The Midnight Strider (The Chronomancer Chronicles Book 2)

by Reilyn J. Hardy

  “I’m still sorry,” I say.

  “I know, and I accept your apology.”

  “But I —”

  “You’re still here,” she says and shrugs. “What more could I ask for?”

  I frown. I feel like I was just punched in the gut. She was happy that I didn’t leave.

  “We’ll find him,” I say, picking up an old, rotten apple core from the ground. I nearly stepped on it. She just shrugs her shoulders again at my words. I ignore it. “Do you want to see something?” I ask, rotating the apple in hand.

  “Sure,” she says.

  I close my eyes and focus on the apple. I never had an audience during previous nights, but it got easier. I open my eyes and the apple grows plump against my palm. I pretend to act like I knew it was going to work all along and smile proudly at my work.

  “Jace loves apples,” I say as she takes it from me. She squeezes it gently.

  “I liked apples once,” she tells me, increasing her hold on the apple till it crushes completely. The apple pieces fall from her fingers and into the snow. “I suppose it’s unfortunate he’s not here to enjoy them year round now.” She shakes the excess juice from her hand before licking her fingers individually.

  “Yeah,” I say, my volume drops. “I miss him too.”

  “I never said I missed him, Artemis.”

  “You’re wearing his shirt.” I acknowledge the white, buttoned up shirt beneath her coat. The buttons stop toward the bottom, which she tied around her waist, probably because it’s too big for her. She readjusts her scarf to hide it and pulls the coat closer to her body. Vampires didn’t get cold, and I knew she was hiding something when she first came through the front door looking like that.

  “All of my clothes are dirty,” she claims.

  “Sure,” I say. If she doesn’t want to admit it, I’m not going to force it out of her.

  “Has Father Time taught you anything?” she asks when I glance back down at the apple bits now buried in the snow. “Or do you just do magic tricks?”

  She’s right. It is a trick. My dad can stop time. He can make someone’s clock tick a little faster and reduce them to dust. He can do so many amazing things, people used to talk about him all the time like he were some kind of deity, and all I can do is bring fruit back to life.

  “I’ve kind of been avoiding it,” I say, shuffling my feet in the snow. “I mean, shouldn’t I just know how to do this? All of this information forced itself into my head when I came back to life. It’s there but —”

  “Knowledge does not equate experience, Artemis,” she tells me, while crossing her arms. “You could know everything, and still have no idea what you’re doing.”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  I know she’s right, but I’m stubborn.

  Chapter TWO

  what you deserve

  I keep the sundial in the top drawer of my desk. I don’t know if I want to touch it again, but I want to make sure it’s easy to find. It sits on top of the dragon book, while the rest of the items remain inside of it.

  I had a nightmare about my dad, after my conversation with Rhiannon. About him getting killed right in front of me by some dark shadowy figure I assume was Drarkodon. It only makes me want to avoid him further. What if I cause him to die? I caused Apollo’s kidnapping. I caused David’s death.

  I caused Nannu’s.

  I keep myself cooped up in my room. Even ignoring Rhiannon and Amelia, especially Amelia. She knows me too well. My habits, she’ll know I’m hiding something. I was always a really bad liar around her. She could see right through me, and now she’s too close to my father.

  His words lingers in my mind. He needs to show me something. But I don’t leave my room. Not until everyone’s asleep.

  Grabbing the sundial, I sneak out unnoticed.

  Unfortunately for me, he catches me in the hall when I’m coming back in. It’s hard to want to sleep when nightmares plague you, and now there’s no one around to distract me. I stayed out a little longer than usual.

  It’s morning.

  “May I show you now?” my dad asks. He looks like Weylan still, but dressed like my father, and grasps tightly onto his staff. “It has to do with Jace.”

  I tilt my head. “You waited this long to tell me?”

  “You wouldn’t exactly come out of your room, Artemis, and you’d ignore me every time you’d see me. That didn’t give me much room to talk.”

  “That’s not —” okay so it is true. I don’t bother finishing my sentence and I just nod instead.

  “He’ll come back when he’s ready,” he says, leading me into the living room.

  “How do you know?”

  “I know everything.”

  I want to roll my eyes, but I don’t. “Sometimes it seems like you do,” I say. “So I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “No one knows everything. The worlds are constantly changing. Forces that are alive. It’s not something that can be known or controlled.”

  “But aren’t there seers? Oracles? Don’t they see the future?”

  “They see a possibility,” he says as he turns to face me. “It won’t always necessarily come true. But more often than not, predictions are misinterpreted. They can mean several different things.”

  “You really think he’s going to come back?” I ask. I cross my arms and lean against the frame of the doorway.

  “I have no reason to believe otherwise,” he says. “I’m going to show you why.”

  He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small berry, rolling it between his index finger and thumb. He then plucks two feathers from the head of the pre-teen Nova, who nearly knocks him over as he runs past him.

  “Ow!” Nova rubs his fingers through the bright red and gold feathers sprouting from his head. “Hey, what was that for?” he grumbles at the two of us.

  “Stop running in the cabin,” Alekoth scolds him. “I want to show Artemis Jace’s footprint.”

