by J B Cantwell
Soon, I found I didn’t have a choice.
He flipped my headlamp on, and took off his own helmet. Then he sat down across from me.
My skin crawled at his closeness.
“Look at me,” he said.
I stared down at my hands, too scared to move.
“Aster, is it?” he pressed. “Look at me.”
Slowly, I let my eyes lift, found his.
But nothing had changed. They stormed, dark and cloudy, just as they had down beneath the rock. Just as Cait’s had the day she tried to kill me. Just as Jade’s.
I dropped my gaze again.
“What do you want to do?” he asked.
The world was spinning again, and the little strength I had regained from hearing Cait’s voice drained away.
“We should leave,” he said. “Maybe if we get away from here, you’ll feel better.”
Something I’d forgotten suddenly swam up to the surface.
“Where’s the gold?” I mumbled, blinking heavily.
“I have the gold,” he said. From the side of his backpack, he retrieved that stone I had seen in the safe, the salvation of all of us. He lifted up the huge rock.
I tried to force myself to focus on him, but I couldn’t do it.
I reached out for the gold, and was surprised when he let it drop into my hands easily. He didn’t seem to mind handing over the treasure he had stolen for his master one bit. The stone was heavy, and I stared down at the tiny threads that stuck out of it on every side, ever reaching.
“How are you so…normal?” I asked.
He snorted with laughter, a sound so unexpected that it jarred me, making me marginally more alert.
“I want to know,” I said, trying and failing to give my voice the sort of command that would inspire his honesty.
“I don’t really know,” he said, looking up at the twilight sky. He paused for several long moments, seemingly trying to figure out how to phrase his thoughts. “Do you ever get the feeling that you’re walking around in a haze?” he finally asked. “Like everything you do is automatic? Like you’re on autopilot?”
I nodded.
“Well, I’ve been like that for a long time, I think,” he continued. I feel sort of…new. Like a newborn child. I vaguely remember coming here months ago. Though I seem to be sharing this body with another; I don’t remember all of the traveling I’ve done, you see. I fade in and out of consciousness. Like today, when I woke up with my hands around your neck. I don’t know where or who I had been in the moments before I came to.”
But I knew. I knew only too well that the man who had tried to kill me wasn’t the one sitting across from me now. The man who had tried to kill me was my own father.
“Does he talk to you, then?” I asked. “The other one?”
He shook his head.
“No, nobody talks to me. I just sort of get a feeling about things. Something’s driving me to do these things, I can tell you that. Why else would anybody come to a place like this?” He looked around us at the sunburned hills, now gray in the twilight. “There’s nothing here, is there? Nothing except this gold.” He reached into his pack and pulled out a small handful of smaller gold pieces, fingered through them as if amazed that anyone could care about something so silly. “But this…being…it wills me to go, and so I go. And like I said, sometimes I just wake up and I’m somewhere new. Like today.”
Cait climbed up onto the wall next to me and rested her head on my shoulder. She gave a long, shuddering yawn. It seemed she had no ill feelings toward me for abandoning her below.
“I want to go home,” she said, her voice sleepy now in the gathering darkness. “I want to see Rhainn-y.” Then, she lifted her head and looked deep into my eyes. “You should believe him,” she said. “I do.”
I looked between her and the man who, despite his current condition, was my father.
I didn’t know who to believe anymore.
But one thing was for certain. We now had enough gold to return to the Triaden. Enough to put it to good use. Maybe we would have a chance at success now. We could even end this thing if we were lucky. And maybe we could find Rhainn.
But still, I doubted.
“Who will take care of you?” I asked. “If we do go, there’s a war, you know. And we don’t even know if we’ll find everyone from Stonemore where we left them.”
“Lissa would take care of me,” she said, bargaining.
‘If we stay here, then my mom and Grandma could take you back to the farm. I bet you could watch all the television you wanted. Maybe you could even get to see Lily sometimes.”
She thought about this. She had made a good connection with Mom, that was for sure. And the draw of Carl’s young daughter was certainly appealing. But the draw back to her homeland, no matter how sick and overrun it was at the moment, was too strong for her.
“I want to be with Rhainn-y,” she said quietly.
I sighed into the top of her head. I had brought her here to try to protect her from the madness of her worlds. But since our arrival, she had been anything but protected. Now, with her clearly voiced desire to return back to her one chance at having what was left of her family back by her side again, I felt helpless to deny her.
Finally, I gave in.
“Okay,” I said. “We can try.”
I looked up at my father, who hadn’t voiced an opinion one way or the other about this course of action.
“What about you?” I asked. “What will you do?”
It had been my intention to take him with us when we did finally go back. But now everything had changed.
“I’ll go where you go,” he said. “If you’ll have me.”
I swallowed heavily, my throat still sore from his earlier attack. He seemed to know my mind.
“I’m sorry about what happened before,” he said. “I don’t know if I can convince you, but I have no desire to hurt you.”
“No,” I said. “It’s my father that wants to do that.”
