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Insidious

Page 28

by Dawn Metcalf


  “You made an appointment for tomorrow morning,” Stef said, pulling out of the space and driving onto the road.

  “I know,” Joy said, shoving the box back into the glove compartment. “You’ll have to keep Dad busy, and I’ll be back before you know it.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” Stef said, turning the wheel. “I’m not going to let you go anywhere alone!”

  “It’ll only take a moment,” Joy said, unzipping her bag. “And, besides, you want to see Dmitri, don’t you?” She lifted up the glow stick and waggled it in front of his face.

  Stef opened his mouth, closed it and scowled. “You’re living dangerously.”

  “Not me! Remember? No Stupid,” Joy said, only half joking. “I promise I won’t go alone.”

  He raked his hand through his hair. “How long did you say Ink was unavailable?”

  “I don’t know.” She wished that she knew, but speaking wishes would be a lie.

  “Then who’s going with you?”

  “I’ll find someone,” Joy said, pulling out her phone and swiping it on. She hoped Ink would show up by then, but just in case, she’d better have a contingency plan. She was sure Graus Claude wouldn’t be happy if she insulted his tailor by missing her appointment. Even if he were pleading his case behind bars, Joy suspected that this was one of those things that was considered an unpardonable offense. Etiquette and decorum, she thought as she quick-typed a message with her thumbs.

  Can anyone come with me to GC’s tailor, 5am EST? Have an appt I can’t miss. Camping at Lake James State Park, site 11. Help?

  Hitting Send to the Cabana Boys was like a group shout-out. Joy was confident that one of them would be able to come, or maybe get a message to Inq. Whatever Invisible Inq might feel about her right now, Joy was her best chance at getting her mother out of the Bailiwick and bringing the King and Queen home. At least, she hoped that was still the case. Joy dropped her phone into her bag.

  “Got a ride?” Stef asked.

  “A sweet one,” Joy said, thinking of Enrique’s invisible Ferrari. Unfortunately, it didn’t have an auto-retrieval option. Maybe she could install an upgrade? She checked herself in the mirror as they took another corner. “I should be getting a callback soon.”

  “Good enough for me,” he said, pulling over by a copse of trees. Joy doubted that Stef would be so easily appeased if he hadn’t been so distracted. He snagged the keys and popped the doors. “Get out.”

  Joy frowned. “Manners?”

  “Get out, please,” Stef said and shut the door. Glancing around, he checked the road. He’d doubled-backed and turned around, making sure there was no one on the trail. Satisfied, Stef pushed into the brambles, climbing up the hillside with eager, steady strides. Joy grabbed her things and followed, remembering their instructions were to go deep into the trees. Unfortunately, she was still wearing her flip-flops. She wasn’t eager to go bushwhacking uphill.

  “Stef?” she called out.

  “I found a clearing,” he said through the maze of trunks and leaves. He waved for her to follow. “Come on up.”

  She put a foot on the slippery incline. “Now who’s living dangerously?” she muttered.

  “Hurry up!”

  Grumbling, Joy grabbed a thin sapling and hauled herself upward, picking her way up the slope in foam footgear. She stubbed her toes, scratched her arm and got rocks in her flip-flops. She was close to swearing as she crested the rise, muddy and scuffed, feeling none of the energy she should have while slogging through the earth—all she really felt was pestered and damp. Stef held out a hand to her, which she took, and he yanked her onto even footing. There was a downed tree with mushrooms growing beneath it and mosses eating the bark to crumbly rot. It smelled rich and ripe—death and life together. Joy sat down and inspected her toenail. Stef stood impatiently over her.

  “You’re fine.”

  “Give me a minute,” Joy said, holding the glow stick in her palm. The fluid sloshed around inside its hard, plastic shell as she dug a chunk of wood out from under her nail. Her brother looked anxiously out in the green. He took off his glasses and wiped them clean. His smile was gone. The corner of his mouth twitched.

  “What is it?” Joy said, looking around. She knew that there were Folk here in the preserves, where their magic remained untouched. Kestrel lived in a place like this. And the not-so-squirrels. And things like Briarhook. She wondered if Stef had seen something. She wasn’t used to being around others who had the Sight.

