by Chloe Jacobs
Greta had a feeling they were all going to be undergoing some heavy-duty trauma counselling in the very near future, and once that started, the little ones would start talking about Mylena. It was inevitable, and she’d never really expected them to maintain the half-truths they’d all told to date. They were too young. She only hoped they would weather the questions well enough to avoid suspicion, and that they’d be able to put their time in Mylena behind them until it became nothing more than a half-remembered dream.
Sloane and Wyatt each spoke to their parents on the phone. They would also be arriving in the morning. Ray still hadn’t asked about his family or shown any interest in calling them. Officer Fielding indicated that they initially had some difficulty locating them based on the information Ray had provided, but finally got lucky when they ran his photograph through the system. Ray only shrugged as if it didn’t matter.
Those three were old enough that they’d probably be able to navigate all the questions still to come without raising any alarms, but Mylena had changed them. How long before they started to feel as if they’d been cheated out of a normal life and began to act out? Ray was already super angry. How long before he turned to drugs or joined a gang because he was looking for the kind of outlet that the human world just couldn’t provide?
She shook her head. She had to trust that bringing them back had been the best option, and she would make the choice again in a heartbeat. But there was a part of her that felt that even though Mylena had been dangerous and hard, they’d found something special there and were stronger for it.
Wyatt took her hand and squeezed as if he sensed the direction of her thoughts.
Yes, she had to believe this was the best for everyone. They were going to be fine. They were going to live healthy, happy lives, never thinking that perhaps they truly belonged somewhere else.
Chapter Four
Greta escaped to her room to avoid everyone’s concerned looks. She hadn’t succeeded in keeping them from seeing how hard it was to let the boys go.
There was a soft knock on the door, and she groaned. “Yeah, I’m coming,” she said.
The door opened, and her father peeked inside. “Can we talk for a minute?” he asked.
“Uh, sure.”
He walked to the desk across from where she sat cross-legged on the bed and leaned his hip up against the edge of it. “Officer Fielding mentioned something before she left,” he said.
“Did something happen to one of the boys?” She jumped up, but he waved her back down with a frown and shook his head.
“No, it wasn’t anything like that. She wanted to let us know that she still hasn’t been able to locate your two friends’ parents. Isaac and Siona don’t appear to be on any missing persons list that the police have been able to access.”
“Oh, well I’m sure the police will figure it out soon.” She dropped her gaze, uncomfortable with the lies that never seemed to end.
“Ms. Davidson says that she’ll find a family willing to take them both in until that happens,” he said.
She jerked her head up. “What?”
“They’ll be matched with a foster family who will be really understanding about what they’ve been through,” he promised.
“Yes, but—”
“It’s for the best,” he said firmly. “Your other friends are going to be picked up by their parents tomorrow, and when it’s just the four of us—you and us and Drew—we can all focus on becoming a family again.”
“Dad, I really don’t think that’s such a good—”
“Now, about school,” he interrupted. He crossed his arms. Case closed.
Shit.
“School,” she muttered, the word lingering on her tongue like the scrape of sandpaper. “Sure, okay.”
“Your mother suggested that maybe we shouldn’t expect you to go back right away, and she’s probably right.” He paused. “What do you think? I don’t want to push you if you’re not ready,” he said.
She hesitated. “You don’t?” If they let her stay home, she could get started trying to research a way to find the portal back to Mylena.
“You’ve been through a lot. Maybe we should give you some time to adjust to being home again before throwing you to the wolves at Jonesport High.” Her father chuckled, but it sounded pretty strained. He was an investment banker, not a comedian. And although he’d always remembered him as a great dad, he looked completely out of his element dealing with her right now.
She could relate. It’s not like he’d gotten any warning before being saddled with a full-fledged teenager overnight. And after four years without having to answer to anyone except maybe Luke—and even then she’d pretty much done what she wanted as long as it kept her alive—Greta bristled at the idea that everyone else suddenly figured they knew what was best for her.
“Anyway, we decided that you could stay home for a couple more days. You can stay home for as long as you like, actually. We want to support you.”
She might not win any medals for daughter of the year, but he was trying to be a good father to a girl he didn’t even know.
Shame crawled up her throat. “No, I’ll be fine by Monday. I can handle it,” she said. It was almost a week. Hopefully by then she’d have a plan for getting them back to Mylena.
He smiled, and the relief in his face made her feel even worse. What would happen if she actually did find a portal and left? After all this, could she put them through that again?
“That’s my girl.”
He’d said that to her so many times when she was little, his voice filled with pride at her accomplishments. She’d been certain she would never hear it again.
After dinner, she asked her father if she could use the computer. He let her and Wyatt into his office. “So what is it you guys want to search?” he asked, obviously curious.
She bit her lip. “Uh, we just want to fool around a bit,” she said. Looking for a portal to another world.
