by Sarra Cannon
“Are you feeling better?” he asked.
“Much.” She managed a smile and looked into his eyes again. They were kind eyes.
He smiled back. “You’re so pretty,” he whispered.
She touched her knotted hair and shook her head.
He swallowed nervously. “You’re the most beautiful girl I ever saw.”
The young witch blushed. No one had ever called her beautiful in her whole life. No one had ever looked at her like that. Like he thought she was something special and unique.
In the next room, the man’s mother started coughing again. She called out to him, calling him Marcus. Disappointment flashed in his eyes as he stood and moved the chair back to its place against the wall. “I’ve got to go see about Momma,” he said. His eyebrows pinched together. “She’s not feeling so well these past couple days. Might end up having to call that doctor after all.”
The man nodded to the tray beside her bed.
“There’s more tea in that pitcher if you want some,” he said. “And there’s plenty of food in the kitchen if you feel up to coming down in a little while. I’ll fix us some supper here in a bit.”
“Thank you,” she said.
He turned and started out the door, then looked back at her. “I’m really glad you’re feeling better,” he said. He reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled something out. He stepped toward her, his fist outstretched. “I almost forgot.”
She lifted her hand to his and he dropped a small purple stone into her palm.
The witch gasped and pulled the stone closer. The Fatalis stone. She thought it had been lost with Tobias. She picked it up carefully and studied it, turning it around and around in her hand. It was faceted with five sides. Each side had a unique mark engraved on it.
“Where did you find it?” she asked.
“It was laying on the ground in a pile of dirt where we found you,” he said. “I figured it must be yours.”
She nodded. “Thank you.”
The older woman coughed again and the man glanced nervously toward the hallway. “I better get going,” he said. “I hope I see you for supper later.”
He shut the door behind him as he left.
The witch clutched the purple stone close to her heart. She had no idea how to use it, but seeing it made her heart soar. Tobias had used this stone to somehow create the portal that brougt them here. If she could figure out how to use it, maybe she wouldn’t be trapped here in this world after all.
Maybe there was still a way home.
Parrish
The door to her room opened with a creak and Parrish pulled her headphones from her ears.
“I told you not to come in without knocking,” she said, jumping up from the bed. If her mom came bursting into her room without asking one more time, she was going to seriously lose it.
“It’s just me,” a soft voice said.
Parrish relaxed and moved back toward her bed. Some of her schoolwork was spread across the comforter. She brushed it to the side in one big pile and sat down.
Zoe walked in and shut the door behind her. Her hand looked so small on the doorknob and Parrish smiled. She was like a little porcelain doll, but when she picked up her bow and violin, she was transformed. She could play something soft and heartbreaking like Barber’s Violin Concerto, but she could also bring out the strength of a composer like Bartok. That little girl had more talent in her pinky finger than Parrish had in her whole body.
She was really going to miss her.
“Are you guys about ready to go?”
Zoe shrugged and hung her head. Her long hair fell across her shoulder, partially covering her face. “Dad said we should leave in a few minutes just in case there’s any traffic.”
Parrish nodded. “Are you nervous?”
Zoe crossed the room and sat next to Parrish on the bed. She had to raise up on her tiptoes just to reach high enough. “A little,” she said. “I think Mom and Dad are more nervous about it than I am. They keep asking me if I have everything memorized and if I want to run through the Tchaikovsky one more time.”
Zoe sighed, then slowly placed her little hand in Parrish’s.
Parrish bit the inside of her lower lip and blinked back hot tears. She squeezed her sister’s hand and sniffed.
“I wish you could come with me,” Zoe said, her voice trembling a little.
Parrish swiped at her eyes with her index finger. This was stupid. She was not going to cry. It would be nice to have the house mostly to herself for the next few months. Her mom was staying home for the first two weeks, then she was joining Zoe and their dad in London. Her mom’s sister Stacey was flying out to stay with Parrish for the rest of the length of Zoe’s tour. Three months with no parents.
Three months of not hearing about Zoe’s talent and Zoe’s practicing and Zoe’s dedication. Every. Single. Minute. It would be heaven.
So why did her eyes sting?
Maybe she was just still feeling emotional about what happened the night before with the man. She wasn’t sure what had happened to him. Was he still alive?
Seeing him collapse like that really shook her up. For some reason, it made her want to keep her sister close to her. To not let her go.
Zoe leaned against her, putting her head on her arm. “Do you think they’ll let me order room service at the hotels?”
Parrish laughed. “Probably.” She sniffed again. “You gotta eat something, right? It’s not like you’re going to have a full service kitchen or anything. Well, except when you get to Australia. You’re in an apartment there for a couple weeks, right?”
Zoe shrugged. “I can’t remember.”
“Well, hopefully you’ll have a better memory when it comes to Tchaikovsky.” She nudged Zoe with her elbow.
Her sister looked up, her lips pressed tight and her eyes narrow, pretending to be mad. Parrish stared right back at her, eyes locked. Their faces serious.
It was Zoe who laughed first. Even her laughter was musical.
It filled the room and tugged on Parrish’s heartstrings. “I’m going to miss you, you know that right?” Parrish said.
