Still, I hoped I would tire enough to sleep well tonight.
Any hope I had for a full night’s sleep was dashed in the early hours of the morning when I was shaken awake.
“Huh… Wha…?”
“Bryn?”
I peeled open my sleepy eyes to see Audrey standing over me, looking worried.
“What is it?” I murmured.
“Sorry to wake you but… Klaasje’s missing.”
“Missing?”
“Dureau is going nuts with worry. He was hoping you’d be able to sense her. Odran and Rand are out looking, and your sister has organized search parties.”
Shaking off sleep, I pulled myself out of bed. “What time is it?”
“An hour before sunrise.” Audrey knew why I’d asked the question.
It wasn’t the specific time I was after; I wanted to know how long until the sun came up, because Klaasje was a vampire, and if she was caught in the sun, she would burn.
I expected the settlement to be a hive of activity, but as I hurried out with Audrey leading the way, the first thing I heard was an argument, verging on a fight.
“I’m just trying to help.”
“The only help I want from you is to know what you’ve done with Klaasje! Tell me!”
“Oh no…” Audrey ran towards the shouting and I followed.
Up ahead of us, I could see Dureau, his face red with anger, fists balled, and ready to fight, straining forwards but held back by Odran, whose massive muscles gleamed in the moonlight.
“Steady Chevalier, the laddie’s nae worth it.”
The ‘laddie’ in question was Adam, who shrank back from Dureau’s anger. Behind him were a group of Daywalkers, and if Adam had been cowed by Dureau’s rage, they hadn’t. They shot dark looks at the Fae and whispered amongst themselves. From the things they were saying, I gathered they didn’t like what they were being accused of.
“I just wanted to help find Klaasje,” Adam reiterated, meekly.
“The more of us who search…”
“You think I’d trust you people to look for her?” Dureau was in no mood to listen.
“Dureau!” Audrey called out to calm her brother. But Jolie beat her to it.
Stepping in between the Fae and the Daywalker, my sister took command of the situation.
“Dureau, this arguing isn’t helping Klaasje. Get back to the search.”
“But…” Dureau strained forward again, still held back by Odran.
“I said, get back to the search.” It was an order from his Queen, and while he didn’t like it, Dureau would obey. Jolie was right, after all; this fighting wouldn’t help find Klaasje. Shrugging off Odran’s hands, Dureau headed off into the night.
“Adam,” Jolie turned to the Daywalkers, “thank you for your offer of help, but I think with the circumstances, it would be better if all of you returned to your camp.”
Adam looked aghast. “You won’t even accept our help in the search?”
Jolie gave the young man a sympathetic look. “I don’t want to make things worse.”
“We’re trying to help,” someone else spoke up from behind Adam.
“I thought you wanted us here!” someone else said.
There was no anger in Adam’s expression, but there was recrimination, and I could see the same in the faces of the Daywalkers who stood behind him.
“The best way you can help is to do as I’ve asked,” said Jolie.
“This is a tough time and I just need you to be patient… please.”
Adam waited a beat, torn between what he’d been told to do and what he wanted to do, before turning back to his friends. “Come on. Let’s go home.”
“Thank you, Adam,” said Jolie, as the Daywalkers began to walk away.
“If you don’t find her in time,” Adam turned back, “then I want you to remember this moment, and know that you could have done more.” He took a breath. “We could have done more.”
As I reached Jolie, she slumped, her face etched with concern.
“Am I doing the right thing?”
“I think you’re doing the only thing you can do,” I replied.
“That kid’s been sweet on Klaasje since he got here. There’s no way he’d hurt her. And another search party would be useful.”
“But then Dureau and Rand would kick off and…” I took a breath.
“…and if anything did happen to Klaasje, then you would have war on your hands. You’re doing what’s best for everyone.”
“And it may end up killing Klaasje.” She took a deep breath and then faced me earnestly. “Can you find her?”
“I can damn well try.”
Vampire minds were harder to read than most; they had too much animal in them—those primitive instincts of the hunter. But if Klaasje was in trouble, and provided she was conscious, then she’d want to be found and would probably guess I’d be amongst those looking. Her mind would be open and reaching out. Still, I’d have to be nearby, and I had no idea where to start.
The Daywalker encampment?
I didn’t know where the thought came from, but it was the first in my mind.
“Where are people searching?” I asked.
“We’re trying to cover all over.”
“Dureau and Rand?”
Jolie guessed what I was asking. “I kept them away from the Daywalkers. I’ve got some of my people searching it with a bit more tact.”
“Okay.”
With nothing to go on, I went with my instincts. I couldn’t rule out the Daywalkers any more than Jolie could, however much we both would have liked to. But if it wasn’t them, then it certainly seemed like someone wanted us to think it was, and that meant that the area around their encampment was a good start.
I made for the woods I’d been running around in the previous night. It was quieter here; searching shaded places was a less of a priority, because if Klaasje was here, she could at least survive beyond the dawn.
In that quiet, I stopped, closed my eyes, and reached out with my mind. The people with whom I’d spent my days left a unique impression on my mind, difficult to describe but impossible to mistake. I searched the surroundings for something the color and shape of Klaasje’s thoughts.
