by E. E. Holmes
“Annabelle?” I called tentatively. Given what had happened to me so far, I hardly expected an answer, and so I jumped in surprise when Annabelle’s voice called back at once. “Hey, Jess! I’ve got what you’re looking for right here! It just came in!”
“What?” I replied.
“I’m in the back room!” she called again. “Come on back!”
Curious, I followed the sound of her voice around some shelves and to the doorway that led into the back room. I couldn’t see beyond it, because it was hung with a vintage beaded curtain. I turned and stared at the door behind me. Instinct told me that that was the door that would lead me out of the vision, and that it was safe to pass through the beaded curtain. I swung the tinkling strands aside and stepped through.
Annabelle had her back to me as she rummaged through a large cardboard box on her desk. At the sound of the beads she turned to look over her shoulder. Her face was smudged with dust, but she smiled.
“It’s on the table,” she said, pointing. Her collection of bracelets jangled like an out-of-tune piano.
I let the beads swing down behind me, unsure whether I should believe my eyes. Annabelle looked . . . fine. I scanned her for signs of injury—a smear of blood, anything. “Annabelle, are you okay?”
She pulled a voodoo doll out of the box and examined it critically. “Of course, I’m okay. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“But . . . what are you doing here?”
Annabelle took her eyes off the doll for a moment to laugh at me. “Is that a trick question? Where else would I be? This is my shop!”
“But,” I began, taking another step toward her. “You’re . . . you’re okay, aren’t you?”
Annabelle put the doll down now and eyed me beadily. “Jessica Ballard, what in the goddess’s name are you talking about? It seems like I should be asking you if you are okay, not the other way around.”
I frowned. She obviously didn’t know what I was talking about. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. What did you say you had for me?”
“What you asked me for. It’s in the box,” Annabelle said, turning back to her work.
“What did I ask you for?” I asked, confused.
Annabelle sighed a long, aggravated sigh. “Jessica, what did you come all the way here for?”
“I came here for answers. I want to know . . .” I hesitated, but decided I could tell her here, in this form. She wasn’t real. She was a manifestation of my own fears and doubts. I wouldn’t be frightening the real Annabelle by telling this dream Annabelle about the drawing. “I want to know what the drawing means—the one that I keep drawing while I’m asleep. It’s about you, Annabelle. I’m really scared that something awful is going to happen to you, and I’m Rifting so I can try to prevent it.”
Annabelle listened to all of this with a completely impassive face, nodding along as though I were simply reciting some phone messages or a grocery list. When I had finished, she simply smiled again.
“I understand, Jessica. Just look in the box!”
Bewildered, I edged through the boxes and baskets and teetering piles of unshelved merchandise until I reached the table under the window. With slightly trembling fingers, I pulled the cardboard flaps apart and looked inside.
The whole world seemed to lurch, tipping me headfirst right into the box, which now looked less like a box and more like a bottomless pit of doom. I was falling, tumbling into blackness. Before I could do more than scream, however, I landed, upright and uninjured, in a chair.
I opened my eyes, sucking a breath into my empty lungs, and looked around me. I was sitting in the middle of the Grand Council Room at Fairhaven, all set up for the Airechtas with its rows and rows of chairs, and the velvet-draped podium up on the platform. It was utterly silent, and completely empty except for me.
I sat for a few tense moments, waiting for something to happen, but when nothing did, I decided that the room was waiting for me to do something. I cleared my throat, tasting the sweet residue of the Rifting herbs, and called out, “Hello? Is anyone here?”
No one answered. My voice didn’t even echo, as it should have done in such a cavernous space. It barely seemed to reach a few inches beyond my face.
“I want to know about Annabelle. I want to know about my drawing of her, and what it means.”
Still nothing. What was I doing wrong? Didn’t I have any Spirit Guides?
Unbidden, Fiona’s voice came into my mind. “Your visions and your understanding of them will never become any clearer if you don’t own them. You must take ownership, Jess. You must embrace it.”