“You will?” Zoe’s big brown eyes were brimming with tears, something Parrish didn’t see very often. In order to be a top performer at the age of ten, you had to have nerves of steel and incredible control over your emotions.
Something about those tears broke Parrish’s heart.
“A little,” she said, then winked as she swallowed back another rush of emotion.
Zoe giggled again, then threw her arms around her. Parrish hugged her back, so tight she was probably cutting off the poor girl’s circulation.
“I love you,” Zoe said.
Their dad called out from the bottom of the stairs and Zoe let go and hopped off the bed.
“I better get going. Are you going to come downstairs to say goodbye to dad?”
“Sure,” Parrish said. She stood and followed her sister into the hallway, but then turned back to her room, remembering. “Wait.”
Zoe paused at the top of the stairs as Parrish ran back into her room and pulled a small box out from under the bed. She couldn’t believe she’d almost forgotten.
Parrish walked toward the staircase and handed her sister the tiny box. “For when you get lonely,” she said.
Zoe pulled the blue ribbon off the box and tied it into her ponytail. Parrish laughed. It was a tradition with Zoe. She always tied gift ribbons in her hair or stuck those stick Christmas bows to her forehead or her shirt. Sometimes she liked the bows and ribbons on the giftwrap more than the gift inside. Parrish had very carefully chosen this blue silk ribbon months ago when they first learned about Zoe’s upcoming tour.
Zoe pulled the top off of the small box and gasped. With shaking fingers, she pulled the silver necklace out of the box and let it dangle in the air between them. Parrish smiled at the surprise and joy on her sister’s face.
The necklace itself was nothing special. Just a plain silver chain like any other. It was
the pendant that was special. A silver infinity sign with two birthstones embedded in the loops. One for each of them. May’s emerald for Parrish and an amethyst for Zoe’s in Februrary.
“So you’ll know I love you for infinity,” Parrish said.
Zoe’s tears came freely now, tumbling down her pale cheek. She rushed toward Parrish and threw her arms around her. Parrish stumbled back slightly, then hugged her back.
“Zoe, come on,” their mom called up from the hallway. “You’re going to be late.”
Parrish pulled away and smiled down at her sister. The truth was she kind of wanted to hate her for how talented and perfect she was, but she couldn’t. She was probably the only person on the planet Parrish could truly say she loved with all her heart.
“Get going,” she said. “Have fun.”
“I will,” Zoe said. She wiped her tears with the back of her hand, the necklace clutched tight. “Love you.”
Zoe took off down the stairs and Parrish followed. She gave her father a hug and stood with her mother in the driveway as he and Zoe drove away, sadness heavy on her heart.
Crash
The microwave dinged and Crash rolled his chair across the cement floor, barely taking his eyes off his monitors. He threw the pizza onto a paper plate, grabbed a Sprite from the mini-fridge and rolled back to his desk.
Each of his six large computer monitors showed something different, but everywhere he looked, the news was the same. The chatter amongst other doomsday preppers was that cases of this new super-flu had been reported from coast-to-coast and everywhere in between.
The prepper forums and underground news sites claimed absurd numbers of hospitalizations in big cities like New York and Houston and Chicago, but the major news networks and health organizations were denying it.
Even social sites like Twitter and YouTube had started blowing up with hits for this virus. Those who knew about it were scared as hell.
Crash opened a new browser and entered a ten-digit password. A second password box popped up, but instead of entering a new one, he clicked on the tiny icon of a bomb hidden in the bottom left corner. He needed to talk to his buddy Atomic. If anyone would know something that was more off-the-grid, it would be him.
He entered a message on the secret forum and waited for his friend to appear. It could be minutes or it could be hours. He never really knew.
Crash leaned back, putting his hands behind his head and stretching. He hadn’t left his apartment in a couple days. Not since that grocery store fiasco. But that wasn’t really all that different from normal. He had enough food and water and other essentials stocked up to last him and four others nearly six months if it came down to that.
He grabbed the TV remote and flipped on the big-screen on the other side of the small basement apartment. He scanned the headlines running across CNN’s ticker, but there was no mention of a deadly virus or a super-flu that had hospitals backlogged. Why were they keeping this shut down so tight?
He ran a nervous hand through his already-messy black hair. It was probably about time for a haircut, but he didn’t care. He’d been out on his own for two years already, which meant no mom to nag him about getting his hair cut or tying his shoes or getting out in the sunshine every once in a while. That last one had been his favorite. His mom had always been nagging him about getting outside. She said it wasn’t good for an Asian boy to be so pale.
Crash laughed at the memory, but then shook it off. Now was not the time to get sad about his mom’s death. He really needed to figure out what was really going on out there. He opened his favorite forum again and started reading through the latest thread about the virus.
Some people were convinced this was a government conspiracy, like something out of some low-budget movie about the end of the world. A deadly government experiment-gone-wrong or some shit.
