Alight: The Peril

by K. C. Neal

  “Ang?” I whispered. “Can you hear me?”

  She grunted, and her head bobbed forward. I gave Aunt Dorothy a silent, pleading look as tears overflowed my eyelids and spilled down my face.

  Mason joined us, concern lining his face. “I followed the guy across the meadow but lost him in the trees. Is Angeline going to be okay?”

  “Give her a moment,” my great-aunt said, her voice uncharacteristically gentle.

  “What happened?” Ang mumbled. She rested her temple against my shoulder.

  “You fell and hit your head.” I tried to keep my voice from wavering, but I was so relieved to hear her speak, a fresh wave of tears filled my eyes.

  “Yeah, really hurts.”

  “I think from now on, we must make sure to have both Guardians present for our drills,” Aunt Dorothy said, her eyelids lowered.

  Good. I didn’t want to take any chances like this again. I wanted to push her for more of an explanation about the drill, because that wasn’t really an answer, but anger at Sophie flared through me. She’d promised to come to our drills and to show up in every way that we needed her to, and she’d already failed us. Ang would probably be okay right now if Sophie hadn’t bailed.

  When Ang assured us she was steady enough to stand up, we all trudged toward one of the picnic tables on the beach. She stumbled once, and Mason scooped her up and carried her the rest of the way. In my concern over her, I’d completely forgotten to check on him, but he looked unharmed by the attack.

  So what did that guy do to you, anyway? I asked. Mason and I sat next to Ang.

  Mason ran a hand through his wavy hair. I don’t know, but it felt like when the old fridge in the garage came ungrounded and I grabbed the metal handle. Not painful, exactly, but very unpleasant. Like paralysis.

  Huh, I wonder if there are people or things out there that could actually do that to you, or if it was just something for the drill?

  Not sure, but I want to find out, too. It was awful, lying there powerless to help you. His hand brushed the small of my back, and I leaned into him for a moment.

  Then I remembered Sophie. I dug my phone from my purse and called her, but she didn’t answer. No response when I reached out through our link, either. My irritation mounted, and even Aunt Dorothy realized it was best to call it quits for the day.

  I made Mason ride with Ang because I didn’t want her taking her mom’s car alone, and I told them to meet me at Aunt Dorothy’s. I parked the Buick in the garage, and moments later, Ang pulled into the driveway. She took me and Mason back to my house.

  In my room, I built a nest of blankets and pillows for Ang on the bed, and brought her some juice and Advil. She looked much better, and even the scrape on her face had faded. Aunt Dorothy had tucked a couple handfuls of healing flowers into my pockets to give Ang later, so I pulled some out and made her hold them while she rested.

  I paced around my room, straightening my desk and putting away clothes, my irritation mounting.

  “I can’t believe she stood us up,” I seethed. “How is this ever going to work?”

  “Want me to talk to her?” Ang asked.

  “Sure, if you think you can make a dent in her stupid, stubborn brain,” I said.

  My phone chimed, and I dug it out of my bag and answered.

  “Hi, Mom,” I said. “How’s Brad doing?”

  “Not so well.” Her voice held all the fear and sadness I’d been dreading ever since my brother went into remission, and my heart began a slow, sickening descent in my chest. “I’m taking him to the hospital in Danton.”

  I could barely focus on her words as she explained the tests he needed, the conversations with the doctor at the clinic. I could think of nothing but the image of my brother lying helpless in a stark room, putrid black fog leaking from his mouth as he begged me for help.

  Now I understood what the vision meant. Some unseen evil had escaped into Tapestry and sought out my brother. And I knew what medical tests hadn’t yet confirmed: his cancer had returned.

  || 17 ||

  ANG RUBBED MY SHOULDER and Mason held my hand. They both tried to comfort me with soft words, but all I could do was stare numbly at the floor. Mom had instructed me to wait for Dad to come home from the café, and then he and I would drive to Danton and meet her and Bradley. I told Ang and Mason about my vision of my brother, how I was sure it had been a premonition of his illness returning, and then I lay curled into a ball on my bed, a nightmarish merry-go-round of thoughts playing in my head. Bradley sick . . . Sophie deserting us . . . Ang’s head slamming into the tree . . . Harriet lurking in the shadows.