  “His what?” I ask, but neither of them answer me. Nova just smirks and nods toward my dad, motioning for me to pay attention.

  Alekoth drops the two feathers and squeezes the juice of the berry over each of them once they’ve nestled against the ground. He waves his staff over them, and they ignite into smoky translucent boots. They start walking back and forth, pacing.

  The laces are undone, dragging against the floor.

  Jace’s boots.

  “You see this?” Alekoth asks me, as from the boots, it slowly transforms into a ghostly corporeal of Jace. “The only time he would stop was when Rhiannon physically forced him to. Made him sit down, made him eat. He would ask me every single day if I’ve found you yet.” We watch as the translucent figure continues to pace around the living room, his eyes avoiding looking at anything and anyone in particular. It was unusual to see Jace like this. It was unusual to see him cry over my death, it was unusual to see how broken he was over Rhiannon.

  I knew he cared, but he’s never been one to show his feelings. ‘I don’t do feelings,’ he’d always say. I was beginning to think he just kept them buried deep. So when he did feel something, he felt it strongly.

  I wonder if Alekoth is showing me this because he knows what I did, what I saw. I don’t look at him. Instead, I keep watching the form of Jace.

  “People who care this much will never stray too far,” he tells me as the ghostly form of my best friend begins to disappear when the flames in the feathers die out.

  “I just want to make sure he’s okay,” I say as I force myself to glance at Alekoth. “I just wanna make sure he’s alive.”

  “If anything happened to him, I would know.”

  “Would I?”

  “Not yet,” he says. “That burden will fall onto you when I die.”

  When he dies.

  Hearing him say that makes it seem so rea
l.

  When he dies.

  Until then, it always seemed so foreign and impossible. I always believed my father was still alive when I was a kid, I thought he just abandoned us, because I could never imagine him dying. I could never imagine what Aridete would really be like without him. Now that he said it, that made it real. One day he was going to die, and I wouldn’t have him anymore.

  I want to hug him, but I can’t bring myself to move. Alekoth is hundreds of years old. I wonder how much time he actually has left. But I don’t ask. Knowing won’t make me any more prepared for when it happens.

  My dream comes to mind, seeing him get killed. I keep my focus on the feathers.

  “How will he find his way back?” I ask. “Does he know where the cabin is?”

  “He won’t be returning here,” Alekoth says, resting his hands on his staff.

  “What? Why not?”

  “Why would he come here when you won’t be here?” he asks me. I frown. I open my mouth to speak, but close it again when he continues to talk. “The Time Traveler will rise but not without force,” he says, and inhales deeply. “Even if I tried to teach you, you aren’t going to learn anything from me. Not yet.”

  “You aren’t even gonna try?”

  “Do you want me to?”

  I shrug. I reach into my pocket and pull out the sundial.

  “I want to know if there’s a way to make myself — actually appear — when I use this,” I say as I hold it out to him. “How do I make it so other people can see me?”

  His small, gray eyes stare at the sundial in my hand.

  “Is that a Heliosi?” Nova asks, peering between us.

  Alekoth nods. “Do you know how it works?” he asks me.

  I look down at the sundial.

  “Turning the center piece counter-clockwise will take me back and turning it back will take me forward.”

  “And to go to a certain time?”

  “I have to focus on it.”

  “You don’t need toys to time travel, Artemis. You are the Time Traveler. You just need to clear your mind and concentrate. Focus on what you need to do.”

  “But how?”

  “You have to want it,” he says as he turns away.

  “What made you want it?” I ask. He stops in his tracks, but he doesn’t turn back around to face me. He remains standing in the doorway. “What made you want to be a chronomancer?”

  “I never wanted to be a chronomancer,” he says without turning around. “I wanted my brother back.”

  He leaves before I can say anything else.

  I look over at Nova, who has his finger so far up his nose, I’m surprised he isn’t touching his brain. It’s only been a couple of weeks since the turn of the new year, and he’s already aged significantly. By spring, he’ll be older than me. “Digging for gold or something?”

  He yanks his finger out of his nose once he notices my stare. I raise my eyebrows.

  “My nose was itchy,” he claims, rubbing his finger against the sleeve of his shirt. “I miss my beak.”

  “So change back into a bird,” I say, dropping the Heliosi back into my pocket.

  “I’m a phoenix.”

  “Which is a bird — wait.” Amusement crosses over me. “You don’t know how, do you.”

  “It’ll come to me!” He frowns, ruffling his hand through the mixture of red, gold tipped feathers and silky strands of golden hair on his head. “Whenever I’m a boy, it always seems to take longer.”

  “What?”

  “Everything,” he says with a huff, stuffing his hands into his front pockets. “Except aging. There’s no stopper in that. But by the end of spring, I’ll be your superior!” He wiggles his eyebrows in excitement.

  I raise one of mine. There’s no stopper in that. Maybe there can be.

  “Why do you wanna manifest when you time travel, anyhow?” he asks, interrupting my train of thought. I look at the doorway Alekoth had walked out of.

  “I want to save my brother too.”

  Nova steps in front of me, putting his fists on the sides of his waist.

