I pulled open the cabinet above the appliances and held up a bag of unground beans, looking back at her with a small smile. Not a smirk.
She smiled back, wide and genuine. “You got it. Cream’s in the fridge. Organic sugar is in that little dish there. I’m afraid we don’t have any fake sugars.”
“No problem,” I said again. “I like it black.”
That made her pause for half a second, but she recovered and smiled again. “Well, all right then.”
In a few minutes the coffee was ready. I poured myself a cup, blew on it once to cool it, and drank the whole thing straight down. Calvin stared at me with a look of utter disgust.
“Thanks very much for breakfast, Mrs. Wells,” I said, nodding to her.
“You’re very welcome, Win — Blade,” she said, recovering quickly. Her eyes flicked to the bruise again before meeting mine. “If they’re still bug-bombing your house, you probably need to stay here again tonight.” The words should have been a question, but her tone made them something different.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.
She nodded and stood, taking my plate over to the sink. I took my cue and stood as well, wiping off a little coffee that had dripped on my jacket. “Well, I guess I should go,” I remarked. “You know, lots of learning to do.”
Calvin choked on his juice, sounding like he was going to cough up a lung.
“Thanks again, Mrs. W,” I said. I gave her a little wave and headed for the front door.
Her voice brought me to a halt. “Oh, Blade. Would you mind if Calvin rode to school with you today? Seeing as how you’re both going to the same place. It’s not exactly comfortable for him on the bus these days since…” She raised her eyebrows. Apparently they didn’t like talking about “the incident” in this house. “Anyway, would you mind terribly?”
I looked from her to Calvin, who was staring at his mom with wide eyes. “Mom!” he said, his voice nearly a shout. “I’m totally fine taking the bus. Blade’s got people to hang out with and whatever at school. I’ve got people on the bus to hang out with. You know how it is.”
He was giving me an out, I realized. Calvin thought I wouldn’t want to be caught dead with a nerd riding shotgun, let alone a freshman. If I was Miles or Sarah, or if this had happened before Midrealm, he would have been right.
I took another look at Mrs. Wells, who looked disappointed.
“I’d be happy to,” I replied.
“Really?” Calvin asked, shocked.
“Come on,” I said, turning to walk out.
I heard Calvin scramble in the kitchen as I made my way to the sidewalk. He met me there on the pavement, smiling and waving at his mom at the front door. She gave us both a little wave, then disappeared inside with a click from the front door.
Calvin looked at me nervously. “So, um, were you for real, or were you just being nice to my mom? Seriously, I’m totally fine taking the bus. They hardly ever call me anything any more.”
Now that his mom was out of sight, I pulled out a cig and lit it. I checked the pack and sighed. Only three left. That would get me through the day if I was sparing.
I pointed at him, using the cigarette like it was a miniature laser pointer. “You’re riding shotgun. Don’t scuff the upholstery any worse than it already is.”
Calvin’s face brightened, became something hopeful. Like a puppy. “Are you serious?”
I nodded and stepped past him, walking down the street to where my car was waiting.
“Awesome!” cried Calvin. Then he saw me stop at the car. He looked at its chipped green paint and dirty windows, and for a second I thought he was disappointed. But his mouth was open in awe, not disgust. “Sweet ride,” he said.
I threw open the driver’s side door, unsmiling but secretly pleased. I hopped in and leaned over to pull up the passenger door lock. Electric locks hadn’t even existed when my car had been made. “Get in,” I said through the window.
“Where’d you get this thing?” Calvin asked, running his hands over the dashboard like it was Italian leather instead of vinyl.
“Present from my grandparents,” I said shortly, firing up the engine and flicking my ash out the window.
“How much did it cost them?”
“Didn’t ask.”
The whole way to school, he asked me questions. He wanted to know what the seats were made of. He wanted to know what the third pedal was — his mom’s car didn’t have a manual clutch. He wanted to know the engine specs, and if I’d had to do any work on it.
