There’s tape on her neck, and her bottom lip is slightly purple.
“Last night,” I repeat, and I frown.
“You don’t remember it, do you?” she asks, sitting down beside me. “I figured you wouldn’t. After a while, your eyes turned black. It was a bit frightening.”
“Did —” I clear my throat. “Did we —” I point at her and then I point at me. But I can’t say it. I can’t say it out loud.
“Noooo,” she says and laughs, rubbing my shoulder. “We did not. Definitely did not. I respect you. I wasn’t gonna do that to you. I only kissed you, and you kissed me. That's all. I just wanted to see how you were feeling.”
“Like the building collapsed on me while I slept,” I grumble. I can breathe a little easier now.
“Get some food in you,” she says and stands up. “And feel better.”
I lie back down when she excuses herself. I turn over on my bed, beginning to feel uncomfortable again. I feel like I’m laying on a rock. I roll onto my back and notice my bed sheet is gone.
I open my eyes — I’m no longer in the room. I don’t think I’m in Nevressea at all. I scramble to my feet, as fast as my body will allow me to.
I’m back in the Underworld.
I turn around looking for any kind of movement, but silence and stillness engulf me. This time I know better than to press my hand against the wall and allow it to guide my way. I stop in my tracks and close my eyes.
Focus, visualize.
I inhale deeply. Concentrate.
I have to be able to navigate here somehow. When I became a chronomancer, information about my people and of Glasskeep flooded my brain. Norhurst seemed to be another story. I can’t tap into it, like it won’t let me. I’m not authorized to that information.
I exhale slowly and open my eyes.
They have adjusted a little to the darkness, but not by much. I don’t know what I was expecting. A guiding light maybe. Light. I’m kidding myself.
I start to walk, my bare feet press against the cold ground until I’m stepping in water. Some kind of liquid, I’m hoping it’s water, but it doesn’t smell like it is. I press the back of my arm to my nose. It smells like piss and feces. I hope I’m not standing in it but I don’t want to look down. I keep walking instead, dragging my feet once I reach dry ground.
I don’t bring my arm down from my face. I keep it there. I know the smell hasn’t faded yet. I doubt it will.
“This way!” I hear someone say. It sounds like Apollo, so I follow the voice.
“Where are we going?”
“I’m getting you out of here,” he says, I begin to see him ahead of me. He’s holding his side, and he’s limping, but he doesn’t slow down. He keeps ahead of me.
I stop in my tracks.
“I don’t want to leave,” I say.
Apollo limps over toward me. We’re standing face to face. His cheek is still swollen, though it’s not bleeding anymore. His hand is pressing up against his side.
“It’s good to see you,” I tell him.
“I can’t say the same. You need to get out of here.”
“Why?”
“He'll trap you.”
“But I’m not really here, am I. Not physically.”
“You don’t have to be,” he tells me. “Your mind keeps drifting here. He knows tricks taught to him by the Nightmare King. If he knows you keep doing this, he can trap your consciousness here. You’ll never wake up. So yeah, you need to go.”
“Are you coming with me?”
His expression falters. “I can’t,” he says. “Don’t try to save me, Artemis. You’re too late.”
“No, I’m not. As long as you still believe in —”
“I don’t,” he says. I don’t take my eyes off of Apollo.
“What do you mean, you don’t? I thought —”
“No,” he says, and pushes me back.
I fall back onto my bed again, at the inn in Nevressea. I get up quickly, frustrated by what just happened. Rhiannon comes back in with a plate of food, eggs and sausage, but I’m not hungry anymore.
“Are you okay?” she asks, setting the plate down on the nightstand beside my bed. I inhale deeply and shrug my shoulders. I start to shake my head, but then I nod.
I need a distraction. I sit back down on my bed and wipe the sweat from my brow.
“Are you two going to the wedding together?” I ask as I grab the plate from the stand. She presses her lips together and sits down beside me.
“I think so,” she says. “He gets really goofy when he’s uncomfortable. The stuttering, it’s adorable — I hate myself. He’s just a boy —”
“He hasn’t been a boy for a long time, Rhiannon.”
“But I’m old enough to be his great great grandmother.”
“And?” I ask, breaking the yolk of the egg with the tip of my fork. “At least you don’t look it. Besides, he’s an adult. He can make his own decisions.”
She gently knocks the side of her head against mine. “Are you two gonna be okay?”
“Well, we fight more now that we’re both monsters, but what family doesn’t?”
“He’s not a monster, and neither are you. The only monster here is —”
“Rhiannon, if you’re a monster then we’re all monsters.”
“What makes a monster?” she asks me.
I shrug. I don’t know anymore. “I turned myself into a necromancer,” I say. “I think I qualify.”
“You wanted to help your brother, your best friend and his sister. How is that a monstrous thing to do?”
“And you just wanted to belong, Rhiannon. Two can play this game.”
“But I would take it back,” she says. “Wouldn’t you?”
I shake my head.
“So I guess the real monster here is me.”
I just got my best friend back last night, and I lost him again within twenty-four hours. Jace gave up on me. My brother gave up on me. I look over at Rhiannon, she’s watching me eat. Maybe the only ones who know how to stay are the ones who know what it’s like to get left behind.
