by A. L. Tyler
“’Morning…” A freshly showered Tom said to her before glancing over his shoulder and into the kitchen. “Ah, mom…not again.”
Olesia turned her large green eyes on her son as she licked batter from her fingers. She seemed to settle down a little and grabbed a broom and dustpan out of the corner to clean up the mess. Devin shot Lena a devious smile as he flipped the remainder of breakfast, which was still on the griddle.
“I told you,” He said in a sing-song voice. “I told you, we shouldn’t leave here. You like hotels anyways, and this is a bed and breakfast with family. The kind who don’t try to kill you. It’s perfect.”
“Oh, now you hush!” Olesia said from the floor, grabbing a rag off of the counter and slapping Devin’s backside with it before she went back to cleaning up her mess. “My granddaughter is a career woman. She’s got her responsibilities and she’s going to take care of them. Stop trying to hold her back. You get further in life if you don’t try to swim against fate.”
Devin shrugged as Olesia got up off the floor and seemingly whipped a cigarette out of nowhere. She leaned against the sink, smiling ever so slightly, as Tom and Lena sat down at the table in the corner—Lena suddenly realized that Brandon had been present for the whole ordeal, buckled into his chair bouncer on top of the table in the corner, passively watching two adults sling half-baked breakfast foods at each other. He was a quiet baby, for sure. An easy baby; the kind Ava would have liked, if she were still around.
Olesia held her cigarette over her shoulder and flicked it firmly with her thumb, sending ashes trickling down into the sink basin. She took another long draw. “You know, after the two of you are gone, I’m going to need some help around here. It’s January now, but we hit tourist season starting around May.”
The words hung in the air as Devin turned the stove off, picked up the plate of pancakes, and took them to the table without ever making eye contact with Lena. She sighed in an overly dramatic kind of way and threw her arms up in the air. “It’s not like you need my permission! You should stay, Dev. You love it here.”
“I want you to stay too!” He said, pulling up a seat next to Lena.
“Hmm…Don’t we all.” Olesia mumbled as she started passing out plates. “I’m afraid she has a life to get back to, and we’ll have to sit here, off in the wings, until her next visit. She’ll be back.”
Olesia winked at Lena.
Breakfast was served, and the afternoon plans were decided. Tom was going to take Lena into town to find a phone and an unsecured wireless network so that she could make contact with Kelsey and Howard; Devin was going to do laundry with Olesia, go out to get more oysters for dinner, and then start the lengthy process of repainting the barn for next tourist season. There was only one more night in sanctuary for Lena; she had every intention of leaving the next day.
If Devin was right, and Rollin was actively seeking her, she didn’t want to put the Iris Inn anywhere on his radar; with her new plan in mind, she realized it would be of the utmost importance for her to get back to Waldgrave as quickly as possible to lessen the chances of her interception—she was going to take Brandon with her, and she had no clue how to explain him to anyone.
These were the ideas that plagued her the whole way back to Charleston; they caused her to make a decision that would change the course of her life drastically over the next few months.
Standing on a street corner as Tom walked with Brandon, and staring at the few bars of service on her cell phone, she decided it would be best for Brandon to have Griffin’s support and protection going back to Waldgrave. They hadn’t spoken in more than a month, and they weren’t on good terms. Half reluctantly, she found his number and called it. He didn’t pick up on the first call, so she had to try again.
The second time, he answered.
“Griffin Corbett.”
She wasn’t sure at first what she was supposed to say. It was a lot to tell someone in a phone conversation, and Griffin had been absolutely ripped apart when he found out his deceased mentor, his hero, had lied to him about so much. She took a deep breath and tried to do the best she could. “Griffin, it’s me. I’ve got something to—“
“Lena?” His voice sounded strained, or maybe it was just the static on the line. “Where the hell have you been the last few weeks? I thought you would take this chance to get lost for good.”