But could I? Was I too scared, too selfish to do it? I thought I might be. God, why couldn’t they have given this gift to someone else? Someone who was worthy of it? Someone who could do great things with it? All I seemed able to do was run from it.
I looked down at my hands and found I was holding a crumpled-up ball of paper. Fingers trembling, I unwrapped it, already knowing what I would see. It was the drawing of Annabelle, looking down at her own body.
And I couldn’t just let it happen.
I looked up again and called out, “I’m a Seer. I’ve made a prophecy. I need to understand what it means. Please help me to understand what it means.”
Something had changed. This time my voice reverberated powerfully around the room, breaking off and multiplying, so that there might have been a hundred of me, all shouting over each other. Over and over the words bounced back to me:
I am a Seer.
I am a Seer.
I am a Seer.
I caught a slight movement out of the corner of my eye. I turned to look. Someone was now sitting in one of the chairs in the very front row. I could only see her back, but there was something familiar about her. A long thick braid of flyaway silver hair hung down her back.
“Bernadette. Bernadette Ainsley.”
Her name came to my lips before I had consciously recognized her. She did not turn or answer me. She simply nodded her head, sending rippling glimmers of light through her hair as the candlelight wavered across it.
I stood up slowly and edged my way across the row of chairs and up the aisle. I wasn’t scared to approach her. I knew that she couldn’t hurt me here in this dreamscape, and since I had last seen her, I had learned that she, too, had been a Seer. Another Seer. I had never spoken to one before.
I stepped around the last row of chairs and chose one to sit in, leaving a few chairs between myself and Bernadette, just in case. She was staring up at the Council benches, but didn’t really seem to see them. Her eyes had a glazed, far-off look. As I watched her, trying to decide what to say, a tear slipped down her face and clung, glimmering, to her chin.
“Bernadette,” I said again, very softly.
“Yes,” she said, her voice barely more than a whisper.
“Are you here to help me? Can you help me to understand this prophecy?”
Bernadette laughed a tiny, bitter laugh. “Understand? The understanding of my own prophecy eluded me until it was too late. What makes you think I can understand yours?”
“I asked for help and you appeared,” I pointed out.
“I came to warn you, not to help you,” Bernadette said.
“To warn me? About what? Is it the drawing? Do you know what it means?” I asked quickly, my words tumbling over each other in my eagerness.
“Not about the drawing. About your gift.”
“What about my gift?” I asked.
“If you embrace it, you are a fool. It will destroy you, just as it destroyed me,” Bernadette hissed, turning a fierce, burning look on me.
“You don’t know that,” I said. “Many Seers who have embraced their gifts have gone on to help lots of people. Your daughter Fiona told me that.”
Bernadette cackled. “You’re going to take the word of my mad artist daughter?”
“Your daughter has been a good mentor to me,” I said defensively. “And I’d be more likely to take her word than yours, or did you forget that you onc
e tried to stab me?”
The wild smile that had accompanied Bernadette’s laughter faded. “I thought only of protecting my sisterhood.”
“And that’s all I’m thinking of, too,” I said. “I know you think that I’m a danger to you, but I’m not. I’m just trying to find a way to live with this legacy I’ve been given. So, if you can help me do that, I would really appreciate it.”
Bernadette laughed again, but the laugh was half a wild sob. “It will break you, Jessica Ballard. Do you hear me? It will leave you broken.”
“Don’t you dare tell me about broken,” I cried, my voice cracking. “I know all about broken. I’ve been broken. Hell, I’ve thrived broken. You aren’t going to scare me away from this. Now, tell me what I need to know. Please, Bernadette.”
We stared into each other’s eyes. I watched a fierce battle rage behind her glaze of tears.
“The drawing. Your prophecy. That is how you will keep your promise.”
I frowned. “What? What does that mean? What promise?”
“That is how you will keep your promise to the Walker.”