Chapter TWENTY-TWO
black and white
I sneak outside once everyone’s asleep. There are a few people of Nevressea out and about at this hour, but I think most of them are used to not being able to go outside. When you aren’t able to go outside at night for over a decade, it just became normal, I’m sure.
I always find myself standing on the bridge where it all happened. I look out at the water, and it’ll replay in my head, again and again. When Rhiannon tried to grab Amelia from the floating board, when the hag attacked her. I knew why Jace didn’t want to come back here, but it was a town on water, and I needed water. I needed to be near Beinyth’s domain, as close as I could get.
“I remember you,” someone says and I turn around. “You’re the chronomancer, right? The one who got rid of the hag last year.”
There’s a woman standing there, she’s gripping tightly onto an old wicker basket. Middle aged, she only reaches to her face to brush her hair back when the wind blows. She doesn’t look afraid of me. I find that comforting.
“Yeah,” I say with a nod and turn back to face the water. I rest my forearms against the wooden railing. “That was me.”
“I don’t know what this town would’ve done without you,” she tells me as she approaches. She stands beside me, pulling her basket over the rail, she rests her arms against it too. Out of the corner of my eyes, she’s peering over, looking at the dark waters. “It’s nice to know nothing else is coming outta there.”
“Nothing else has ever come out of the water?” I ask, slightly turning my head toward her. She presses her thin lips together and shakes her head.
“Except maybe the Midnight Strider, but no one alive has seen the ship.”
“Even if it’s summoned?”
She looks at me and frowns. “Summoned?” she repeats after me. “Who would summon it?”
I shrug. I shouldn’t say anymore. I don’t want to scare her, but it bothers me that I don’t know how he’s doing it. How Drarkodon gets the ship to dock so his creatures can get off. Maybe it’s just different for them. Maybe it doesn’t have to dock, but if it doesn’t dock, how are we supposed to get onto it?
I guess that’s the point. We aren’t supposed to get on it.
“Have a good night, Artemis,” she says, bowing away from me. I nod my head in return, but I keep my focus on the water.
“My brother told me what you’re planning to do.”
I close my eyes at the sound of Kina’s voice. The fact that her tone is soft and seemingly gentle surprises me, considering she knows what she claims to know.
“If you’re here to try to stop me or tell me I shouldn’t do it,” I say as I open my eyes again and look up at the moon. “You’re wasting your time.”
She comes up beside me and touches the side of my shoulder. I turn to look at her, and the corner of her lips tug up slightly, but it doesn’t turn into a full smile. It seemed like more of a twitch.
“I couldn’t do that,” she says. She pulls her hand away and grips onto the railing. “I know what it’s like to lose a brother, and if I could do what you can do, nothing could stop me either from doing everything I could to save him. You have to do what you need to do.”
“Why can’t Jace understand that?” I ask. I don’t take my eyes off of her, but she turns away from me.
“Because you’re his family too, Artemis, if not more than I am, and he just got you back. He already watched you die once. It’s a complicated situation. You have to understand that.” She looks at me and places her hand over mine. “We’re always so quick to risk our lives for other people that sometimes we don’t realize who we’ll hurt if we don’t come back. Death takes the pain from you, and gives it to everyone else.”
“I’m not gonna die,” I say.
“You don’t know that you won’t,” she says. “The Underworld isn’t like here. Time has no control over it, and I think you know that. Norhurst and Glasskeep couldn’t get along for a reason. They had trouble co-existing, because neither would submit, and neither could control the other.”
“How old are you?” I ask and she laughs.
“Your age,” she says. “But I wanted to find my brother too, once. Nothing would’ve stopped me — until I became a werewolf.” She glances down at her hand still on mine. “Were you there for him last year? During his first change?”
I nodded.
“I wish I could have done better though,” I tell her.
Kina shakes her head. “Just knowing someone’s there, helps.”
“Your family was there for you, right?”
She hesitates for a moment, and shakes her head.
“Like I said, I wanted to find my brother too. I thought I was gonna make it home in time, but I wasn’t quick enough. I suffered alone. The bones breaking, the pain. I was alone.” She purses her lips together. “Thank you,” she says softly. With the wind howling, I almost don’t hear her.
“For what?”
“I know your brother isn’t the only one you’re trying to save,” she says. “I don’t think anyone’s thanked you, so I’m thanking you. Maybe no one agrees with your decision, but it’s your decision, Artemis. Not ours. Not mine, or Jace’s, or Rhiannon’s, and I want to say thank you, because I know you’re trying your best with what you have, and I don’t think anyone’s acknowledge that. I’m sure it’s hard,” she continues, “everyone is so quick to tell you when you’re wrong, and none of them will tell you how to make it right. I think they forget.”
“Forget what?”
“That you don’t have to try at all,” she says. “You’re twenty years old, forced to become something you didn’t want to be. No one lends a guiding hand and when you try to do your best with what you’ve got, your best isn’t good enough for anyone. So here’s me telling you, that whatever you can do, it’s good enough.”