Eyes still closed, I paced slowly forward, hands out in front of me to stop me from walking into a tree.
Come on, Klaasje. Find me. I can’t do this without your help .
And then there was something.
It was barely anything. Like a breath on my cerebral cortex. But it gave me a direction, and as I moved towards it, I felt more.
Opening my eyes, I broke into a run. I passed the tree line, out into the open. Down the slope to my left was the Daywalker encampment, but the sensation seemed to come from up the steep hills to my right, bare and windswept. Up there a vampire in daylight would have nowhere to hide.
Once again, I closed my eyes and reached out.
There it was, still so painfully weak, but just recognizable. It had the feel of Klaasje, but none of the shape. Vampire minds are a tussle between the primitive and the organized, the animal and the man. Klaasje’s mind, on those rare occasions in the past when she’d let down her guard enough to let me through, had been all edges, sharp and ferocious but well ordered, as if she had consciously taken all those bestial instincts and harnessed them.
What I felt now had no order, no focus. It was Klaasje shorn of what made her Klaasje. It was a mind in crisis, either hurt or panicked.
She was in trouble, and I had to find her.
I looked around, but there was no one within shouting distance.
That figured. So, it was all down to a pregnant woman running up a steep hill. I set off as fast as I could, the burn coming quickly to the backs of my calves. On nights like this, I thanked God for my warrior training.
As I ran, I briefly abandoned Klaasje’s mind to reach back in another direction.
Jolie, can you hear me?
Yes. What is it? Have you found her?
<
br /> I think so. But if it’s her, then she’s in trouble. I’m on the far side of the wood, not far from the Daywalker camp. Up the slopes towards the cairns.
We’ll be there as quickly as we can.
I hoped that was very quickly. As I achieved the ridge that led higher into the hills, I saw the first signs of morning troubling the horizon. Klaasje didn’t have long.
#
The cairns were piles of rock, stacked by mortals back when they lived in mud huts and worshipped the elements. What those piles meant had been lost to time, but the piles formed a five-pointed star, and on midsummer nights, the setting sun shone directly onto the tallest of them.
By the time I reached them, I was out of breath, and my legs felt like jelly. Pregnancy had been as good an excuse as any for letting my fitness interests wane a bit, but I was regretting doing so now. I used to go running every morning; now it had been weeks since I’d gone, and it was shocking how quickly your fitness could evaporate.
The sensation of Klaasje was just ahead.
“Klaasje!” I yelled. Surely, she could hear me by now. But it was hard to hear anything above the wind that scoured these hills.
“Damn it, where the hell are you?!”
I don’t know if it was because I became angry, but Klaasje’s mind suddenly started to tug itself back into something resembling order.
“Klaasje!”
I darted about the rocky landscape, strewn with boulders that had tumbled down from the cliffs above. There were a billion good hiding places here that could shelter a person from me but not from the sun.
Following the slowly growing call of her mind, I ran on, nimbly dodging across the uneven landscape in my tennis shoes. And then…
“Klaasje!”
By the light massing on the horizon, I caught sight of a foot, stuck out between two rocks. I ran for it and could have cried in relief. There, lying on the rocky ground, was Klaasje. Her eyelids flickered as she fought to regain consciousness in response to my mental prompting. Beneath her head, I saw a large patch of vampire blood staining the rocks. Glancing back, I could see the first sliver of the sun creeping above the line of the hills.
Stay still. I spoke to her mentally.
She probably wouldn’t be able to understand, but the sense of my thoughts would hopefully get through. I’m here now. Just relax.
Don’t strain yourself.
Bryn? Where are you? That was Jolie.
About five minutes along the ridge from the cairns. I’ve got her!
But someone better be bringing a blanket, because the sun is going to reach her any second.
It was moments later that I heard running feet. Looking back the way I’d come, I saw Dureau, running as hard as he could, face twisted with the effort.
“Dureau! Here!”
Seeing me, he seemed to run even faster, and I saw that he had a thick, wool blanket beneath his arm. He tossed it to me as he reached me, collapsing against a boulder, utterly exhausted.
“She… Okay?” He managed between breaths.
“She’s been hurt,” I replied, as I unfolded the blanket and spread it across the supine form of Klaasje. Her thoughts became calmer in response to the darkness—she understood she was now safe from the scorching power of the sunlight.
Dureau fell to his knees beside his girlfriend, almost choking with relief. He raised the blanket to dip his head beneath and kiss her. I stepped back, not wanting to intrude on an intimate moment.
But when his face emerged, and once he’d covered Klaasje up again, Dureau looked grim. “I don’t care what you think, Bryn. I don’t care what Jolie says. I’m going to make those bastards pay for this.”
I didn’t have to ask who he meant, and I prayed that Klaasje would be able to shed some light on what had happened to her.
TWELVE
Sinjin
Night, if you could even call it such, fell as soon as we achieved the top of the cliff. We settled down to make camp, eating and drinking before turning in. Dayna insisted on taking the first watch as she had not taken one at all the previous evening.
