by Etzoli
“Carl, I’m sorry.” My voice threatened to crack, but I held it steady. I had to hold it in. I couldn’t let any vulnerability out. I had to be strong.
One crack, and I’d shatter into a million pieces.
“No, please. Don’t say you’re sorry. Tell them.”
Oh stars. Please. If there were ever a time to grant me a blessing of some kind. Anything at all. This is the moment. Give me resolve, give me bravery, give me something .
The stars didn’t answer. They’d probably never answer me again. I don’t think they took too kindly to traitors.
Carl’s eyes got even wider with my continued silence. He raised his hands, still cuffed and chained. I saw the stains on the bandages up close, and I deliberately recoiled. I had to act like I was scared, or disgusted, or whatever I needed to do. I couldn’t follow my instincts, to try and comfort him and heal him. I couldn’t go anywhere near him.
He took a step forward. Instantly, the guard was at his side, pulling him back.
“Jen, please! Talk to them!” Carl blurted out. There was no pretense of secrecy anymore. “Tell them about Cyraveil! About the world! You’re a Sylf, for god’s sake! Matt took over an empire! Explain it! Matt?” Carl’s head swivelled around for a new ally, since his closest had just abandoned him without a word. I looked over too, watching Matt’s reaction.
“…Carl, none of that is real. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Matt responded so calmly, so naturally. I believed every word he spoke. Everyone in the room would have believed him. He just looked like a concerned bystander.
Carl struggled against his restraints. The guard was pulling him back out of the room, and he began to shout for help, for anything to save him.
Which, of course, meant it was my turn. The world fell into that slow motion state, when you know something terrible is about to happen, and you can see it coming from miles away, but you’re helpless to do a single thing about it.
Except, I wasn’t helpless—because that terrible thing about to happen was me.
Carl got the guard to stop pulling him away. His eyes locked with mine from across the room. I felt my heart harden to ice in my chest, preparing for the worst. My hands flew up to my mouth, as if I could prevent was was next. Like anything could have stopped what was coming next.
“Jen, you were there. You know. The Sylves, Jen. Everything. We were together, Jen. You and me. I rescued you, remember?” Carl was raving now, struggling to keep composure.
I shook my head again. Tears tried to spill from my eyes, but I wouldn’t let them. I refused to let myself cry. Strength, I told myself. I had to get through this. I stared straight at Carl, with the rest of the world still frozen in place, and I opened my mouth.
“I’m sorry, Carl. I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.” His face fell, and my heart with it. But I made it through, right? Carl would be taken away, and I would be free once again—for all the good it did me. This night would be seared into my brain forever. I knew that already. I’d never forget what we’d done.
Then, I heard his voice once more from across the room, calling out in perfect cadence, perfect pronunciation. As if he’d memorized it just for me.
“ Vei illum dou, velae envil ‘svil tosilandar, ta nal erreth ala venand slasev. ”
My heart shattered. I was almost overwhelmed. Almost completely overcome. I had to fight through a surging wave of emotions swallowing up every sense in my body to force out four simple words.
Four words that would finally condemn him.
“Carl, you need help.”
His eyes, which only a moment before had filled with hope and love and promises of a life together, hollowed out to nothing. There was a despair so total, so utterly void of feeling that there wasn’t a person inside anymore. He slumped in the guard’s arms, and was slowly dragged back into the interrogation room. The two detectives gave us another curious glance before they followed him back in, and the door snapped shut.
I felt Matt’s hand drop onto my shoulder once again. It was like he’d flipped open a tap. Tears erupted from my eyes as I turned and fled the building. With every step, I ran further away from a man I’d just sent to his worst nightmare, all to save myself.
It was raining once more, harder than ever, and I welcomed it gladly. I fumbled my way back onto the bike and started pedaling. Maybe it could wash away the guilt and the pain now consuming me, but I doubted it. Surely, I was damned forever.
***
By the time I got home, Matt and Sara were already waiting for me in the garage. Matt was holding the envelope I’d left on the kitchen table. I pulled up silently, and carefully placed my bike back on the rack where it belonged. Sara watched with worried eyebrows, but Matt wore an unreadable mask. Had he always seemed so distant and terrifying to me? Was this a new side of him, or the side I’d always pretended wasn’t there?
I’d finished crying. I knew there was nothing more to be done. Instead, I had a new choice to make—one just as important to our future.
Sara was the first to speak, cautious and hesitant. “Everything okay?”
Matt hadn’t told her, of course. I didn’t answer her right away. I turned to my brother, staring him down with all the determination I could muster. I had to know, right there, what sort of person he was. Who the man I was taking back into my world really was under the surface.
