“The... four elements?” Merlot stared at the white board. Then, at me. “I guess... Maybe? But what is it mean?”
“I don’t know.” And just like that, my bubble of elation popped. “But it’s a connection, and I’m sure it means something. Go find Lilly and tell her. Maybe she’ll see something we can’t.” Merlot made a face at that, and I smiled. “I’ll get Dylan.”
Limping out of the house (stupid knee), I found Dylan down on the beach, ankle-deep in the lake and cupping water into his mouth.
“Hey,” I said. “You okay?” He didn’t look it. He was pale and the skin around his eyes was tight.
“Can’t get the taste of sea-salt out of my mouth,” he said.
“What?”
Dylan shrugged, cupped another mouthful, and spit it to the side.
“I think I figured something out,” I said, and nearly bursting with excitement, I told him about the white board, and what I thought it meant.
As usual, he didn’t reply right away. He straightened and looked out across the black lake. “That makes a sort of sense.”
“It does?” I hoped so.
“The Greeks thought the elements represented balance. And in the vision my uncle told me... Well, he said a lot, but he called the griffins the unbalanced ones.”
“So, you talked to him?” I couldn’t take it any more. I had to ask. “What did he say about a cure? Did you tell him about my feathers?”
Again, Dylan hesitated. “He didn’t say, directly. He wants us to go to the house in Big Sur. He calls it Sanctuary, and said the griffins couldn’t get in. There is a cure for those who have not succumbed—No I don’t know what that exactly means,” he added before I could ask. “But Clarissa... I think I was wrong. That wasn’t my uncle. He—it had Uncle’s shape, but...”
“What do you mean? Who was it, then?”
“I don’t know. Coyote?” He laughed without sounding amused. “He’s supposed to be a shape shifter, right?”
“What?” I had no idea what he was talking about.
He shook his head and let out a breath. “He says we need to get there before June 20th.”
“Oh, that will be easy to remember.” I tried to smile. “That’s my birthday.”
He blinked. “Really?”
“Yeah, and if we’re gonna get all mystical, it’s also the summer solstice.” I normally didn’t pay attention to those things, but, again it was my birthday.
“Huh. But he also said—Well, he only let me ask three questions, and he only half-answered most of it, and told me some other stuff—”
“Dylan,” I said, resting my hand on his arm. “How about you start from the beginning.”
He flashed a smile. “Okay.” He then went on to tell me about the air hangar stuffed with food, his uncle’s warning about magic ‘reentering the world’, and the fact we had about five weeks to get there.
It was kind of a lot to take in.
“Well.” I straightened my shoulders. “I think we should go.”
His gaze locked onto me. “I agree, but... Clarissa, I don’t know for sure if the tide pool can do anything for you.”
I shrugged as if it didn’t bother me. It had to be a cure. I couldn’t let myself think otherwise. “Doesn’t matter. We need to get out of here. Now. Tonight. Or else Terry will convince Merlot and your sister that it’s a good idea to camp out at a neighbors house, or patch up our own. We’ll never leave.”
I’d been thinking about it on and off since the Turning, but tonight was a wake-up call: We couldn’t stay in the Tahoe basin. Eventually, the food would run out. After the summer was over and the real winter began, there would be no grocery stores to buy fresh food, no warm heater to curl up in front of when it was blowing snow outside. Only the frozen cold, impossibly deep snow, and hungry griffins.
Besides, I thought, This was where mom died.
Dylan moved to face me. “But what if what I’ve seen isn’t real?” he spoke low and quick as if afraid someone was listening from the bushes. “What if we get there, and the airplane hangar is full of junkie car parts instead of food, and I’m just crazy?”
“I don’t think you are,” I told him. “But even if you’re wrong... Dylan, we barely got out of that basement today. That house is like a pressure cooker. What happens the next time Terry wants to blow off steam? He needs a goal to focus on. He needs hope. We all do.” I met Dylan’s eyes. “I’m willing to believe in you and what you’ve seen.”
He looked down. “I’m not comfortable telling anyone about my visions. I don’t want to lead them on, or set myself up as some kind of... shaman or seer.”
“We won’t have to,” I promised. “Let’s talk to Terry about that airplane hangar.”
“My pops?” Terry said, rising from a crouch to stand with his arms crossed.
We’d found him in his own bedroom—or what was left of it—digging through a pile of debris for clean clothes.
A griffin, or maybe a couple of griffins, had busted their way through the walls between Terry’s room and Lilly’s, next door. The bed frame was broken, and what was left of the mattress was covered in dust and drywall. A heavy, oily scent of manure was thick in the air. I made sure to watch my step as I came closer to him.
I tried to play it cool. Maybe sweeten him up a little. “He lived next to the ocean, right? You said you had a boat?”