“It’s not important. We’ve been on the run. But look, there’s something important I need to tell you, and then I’m going to call Howard—“
“I’m hanging up.” He sounded so calm, but he was still angry; Lena couldn’t believe it. He was such a brat.
“No! You have to send me money to get home, because—“
“Lena, Howard’s—“
“Just shut up and listen, okay! I’m out here in Charleston with a baby, and I’ll be damned if you’re going to leave us out here! This child can make it better for both of us and everyone else. We have things to take care of, Griffin, and I need to get him back to—“ The words caught in her mouth.
She didn’t know how she could have been so stupid. How had she not seen it before? The echoes.
Ava had taken Thomas back to Waldgrave to fix everything.
It hadn’t ended well for either of them or anyone else.
Before she wrenched the phone from her ear, she was fortunate enough to hear Griffin yelling into the silence:
“Stop talking! They’ve been tapping lines for a month now trying to find you, and you need to not be wherever you are now in ten minutes!” He sighed heavily, and she knew the look he had on his face. His next words said it all. “People want you dead, and you need to start running. Now.”
She turned the cell phone off, dropped it on the street and kicked it into a weather drain. She turned around to see Tom, gingerly holding his son in front of a store window display and looking at her with a mix of compassion and worry.
“Bad news?” He asked.
“The worst.” She said, voice shaking. “I have to leave. Now.” She took off in the direction of the car with Tom in tow.
The evening preceding was taking on a new meaning for Lena; everything was clear in hindsight. Every word she’d exchanged with Devin had seemed so natural then, but now she had to wonder if her own parents had held the same conversation before Ava’s flight back to Waldgrave. Aaron, begging her to stay with him, not to go back to Waldgrave because there was nothing left for them there; and Ava, so determined that her son could bring redemption to the world.
Please, we can make this work. He can fix things on his own.
Tom managed to buckle Brandon into his car seat in the back with surprising speed and then hopped into the driver’s seat next to Lena. He looked over at her with a crazed look in his eye. “Where are we going?”
Lena could only stare at him for a moment, processing what he had said. “We? We’re not going anywhere. You’re taking me back to the island, I’m getting my car, and then I’m leaving. You have to keep Brandon…it’s not safe for him where I’m going.”
But Tom only shook his head. “I’m dying. You have to take him because he can’t live the life I’ve lived.”
Lena’s eyes went wide. Hadn’t he listened to anything that she had said? “He can’t live the life I lived either, Tom!”
And she certainly didn’t want him living the life of her poor deceased brother, strangled to death with his Labrador in a small clump of trees on the Waldgrave property. They locked eyes, and all Lena could do to break the stony silence was to look into the back seat, where Brandon was watching them both and becoming ever more agitated as the emotion in the car rose. He was starting to whine, turning his tiny face red and squinty.
Take the baby. Leave the baby. Take the baby…
The fact, in Lena’s mind, was that the poor kid didn’t have a chance. He didn’t have a life of his own—it had all been done before. There was no escape. But before she could make her decision, Tom started the car and pulled onto the street.
<
br /> “Hey!” Lena yelled. “Hey!”
“You’re not going without me. I’m not letting either of you go alone, and I need to know that Brandon is safe. I’m going with you. Now, where do we go?”
“Tom, you can’t…”
But he could. As they turned off onto a main road, she realized he had. Olesia had been preparing for his inevitable departure for weeks; she would know that he left sending her all of his love. Devin would, perhaps, be upset at first, but at least he was happy; she would send word to him as soon as possible. He knew she could take care of herself, and when she didn’t come back, she hoped he would have enough wit to bother hiding her car in the barn with the rest of Olesia’s junk.
“North,” Lena said, “Just drive north. We’ll find a place to stay later.”
“Who’s after us?” Tom asked, as if this would help them decide where to hide.
Lena raised her hands in defeat. “Everyone. Assume it’s everyone. Anyone who looks at you for too long.”