And for this, like so many other things, he had no explanation.
“It’s alright,” I said. And something in his manner, something in the kind way those black eyes looked at me, made the decision for me. “You can come.”
The tiniest seed was planted deep in my heart, had taken root there long ago and refused to let go. There was still a chance. There was always a chance.
Maybe somewhere hidden deep inside this man I looked at now, my father still remained. Maybe the man who had fed me ice cream for the first time and pushed tiny train cars across the carpet of our city apartment was still in there. Somewhere.
Chapter 25
As night fell around us in earnest, we set out to find somewhere comfortable to sleep. I showed him the museum, which he hadn’t seen before, at least not in this state. To one side of the gift shop entry, a narrow staircase snaked up along the side of the building. He carried Cait, who had fallen asleep, up the stairs, where a shopkeeper’s apartment was built above the main structure. He gently lay her sleeping body down onto a small couch on the far side of the room, taking care to remove her bulky helmet before he did so. Then, with a tenderness I did not expect, he bent down over her and kissed her gently on the forehead, smoothing out her ratty hair with one hand.
I slumped into a big cushy armchair, exhausted. I slid my backpack around to my front and opened it, stuffing the large gold stone into it. My fingers brushed up against Brendan’s diary, which I hadn’t read since before Denver. By the light of the headlamp, I flipped it open at random.
“March 21, 1899
I am trying to keep true to my original purpose here, but the struggles of everyday life are enough to sometimes make me forget the importance of my quest. I have gathered so little gold, and seen so little magic, that I fear I may never be able to return home. And yet, I must press on. I must not give up the fight, no matter how difficult it may become to continue.
Sometimes I am tempted to tell Josephine, to enlist her to help me in some w
ay that I cannot yet imagine. But the fear that she may see madness where there is truth stops me from enlightening her. The dust fire does not come at all anymore, and if I were to try to prove my stories it would accomplish little but making me look a fool. I fear not appearing foolish, but her trust is something I value dearly, and I do not want to scare her.
So I continue on, on my own, in secret. It is all I can do. It is the best I can do. I hope that one day I will be able to prove the truth of my past to her, or that her trust in me will be so great that I will be able to tell it to her frankly.
Until then, the search continues in solitary fashion. For the gold. For the magic that was once so close to me it felt as a brother. Though both have eluded me for many years, I push forward in the hope that one day the spark of power will ignite from my fingertips once more.”
I read the passage over and over, certain that there was something within it that might help me find my way out of the darkness. But all was a foggy mess in my brain, my heart. I looked up to find my father sitting across from me in a matching armchair, gazing at me with curiosity. I raised my eyebrows at him.
“What is our plan?” he asked. His manner was mild. His face friendly. Yet still I tried to avoid looking into his eyes.
I turned off my headlamp and tucked the diary back into my backpack, sitting across from him in the dark to spare me the pain of seeing all that black.
“Tomorrow I’ll take you to the Fold, I think,” I said.
“Oh,” he said. “What is that?”
I let my head rest against the arm of the chair, too exhausted to try to stay up and watch him. A large yawn escaped me despite my effort to appear alert.
“It’s a place,” I said. “A place where we might be able to heal you.”
“But what is wrong with me?” he asked. “I don’t feel ill.”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s always sort of been the whole problem.”
“The girl is coming, too?” he asked. In the light of the moon coming through the small window, I saw him turn and look in Cait’s direction. “That is what you want?”
“Yes,” I said, thinking that I would be hard pressed to deny her.
“Good,” he said. “There’s something about her. Something I like.”
I turned and looked over at Cait, too, her little body curled up into a ball on the couch. She seemed so content, as if nothing more dramatic than a rough day of play had just passed her by. I marveled at her resilience, her ability to remain steadfast in her wants and dreams despite all the mayhem that had surrounded her for so long. Perhaps there was more to her magic than just following trails and connecting people with their desires. Perhaps the power of Elyso had bestowed other, less obvious, gifts as well.
I opened my mouth to speak when a low rumbling snore came from him. It appeared that the day’s events had tired every one of us out.
I turned back to Cait, watched her light breathing as she slipped into a dreamland all her own. I made a wish for her that it was full of brightness tonight, that fear and angst stayed far away from her mind as she rested.
“I like her, too,” I whispered.
At the sound, my father tucked his arms into his chest and rolled onto one side, sleeping as soundly as a child.
I let my own head rest against the arm of my chair, and when I closed my eyes, I remembered the blackness of the cave as it had been punctuated by the pinpricks of stars across my vision. I remembered the huge swaths of stars I had seen when I had been on the snow planet staring out, wishing to see some hint of home. Of here. And it was with that as my backdrop, the galaxies that represented all life, that I finally let myself fall into sleep.
We jumped through the next morning and most of the afternoon without rest, he taking this new mode of travel easily in stride. We rarely stopped, rarely walked, rarely slept. It seemed that all of us were eager to leave this place, now that we had the gold we needed and the decision had been made. During one of the brief rests we did take, he dug out the rest of the gold he had discovered, including the snarl of necklaces from the attic.