That’s when things really took off. Dorky as he was, Calvin knew his way around an engine. I told him every replacement, every repair, every mod I’d had to make, and Calvin nodded knowingly, making suggestions and asking if I’d thought of this or that thing when I was doing it. Then he ended up telling me about this time he took apart his dad’s ride-on lawnmower engine just to see if he could, then put it all back together again. He’d messed something up, and when his dad kicked the lawnmower on the engine had burst out from the hood like it was possessed, its pistons breaking loose and launching it down the street like some demonic spider while his dad chased it in baby blue short-shorts and knee high white socks.
That made me let out a sudden, sharp bark of laughter before I could stop myself. I quickly swallowed it into a clearing of the throat. But I caught Calvin looking at me, as surprised to hear me laugh as I was to find myself laughing.
That’s when we pulled into the school parking lot and I parked. Calvin looked kind of depressed for a moment, but he didn’t say anything. He simply pushed himself out of the car and began the walk toward the school’s front doors.
I got out and followed him, falling into step. He gave me a sidelong glance.
“Blade, what are you doing?” he asked quietly. “You’ve been the toughest kid at Roosevelt since I got here. You’ve got a reputation to uphold. Driving the resident geek to school will scuff your image.”
I smirked. “You’re worried about my rep?” I asked. “My rep comes from my guns.”
His eyes went the widest I’d ever seen them. Wider than when we first appeared in Midrealm. “You’ve got guns?” he whispered.
“Sure.” I flexed my left arm, then my right, making it a show. “Right here, and right here.”
Calvin let out a sudden, shaky whoosh of breath, laughing nervously. “Right. Duh. I thought you meant the real thing.”
That’s when I noticed everybody staring. Everyone who was on the front lawn watched me and Calvin approach the school. Some of them looked amused. Some of them were mocking us with their eyes. All of them looked on in disbelief.
I spotted Chuck suddenly, leaning against a light pole on the sidewalk. “Finally decided to give your girlfriend a ride?” he asked.
Without answering I passed him by. Just when he thought I’d blow by with no response, my hand leapt out, grabbed his face, and shoved backward. Hard. He tripped over a sprinkler at his feet and fell in a deep puddle of autumn mud. I smirked again as we walked away, leaving him cursing behind us.
Calvin risked a quick look back. “Nice. Of course, I’ll probably pay for that more than you,” he said ruefully. “He won’t come after you, but he’ll have no problem with me.”
“Run if you can,” I said with a shrug. “There’s only so much I can do.”
Calvin nodded again, then changed subjects. “So, are you actually going to class? I heard from Sarah that you mostly skip school. You gonna be good today?”
I stared at him through narrow eyes until he wilted. “I’m always good,” I said, letting the smirk escape again. “But no, I don’t ditch every day. I just don’t approve of the school’s schedule for me. So I follow my own schedule.”
We passed through the front doors and before Calvin could ask what I meant, I peeled left, separating from him and heading toward bio. It was the sophomore class, two years behind me, but it was where I was going. I hung outside the door for a minute, waiting until the teacher was looki
ng the other way. Then I slipped in through the door and headed straight to the back. Once there, I plopped down in a seat behind everyone else, slouching as low as I could so they couldn’t see my size.
And just like I knew she’d be, there was Tess, right in the middle of the room. Buried in the crowd. Hidden.
But not from me.
Slowly, her head turned toward me. Her uncovered right eye found mine at the back of the room a fraction of a second before I looked away. Even out of the corner of my eye, I saw her smile.
The next three days were ones of odd transition, in two ways.
In Midrealm, we spent three days traveling to Faya. Traveling there from Linsfell, we had to head in the exact opposite direction of Morrowdust. Though we’d been here just over a month, it still felt like we were leaving home farther and farther behind.