Tom looked over at her.
“Yes.” She responded, her voice hitting a high pitch. “I’m serious.”
As they drew closer to the North Carolina border, the landscape become hillier with more twists in the road. They pulled off of highway 95 at some point and found a smallish motel in a town called Raeford just as dusk fell.
Tom used his credit card to pay for the room, much to Lena’s relief. They probably knew she was paying everything with cash due to the inactivity on her cards; they didn’t know she was traveling with a man named Tom Spinkle.
She didn’t even know who they were, but the tone of voice Griffin had used when he asked her where she had been suggested that something big had happened. Had Rollin taken control of the situation somehow? Most certainly not, or Griffin would be dead by now. The New Faith, then, had come out on top? It was possible, and it would certainly explain why Griffin feared he was being tapped, but Lena had thought she was on good terms with them. It made no sense at all that the Old Faith coming to power would make Griffin so paranoid; if anything, they were his greatest allies.
Unless he had slipped further from favor than she imagined.
She was perplexed. Once in the hotel room, Lena set up her laptop—the only thing she now had besides the contents of her small travel purse and the clothes on her back—as Tom prepared a bottle for Brandon out of the diaper bag. Howard hadn’t emailed her; it had been more than two weeks now. She felt her heart drop as she realized that Griffin had tried to tell her something about Howard. Was he dead? Was that why he had stopped writing?
She suffered a small pang of grief in her heart that her thoughts had immediately gone in that direction, as though the murder of her uncle were a completely normal, natural, expected, and regular event. But what if he really was gone now—shot in the chest by some Old Faith representative volleying for control of Daray’s stronghold at Waldgrave, or poisoned by one of his previous New Faith friends who thought he was standing in the way of progress by violence?
The image of everyone sitting at breakfast, handguns laid out next to the oatmeal and bananas, flashed into her mind. The holsters they wore around Waldgrave when Rollin had been hanging around town rose to the front of her mind, and she could smell the leather and hear the noise the guns made when they were laid down on the wood grain of the table, slightly muffled by the starched linen tablecloth. Howard had assured her that the guns had always been there; they were just more visible in times of war. She wondered who had taken a gun, one that had always been at Council, in that room with him so many times before, and shot Howard with it.
Brandon cooed and Lena jumped in surprise. She brought herself back to reality and fought the impulse to grieve Howard’s passing. She didn’t even know if he was dead, and it was possible that she would never know now—she hadn’t even had the mind to check Kelsey’s phone message before tossing the phone. She couldn’t go back to Waldgrave without knowing what was going on first. She couldn’t find out what was going on without contacting someone. She couldn’t contact someone without letting someone else—probably someone who didn’t have her best interests at heart—know where she was.
Or could she? She knew someone else who had operated in perfect secrecy for several years now, and he always knew what was going on.
Lena wrote a quick email to the address she had for Kelsey; living in the same house, Lena hadn’t even known about Kelsey’s email until she had been shown some threatening emails from Rollin. After the discussion about passwords they had shared, Lena had a higher degree of confidence that the account was secure, and none of the higher families would take a lot of notice of a human-born’s email. While she waited on a bed of nails for the reply, Tom put Brandon down for the night and then went out to do some quick shopping. He came back with food, clothes, and basic toiletries for both adults and what appeared to be a Y2K-size emergency stash of diapers, formula, baby blankets, bottles, and other necessities for Brandon.
An alert tone issued from Lena’s laptop as she helped him move supplies into the room for the night. She dropped her bag onto a bed and ran over to check her email. The email hadn’t come from Kelsey; the tone was wrong. The level of detail suggested that Warren might have written the reply.