“Don’t make allowances just because I’m the girl. I could tear you both apart with my bare claws if I wanted.”
“Isn’t she brilliant?” breathed Damek, giving me some serious questions about what sort of fetishes this young man was harboring beneath his innocent exterior.
By the time I woke, it was day again—whatever that meant. I looked at my fingers to find they had healed overnight, leaving a mass of scar tissue which would fade over the next few hours.
Thank goodness for the vampire metabolism.
Damek and Dayna were eating breakfast. “Morning.”
“You let me sleep,” I observed.
“Seemed like the least we could do.”
“Yes, I suppose it does.”
I took a look around us, something I had been too exhausted to do the night before. We were on a broad plateau, fringed by peaks on every side. A recognizable trail led across it, on into the distance.
“I was hoping there’d be a ‘Congratulations!’ for passing the first trial,” commented Damek. “But I can’t find any pictograms at all.”
“Gaia does not strike me as the type to offer a pat on the back for a job well done,” I answered. “Our reward is still being alive.”
Damek nodded before saying to the landscape, “And I appreciate it very much.”
Despite Damek’s thorough search earlier, we found a pictogram almost as soon as we started out, though it was not particularly instructive.
“The second trial.” Damek looked around. “I don’t understand. I can’t see anything.”
“I doubt we will be kept in suspense long.”
I was correct. As we crossed the plateau, the world around us seemed to lose its hold on reality, which had been a pretty tenuous one to begin with.
“Sinjin!”
I turned to find that my companions, who had been just behind me, were now far in the distance. I took a step back…
“Sinjin?”
I was at their side again.
“Did you take a big step, or did we magic over to you?” asked Dayna.
“Neither,” I guessed. “The world is changing around us.”
“Should we tether ourselves together again?” asked Damek.
“I fear that might be ill-advised.” I reached out to my side, and my hand parted the air as if it were treacle. “The rules of reality seemed to have ceased to apply here. Tethering ourselves together will render us unable to help each other when the weird stuff starts to happen.”
“Starts?”
“I do not think that we have even scratched the surface thus far.”
The path we had been following was now a slim purple line leading away and up into a mountainous landscape that suddenly looked as if it had been painted onto the sky by a French Impressionist (an artistic movement that had never really appealed to me; I am more of the Renaissance school).
“I suppose we go this way then. Stick to the path.”
But that turned out to be easier said than done as the purple line moved even as we watched, slipping from beneath our trudging feet and squirming from side to side ahead of us like a snake on a hot plate. The world stretched like elastic, distorting in an instant before springing back. Bits of ground detached themselves to float up into the sky while the land swelled to fill the void left behind. The sky was the only thing that remained familiar, the same ever-shifting wash of bright colors, which had once seemed surreal but now seemed like the only thing left for us to cling to.
“Do you think this serves some purpose?” asked Damek. “Or does this Gaia just get a kick out of seeing us sweat?”
“Does it matter?” Either way we had to pass her trials. “And may I remind you to speak about Gaia politely. I doubt she cares what you are saying, but better to be cautious. And polite.”
“How many people do you suppose have come this way?”
“I do not know.�
�� But I imagined many. And I further imagined that most of them had died.
“Do you think they got to go back if they failed?”
“I know not, Damek.”
The young man liked to talk when he was nervous, while I preferred silence.
“What was that?”
The mountains trembled. Not violently as in an earthquake, but more like an earth shimmy. Then everything moved. We all rushed to grab hold of something as the world seemed to turn upside down, blood rushing to our heads as the ground became the sky and sky lay below us like a limpid pool of color.
“What the hell!” yelled Damek.
“Stay calm!” I could not think of any better advice than that.
Picking up a loose stone from the ground, I dropped it and watched it fall upwards to the ground. We were upside down, we felt upside down, and yet we were not about to fall. Gingerly, I let go of the rock I had grabbed and stood up again. The sensation was incredibly disconcerting; everything told me that I was about to plummet down into the sky below me, and yet my feet were planted firmly on the earth above my head.
“I think it is like the pictograms.”
“How on earth is this like pictures of animals and trees?!”
Damek’s panic made him shout.
“The change is in us,” I explained, congratulating myself on my profound intelligence. “We could not read the pictograms until we could—they did not change, we did. I do not think the world has turned upside down, but something inside our heads is telling us it has.”
“Is that supposed to be comforting?” asked Dayna.
“I am not trying to comfort you,” I shrugged. “I just need you to get up and walk. You chose to come. Perhaps I should have insisted you stay. But you are here now and, thus, it is too late to go back. You stand up and walk, or you stay here forever.” I wondered how many people had made the latter choice.
Damek and Dayna clung to each other as they stood up.
“This is really weird,” said Damek.
“You have a gift for understatement. Let us continue.”
The sensation never changed. Each step we took was difficult because all our instincts screamed that we were about to fall, and our progress, therefore, was slow. Then, suddenly, the mountains shimmied again and in the next instant the world righted itself.
The Changeling Page 10