In This Iron Ground (Natural Magic)

by Marina Vivancos

  In This Iron Ground

  A Natural Magic Novel

  Marina Vivancos

  Synopsis

  Damien is nine years old when his parents die. What should have been the worst moment of his life begins a journey shadowed by loneliness and pain. The night of a full moon, four years and seven foster homes later, Damien flees to the forest, desperate to escape everything.

  Instead, he finds the Salgado pack, and the earth beneath his feet shifts. Damien has seen the Salgado children in his school: Koko, who is in his class, and Hakan, two years older and infinitely unreachable. Damien is suddenly introduced into a world that had only ever existed in his imagination, where there is magic in the forest and the moon. He meets creatures that look like monsters, but Damien knows that monsters have the same face as anybody else.

  Over the years, Damien and Hakan grow closer. First, just as friends and foster brothers in the Salgado house, and then into something heated and breathless when Damien joins Hakan at college. Despite what he may yearn for in the darkest part of the night, Damien knows, deep down in that bruised and mealy part of his core, that he’s not good enough to be part of the Salgado family, their pack. He’s not worthy of calling Hakan his home.

  Even though he knows in the end it’ll hurt him, he’ll hold onto this for as long as he can.

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Part Two

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Note from the Author

  Other Books by Marina Vivancos

  This book is a work of fiction. Any names, places, characters, or incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Marina Vivancos

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means.

  Copyedited by Kiki Clarke, Between the Lines Editing

  Proofread by Hope & Jess, Flat Earth Editing

  Cover by Natasha Snow Designs

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  The full moon was a ghost in the deepening blue. Damien paused a moment to look at it. He could almost breathe out here. He’d stayed too late in the public library, and knew there was a scolding waiting for him at the McKenzies’, so a few more minutes in the autumn air wouldn’t make a difference. For now, the sky was clear and filled with colour.

  The McKenzies were his seventh foster carers in four years. The first few were protocol, he was told. Short-term carers, starting when he was nine and his parents had disappeared amidst the broken glass and warped metal of a crashed car. His social worker had tried to sugar-coat his last few carers, but Damien knew each time he was passed on was his fault. He had learnt what words like “exhausting” and “troubled” and “a bad apple” really meant. It was the last one that stayed with him the most. At night, he would imagine himself being sliced open from one point of his soul to the other and finding everything inside was mealy and bruised and ruined. Every time he overheard that conversation, the “I can’t do this anymore” conversation, it got a little worse in that place inside.

  Damien tried to be quiet as he finally reached the house. He opened the gate to the front garden carefully, but it announced his arrival with a whine. He cleared his face of any expression as the front door opened and Mrs. McKenzie stepped out. He looked at her immaculate brown hair, her immaculately painted face, her immaculate sleeves and collar and skirt hem. She was beautiful like a painting was beautiful. Something you could look at but couldn’t reach.

  “What on earth happened to you?” Her voice was deceptively quiet.

  “Sorry,” he said. She was looking at his dirty clothes with a hawk’s stare. Some kids in his class had pulled a prank on him, and it had ended up with his jeans and sweater covered in mud. It had dried, caked into cracked segments that flaked off when he walked. He’d been surprised when the librarian had let him in, but she was probably used to Damien by now.

  “Come here,” Mrs. McKenzie said.

  It defied every animal instinct to approach her, but he couldn’t do anything else. As soon as he was within range, she snatched his arm, yanking him forwards. That was something adults seemed to love to do: force you to do things you were already doing. Damien clenched his teeth and didn’t make a sound at the pain that lanced through his shoulder. Thirteen was old enough to weather that sort of thing, he thought. There’s no use complaining about things you’ve brought on yourself. That was something he’d heard a lot.

  Mrs. McKenzie was talking as she dragged him to the backyard. It was a familiar wave of acidic water. “Look at you,” and “Why do I waste my time?” and “Can’t leave him alone for a minute,” even though Damien was always alone.

  “Stand there,” she said, setting him firmly against the garden shed. “Don’t even think of stepping onto my white carpets looking like that. Take off your clothes then, come on!” she snapped, as if it were obvious. Damien looked down at himself incredulously.

  “But it’s cold,” he protested, dread curling in his stomach.

  “You should have thought of that when you were covering yourself in dirt. Don’t make me ask again.”

  She picked up the hose lying on the grass and looked at him expectantly. They stood like that for a moment, silence and cold air between them, before something went unnaturally still inside Damien.

  He started stripping methodically. His mind was blank like it got sometimes, as if he couldn’t look at himself inside. When all his clothes except his boxers were on a pile beside him he grabbed at his elbows as the cold air bit into him, managing to swallow his yelp whole as the water was turned on suddenly, the hose directed at him. The water was so cold that he couldn’t breathe for a moment. The chill permeated his skin and went straight to his lungs. Even when he managed to catch a breath, it came out short and pained as Mrs. McKenzie covered half of the hose opening, so the water hit him sharply, slicing away at him.