DO NOT RESPOND
Old and New Faiths have reached a standstill in the killings. Riveras are leading on one side, Colburns on the other. Jason Rivera seized control of Waldgrave recently, Howard stepped down amicably to avoid splitting interest in the party and says he hasn’t heard from you since November, doesn’t know where you are or what you’re up to. A picture has surfaced of you in what appears to be maternity clothing, and Rivera is using it to bolster a theory that Old Faith are protecting you and that you’ve had the portal all along. Collins and Corbett are under house arrest until you’ve been found, and be warned, there’s a price on the recovery of the child who you confirmed to be male in an earlier phone conversation. Old Faith seems to think the whole situation has been cooked up by Rivera as a means to rally political support for the disbanding of Old Faith households. Many of the Old Faith families seem to think you’re either already dead or in league with Rivera, as you were most recently known to be striking some sort of allegiance with New Faith Representatives.
Rivera seems to be in favor of the reinstatement of your house arrest. BE WARNED that ideas concerning the child are leaning toward disposal.
Disposal? Maternity clothing? Lena’s throat had gone dry and she was suddenly having trouble taking the email seriously; perhaps it was denial. People were going crazy—and it was now blatantly evident that she had made the wrong choice. Tom had forced her to, and now they were undoubtedly going to be forced to travel the world together like her parents, hiding this child, perhaps until Lena’s overwhelming sense of responsibility forced her back to the Council. Perhaps until Tom met his untimely demise, which doubtless was drawing near. It was all happening—again.
*****
Lena suddenly looked over at Tom, checking in on his son sleeping in his carrier, gazing down with those death-stricken eyes. She felt the urge to explain to him; to tell him he needed to take Brandon and leave her here, to go running back to South Carolina, the oysters, the irises, and the cats—and to never go near a train.
But it was too late now; their fates had become intertwined, and the acts that were destined to happen had to be played out. She knew now why Tom was dying. The echoes demanded it.
Tom looked over at her and caught her sad gaze. His smile fell slightly. “More bad news?”
“More of the worst.” Lena replied, trying not to choke up.
He pulled a chair up next to her and sat down. “What’s wrong? I mean, whatever it is, it’s okay. We can fix it. We can make it work.”
Lena shook her head in frustration and sadness and closed the email that had been sitting open on the screen. It was too late. There was no escape from the things that were going happen, because even when she fought, the echoes still found her.
<
br /> “Well,” She began, overcoming the lump that had formed in her throat, “You remember when I said it would be a bad idea if I showed back up with a baby?”
Tom looked down at his knees and nodded a little. “Oh.”
“It’s not that I don’t want him. He’s a beautiful child, and I want him to have the best life he can, and I really want to be there to see it, but I’m afraid it’s just not possible.” Lena wiped a tear away. “This isn’t the world he deserves to live in. I just can’t do it. If you knew what they want to do to him…You have to take him back, Tom. I can’t let him be a part of this.”
Tom took a long time in answering. For a moment, she thought she had been thinking too loudly about the contents of the email, which she never intended to tell Tom about. “I’m sorry, Lena. I’m sorry I dragged you in to all of this. I just wanted him to have a family.”
Through the tears she was holding back, she almost laughed. “If anything, I should be apologizing to you.”
Tom smiled dolefully at her, then got up and turned the bedside lights on and the room lights off. He moved Brandon, still asleep in his carrier, over to the near side of his bed. He fidgeted with Brandon’s blankets for a few moments before laying down on the bed. “I just wanted him to have a family. I was an only child.”
Lena got up and laid down on her own bed. She kept her voice very low to avoid waking Brandon. “I was an only child too.” But then she paused. “Well, actually, I had a brother.”
“Had?” Tom whispered, staring into the ceiling.
“He…he, um…Well, I never really knew him. My mom and my dad separated a long time ago, and my mom took him and my dad took me. And, uh…” Her voice was trembling again. “Uh…my brother died before I got to meet him. Murdered.”
“I’m so sorry…How old were you?”
“Five.” Lena pushed out. “We were both five. We were twins.”
It was a long time before Tom spoke again. When he did, it didn’t help. “What’s your dad like?”