  “It’s nothing,” Stef said.

  “Stef—”

  He shook his head. “Just do it.”

  What went unsaid was Please!

  Joy snapped the glow stick, shook it and watched blue light fill the runes. The glow in her palm grew stronger, pushing beyond the confines of the clearing—tracing every cord of bark, every vein on every leaf, every broken twig in sharp neon light. The beacon’s orb enveloped them, a wide globe stamped through space, welcoming them back to that distant forest in the heart of the Grove.

  Stef stepped forward as if mesmerized. Joy hurried next to him in case the spell needed her to go first. She didn’t want anything going wrong. Not with Stef. Not this time. She squeezed the scalpel in one hand, fighting another bout of déjà vu.

  Her ears popped as they entered the Grove, and she blinked back blue sparkles. Little sounds sprang to the surface: the crunch of Stef’s boot changing from bramble to meadow, the rhythm of his walk as he took one step, then two, and a strange coughing sound as he turned toward the forest. In the distance, there was movement—a crashing, leaping shadow darting toward them, coming fast between the trees.

  Stef’s arm held her back, hand open. A sigil had been drawn on his palm—a wizard’s mark. He’d come prepared. Joy went cold. What had he seen that she hadn’t? Was it a monster? A trap? She switched hands, palming the beacon and flipping the scalpel sideways as the shadow gained shape, bounding through the deep wood, gaining speed.

  Stef bolted toward it.

  “St—!” Joy caught herself before she said his True Name. Her brother wasn’t safe here—he didn’t have a signatura to protect him. She cursed herself for being so stupid! His name could control him. It was her fault for not telling him! She squeezed her fists and bit her tongue. She couldn’t call his name, and she couldn’t catch him in time.

  The grass parted as he ran. A crackle of twigs answered. Joy saw the shadow resolve into the curly-haired satyr, bare arms swinging, shoving branches aside, fighting his way through the wood. He broke through the tree line at a gallop, leaping into the grassland, arms pumping, legs bounding, a thin braid trailing behind him like a kite string.

  Stef ran straight for him, full-out.

  The sound punched from their bodies on impact. They wrapped their arms around each other and held on tight. Joy didn’t know what to say as Dmitri grabbed fistfuls of Stef’s shirt. She didn’t know what to think when Stef pulled back, holding Dmitri’s curly-haired head in his hands, pressing their foreheads together, gasping for breath, and kissed him full on the lips. They turned, spinning, almost wrestling to hang on; drinking in one another like they were drowning in the meadow, waves of grass undulating like the sea around their legs.

  Joy didn’t know what to do. She’d never seen her brother so happy.

  Tearing up, she smiled.

  Overly conscious of being the third wheel, Joy wondered if there was a discreet way to make her exit and what excuse she could give her father for bringing the car back to camp alone. Lies were tricky business and half-truths even more so. Her father would want an explanation. She heard carefree male laughter behind her and started picking up the pace. She would just wait in the car. Time did funny things—it might only be a moment. She could still see the mushroom-covered tree outside the beacon’s glow. She concentrated on her footsteps as she flatte
ned the meadow grass underfoot, tiptoeing toward the edge of the bubble and a quick trip home.

  There was the creak of heavy wicker baskets.

  Joy froze, ears straining for the sound that haunted her nightmares. She shook her head in disbelief. Her brain was playing tricks. It was probably the sound of the trees in the distance. But standing on the edge of the Grove, her body refused to move, every hair on her skin rising in a prickle of prescient fear.

  The low creak of wood came again, tracing a sharp finger up her spine.

  Joy spun, scalpel out, arm forward, now sure. She crept along the clearing, circling toward the woods, where the sound hid in shadow. Joy crept forward, ignoring everything but the low creak on the edge of her hearing, expecting to see a flash of orange foxtails in the corner of her Sight. She pushed into the forest, following a thin deer trail pocked with scat and rocks, winding her way deeper into the wilderness cloaked in dappled shadows and dark thoughts.

  It can’t be...