The first morning, we set off at what was, in Midrealm, ten o’clock in the morning. Greystone had chosen fresh horses from us from the Linsfell Runehold’s stables. The ones we’d rode from Morrowdust would spend a long, long time resting in quiet, respected comfort. They’d carried us nearly one hundred and fifty miles in a single, long day. True, they’d been buoyed by some handy magic from Greystone, but their effort had been impressive nonetheless. Their bodies would need time to recover. From the way I saw the stablehands fawning over them, they’d be given all the time they’d need.
We traveled in cloaks of plain brown, wearing clothes no different from any common peasant. Traveling as far from Athorn as we were about to, we didn’t want anyone recognizing us as Realm Keepers and possibly alerting Chaos to our presence. The Runegard, too, wore clothing that was much different and plainer than their traditional armor. Each of them looked unremarkable in their mismatched clothing of various sizes, all of them wearing no armor except a single breastplate.
“How the mighty have fallen,” I joked with Samuel, who looked extremely uncomfortable in his new get-up.
The gesture he made wasn’t the same as the one we use on Earth, but I got the gist of it.
The first day’s ride was bright and cheery. We’d had more than a day to rest from our hard travels. We had a sense of purpose. How hard could it be, I remember thinking, to head to some backwater smithy town, pop in, find the tomb, and get out?
Best of all, Chaos probably didn’t have any idea the tomb was there. Therefore it would be logical for them to assume that, after our fight in the Sink, we’d head home to Morrowdust. So we were heading directly away from thousands of evil devil monsters that wanted to kill us.
What could go wrong?
That night we stopped in a small town whose name I never learned. We were well out of Athorn, but the people were still friendly. Well, as friendly as anyone was these days. They were wary of strangers and distrustful of us when we approached the gates. However, once they saw we weren’t shadows, their mood lightened considerably. It may also have had something to do with the generous amount of coins Greystone spent, first at the trader to secure more provisions, and then at the inn to get us a room and board for the night.
Once the horses had been tended to by the inn’s stablehand, I wanted to find my way to the common room to enjoy the rest of my night before bed. But Cara issued strict orders that we were to go straight to our rooms — one for the men, and one for the women, on Sarah’s insistence — and stay there until morning.
Even so, I’d planned to sneak out when no one was looking. As soon as I tried, though, Samuel blocked my exit, staring at me with his dark brown eyes and a slightly disappointed twist in his mouth.
“We need to stay here,” he reminded me. “For your safety, as much as everyone else’s. Wouldn’t do to draw any attention to ourselves.”
He didn’t exactly say that he’d knock me on my butt if he needed to, but there are certain things guys like us can communicate without the spoken word. That’s one of them.
Then the next day on Earth, we all went back to school and spent the whole day acting totally normal, as if we weren’t in the middle of a cross-country trek together in another dimension. I’d spent the night at Calvin’s again, and I had another too-polite breakfast with him and his mom. I hadn’t seen his dad poking around yet. I wasn’t sure if he was avoiding me, which I would have understood, or if he just took off for work too early for us to run into each other.
Taking off from the small inn the next day, Greystone gave the innkeeper another coin as an extra tip. Then he told the innkeeper that we were coming back this way, and if word of our presence could be kept within the inn’s walls, there would be another three coins just like that one in the innkeeper’s palm.
The innkeeper agreed easily enough. Too easily for Greystone, apparently. Hidden in his palm where none of the patrons could see, Greystone summoned a small ball of green flame. He looked the innkeeper dead in the eye and told him that, if word of us did make it out of the tavern, the tavern would find itself the victim of a sudden and inexplicable case of arson.
The innkeeper got the point.
When Greystone summoned the flame, I felt a little twinge in the back of my mind, like trying to remember a dream after you’ve already woken up from it. Tess had mentioned the same thing recently. Greystone said it was the feeling you had when someone else used your magic. He said we’d all start feeling it soon. I smiled a little satisfied smile at finally knowing what they were talking about.
After that it was another long, long day on the road. Spring was warming toward summer in Midrealm, but the days hadn’t started getting hot yet. We rode and rode, mile after mile and path after path. The land was sloping steadily upward, the road leading us steadily to and through mountains that, on True Earth, would have marked the border between France and Germany.
