by Jodi Meadows
The sound remained, but the branches, half-dressed with autumn, became motionless.
A square of light fell from my window onto the grass when Sam clicked on the nearest lamp. “What is it?” He stopped at the foot of the bed, yawning.
“They’re watching.” I grabbed my flashlight from the nightstand, gave the tube a few sharp twists, and shone the light toward the woods.
Shadows skittered away, yelping and whining, but they didn’t come closer. When I pulled the beam toward the lab again, the shadows relaxed and resumed their places at the tree line.
“Watching?” Sam touched my shoulder and peered out from behind me. “How many are there?”
“A lot.” I closed the window and pulled the shade. We were probably safe inside the iron building.
Probably. “Do you think any of these are the same sylph that attacked me on my birthday?”
“I don’t know.” Sam clicked off the light. “If they are, why behave differently now?”
Mysteries and more mysteries.
The sylph didn’t leave that night, or the next, or the next. They never moved closer, never threatened or attacked, but they were always there. Watching.
Over the next few weeks, I learned why it had taken Menehem eighteen years to re-create and perfect the results of the first Templedark.
The process of creating and dispersing the poison was a complicated one. Sam and I watched video after video of Menehem explaining different theories and tests to the camera. The hundreds of combinations ran together until one finally gave the response Menehem had been looking for.
Sam and I sat curled on the sofa together, his arm around my shoulders. I had a notebook balanced on my knees so I could write down stray thoughts. The screen, which Menehem had hidden in a wall, showed a summer day with my father bustling about the yard with cans of aerosol poison, which he’d created using a machine in the back of the lab.
“Aerosol,” he explained to the camera for the hundredth time, “has proven to be the most effective delivery system. It allows the hormones to be both solid and suspended midair. For sylph, both corporeal and incorporeal, almost a paradox themselves, fighting them with a substance that behaves the same way seems the most logical.
“The problem has been finding just the right amount of each hormone and timing the exposure, but I believe that I’ve finally found a combination that will work. I started with…”
He droned on for a while, repeating many of the same things he’d said before. Then he ambled toward a large speaker by the building and flipped a switch. Music crackled and settled, and a haunting piano sonata flowed across the small field and toward the nearby creek. Music streamed toward the mountains, filling the entire area with melody.
As they’d done in nearly every other video, sylph appeared in the distance.
Shadows glided toward the speaker, writhing like flames. Tendrils of darkness shot out of them, like hands reaching for the sky. Under the familiar sounds of Sam’s piano playing, the sylph voices rose up to sing along.
I glanced at Sam. “Is that weird? That they like music so much?” As I had, Menehem seemed to have discovered their response to music by accident. Then he’d begun using it as a lure.
“Maybe. Who can tell with sylph?”
Perhaps they thought Menehem had captured one of their own. Would they have cared if Menehem had trapped another sylph?
On the screen, sylph drifted around the yard, ignoring the small canisters placed about. When there were nearly a dozen sylph singing along to the sonata, Menehem pressed another button.
The canisters spewed aerosol, hissing loudly. The sylph ignored it; if these were the same sylph as had been in previous videos, they were used to this part, too. The gas had never done anything to them.
This time, the sylph dropped.
Two or three at first. They twitched and seemed to glance around—how could they glance if they had no eyes?—and then sank into puddles of darkness.
Another sylph shimmered and fell. And another.
Soon, Menehem flicked off the speaker and the field was silent.
“I did it,” he said. “Finally, I did it!” Menehem jumped and whooped, giving me an odd sense of embarrassment for him.
Sam shifted uncomfortably, and I doodled roses in the margins of my notebook while we waited for Menehem to compose himself on the screen.
“It looks like they just fall asleep,” Sam said.
“The music draws them in, and the gas puts them to sleep.” I nodded and leaned forward as Menehem approached one of the sylph puddles. I almost felt bad for them, being experimented on. Sam was right. I didn’t want to hurt them—though these didn’t look like they were hurt, exactly.
Menehem knelt by the nearest sylph and pulled a device from his pocket. “Temperature is abnormally low for a sylph.” He stuck his hand into the sleeping sylph. “It’s warm, but not uncomfortable.”
My heart jumped and sped. “Sam.” Why would anyone put their hand inside a sylph?
“I see it.” He touched my hands, squeezed them. “They’re fine now. Healed completely, remember?”
I nodded, but the sensation of burning wasn’t something I’d ever be able to forget.
As we watched, a couple of sylph twitched and shifted in their sleep. Could sylph dream?
Suddenly, the one Menehem had touched shot into the air, towering over the chemist. Grass sizzled, and the sylph shrieked so loud and high that Sam and I both covered our ears.
Other sylph awoke, equally enraged. Smoke billowed where they burned the grass. They converged on Menehem andAnd they seemed to think about it. Something passed among the sylph. Communication? I couldn’t tell. It was so fast, and they were still keening….
At once, all dozen sylph fled the area, leaving patches of scorched earth behind. Menehem slumped to the ground, an unused sylph egg rolling from his hand. He’d almost been killed.
He’d almost been burned alive, but the sylph decided not to do it.