“Matt, did we do everything we could for him?”
Matt opened his mouth to answer, and I held up my hand. I knew what he would say, and I couldn’t ever let him voice it. I could already tell what the answer was, and it sickened me to my core. But I’d made my choice. If I confronted him, if I disowned him for what he’d done tonight, our lives would fall apart completely. There was only one way forward, and it was united. I needed him, and he needed me. If we were going back to Cyraveil, there was no way we’d survive unless we were on the same side again—no matter how much it disgusted me.
Without another word, I walked forward and took Sara’s hand. I lead her around the other side of the truck and got in, deliberately placing myself in the center between Matt and my best friend. As she got in, I closed the door behind her. I watched as Matt carefully placed the letter on the door to the garage, wedged into the handle, and turned the lights out one by one.
He got into the truck, turned the key, and backed out down the driveway. The garage door slid shut in front of us, closing off my old house for the last time.
My fingers tightened around Sara’s as I kept my eyes fixed straight ahead on the road. As we took the first exit, I turned around to look back out the rear of the cabin, up into the stars barely visible through a gap in the rain clouds, and I prayed.
Maybe I was doomed to regret this forever. Maybe I should have told Carl long before I ever talked to Matt. Maybe I shouldn’t have volunteered in the war. Maybe I shouldn’t’ve ever left the comfort of my little place up in the trees. Maybe I shouldn’t have begged Matt to take me along that night to whatever Blake had found.
Maybe, maybe, maybe. My life was always full of maybes. I hated it. I was done with it. I was getting the hell off this planet.
And I was travelling back to my own, where I’d live with the knowledge and guilt for the rest of my considerably long life. Where I’d probably never be able to trust my brother completely again, even as I lived side-by-side with him for the years and decades to come, a smile on my face and laughter on my lips, pretending we were a team.
You probably hate me a little, don’t you? Or maybe you’re sympathetic. Fuck that. I don’t deserve it. Save it for Sara, or Carl, or anyone else. I’m just one nervous wreck in a large collection of nervous wrecks hanging around, but I put myself up here. I did this to myself. It’s up to me to dig my way back out.
The headlights flickered as we bumped off the main road, and the sign for Cyraveil Park flashed up in front of us. I felt my own hand squeezed in return, and finally, I allowed myself just a little bit of hope. I still had Sara, and I
still had myself.
There was still some magic in the world—damned if I wasn’t going to use it.
Time to go home.
Chapter 19 — Epilogue
“Did that convince you at all?” Detective West asked his partner.
Portman shook his head, as Matt departed in the beat up old truck. The rain drizzled off the awning above the doors to the station in a curtain. Portman felt perplexed as he shivered in the cold night air. He’d not been sure what to expect from letting Carl talk to his friends, and it hadn’t exactly flagged any real triggers, but it was still bizarre to say the least.
Back inside, he had a high school kid with insane delusions of magic and a fantasy world he’d supposedly traveled to, plus a missing friend that Portman believed he was responsible for disappearing to some degree. He couldn’t make heads or tails of Carl’s demeanor though—not after the confrontation with his friends.
Portman was never one to let a case go easy. His dogged determination to follow threads to their very end, when he could just as easily walk away at the first opportunity to clear a number and bump his statistics, had driven away more than a few partners in his career. West was just the newest in a long line.
“I don’t know about you, but—”
Portman interrupted him. “I’ll take care of Stokelson. Go get the car. We’re following them.”
West grinned. “Just what I was thinkin’.”
Portman smiled as he hurried back into the station. West seemed like a good fit.
They didn’t bother with sirens or lights, not this late at night. The roads were calm. Most people were asleep. West sped them through hazy strings of green lights shining through the rain, then took them into the maze of streets that made up the suburbs.
Just as they pulled up to the Silverdale residence, Portman caught a lucky break. He tapped West, who’d slowed to a crawl, and pointed further down the road. Past the sheets of downpour, they could just barely make out the taillights of the pickup, turning the corner and disappearing from view. A few seconds later, and the detectives would never have seen it.
What followed was the quietest of police chases. There were no cars to be seen anywhere, and barely a sound beyond the pouring rain and the purr of the engine. Surreal , thought Portman. Like they were cruising through a dream, with faint patches of color glowing through the raindrops from the red taillights, the light yellow beams of the headlights, and the dim street lamps above them. The moon was hidden behind the thick cloud layer, and as they drove further and further off the main roads, even the street lights vanished.
West killed the lights, and their car was black, so Portman didn’t expect to get spotted. If Matt was even checking for people following him.