  I’d been incredibly naïve to think that as long as Harriet didn’t attack the four of us, and if we kept an eye on the convergence, everything would be okay. If something from the hypercosmic realm had already invaded Brad’s body, without any of us seeing it coming, what else could we expect next? And summer solstice was barely more than a month away. Was it already too late?

  Mason called Aunt Dorothy to tell her about Bradley and find out if she had any idea how this had happened, and what, if anything, we could do. I tried to follow his end of the conversation.

  Someone knocked on my bedroom door, and I sat up, hoping my dad was home early.

  “Come in,” I called.

  The door swung open, and Sophie let herself in.

  “The front door was unlocked, so I just came down,” she said.

  I glared at her, waiting.

  “What’s going on?” she asked, frowning as she picked up on the morose mood of the room. Then she focused on my face and blinked a couple of times. “Geez, Corinne, you look really awful. What’s wrong?”

  I hardly knew where to begin. Anger welled up like a tidal wave inside me. I kept my eyes on Sophie and pointed at Ang.

  “First of all, Ang got hurt because you weren’t there today. You promised you’d be dedicated to this now, to us. And you flaked out. You don’t get to pick and choose when to participate, Sophie. Where have you been this whole time? And if you’d been with us, you’d know why I’m so upset. Brad is sick, and Mom is taking him to the hospital in Danton.”

  Her face fell for a second when I mentioned my brother, but then the haughty mask she’d worn the last five years obscured her initial reaction.

  “Just because you’re Pyxis doesn’t mean you can control everyone else.” She narrowed her eyes and leaned toward me. “I’m not going to jump when you snap your fingers, and you’d better accept that. Besides, you didn’t have to do the drill without me. Maybe you should have stopped it, all-powerful Pyxis. If anyone here is responsible for what happened to Angeline, it’s you.”

  Silence seemed to pressurize the room.

  “Get out.” I was sweating with the effort it took to restrain myself from springing from the bed and throttling her neck. “Now.”

  “I wouldn’t stay if you paid me.” She turned on her heel, her hair whipping out in an auburn curtain behind her, and stomped out of the house. I buried my face in my hands, my anger fading back to worry about my brother.

  “She’s wrong,” Ang said. “It wasn’t your fault. No one blames you, Corinne.”

  “She’s probably right, though. I should have stopped it.” Before Ang could respond, I looked up at Mason. “What did Aunt Dorothy say?”

  He hesitated and licked his dry lips. “She thinks you’re right about Brad. But she doesn’t think it was a breach in the convergence. That’s good, I guess. She’s pretty sure it has something to do with Harriet. Aunt Dorothy suspects that she’s targeting your brother to distract you.”

  “So what’s stopping us from busting down Harriet’s door and, I don’t know, knocking her unconscious?” I asked.

  “Aunt Dorothy says that short of killing her, which is obviously out of the question—unfortunately—there’s not a lot we can do to permanently stop her. If Harriet is physically unconscious, she still has access to the hypercosmic realm.”

  I slumped. “I guess that makes sense.
Maybe Ione, the Rome Pyxis, will come up with something that will help us control her.”

  I heard footfalls upstairs, and a moment later, Dad appeared in the doorway, his face pale and drawn. He nodded to Mason and Ang.

  “Ready to go?” he asked me.

  “Yeah,” I said. I stood to gather my bag and jacket, and Dad turned and headed back upstairs.

  Ang wrapped her arms around me. “Text me as soon as you hear anything.”

  When Mason pulled me to his chest, I almost lost it. I buried my face in his sweatshirt and inhaled the smell of his soap.

  It’s going to be okay. We’ll figure out how to help Brad. Don’t worry about everything else. We’ll find a way to take care of all of it.

  I remembered Zane pulling me back from the grip of Harriet’s influence. Maybe he could help us? But it was nearly winter solstice in Perth and he’d have his own union and convergence to attend to.

  Tilting my chin up with his fingers, Mason rested his forehead against mine for a second. When he kissed me, I wanted to melt into the warmth of his lips and forget this entire day.