“What…” I stared at the screen until Menehem soberly got up to declare this portion of the experiment finished. The video stopped. “Did he even realize the sylph chose not to kill him?”
“Hard to say with Menehem.” Sam switched to the next video but didn’t play it yet. “It didn’t last very long, what he did to the sylph. A few minutes at best.”
I checked one of Menehem’s diaries. “This says the initial dose was small. He eventually increased the doses, but they grew resistant.”
Sam nodded. “And the dose he gave to Janan?”
Oh. If it affected both sylph and Janan the same way, then it was logical to assume Janan would develop a tolerance, too. I checked Menehem’s notes, flipping several pages toward the end. “It was a massive dose. At least a hundred times larger than the biggest dose ever given to the sylph.”
“So what he did during Templedark won’t work again.”
I shook my head. “No, looking at the logs, the tolerance grew quickly and exponentially in sylph. If anything were to affect Janan again, it would have to be—I can’t even comprehend. There’d have to be a lot of it, and it would take months to make, even with that machine in the back doing all the work. The delivery would have to be unbelievably enormous.”
“Yeah.” Sam considered for a moment, then touched my wrist. “At least there’s something good in this.”
Was it bad? I wasn’t sure how I felt about it, let alone whether it was good or bad.
“Should anyone accuse you of wanting to attempt another Templedark, we have proof it isn’t possible.”
Newsouls were supposed to be impossible, yet I’d been born.
Getting into the temple should have been impossible, yet I’d been inside.
Poisoning Janan again wasn’t impossible. With a bigger dose and a bigger delivery system, it could be done. I just didn’t know how. Or whether I should.
Inside the temple, Meuric had hinted about something horrible happening on Soul Night: the spring equinox of
the Year of Souls. That threat nipped at my thoughts.
“We still can’t tell anyone about the poison,” I said. “I don’t want the Council—or anyone—to know we came here and looked. They’ll assume the wrong thing. They’ll assume I’m like Menehem, and I’m not.”
“I know.” Sam lurched up from the couch and paced the room, shoulders and back stiff.
After a while of watching him walk ditches in the floor, I asked, “Are you okay?”
“Yes.” He stopped and sighed. “No. Sorry.”
Sorry for saying yes when he didn’t mean it? Or sorry that he wasn’t okay? I waited for him to go on.
“I’ve never gotten involved in disputes. I don’t like them. Even in the beginning, I stayed away from conflict.” Emotions shifted over his face, and he looked at me. “I’m on your side, Ana. Every time.
Before, it was easy to stay out because I didn’t care. I just made music, and no one expected anything more from me. But with you, I do care.”
And by being with me, the controversial newsoul, his life had changed. What he’d been beforenotable for only his music—was gone. Now he was notable for living with, and frequently kissing, the newsoul, and that forced him to take a side. Mine.
“I’m on your side,” he said again. “But I have to admit the idea of being in something is frightening.”
I pushed my notebooks to the sofa and crossed the floor to Sam. His cheeks were warm beneath my palms, and stubble scraped my skin. I wanted to— something. Thank him. Reassure him. Make him know how much I appreciated him and cared about him. Express everything I felt, but nothing that found its way to my tongue felt big enough. So I brushed a kiss over his mouth and stayed silent. His hands tightened on my hips.
Moments spiraled between us, ripe with words unsaid, until finally I pulled away and gathered up my notebooks to work at the table. He’d relaxed a little; that was what I’d wanted.
“What are the sylph?” A book slid from my pile and hit the floor with a loud slap.
“Shadows?” Sam bent and retrieved the book smoothly, and sat across the table from me. “Fire? I’m not sure what you’re asking. They’re just sylph.”
“But they’re—” I dropped to the chair. “Are they like people? Do they think? Have emotions?
Societies?” They seemed like creatures with reason in the videos we’d just watched. They’d made choices.
Choices I didn’t understand.
“I don’t know.” Sam eyed me askance. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m not sure. I mean, we know centaurs live in communities, right? They have language, traditions, and hierarchy. They go on hunts together.”
He nodded.
“And trolls? They’re the same?”
“Different, but yes. They live in communities, too.”
“What about dragons?” I didn’t want to ask him about dragons, all things considered, but I was chasing a point. An idea. A question.
“From what we’ve been able to tell, yes. And rocs nest with a mate and care for their chicks until they’re old enough, like eagles do. Unicorns live in herds. They’re not human, none of them, but they do seem to be more.” He studied me with those dark eyes. “You’re trying to figure out sylph.”
“Aren’t you?” I glanced out the window, where ranks of sylph still guarded the building. “We know so much about everything else surrounding Range, but not sylph. We see them in swarms sometimes, or off by themselves, but we don’t know if they stay with the same group or just join up with any other sylph they meet. We don’t know if they eat, how they think, whether they reproduce. Are there a limited number? We haven’t been able to kill them, but what about other creatures? Centaurs are intelligent. Can they kill sylph?”
Sam just stared at me like I’d grown a second head. “I don’t know. Sylph are all over the world, rather than generally keeping to one region, like we do, or dragons or centaurs or trolls.”