“But—”
Bernadette cut me off with a desperate, feral cry. She leapt out of her seat and drew from beneath the folds of her clan robe a long, curved dagger, the same dagger she had once tried to kill me with. She raised it over her head, all reason and meaning gone from her eyes.
“No, Bernadette, no! Please, don’t!” I cried, slipping sideways off of my chair and scrambling back from her, arms raised protectively in front of me.
The dagger flashed down through the air, but no pain came. I opened my eyes to see Bernadette still standing in front of me, the handle of the dagger protruding from her own abdomen. A deep scarlet stain was blossoming across her robes.
“No! Bernadette, no! What have you done?” I cried, leaping to my feet and running to her just in time to wrap my arms around her as she sank to the floor.
“Broken things,” Bernadette whispered. “Broken things must be discarded.”
“Don’t say that!” I cried, my own eyes blurring with tears now. “You aren’t broken. No one is broken beyond repair.”
“Broken . . .” Bernadette whispered. “Broken things . . . set free.”
An indefinable something was snuffed out behind her eyes, leaving them as vacant and unseeing as the windows of an abandoned house.
“It’s all right, Jessica,” a voice said.
I looked up and cried out. Annabelle was standing there, smiling at me. “It’s all right. Don’t be afraid. This is how you keep your promise.”
In horror, I looked back at Bernadette, but she was gone, replaced by Annabelle, motionless upon the ground.
“Oh my God, no! Annabelle, no!”
With a cry, I grasped at the place the knife should have been, determined to pull it from her, to reverse the wound, but it was gone. I looked wildly around and saw it lying instead on the ground beside Annabelle’s limp, outstretched hand.
“What the hell is this supposed to mean?” I shouted angrily at to spirit Annabelle, who was smiling so serenely down on me. “I’m supposed to let you kill yourself so that Irina can escape? That’s insane. I would never do that!”
“All the answers you need are in front of you, Jessica. You must look. You must see it. This is how you keep your promise, Jessica,” she repeated.
“So, I’ll break my damn promise!” I yelled. “I won’t sacrifice you for her, Annabelle.”
“Jessica, you must wake up now.”
“I’m telling you, I won’t let this . . . what did you say?”
Annabelle smiled again. “I said you must wake up now. Wake up.”
“No, I need to know—”
“Wake up.”
And before I could say another word, before I could beg another detail from her, the door behind me flew open and, like a leaf in a windstorm, I was plucked from the ground and tossed into the air, whirling and flailing, back through it to the harsh reality of consciousness.
21
Unwelcome Visitor
I WAS FALLING, falling again through a vast and airless darkness. As I fell, voices swelled around me, as though I were following their call to the place where I would land.
“Jess! Jessica!”
“Northern Girl, wake up!”
“Come on, come out of it now!”
A group of frightened voices grew louder and louder around me, until they were a ringing chorus of fear pounding my eardrums. At last, with a thud and a gasp, I arrived back in the clearing. I felt my body twitch against the cold ground, and I shot bolt upright, my eyes flying open. I could barely see. My vision was blurred with dizziness and a haze reminiscent of having just woken suddenly from a deep sleep.
“You think she’s still in it?” Jeta murmured to Mairik, who shook his head.
“Nah, she’s back. She wouldn’t be able to see us if—”
“Look at her eyes,” Mina whispered. “Do our eyes look like that when we do it?”
“Jess,” Flavia said in the overly cautious, gentle tones of someone trying to talk someone off the edge of a cliff. “Jess, you’re still feeling the after-effects of the Rifting. Don’t say anything else, okay? Just drink this.”
She held a pewter mug out to me, which trembled slightly in her fingers. Without arguing, I took it and threw back the contents in one gulp. I wasn’t sure what it was, but it burned on the way down, and sent sensation buzzing into my numb extremities. I closed my eyes and tested my senses. Everything seemed to be wired the right way again. My fingers felt hard, cold earth, not scents. My ears heard the murmurs of frightened voices, not colors. I opened my eyes again, rubbing them vigorously until the blurriness cleared away.