Others seemed to think it was the next Black Death and that a third of the population was already screwed. That’s why the news wasn’t reporting it. The virus spread so fast that by the time anyone knew what was happening, it was already too late to really prevent anyone else from getting sick. If they came out now and told the truth about it, riots might break out and people would be too scared to go to work. Society would shut down faster than a church on judgment day.
So far, no one had really come up with any real evidence. As usual, these forums were all about speculation and wild-ass guesses.
He spun around in his chair. His mind was spinning just as fast.
This was exactly the kind of thing that had been haunting his dreams for the last two years. When his mom died, the state sent him to live with a foster family because there was no one else he could stay with. He was first generation Japanese-American and almost all of his family was still in Japan. So, even though he was already sixteen when his mom died and even though he’d been basically taking care of himself since he was five and his mom started working two jobs because his piece-of-crap dad skipped out on them, the state made him go live with a foster family.
That’s when the dreams started.
It wasn’t like he dreamed the exact same thing every night. They were more like variations on a theme. The end of the world brought on by a deadly virus.
But sometimes, they felt like more than just dreams. They felt like warnings.
After a few weeks of screaming his head off in the middle of the night, his foster family had forced him to go see a therapist. A total quack who claimed his dreams were nothing more than a manifestation of his fear of being abandoned. It made sense, sure. His dad had abandoned him as a child and now his mother had done the same thing. Even if it was cancer who took his mom away, it still sort of felt like abandonment.
But Crash knew there was more to it than that. The dreams were too real. Too terrifying. Then there was the matter of the others. Four others who would somehow find their way to him.
And now it was all coming true.
Crash took one bite of his food, then set it aside. He needed answers about what was really going on out there.
He slid his chair back up to his desk and started a new message.
The clock in the corner of the screen read two-fifteen a.m.
Parrish
Parrish opened her eyes to darkness. She sat up and listened. Silence filled the air around her, but just as she started to relax, she heard it again.
A moan.
Her eyes popped open wider and her throat closed in fear. She’d heard a similar sound the other night.
Craning her neck, she looked toward the clock on her bedside table. 2:15 A.M. She propped herself up on her elbows and listened, not even wanting to move. She wanted it to be a dream.
And she had been dreaming. Something that filled her with a strange sadness even now that she was awake. Something about a man who seemed so familiar. And a purple stone.
Another moan, this time followed by a crash down the hall. Breaking glass. Parrish threw the comforter from her legs and raced down the hall to her parents’ bedroom.
“Mom?” She pushed open the door. Her eyes struggled to adjust to the darkness.
“Parrish.” Her mother’s voice was a whisper.
Parrish trembled inside, a twinge of fear taking up residence in her ribcage. She felt along the smooth, cool wall until she found the light switch, then flicked it up.
Her eyes burned in the sudden light. She squinted toward the bed, but it was empty. Her mother’s pillow was drenched, as if someone had tossed a glass of water on it.
The large comforter was pulled off to the far side and the corner of it moved, pulled down out of sight. Parrish crawled across the bed, her mouth dry.
Her mother lay on the floor, her eyes wide and full of terror. Coughs shook her thin frame as she struggled to sit up. A stream of red blood flowed from her hand and arm. Confused, Parrish scrambled the rest of the way across the bed and leaned over to help her up. Was she cut?
That’s when she saw the broken vase. It must have gotten knocked over when
she fell. A pool of glass and water and tulips as red as her mother’s blood all mingled on the floor under and around her mother’s body.
There wasn’t a lot of room between the bed and the wall, but Parrish managed to squeeze through without stepping on her mom. She grabbed her hand and tried to lift her back onto the bed. At first, her mom seemed to help, pulling her weight against Parrish’s hand. But she only made it an inch off the ground when her legs gave out and she tumbled back into the broken glass on the floor.
Parrish looked around, her stomach twisting.
She wasn’t strong enough to pick her mom up and put her back in bed, but maybe if she got lower, she could kind of push her up enough that she would be able to pull herself up with her arms instead of her legs. When she knelt, pinpricks of glass sunk into the flesh on Parrish’s knees and the palms of her hands.
“I was trying to get to the bathroom, but my legs just wouldn’t work,” her mother said in a frail whisper, struggling to sit up. “I don’t think I can stand up.”
The confusion in her mother’s tone terrified her.
“I’m going to put my hands under you. When I do, I want you to try to grab the sheets and pull yourself up onto the bed, okay?” Parrish asked. She used all her strength to lift up as her mother clawed at the bedsheets. Slowly, her mom managed to pull herself far enough that Parrish could get her on to the top of the large King-sized bed.
Parrish pulled the comforter from the foot of the bed and tossed it into the corner. She grabbed a pillow and used it to sweep the pieces of broken glass aside as best she could. A sharp piece sliced into her heel and she sucked a breath through her teeth. She lifted her foot and picked the shard from her flesh, setting it on the bedside table with a clink. Blood trickled from the wound, mingling with the pool of blood already on the floor and all over the sheets.
Violent coughs shook her mother’s body and she doubled over on the bed, her shoulders trembling.
Parrish moved beside her and put her arms around her mom’s shoulders, patting her gently until the coughing stopped.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said. “Do you want me to call a doctor or something?”