  Mason and Ang went home, and Dad and I got into the café delivery van and headed toward the highway to Danton. The van smelled faintly of French bread, and my stomach gurgled a little.

  “I brought a sandwich for you,” Dad said, and reached behind my seat to produce a paper bag.

  “Thanks, you read my mind.” I gave him a grateful smile. “Heard anything from Mom?”

  “Brad is checked in and they’re going to draw blood,” he said. “I told her we were on our way.”

  I wondered how my dad would react if he knew about my premonition, Harriet’s possible connection to Bradley’s illness, or my responsibility in all of it. It struck me that if Dad had a sister, this scenario might be a whole lot different. I might not even be Pyxis yet. Maybe my imaginary aunt could have stopped Harriet.

  Mile markers and trees whipped by, and my body weighed me down like a block of stone, as if I had a private zone of extra gravity that pressed me to my seat with suffocating force. Propping my cheek against my fist, I let my eyelids close. I needed . . . escape.

  When I opened my eyes, I could barely make out the cove through all the sparkling filaments surrounding me. I lifted my arm, trailing my hand through them and allowing them to slide over my skin, feeling the tiny vibrations as I touched them. I tried to remember how Zane and I had floated through the threads of subconscious, but my stubborn feet remained planted on the ground.

  I thought about my brother. What it would be like for him to find out his illness had returned? I imagined the pain that must be gripping my parents’ hearts and weighing down every breath as they hoped their son would be spared another nightmare year of treatment . . . or worse. I tried to picture what my family would be without my brother. Tears built up through my chest, gripped my throat, and overflowed from my eyes.

  “Need to get away, Pyxis?” A deep voice drifted from my right, quiet but resonant, like notes plucked on a guitar.

  I turned to Zane, wiping my wet cheeks with my fingers. “I didn’t think you’d come. Winter solstice. . . .” I was too tired to finish the sentence.

  “My union can spare me here and there for a while yet.” Warmth and concern gave his face a vulnerability I hadn’t seen before.

  He offered his hand, and I placed my damp fingers against his warm palm. He held my hand at chest height, poised as if we were partners standing ready for the opening notes of a ballroom dance, and I stared into his ice-blue eyes as my feet lost contact with the ground. Mason’s presence in my mind faded, but before I could feel anxious at his absence, Zane was there.

  I don’t know how to do this, how to float, I said to him. Can you teach me?

  I could. But then you wouldn’t need me here. He lowered his hand that held mine, drawing us closer together.

  That’s true, I said. If I weren’t so exhausted, so scared, I might have blushed. But I didn’t have the energy for self-consciousness.

  As we drifted deeper into the sea of fine threads, I trained my gaze on his eyes to keep vertigo at bay. Zane’s face was my only point of reference in this undulating cloud.

  He held my gaze, unblinking. His eyes softened, and I could almost see him letting his guard down. I held my breath, remembering our last encounter, his focused expression just before he turned the conversation away from what he was going to tell me.

  Then he quirked an eyebrow, the one with the bar pierced through it. And just like that, he masked himself again. I let out my breath silently.

  Want to listen to one of them? Zane asked, a tiny smile turning up one corner of his mouth.

  We can do that?

  He reached out with his free hand, catching a filament between two fingers and letting it lie across his palm. His skin began to glow white, and a faint blue spark traveled the length of the thread.

  Touch it. Gently, now, he instructed.

  I brushed my index finger across his palm, and when I contacted the filament, a dozen images and thoughts burst into my mind, passing almost too quickly to comprehend. A scruffy brown terrier wagging its tail, a view out of an airplane window, a pile of textbooks on a desk, an old man with a newspaper. . . . Images whipped through my mind’s eye in a fraction of a second.

  What is it? What am I seeing?

  That’s a direct line into someone’s subconscious, Zane said. He let the filament slip from his fingers and blend into the cloud around us.

  That’s amazing, I said, and I gazed into the threads with a new sense of wonder. Each one was someone’s mind, their thoughts and memories stored away. I thought of my grandmother, my parents, Brad, Mason, Angeline . . . each person I knew, reduced to a fine strand of gossamer. Really, what more were we than our thoughts and memories? Our bodies faded and failed us, but all of our experiences, our memories, all of the love in our lives, couldn’t be contained by our mortal forms.