The first thing that came into focus was my own arm. The artwork that Jeta had painted upon it was completely gone, as though it had never been there. I looked at my other arm and saw, with a start, that a single rune remained in the center of my wrist. I rubbed at it, but it did not fade.
“All of the artwork should be gone,” said a voice, and I looked up to see Jeta sitting nearest me, staring down in fascination at the rune still marking my wrist. “It disappears—the magic gets used up along your journey. I’ve never seen one stay behind before.”
“But I didn’t choose to go through the door,” I said. “Someone was calling me back. Someone woke me up.”
“That was me,” Flavia said. “We all finished ages ago. But you were still in it, and then suddenly you were shouting and flailing, so . . .” She shrugged apologetically.
“Even so, this should have faded as soon as you woke up,” Jeta said, her voice raw with wonder. “And I can’t even wipe it off now.” She was rubbing at the mark, but it resisted her attempts to remove it.
“I don’t recognize that rune. What does it mean?” I asked her.
She lifted her eyes to mine. “To set free.”
Broken things. Broken things set free.
My heart stuttered in my chest. My mouth went dry. I focused on the faces around me, one by one: the Traveler kids, their expressions ashen and confused; Finn, his eyebrows drawn together in a severe line over his narrowed eyes; even Laini, who had deemed the situation interesting enough to descend from her perch in her tree and investigate. And . . .
“Annabelle!”
The name escaped my lips in a cry so shrill that everyone around me fell back in alarm. I was no longer Rifting, but there she was, sitting right in front of me beside Fennix, flickering light and shadow from the dying fire playing across her worried features.
“Yes, Jess. It’s me,” she said warily.
“Why are you . . . what are you doing here?” I gasped, backing away from her in a frantic crab crawl, sending my bag and my coat skittering across the dirt, until my back hit a tree trunk and I could go no further.
“I . . . was invited by the Traveler Council,” Annabelle said slowly, her face full of concern at the way I was behaving.
“But why? Why now?” I whispered.
“I’ve been in touch with them since we were here three years ago. I’ve been trying to reconnect with my history, and I wanted to . . . Jess, why are you looking at me like that?” Annabelle asked in exasperation. “What is wrong with you?”
“Me? Don’t worry about me!” I cried. “It’s you! You! You . . . you have to get out of here!” I struggled to my feet.
“Jess, calm down—” she began.
“I will not! I will not calm down! You haven’t seen what I’ve . . .” I scrambled to my feet, but had to lean against the tree because my knees felt like jelly. I turned a desperate gaze on Finn. “Finn, please. Get her out of here. Take her somewhere, anywhere else!”
Finn took a tentative step toward me, reaching out a hand. “Jess, take some deep breaths. You’ve only just regained consciousness. You need to take a breath so that you can process what you—”
“No, Finn, no! You need to get her out of here! Annabelle, please just get out of here! It’s not safe for you here!”
Annabelle didn’t move, though her expression shifted from bewilderment to fear. It was Flavia who spoke next, her voice calm and soothing.
“Jess, why don’t you come with me,” she said gently.
“What?” I snapped.
“Come with me. Come into the Scribes’ wagon. Let’s get you warmed up, and record your Rifting. You’ve evidently been on a wild ride, and something you saw frightened you. Let’s step back. Let’s understand it. You can talk with Annabelle when you’re feeling more collected.”
“No . . . but I . . .” I said weakly. My legs were shaking like mad now, and I fought to stay upright.
“That’s an excellent idea,” Finn said firmly. “Some warmth, some rest, and some interpretation.”
I glared at him, betrayal welling up inside me. “Finn! You know what I’m talking about! You need to get her out of here!”
Annabelle opened her mouth, undoubtedly to ask what the hell we were talking about, but Finn silenced her with a look. He turned back to me. “Jess, do you trust me?”