  “You aren’t planning on tryna stop him from being taken, are you? That time in Valfield? With the gorgons? Artemis, you can’t! It’s a fixed point, you don’t know what you’d cause if you did something like that at that scale!”

  “Are you my dad now?”

  “I’m serious. It could be catastrophic.”

  “At least I’d have my brother.”

  “You don’t know that,” he says. He doesn’t move from standing in my way. “You could make things worse. For the both of you. For all the realms, for the whole universe.”

  I frown and tilt my head. “All the realms?”

  Nova laughs. “How grandiose, to think we’re the only ones in this universe.”

  I raise my eyebrows. “Grandiose?” I ask.

  “I may be trapped in a ten-year-old body but I’m still — shut up.” His lip curls and I try to hide my amusement.

  “What other realms are there?”

  “There’s one that coincides with ours — where the guardians come from — without magic and awesome creatures like me —”

  “Wait.” I stop him there. “There’s another world without magic?”

  “Yeah, a parallel,” he says and nods. “Mortals showing any kind of unique ability from there end up here. Your parents have ties to both — so does your uncle and the Earth Shaker. Time needs regulation, and nature needs tending to, and well, people die everywhere. Though their pollution is worse than ours. Caliswen’s not exactly happy about that.”

  “Have you seen our sky?”

  “You haven’t seen theirs. At least you can still see the stars. Some places, imagine blowing your nose and everything that comes out of it is black.”

  “That’s happened to me when I was younger and Pryley first erupted,” I say.

  “Well, our pollution was caused by a natural disaster. Theirs is caused by greedy, dirty humans. Luckily for us, our paths do not cross. They stay on their side and we stay on ours.” Nova used his hands to point in one direction and then another. “You can’t cross unless the Earth Shaker allows it since the seas connect all. The guardians can go too, I've heard, but who ever wants to return back to a simple life of normalcy? Though, I’ve heard rumors there are passages, where two points don’t quite meet perfectly.”

  “Why is this the first time I’m hearing about it?”

  “Have you met you?” he asks me. “The boy who doesn’t know how to listen or follow directions? The boy who does the opposite of what he’s —”

  “Okay, okay! Point taken,” I say. “So they think I would’ve gone looking for it?”

  “Gone looking for it and potentially cause one of the biggest disasters in history by destroying the barrier, forcing the two to overlap. Killing billions, trillions of people.”

  Okay, I didn’t need to hear that part. Aridetians certainly have faith in me.

  “Primarily Stanton though,” he continued, “he’s not very fond of you or your family.”

  “The feeling’s mutual,” I say.

  “The point is,” Nova says, “you can’t change that event, Artemis. You can’t.”

  I clench my jaw.

  Fine.

  *****

  Darkness creeps along the ground, leaving me standing as still as a statue. Engulfed in a sea of black, a sense of panic rises in the pit of my stomach. I strain my eyes, searching for something to see, or somewhere to go.

  Only, there’s nothing.

  It’s eerily quiet, aside from the sound of water dripping in the distance. I push my arms out in front of me, attempting to feel my way around while I pat the ground with my foot to make sure I don’t trip.

  Keep your cool, I tell myself.

  I can’t see anythin
g, it’s probably safe to assume that nothing can see me either.

  Wrong.

  My eyelids flutter while I blink rapidly, trying to make out who — or what — is sitting before me. There’s a throne made of lava rock, but my eyes haven’t yet adjusted enough to the darkness, nor have I gotten close enough. All I can see are shadows. I reach out to my side, feeling up against the wall to use as a guide, but it’s sharper than I expect.

  My palm slices open, cutting my hand, and my blood smears along the wall. I retract, wincing in pain. I bite on my bottom lip to keep myself from making a sound while I curl my fingers into a ball. I’ve felt worse. I’m fine. But it seems the more I strain to keep myself from groaning, the more it burns.

  I shut my eyes, keeping my fist balled up tight.

  “So… pathetic.”

  My eyes shoot open at the sound of the voice. The seemingly disembodied voice is low, yet blood-curdling as he places emphasis on each syllable he spat. The sound alone sends chills down my spine as canarywarts sweep over every inch of my skin.

  He can see me.

  “However,” he continues, his voice remaining the same, “your blood smells nice.”

  It’s the way he spoke, taking unusually long pauses between his words, making it sound all the more terrifying. I take an instinctual step back. My heart is beating hard and rapid, I can hear it pounding in my ears.

  “This has to be a nightmare,” I whisper to myself, breathily, shaking my head with disbelief. “This can’t be real.”

  It doesn’t matter how much I attempt to make myself believe it though, even pinching my arm. My surroundings don’t disappear.

  “You can’t hide from me, Artemis. I will find you.” I hear him take a long, deep, wheezy breath. I can hear the strenuous whistling of air. “And I will end the chronomancers once and for all.”

  It’s then that I see the man’s long, boney hand reaching out to me. He twists his wrist slowly, until his palm is facing the sky. He pulls his fingers back, one by one, starting with the smallest and the rest following suit. My eyes are finally getting used to the darkness and I’m beginning to wish they’d stop before I see any more. The visual is worse than hearing a voice in the shadows.