with you quietly and it's all over. Eamon is the only one who has any experience with her. And whatever else I believe about him, I know he would protect you with his life. Plus, he says there's a nice little farm just a few miles from your parent's house with some 'lovely milkers’ where he wouldn't mind spending a little more time."