If the kid was innocent, why was he driving out this way at three in the morning? Portman couldn’t figure it out. Was that another silhouette in the cab in the truck? He couldn’t be sure, not at their distance and with so little light.
As they rounded another corner, rising up into the hills, Portman glanced around in surprise. He’d been so busy trying to make out the details of the car, he’d not kept track of their location.
“Where are we?”
“Outside our jurisdiction,” grumbled West. “Wait… Holy shit.”
“What?”
“I think… Yeah. We’re going to Cyraveil Park.”
An alarm bell rang furiously in Portman’s mind. “Are you sure?”
“Can’t think of anything else this way worth mentionin’.”
Carl’s story pushed his way back into the back Portman’s mind. Was it possible?
No. It was absurd. It couldn’t happen. It was the wishful, escapist thinking of a kid who’d seen something terrible and couldn’t cope. Carl was disturbed and needed serious psychiatric help.
Yet Portman couldn’t explain what he was seeing. They just had to keep following Matt, wherever this was going. Maybe he’d lead them to a body, buried deep in the woods. Portman shivered at the thought. Was he about to catch a murderer?
He placed his hand in his coat pocket and double-checked that his pistol was still there on his hip.
***
“Careful,” hissed Portman.
“I hate the woods, okay?” West picked himself back up from the dirt and shot him a glare. “Just go ahead without me if you have to.”
They were a few hundred feet back from a bobbing lantern, travelling deep into the forest. The pickup had pulled off the road a short while after the sign for the park, and three people got out—Matt, his sister, and a girl neither of them knew. Portman’s paranoid brain instantly jumped to the conclusion that Matt and his sister were about to murder the girl, but he brushed that away. The body language was all wrong. They were helping her through the woods. Matt’s sister lead the way, just outside the lantern light, while Matt lead their friend by the hand through the more difficult thickets.
West had no such companion, and tripped over every root and bramble in the near-total darkness.
“Just keep that lantern in sight,” Portman whispered, seriously annoyed. He started ahead while West struggled to keep up. The light was fading away, but Portman was determined not to lose them. The chase went on, deeper and deeper into the woods. He was getting thirsty and tired, having spent far too much time awake, but he still refused to let them out of his sight. He’d figure it out and close the case, no matter what it took.
The forest had grown quiet, he noticed. There were no crickets, no frogs, nothing. Only the wind, rustling the leaves around them. He felt anticipation knotting in his chest, and knew something was going to happen—sooner, not later. Just as the feeling struck him, he saw the lantern swing to a halt.
How close did he dare get? Portman crouched low, trying to move as quietly as possible. He could hear murmuring ahead, as the light shifted around and shadows moved all about. From what he could tell, they’d set down the lantern behind a tree, blocking out the light from the clearing they were standing in. Why would they do that? What are they planning?
He needed to get closer. He edged forward, step by step, his feet crinkling the sheets of ivy beneath him. Finally, he could make out a few words.
“…and I stand here?”
“I don’t think it matters. We… to hold hands.”
“You aren’t sure?”
“ Vack dou , I’ve never done this before.”
A nervous laugh. What was going on in there? He tried to move closer, but he could see thick patches of ivy and leaves in front of him. They’d make too much sound. The risk was too great. If he revealed himself now, he might not hear everything important. He could only trust that he would hear them if they started moving again, or if anything seemed about to happen.
“Ready?”
“Can you ever be ready for something like this?”
“Oh, stop grandstanding. Let’s just do this.”
“Okay.”
“You two are gonna be a bundle of fun. Okay, hang on tight.”
More muttering, and this time in what sounded like a foreign language. It was too quiet to hear the word—if they were even words he could understand. Portman spoke a few languages fluently, but this definitely wasn’t one of them. Wasn’t even in the same family.
Abruptly, the voices stopped. Everything stopped. All he could hear was the wind.
He waited. For minutes that dragged on and on, he waited. The lantern light flickered in front of him. He watched carefully for any sign of an escape attempt. Finally, with West creeping up behind him, Portman could wait no longer.
He burst out from the underbrush, rushing into the clearing.
It was empty. Completely empty.
The lantern flickered again from behind the nearest tree. He looked down at the ground, at the tracks scattered in the dirt floor. There was a small depression at one end of the clearing, where a heavy rock might have sat.
“The hell?” asked West, looking around at the surrounding forest. Tall, dark shapes surrounded them,
thick trees and indistinct shadows alike.
Portman crouched down and picked at the grass in the clearing. The dirt was already dry, though the rest of the forest was still soaked from the rainfall. He sat down, and looked up at the circle of sky above them. Directly above, through a gap in the clouds, he could just make out the twinkling stars.
“They’re gone.”