  The eerie echo came again, this time accompanied by a light scraping of feet. Joy crouched down. There was a flicker of movement to her right, maybe a bird or squirrel or something worse. Her fingers went cold. Her burn scars itched. She eased out of her flip-flops, trading the thin layer of plastic for the pressed-grass ground. She didn’t know what it could do for her, but she wanted every advantage, even the unfamiliar ones. Fear bubbled below her surface like the distant roar under the earth.

  Joy followed the trail.

  Five satyrs were walking down rough rows of saplings, laughing and joking. They had leather bags slung across their chests and cloth bands tied over their foreheads, dark with sweat. There were wheelbarrows of earth and giant barrels of water. One rust-colored faun, covered in dirt up to his elbows, wiped the back of a hand across his brow, leaving a muddy smear. A chestnut fellow splashed him with a small bucket, flattening his curly fur. He shook himself out like a giant dog. The others erupted in jeers.

  It would be a magical sight if not for the creak that had shivered Joy’s spine. She turned aside, hunting it like a scent on the wind, moving south along the tree line. Joy dug her toes into the ground, feeling the undercurrent of old rock like a taste in her mouth, letting it fuel her feet forward when every other impulse was screaming at her to run. Run away! Go now! But she had to know if her ears were lying. They have to be lying. Joy had seen Aniseed’s death with her own eyes—but she knew that eyes lied. It has to be a mistake. But there were no mistakes; she knew that fact better than most. There must be some other explanation—there were always exceptions to the rules: the Red Knight had beat the Edict, the Tide had tried to kill her, there had been poison in signaturae, Ink had been emptied, Kurt had been brought back to life, even Briarhook had fought on the battlefield after his heart had been ripped out. Joy never knew what to believe. In the Twixt, anything was possible.

  She crept forward.

  There was a wide, circular clearing up ahead, dotted with enormous stumps like ruined Roman columns cut at different heights. Each broken tree was the center of its own tended circle of upturned earth surrounded by white stones. Each stone had a single glyph, which together made a long sentence—a spell—creating a protective shield out of the granite and quartz. Each stump sported a sprout or burl or crust of new green. A glimmer of pollenated sunlight reflected gently off one of the shields, an invisible dome like a terrarium membrane protecting the delicate plants within. Rich, loamy earth had been raked along the bases and watered enough to produce a smell of deep spring. A breeze tickled the clearing, ruffling the tiny, sprouting leaves and red baby buds. Air could pass through the shields, and sunlight, and water. It had the soothing, cuddled quiet of a nursery’s afternoon nap.

  But the sound came again, and this time, Joy saw it—something on the farthest stump moved.

  She was walking before she realized it, the energy under her heels channeling her forward. Joy circled the clearing, exposing more stumps as she walked around the glen. As she stared at the knobby growths, the patterns in the bark formed impressions of tiny mouths, tiny eyes, curled fingers, bald heads, but her eyes fixed on one lengthy, adult-size limb that hooked around the base of the farthest tree, creaking with stiffness and age. Joy stopped. Her gaze followed the bulb of the ankle up the bow of the shin, the knob of the knee, the swell of the thigh to where the bark bristled and blistered with swollen bores, melding the thigh to a wedge carved deep into the stump, leaking sap and bandaged in moss—and from the split grew a small figure with thin, weak limbs, a swollen belly and a dark, bulbous head. Sunlight slid off its skin like oil. Its wide eyes, riddled with dark veins, rolled in their sockets, looking faintly Eurasian, tilted up at the tips.

  Joy screamed.

  The Grove exploded into motion. Satyrs charged out of the woods, carrying bags and wicked staves as Joy stumbled back, smacking into a thick tree trunk and falling to the ground. A cobweb of woody vines squeezed together, smothering sunlight as a shimmering ward appeared, slamming down with enough force to kick up a puff of leaves and dirt. Joy kicked feebly away from the fetal thing wearing Aniseed’s eyes, Aniseed’s face, growing out of Aniseed’s severed leg.

  Joy swung her scalpel, and the ward lit with sparks. She pointed the tip with the edge of her finger and attempted to pierce it like an illusion, praying it was an illusion, hoping it would pop. There was a hot, searing buzz that trembled angrily up her wrist, seeping up her arm and quivering in her chest. The ward shuddered, flared and threw her back. Joy crashed into a swath of ferns and tumbled through the leaves.