“Don’t know where these came from,” he said, handing them to me. “But I worked for weeks to get this.” He passed over a small vial, and inside floated gold specks similar to those I had carried with me since Colorado. I took his giving me all of these as a gesture of trust, and I tried to listen to the small voice inside my head that told me the Corentin, himself would never give away all his gold like this.
It was strange, but now that we were together, I felt as alone as I had that first instant I had jumped to the Fold from the attic. Nothing was turning out to be what I had thought it was, and my understanding of truth was no longer what I had believed. I craved the contact of my friends, of the people in the Triaden who had helped me so much along this journey. I wanted to trust Dad, and there were moments when I was thrust back into the mind of a young child, looking up to him, believing him.
But each time those black eyes stared back at me, the trust faded away, and I was left alone again.
Only Cait, who seemed happier now than I had ever seen her, kept me moving forward. She was excited to see Larissa again, and I think maybe she thought Rhainn would somehow appear before us upon our arrival back in the Fold. Either way, it was a relief to not have to drag her along, and her energy lifted all of us as we faced the arduous journey back to the countryside, back to the spot in the land where the chaser’s magic would take us all across the universe in a reverse trip.
When we finally did start to see the remains of the land on the other side of the Rockies, the decimated cornfields, the houses slowly melting back into the Earth, I was relieved. The sun was high in the sky, and the clouds were still far off on the horizon, not yet ready to threaten the land below.
Finally, as we jumped through the fields near the strange rock formations that had served as my marker, I knew we were close. Soon, we landed on a spot not far from a small cluster of buildings, too far away to see clearly, but close enough to look familiar. I couldn’t tell for sure, but it was as likely to be the old farmhouse as any structures we might find still standing out this way. I felt certain that, here, we were close enough to our original entry point to use the chaser successfully.
I strained my eyes, looking for signs of life, half hoping to hear the shouts of protest of my mother commanding me to stay home. I saw very little, though, and from here the tiny lump that sat beside the house might have been the old sedan we had ridden in across our wrecked country, or could have been nothing more than a boulder deposited here millions of years ago.
She didn’t come running. Nobody saw us appear.
Nobody would see us leave.
I looked up into my father’s face, so benign and weirdly friendly. He smiled down at me.
I had to figure him out. Who this man who stood before me now really was. That body, those hands, had tried to snuff out my life yesterday. And now he stood before me, as agreeable as could be despite the grip that clearly held him, rendering his memory blank and his actions gentle. I might have chosen the safer path, to leave him behind. The risk of bringing him hung heavily over me. I could have pushed on alone in my quest to rectify the imbalance of the Fold with one less uncertain ally by my side. But if I did, the mystery of what had happened to my father would haunt me forever. Keeping him close could be my only chance to discover the truth before I succeeded, or failed, in my mission. The truth about what had happened to him.
And about how he really felt about me.
I stared out across the land, hoping it was not for the last time. In my mind, I made the promise I knew I might not be able to keep.
Meet you back here, Mom.
Then, I turned my back from the place, and knelt to dig into the old backpack for the chaser. My hand closed around it, and I realized that now it reminded me of something in recent memory: one of the hard, smooth balls from the pool table where Cait and I had learned to play.
I smiled, relishing the feeling of its
cool surface against my palm.
Then I held it out, and the gold floating within it winked in the late afternoon sun. I took Cait’s hand in mine, and she took my father’s in her other.
Then, with one last look up into the acid sky, we left this place.
My planet.
My world.
My home.
<<<<< >>>>>
Aster Wood and the Wizard King
Book 5
Chapter 1
We were lost.
My heart thudded in my chest. The increasingly familiar panic was overtaking me again. I felt beads of sweat break out in a prickly wave over my forehead and shoulders as I surveyed the strange countryside.
We had been wandering for days; four, maybe five. I was quickly losing count, stuck in a haze of desperation that grew thicker with each passing of the sun. My eyes scoured the land that unfolded in a thick green blanket in all directions, searching for anything even remotely recognizable. I wondered if we were even on the right planet. When Cait, my father, and I had left Earth, Aeso had been our target. Home of the village high in the foothills of the Fire Mountains, its people tortured and murdered by the Corentin. Home of Stonemore, the walled city, now destroyed by fire. And home of the Hidden Mountains, where my friends and the remaining inhabitants of the torched city now hid, awaiting my return. But this place looked nothing like the Aeso I had come to know. Our arrival back to the correct location had been all but assured by our use of the chaser link; it should have delivered us to the heart of the Hidden Mountains, the spot where we had jumped from.
Instead, this strange landscape stretched out before us, not even a hint of a mountain in sight.
Something had to be wrong. The chaser link had never failed us before. It followed the known path of a regular link, permanently opening a jump for anyone who held it. Why had it delivered us here, far away from where we needed to be?