He grinned. “Well, if you need help with anything in particular, just give me a shout. I may not be as skilled at finding the embarrassing celebrity photos and good cat videos as the teenagers are, but I should be able to come up with something fun for you.”
“Yeah, okay, thanks.” Let him think they had nothing better to look up than useless gossip so that he wouldn’t hover over her shoulder and question their true motives.
When they were alone, Wyatt leaned against her father’s desk while she sat in his chair. She figured technology had jumped ahead in the four years she’d been gone but was pretty sure she could still navigate the internet. She opened the browser and typed, missing children.
Wyatt bent over and squinted at the screen. He whistled. “Wow, that’s a crazy number of hits.”
“I guess we should narrow down the search.”
He pointed to one line. “Wait, try that page.” National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
She clicked on the link and hissed. “Oh my God.” There were names and photographs, dates and locations where children had gone missing. “There are so many. Those poor kids.”
They scrolled through the lists state by state because they didn’t want to chance missing something, although they weren’t even positive they knew what to look for.
Greta’s eyes ached before too long. After a while, they switched positions, and Wyatt sat down in front of the computer. She looked down at him with crossed arms. “So, what’s going on with you and Siona?”
He glanced up at her, his cheeks beet red. “Nothing’s going on. I’m probably leaving tomorrow, and we’re trying to get her back to Mylena, remember? When is there supposed to be time for something to be going on?”
“Yeah, I know all that.” She paused. “So what’s going on?”
“Jesus, Greta. Case closed. It would be stupid to start something that has no future.”
She put a hand on his shoulder. “Trust me, I know all about stupid,” she said, softening her voice. “Sometimes, you just gotta go with it
, anyway. You know?”
He sat back in her dad’s chair and curled his hands tightly over the arms. “How the hell am I supposed to do that? It’s already going to be hard enough to leave you guys to figure this apocalypse thing out on your own. How am I supposed to go if I let myself feel something for her?”
“I’ve seen the two of you together. It’s already too late to not feel something. But if you open your heart and it isn’t meant to be, at least you’ll be able to go back to your old life with some good memories of Mylena.” She cleared her throat. “And if the three of us are going to die taking Mylena back from Agramon, Siona deserves to know what it was like to have someone love her like that.”
“None of you are going to die,” he snapped, pissed.
She laughed. “Well duh, of course not. We’re three people against a crazed faerie queen merged with a demon who controls an army of gnomes. What could happen?”
Oh God, how are we going to do this? They’d been so focused on how to open the portal, the equally as imperative How to defeat Agramon question was still hanging out there without any viable solutions.
“Why am I helping you on this suicide mission again?” He swore and dragged a hand through his hair, making Greta feel guilty for teasing him.
She sighed. “Because it’s probably impossible to find a way back anyway, but we have to try.” She felt guilty just for thinking it, but she couldn’t ignore the truth. “And because Agramon’s evil won’t be contained in Mylena for long. He’ll come through a portal once he’s destroyed that world, and he’ll do the same thing here before moving on to another place, and then another.”
“But why does it have to be you three putting your lives on the line?”
She shrugged. She’d never actually asked herself that question. The answer had always been obvious.
“Isaac won’t stand back and let anyone do his fighting for him, and Siona has her reasons, because of her part in freeing Queen Minetta.” She frowned. “But I’m the one who released the demon in the first place. Mylena had managed to contain Agramon for hundreds of years before I came along. It’s because of me that all those people are dying now.”
He continued to grumble. She leaned over his shoulder with her hand on the mouse and started scrolling through the pages once again. Wyatt sighed and put his palm over hers softly. Surprised, she looked up into his eyes.
“I don’t think I can do it,” he whispered. “How can I just leave?”
She sighed. “You don’t have a choice. You have to go home. Mylena almost destroyed you, and that was before this war… You’re not cut out for what’s coming, Wyatt.”
He winced, and she felt even more guilty, but it was better to tell him the truth than pretend differently and let him come back with them when the time came. She remembered the darkness that had overcome him after the horrors of the eclipse, when Jack died and the other boys were captured by the faeries. It had almost broken the part of him that was sweet and soft-hearted. She couldn’t let him willingly succumb to that again.
“You’re strong and capable, but you’re not a killer. Returning to Mylena to do what we’re going to have to do will destroy your soul.”
“But it’s fine for me to sit back and let you take that on?” he said snidely.
She clenched her jaw and nodded. She was already broken. “Yes.”
When he turned away, she closed her eyes against the rush of fear and uncertainty. Were any of them doing the right thing?
“Hey, look. I think I found something.”
She blinked and glanced down. “What is it?”
He pointed to an image on the screen. “Isn’t that Carter?”
It was. He looked so much younger in the photo, but there was no mistaking those dimples.