  Hands in the earth. Belly in the earth. Her fingers clawed the ground. She reached for something wild and roiling. Old and powerful, mountainous, crushing—she burned with rage and fire in her throat. Her eyes filmed over. Her mind honed sharp. She would rise up, destroy this abomination and BURY HER ENEMIES FOREVER!

  Her head rang with fury as spearheads pointed at her throat. The satyrs shouted an Italianate garble, angry and insistent, but she couldn’t understand and didn’t much care—the keening in her head rose to a high whine as she saw a dark hand crawl out from beneath the stump, pushing the raked soil aside. A flat head rose to the surface and glared at Joy with fiery eyes, its mouth opening in a howl.

  The golem pulled itself from its grave and squatted like a watchdog at the feet of its mistress.

  She could hear Stef’s voice from far away, “Joy!” and Dmitri’s rough, babbling cry ended with a sudden English “Don’t!”

  Joy heaved slowly, belly pressed against roots, body smeared in the earth, ears buzzing with something nameless that called to her, lighting a fire where there was emptiness, clanging loudly in her silent chest. She wanted power. She wanted it to fill her. She wanted to crush everything around her. But a small part of her, a human part of her, held back. What’s happening? She trembled with need and fear and vengeance.

  “Joy?” Stef appeared, filling her vision, forcing her eyes to his as his shoulder blocked the golem’s ruby-red-hot glare. “Joy, listen to me. Drop the weapon.” He looked disheveled, confused, sweaty and afraid. “Drop it, Joy. These are guardians of the Glen. No human can be here. We have to—”

  There was a bark of noise and a shove. Stef pitched forward but caught himself on one hand, the other shot up, exposing the wizard’s mark, gaining fast attention. Dmitri waved his arms and spoke in fast, husky assurances. Joy let the pounding feeling recede until her fingers were her own, no longer an extension of the ground, and opened her fist slowly. The scalpel rolled into the earth. She stared up at her brother.

  “It’s—it’s Aniseed,” she said, hardly believing the words. To say it aloud was to admit that it was true. “Aniseed! That! Over there! We have to—” Her fingers reached for the scalpel again. Stef’s hand came down hard, pressing hers flat. Joy shed tears of fury and fear. “No,” she pleaded, tugging. “You don’t understand—!”

  “It’s not her,
” Dmitri said in English. His troop of satyrs stood behind him. A few had been dispatched to check the other stumps, concern clear on their faces. None of them looked twice at the golem. One of the satyrs with gray in his curls and scars on his chest lifted his weapon to neutral position and glared down at Joy.

  “It is not Aniseed,” the old satyr said. “Not yet.”

  “Not yet?” Joy cried, horrified.

  “Not even when she’s grown and cleaved from the tree,” he said. “She is a graftling, a cutting grown from the parent limb.”

  Joy’s insides tumbled over. She tasted sick in the back of her throat. “That’s Aniseed’s leg,” she said. “You cut off her leg?”

  “In order to twain, dryads must donate a significant portion of their body mass,” the old satyr said. “We mold substitute limbs out of willow to promote quick healing and regeneration. For some, it is the only way.”

  Joy imagined the segulah when they’d last met—Aniseed strutting slowly around the glowing warehouse floor like an old woman too proud for a cane. She could picture her stroking her fox-fur collar with long, precise fingers, flicking drops of burning alchemical fire and tearing Ink’s throat with her teeth. And when she walked in her long, trailing dress, she hobbled with the sound of creaking wicker baskets.

  Willow baskets. A willow leg.

  She’d planned this all along.

  “That’s...Aniseed’s baby?”

  “More like Aniseed’s clone.” Dmitri said. He nodded to his friends, who cleared the wood but for the elder and two armed guards. Many exchanged staves and spears for shovels and rakes, but the black looks remained. One of the satyrs spoke to a handful of squirrels in elaborate saddles carrying tiny brown mounts. Dismissed, they scattered up the trees in winding spirals. The fingernail skitters ran prickles up over Joy’s skin. Dmitri caught her stare. “The graftlings share a genetic makeup, and even some memories, with their parent, but the bud will grow up to be her own separate entity. She will not be Aniseed.”

 

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