Her words affect me more than I think they will. It’s like she knows exactly how I feel, and at the same time, I’m not sure she’s fully talking about me. I turn my hand over and I grip onto hers that formerly encased mine.
“You’re good enough, Kina,” I say, because I think she needs to hear it too.
Her smile is weak.
“My dad wishes it was me, you know,” she says, slipping her hand out of mine. She places both of them together against the rail, clasping each other. “Instead of Jace. It wasn’t easy, seeing the hatred and disappointment in his eyes whenever he looked at me. The disgust. Because Jace would’ve been more useful to him, Jace would’ve been stronger, and so, I tried to find him. I thought that if I did, he’d see that I wasn’t useless. I tried so hard to — to —”
I wrap my arm around her and she leans against me.
“You’re good enough,” I repeat. “The fact that he couldn’t see that is not your fault.”
“I know,” she says. “I know it’s not my fault and I think that’s what makes it worse. Because I know I can’t do anything about it either.”
I didn’t know how she felt. How she feels. I spent most of my childhood thinking my dad left my brother and I because we weren’t good enough, and then I spent years with him without knowing.
I was enough.
He turned his back on the world for me. By the sound of it, her father would’ve given her up to get Jace back. I don’t know how that feels.
“I want to help you,” she says. “And I want to be upfront with you, it’s for selfish reasons, but I want to help you. Whatever you need.”
“Your father’s acceptance means that much to you?”
Kina bites on her bottom lip and shrugs.
“He’s the alpha. He’s my dad.”
The alternate timeline the Heliosi showed me made complete sense now. Her brothers didn’t fully lose it until they saw that Jace was dead. Kina was just another casualty.
It’s making me feel sick.
“Jace wouldn’t want you helping me.”
“Well, right now I don’t really care what Jace wants,” she tells me matter-of-factly. “Besides, I’m sure we can get Rhiannon to distract him. With her around, he won’t give a crap about what I’m doing.”
“You think that’ll work?”
“Please. You know him. My brother is a heterosexual boy. The girl he’s in love with is giving him attention? It’ll work. I mean, all Rhiannon had to do was flirt with him and he turned into an open book about you and the Strider. He’s pathetic.”
She’s right about that. I try not to laugh.
“Is it weird for you?” I ask.
“Rhiannon?” she asks to clarify and I nod. “It was. I couldn’t understand how he could like her. I still don’t fully understand it, but I grew up thinking of them collectively as one thing. One evil. I grew up thinking of them as monsters who only wanted to hurt us. Who fed on the mundane maliciously. It was very black and white, but it’s really not. She’s nothing like the vampires I learned about.”
“Just remember they aren’t all like her. Some of them really are bad.”
“How do you know which is which?”
I shrug. “You don’t. It took me a while to trust her and see her as my friend. Now that I do, I can’t believe I ever doubted her.”
“This might sound weird,” she says, there’s a hint of a frown on her face. She doesn’t turn to look at me. “But I’m glad Jace was with her. Even if it meant I had to grow up without him.”
“Me too,” I say.
“So how are we gonna do this?” she asks me as she turns around, leaning her back against the railing. “You’re summoning the ship, right? How's it gonna work
?”
All good questions I don’t have answers to.
“I don’t know, exactly, I’ll have to ask Nadia.”
“Are you sure you don’t know? You seemed to know what you were doing in the Shattered Lands with those hellhounds.”
“I don’t know, Kina.”
“Okay, well, when I was growing up, we were told a lot of things about the Midnight Strider. An invisible ghost ship that brings the dead to the Underworld. The obvious idea would be to kill somebody —”
“Kina!”
“I didn’t say that was the only idea! Relax, we aren’t killing any innocents — or at least I’m not — since you can’t. Or maybe you can now?”
“Kina…”
“Sorry, anyway,” she says as she takes a step away from the rail. She furrows her brows and turns back to me as I turn around to face her. “What about symbols?”
“What?”
“You used the triskelion to protect the house or something, maybe you can use the ouroboros to call the ship. I mean, you’re a necromancer now, right? If anyone above ground can use that symbol, it’s you. And why wouldn’t the symbol of Norhurst, of the necromancers, call the ship of the dead? I mean it makes sense. I think I remember my dad saying something about that symbol being everywhere in Norhurst.”
“What do you know about Norhurst?” I ask.
“Not much,” she says. “Only the basics that I’m sure everyone knows. But it’s worth a shot, right? There’s no harm in trying.”
I nod.
“How about tomorrow? Same time?”
“If all goes well with Rhiannon, I’ll gladly let my brother know she wants to see him.” She smiled devilishly. “And I’m sure it will, she doesn’t want him mad at you either.”
That makes three of us.
*****
The first time is rather anticlimactic.
With my dagger, I carved the symbol on the bridge railing where we stood, and we waited. I don’t know what we were waiting for. Maybe for the water to boil, or sails to come into view. We waited for something, anything, but nothing happened.
“We can try again,” Kina says, while I frustratedly grip at the railing. It wobbles beneath my grasp and if I pull too hard, it might break. “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”
The Midnight Strider (The Chronomancer Chronicles Book 2) Page 22