Greta grabbed a piece of paper from the personal printer behind her dad’s desk and wrote down the details of Carter’s disappearance. They kept looking and eventually found everyone, even the information about Drew’s second disappearance. There was a newspaper article from only a few weeks ago about the boy’s safe return. He’d apparently been missing for just a few days. The article said he’d been playing outside one morning and Greta’s mother had come out to check on him only to find the yard empty and the back gate open. The whole town had rallied a search party, and the police had found him wandering the woods near the edge of town two nights later, looking dazed and confused.
Thankfully, it meant that he hadn’t been locked in Agramon’s magick circle for long. She’d been so worried that Drew had been taken again right after she thought she’d saved him and that he’d spent four years turned to stone while her parents were here falling apart that whole time, thinking they’d lost both their children.
She and Wyatt went over their notes.
“They were all taken from different places,” she said, frustrated. “Some from wooded areas, some from mountain areas. It looks like Jack was taken from the cornfield behind his parents’ farm. How are we supposed to figure out the connection, the thing that determines where the portal can be opened?”
Wyatt pored over the piece of paper. Suddenly, he looked up. “What if it isn’t the place that’s important, but the time?”
“Like the date?”
He nodded and pointed to the date of his disappearance. “The weekend I went out with the Boy Scout troop, I remember we were all excited because there was going to be a lunar eclipse. We even brought a small telescope.”
An eclipse. Could that be it? It would make sense. All of Mylena was ruled by the moons in one way or another. “I don’t remember if there was an eclipse the day I fell through the portal.”
They plugged all the dates into the computer to check, and sure enough, each and every one had occurred on some kind of astronomical event, but it wasn’t always an eclipse. In her case, it had been a planetary alignment of Jupiter, Mercury, and Venus.
“So, when is the next eclipse?” she asked.
Wyatt swore. “We missed it already. There was a total lunar eclipse in April.” He paused and clicked on something. “Wait a minute, though. I’ve got a date for the next planetary alignment.”
“Don’t tell me it’s four years from now.”
He looked up. “We’ve got four weeks.”
They were all sitting on the back deck as the sun went down. Jacob was in Sloane’s lap, eyes closed with his curled fist tucked beneath his chin. He’d been very quiet ever since the other boys had left with their families, except to ask every hour or so if they thought Charlie, Leo, and Niall missed him yet.
Her parents’ yard was a big grassy rectangle surrounded on three sides by a short hedge, and the swing set acted as the sole focal point, off to the left. It was just like the neighbor’s yard, and the neighbor beside them, and so on. Maybe one yard had a sandbox or a shed instead of a swing set, maybe even a pool. But all in all, it was one box after another. The differences came from the people living inside those boxes. People who had no idea of the danger they might soon be in.
Agramon would tear a swath through this neighborhood as easily as sweeping an arm across a dining room table. Effortless destruction. No resistance.
Resistance. The only way they were going to have any chance of keeping the demon out of the human world would be to stop him in Mylena. They needed to unite as many of the species as possible to fight him there, where they could match his magick with their own. And even then…there might not be enough magick in all of the worlds.
She couldn’t think about that now.
She and Wyatt told the others about the planetary alignment and their suspicion about what it would mean.
“Mylena will be beyond redemption if we wait that long,” Isaac said. He looked ready to head out then and there to start scouring the nearby forest for better options. “There must be something we can do to return to my people sooner. I will not continue to bunk in your family’s dungeon like an outlaw so that you can relive your fondest childhood memories until there isn’t anyone left in Myl
ena to save.”
Wyatt jerked forward. “Hey! That’s not even close to being fair.”
She pushed them back from each other and looked up at Isaac, trying not to let him see how much that had hurt. She knew he was frustrated and worried. In fact, there were dark circles under his eyes, and his forehead was creased like he hadn’t slept very well in the “dungeon.”
She was still trying to figure out how to tell him that Ms. Davidson was going to have him and Siona sent to a foster home tomorrow. That wasn’t an easy discussion under the best circumstances, and now his already-thin goblin temper might explode and convince her parents that they should restrict the amount of time she was allowed to see him after he left.
“Do you honestly think if we just wander around, we’ll conveniently come across a portal to Mylena? It won’t happen. There’s no magick in this world,” she reminded him. “And unfortunately, that means there are no options. Nothing on this side is going to open that door until the timing is right. We have to wait.”
His eyes still flashed with frustrated impatience. She touched his arm. “We’re doing the best we can. And even if you spend the next few weeks grumbling like a child, it won’t change anything. So why don’t we use the time to prepare, to see if we even have a chance of beating Agramon when the time does get here.”
His jaw tightened, but he nodded stiffly.
And maybe they wouldn’t have to wait the whole four weeks. When Agramon had been inside her, something had happened. Something more than just the magick, and she’d only started to realize the depth of the link between them now, but it felt like he…needed her. It suddenly occurred to her that their narrow escape from Agramon/Queen Minetta through the portal was something the demon had planned all along. When he realized he couldn’t have her by consuming her soul and taking her body, he’d done the next best thing: he’d sent her to the human world where she couldn’t be any trouble, but he’d be sure to find her when he was done with Mylena.