“There are bears and flies all over the world, too, but sylph aren’t like bears or flies.”
“No,” he agreed. “They’re much different.”
“But how? Please tell me you at least understand the questions I’m asking, even if you don’t know the answers.”
“Of course.” Sam frowned, eyebrows drawing together to carve the thinking line. “Why wouldn’t I understand your questions?”
Lightning struck inside my chest. He couldn’t even remember that sometimes he didn’t. It was okay, though. Most people couldn’t remember things about the temple, or Janan, or understand why I asked so many questions. I said gently, “What’s inside the temple, Sam?”
“Nothing. It’s empty.”
“How do you know that? Have you been inside?”
He shook his head, looking confused. “There’s no door.”
My fingers skimmed the silver box I’d taken from Meuric during my trip into the temple. The door device was too dangerous to leave behind. Doors could be created, and the temple wasn’t empty—not completely. I’d stabbed Meuric and left him there, and I’d taken a stack of books from inside the temple; there were still more there.
Sam followed the motion of my hand. “What is that?”
“A key, I think.” I waved his next question away. We’d had this conversation a few times already. He just couldn’t remember. “And in your life before this one, you went north?”
“Yes. There were dragons.” A shudder passed through him.
I wished I hadn’t brought it up.
“But before the dragons, you said you came upon a huge white wall.”
Slowly, he nodded. “There was snow everywhere. The wall was pitted with weather. It seemed familiar, but strange, too.” The haze vanished from his eyes. “We were talking about sylph.”
No, we were talking about why he might not understand my questions.
And knowing what I did about reincarnation, what entity was responsible for it, I could make a pretty good guess as to why Sam—and everyone else—struggled with certain subjects.
Janan didn’t want them to know.
Janan didn’t want them to question.
Janan kept a huge secret in that temple, in those books, and somehow the sylph were connected to it.
I just had to find out what it was—and use it against him.
5
WORDS
AFTER MORE RESEARCH and note consolidation than I could stand, I slumped on the rickety bed to check my SED. It had been chirping with messages all morning; they were from Sarit, asking me to call.
I shifted to the communicator function.
“Ana!” Sarit’s voice squeaked with joy. “What have you been doing all day? I’ve been waiting and waiting.”
I giggled. Sarit was amazing. No other oldsoul would complain about waiting. Everyone else, Sam included, was ridiculously patient. “You know Sam. There’s always more work with him.”
Sam glanced up from the sofa where he was writing in his diary. He looked adorably baffled about why he was getting blamed for something, and I winked.
“Oooh.” Sarit drew out the sound. “Work. I’m sure that’s all you’ve been doing.”
“Well.” I giggled again, remembering earlier when we’d taken a break to cook lunch, and later had to eat burned rice and vegetables because we’d been too busy kissing to remember to stir.
“That’s what I thought.” Sarit laughed. “I can’t wait for you to come home. I want to see the flute and hear the duets. Just the idea is making me wilt.”
“That’s why you’re one of my favorite people.” I leaned back on my pillow. “But tell me about the fifty thousand messages you left. What’s so important?”
“Okay, there are two things. First, did you feel the earthquake?”
“Earthquake? No.” I glanced at Sam, my eyebrow raised. “Did you feel an earthquake?”
He shook his head.
“Neither of us did,” I said to Sarit. “Was it big? Is everyone okay?”
“Oh, yeah.” She sounded br
eezy. “Everyone’s fine. It was small, really. There are always earthquakes in Range, though most are too tiny to feel. But you know how everyone gets. They’re all wishing Rahel were still here; she looked after the geological and geothermal aspects of Range. It just makes people feel safer to have someone like her saying there’s no danger.”
“Ah.” I shifted, hating when anyone mentioned a darksoul. It wasn’t that I wanted people to pretend they’d never been here, but friends’ pain was too sharp. “What was the second thing?”
Her tone lightened. “Well, you remember how you were asking about what happens during a rebirth?”
“Yeah…”
“But no one invited you and you said you felt awkward just showing up?”
“Yes?” After Templedark, several pairings had been approved by the Council; they needed to start getting souls back, and not everyone who’d died that night became a darksoul. Lots would return, like Menehem.
“Lidea was asking about you last night. She wanted to know when you and Sam would be back, because she was hoping you’d be there when she gives birth.”
“Really?” I bounced. “You’re not tricking me so I’ll come back to Heart early, are you?”
“No!” Sarit lowered her voice, as though telling me a secret. “She said she wouldn’t be alive now if it weren’t for you. And she was asking about you, really. Not even Sam, but he’s probably expected if you’re going.”
“Wow. Okay. When is it?”
“They’re thinking it will be just a couple of weeks”—her tone turned sly—“so you should probably come home now.”
I snorted. “I knew there was a catch.”
“And a bribe. Come home and I’ll give you another jar of honey. A bigger jar. I’m sure you’ve run out of the little one by now.”
It was true. “You do know the way to my heart. I’ll tell Sam I can’t pass up an offer like that.”
“Good! Okay, go tell him. See you soon, my little moth!”
“Ew. Really?”