"Yeah, a sweet Lazzara-eighty. Not that it does us any good." He scowled and kicked at a loose flap of drywall. "Why?"
Time to be blunt. “And he had a whole airplane hangar stuffed with end-of-the-world-supplies, isn’t that right?”
Terry stiffened, looked past me to Dylan, and back again. “Yeah, that was his latest obsession before I... came here. So?”
I heard Dylan let out a long breath. It sounded like relief. One small bit of evidence to prove he wasn’t hallucinating.
But I was annoyed. Terry had given Dylan a lot of grief over that video. But he’d been warned, too, in his own way.
“So?” I repeated. “Why didn’t you say this before? We can’t stay here.”
Terry shook his head. “Because it doesn’t matter. We can get everything we need way closer than Big Sur. There is a freakin’ Walmart across town—”
“If it hasn’t burned in the fire,” I reminded him.
Terry was stubborn. “Then we’ll go to other houses. There’s only six of us, counting the baby. It’ll take ages to go through what this town still has to offer.”
“We don’t have ages,” Dylan said quietly. “We don’t even have a few months.”
That stopped Terry cold. He turned to his cousin. “What, now?”
Dylan took a deep breath, almost as if gathering himself. “I’ve been... thinking about what your father used to tell me. A lot of it didn’t make sense. I was just a kid. But he was always on about June 20th... The summer solstice?”
I winced. That had sounded super awkward. Dylan was a terrible liar.
But Terry had lost all the expression on his face.
“He told you something about the summer solstice, too, didn’t he?” I asked.
Terry said nothing. But his eyes said yes.
Time for a new track. “Look,” I said. “We can’t live off canned food forever.” I couldn’t, especially. Unless it was canned meat. “Why not live by the ocean? We could fish, maybe figure out how to farm a little.”
“Big Sur’s four hundred miles away,” Terry said flatly.
“We’re not walking there. We have two cars.”
“And we need to leave soon.” Dylan’s voice took on a firmer edge.
“Why?”
Dylan hesitated, and I could practically see him gather his confidence. He looked directly at his cousin. “Something tells me it’s now or never. I’m sorry, I can’t explain it to you.”
“Now you’re starting to sound like my pops,” Terry said, but it wasn’t quite a ‘no’. His shoulders slumped, and he spent a long moment gazing around what was left of his be
droom.
“Fine,” he said at last. “You want to go live by the ocean, Clarissa? Fine. Whatever is waiting for us there can’t be worse than here, right?”
With Terry proposing that we go to the Big Sur house, even Lilly didn’t an objection. Merlot tended to go along with the rest the group, and Ben followed my lead.
We didn’t have much time to prepare. Most of what had been usable in the house had been eaten, shattered, or just ripped apart by razor-sharp talons. The clocks were knocked off the walls, but Terry’s wristwatch said it was already one in the morning. Sunrise wasn’t for hours.
We loaded up the Toyota truck and the sedan. The amount of unopened cans we managed to find wasn’t enough to fill the sedan’s trunk. We threw in changes of clothes, diapers from scavenging neighbor’s houses, jugs of water from the lake treated with iodine we’d found at the Norris’s, and extra bedding into the truck. The remaining guns and ammo were split between the two vehicles.
And that was it. All of our lives, packed easily in two cars.
I drove the sedan, Dylan took the truck. Terry sat shotgun next to me and kept giving me long looks. I think he wanted to apologize again for what happened.
Well, if he really felt sorry, he could make it up to me by not being an idiot on the road. He was a good guy. I just wish he wasn’t so impulsive...
Whatever. It was time to go. Drawing a long breath, I let myself take in everything that had happened tonight: We were really leaving Lake Tahoe. Maybe, I would never see it again.
Bye Mom. Wherever you are—whatever you are—I hope you got out of here, too.
“Clarissa,” Ben piped up from the back seat. “Promise not to get in a car accident this time?”
I smiled. “I promise.”
“You’re going to love the ocean, little man,” Terry said. He always knew how to cheer up Ben. “I’ll teach you how to fish.”
“Awesome,” Ben said.
Terry caught my eye and smiled. Despite myself, I grinned back. In the rear view mirror, I saw Dylan behind the wheel of the truck. He was ready to go, waiting on me.
I started the engine. Big Sur or bust.
End.
Thank you for reading! The next book in the Under Wicked Sky serial will be available on Amazon and Kindle soon!
Afterword
As an author, I often feel a little like I’m screaming in the wind. So if you enjoyed this book, or just want to say something about it, feel free to leave a review or contact me at my email: [email protected].
Speaking of email, if you’d like an alert sent out when the next part of this serial is up. (Or other releases of mine), join my spam-free email list here: http://eepurl.com/c40qyv
See you in the next book!
~ S.G. Seabourne
Under Wicked Sky_Book 2 Page 10