  Competing emotions swelled in the center of my chest, and my body couldn’t seem to decide whether to cry for the pain and uncertainty or laugh for the love. I closed my eyes for a moment, and let the vertigo sweep through me.

  Deep thoughts there, Pyxis, Zane said. He drew me to him, one hand outstretched and holding mine, in an almost formal posture. My heart jumped at his closeness, and a shiver crept down my back. His voice in my mind lowered to a barely detectable wisp of words. There are two full generations of power within you, one for your own, and one for the latent generation before yours. You have more within you than you know. He paused and swallowed, and then his lips parted a little. I want nothing more than to be there when you discover who you really are . . .

  His words scared me and thrilled me all at once. I looked into his eyes and suddenly wished, too, that he could be the one to take this journey with me. I longed for the reassurance of his experience and knowledge. I was tired of flailing and worrying. How much easier all of this would be, if only. . . .

  “Corinne, we’re here.” My dad’s voice came to me from a distance, and I squeezed my eyes shut, resisting. But I knew I must return to my body, to the world and my brother, who needed me.

  Dad and I locked the van and walked in silence through the main entrance of the hospital.

  || 18 ||

  THE BLEACH AND MEDICINE SMELL of the hospital was faint, but enough to bring a wave of dread that poured through me. I’d had enough of this smell when Bradley was sick the first time. Walking down the gray linoleum hallways was like a bad dream, a remnant of a memory I’d be happy to forget.

  In a room, Brad lay hooked up to an IV, and Mom sat on the edge of a chair pulled close to his bed. He saw us first, and raised his fingers in greeting. He didn’t look unwell, aside from the dark rings under his eyes. I watched him over Mom’s shoulder as she embraced me.

  As my parents talked about what the doctors did and didn’t know, I sat on the edge of Brad’s bed, next to his thigh. I gave him a tiny smile. “Hey, how’re you doing?”

  “Okay.”
His voice was soft, but not weak. “Trying to keep Mom from freaking the eff out.”

  I nearly smiled, and I glanced over at my parents. When my gaze returned to Bradley, he’d closed his eyes. I hesitated a moment, and then I reached out with my mind, a tentative probe, down to his chest. I reached into his body the way I’d done with the black cloud in our first drill in the meadow. I searched for something, anything, that might let me know what to do or understand what was wrong with him. I closed my eyes and reached more energetically into the center of his chest, sensing something familiar. It was lodged just under the lower part of his rib cage, on the right side. It had the same putrid, malevolent feel as the dark fog. When I tried to probe it, Bradley drew a convulsive breath.

  “Does it hurt?” I asked, quiet, so only he would hear.

  He nodded, and his face pinched.

  I pulled back a little, skirting the edges of the thing that did not want me manipulating it. I was tempted to try using a blend of influences, but what if I hurt him, instead? I tried to memorize the feel and vibration of the foreign presence within him. Maybe Aunt Dorothy could help me find some blooms in the meadow that could help him.

  A willowy, blonde female doctor about my parents’ age came in and started talking to them about white blood cell counts. I formed a calming swirl of influences and pushed just a bit of it to Bradley, and he sighed a deep, slow breath.

  Dad and I needed to get back to Tapestry because I had school in the morning and he had to open the café. We left a bag containing changes of clothes, books, a blanket, and a few other items for Mom and Bradley, and left them to drive home.

  In the van, I texted an update to Ang, and she sent back a sweet, sympathetic message.

  I think I can help him, but I’m afraid of hurting him, I said to Mason.

  So the cancer is back?

  My breath caught in my throat. Pretty sure. They’re going to do more tests. A tear slid down my cheek, and I dabbed at it with my sleeve.

  So sorry, Corinne. We will find a way to fight it.

  It was late by the time we got back to Tapestry, and the house was too still that night without Mom and Bradley. Exhaustion rendered my mind numb and my limbs heavy and useless, but when I went to bed I couldn’t sleep.