As the sun began to sink in the sky, we began to look for a place to make camp for the night. We found one without too much difficulty — a small clearing in the woods that was less than a mile from the road. It would keep us safe from prying eyes that might try to find us while we slept, but it wasn’t so far from the road that we would waste much time traveling to or from it.
“Lord Calvin. Lady Tess,” said Greystone abruptly as we finished pitching our tents. “Come here.”
Calvin looked up questioningly, then sprang to his feet. He went to Greystone eagerly, his clear blue eyes meeting the old man’s a foot above. Tess followed more slowly, glancing around at the rest of us uneasily.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“I am going to teach you both to make curtains,” said Greystone. “They are relatively simple enchantments, but extremely useful. It will muffle any noise within the camp. At the same time, if anyone should pass through it, you will sense it. That is not always useful for you, as it will not wake you from your sleep. But for a wizard such as I, it is the best way to keep watch over a camp while on the road.”
Calvin gawked. “Sweet!” he cried. “Like a muffling spell?”
Greystone sniffed. “That is what the low, superstitious folk refer to them as. True magic wielders know them as curtains.”
“That’s definitely more manly,” Raven called out sarcastically. Greystone ignored her with an obviously titanic strength of will.
“Hey, why don’t we get to make curtains?” I asked, gesturing at the others.
Greystone stared at me like I was an idiot. “Are you asking for permission to erect a standing ring of fire around the camp we have constructed in the middle of this wooden and very flammable forest?”
I pressed my lips into a thin line. “Did not think of that.”
“Clearly.” Greystone turned back to Calvin and Tess and gestured around the camp. “First, the basics. Do not cast your curtain so wide that it extends far beyond the boundaries of eyesight. Passing through a curtain is a noticeable thing, especially for creatures of Shadow. If you cast a curtain a mile in every direction, you may alert those to your presence who might otherwise have passed you by.
“Similarly, do not cast the curtain so closely that it p
roves useless. A curtain well within your line of sight is worse than useless. It provides a false sense of security while protecting you less well than your own eyes. As well, you shall be startled every time one of your companions goes to use the latrines.”
Tess blushed furiously, making me grit my teeth a bit. But she nodded and said, “I understand.”
Greystone nodded, pleased. “Now,” he said. “You both know how to create plates of force with your elements. Now, focus on making bands instead. Thin, flat bands just strong enough to provide resistance, just weak enough to allow one to pass through.”
Calvin held up his hand like he was in class. It was a moment before Greystone looked at him, sighed, and asked, “Yes?”
“Why make them able to be walked through?” Calvin asked. “Why don’t we make them strong enough to act as a force field?”
Greystone rolled his eyes. “Ah, I never tire of that question. No matter how many novice Realm Keepers ask it of me immediately after I have expressly and clearly told them what to do, it never grows old or tiresome.”
“Unlike yourself,” I grumbled. I tried to do it under my breath, but Greystone’s piercing eyes flashed to me. I turned on the spot, pretending to be absorbed in the lowest branches of the oak above me.
When I looked back, Tess’ eyes went white. A faint breeze ruffled Calvin’s sleeves and hair as he gestured with his hands. I couldn’t feel anything, of course, and both of their powers were invisible. But Greystone seemed pleased, a smile growing on his wrinkled old face.
“Most excellent,” he exclaimed. “Better than I had hoped. Now, weave the bands together. Like the sticks of a wicker basket. Intertwine them with each other so that they hold shape, requiring no outside force.”
I saw struggle break out on both their faces. After a few tense minutes of concentration, Tess’ eyes regained their color. Calvin, meanwhile, broke into a grin.
“I think I’ve got it!” he said excitedly.
Tess frowned, and her eyes went white again. I saw her hands twitching like she was tempted to reach out for the bands she was weaving with her mind. Finally I saw a small smile.
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