  “There we go,” she finally said. “Stay here.” She disappeared into the house.

  Damien tried to clamp his jaw shut, but his teeth were chattering wildly, his whole body shivering. He tried to keep that white stillness inside, but it was trembling out with the cold.

  By the time Mrs. McKenzie reappeared with a towel, Damien was bent over in half with his arms around his waist to try and keep some of the warmth in.

  “Damien, don’t be dramatic,” Mrs. McKenzie said as soon as she saw him, handing him the towel. “Dry yourself and go straight to your room. No dinner. You can spend that time thinking about your behaviour.”

  Damien grabbed the towel with stiff fingers, not bothering with a reply. Going to bed without dinner had happened too many times to count. He used to keep some cans of food under the bed before they had been found, sparking another round of the popular game adults liked to play: What’s Wrong With Damien?

  “Can I take a shower?” Damien managed to say through his chattering teeth. He didn’t have to look at Mrs. McKenzie’s face to know she was frowning.

  “What for? I just washed you!”

  “I’m cold.”

  “Just go upstairs and put some clothes on, Damien. Come on, it’ll be nice and warm in your room.” Mrs. McKenzie ushered Damien inside, shooing him up the stairs with a warning to be quiet an
d not “stomp all over the place” like Damien tended to do.

  He stumbled upstairs, shutting the door of his room softly behind him. A vicious part of him wanted to slam it sometimes, wanted to break the windows and punch the walls and…but it wasn’t worth thinking about that.

  He put on three layers of clothes and hid under the covers with the towel around his head to protect the sheets from his still-damp hair, letting his own breath warm the burrow he had made himself. He tried to hold on as long as he could in the stale space made more and more of his own breath, but had to burst out after a few minutes, gasping the cool air into his lungs.

  He lay there for as long as his restlessness let him before rolling out of the bed. He grabbed one of the comic books he’d gotten at the library out of his backpack, along with the round pin he always carried with him. He crawled under his desk with his treasure and rubbed the pin with his fingers. His first foster carer had given it to him for talking to the social worker that first time after the three-week-long silence his parents’ death seemed to have cursed him with. You Are Super! the badge proclaimed cheerfully in reds and blues and yellows, the ‘S’ stylized in Superman fashion. The plasticky colours were chipping at the edges, the back rusting into a diseased looking black. Damien tried to look after it, but he wasn’t great at taking care of things, even if he loved them.

  He’d liked that foster carer. She’d been nice and quiet, not shouting at Damien when he was bad, even when his throat and lungs choked up and his head filled with an odd sound like the static of a police scanner. Not even when he started talking and couldn’t stop, coming out of him in retches, filling up all that dead space between him and everything else. Not even when he started crying and couldn’t sleep and kept everybody up with all the noise he was making, like he was in pain but in a place too deep, where even he couldn’t quite reach.

  He stared at nothing for a while. He liked the nothingness. It was safe.

  Damien had discovered there were lots of ways to escape the world. His favourites were comic books and fantasy stories. He liked to imagine himself in the adventure, in a land where good always triumphed. He’d tried drawing his own stories, but Mr. McKenzie had found them and taken them away. Both Mr. and Mrs. McKenzie had sat him down and asked him why he would draw something like that, with so much blood and gore. “There’s something wrong with the boy,” Mr. McKenzie had muttered.

  They’d thrown all the drawings away and Damien hadn’t cried or anything, even if his teeth hurt later from clenching them shut. As much as he didn’t really like the McKenzies, he didn’t want to be passed on again. He didn’t want to make them angry, though it seemed to be something he was especially good at.

  Damien flipped open the comic book carefully, where superheroes with powers they hadn’t asked for fought for a cause. Damien wouldn’t mind getting superpowers, even if they hurt. If he could choose, he’d pick time travel. He’d go back in time and stop his parents from getting into that car. He’d be a different person if they hadn’t died.

  He might not have become so rotten inside.

  **********

  Damien stared at the scratched wood of the desk. He could hear his classmates laughing and playing outside, in another dimension. Where Damien was, however, it was silent. It was a familiar place. He didn’t have to look at his teacher’s face, sitting behind her desk in front of him, to know what the expression would look like. It would be one of the many versions of exasperated pity he was used to. The “Come on, you can do better” look.

  “Damien, are you listening to me?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did I just say?”

  “That I’m failing.”

  “Damien…what I’m saying is that your grades are not reflecting your ability. I know you can do better. Look at this.” She pulled out a piece of paper and slid it into Damien’s line of sight. It was a piece of homework, covered in green ticks.

  “Now, look at this.” This time, the piece of paper was messy with his own handwriting and covered with the teacher’s red ink.

  He remembered that piece of homework. It had been from the day he’d been sent to his room for knocking a glass of juice over. He’d been fidgeting too much and being annoying, and Mrs. McKenzie had told him to stop several times, but he kept forgetting. He’d been sent to his room and he’d been too worried to get his backpack once he realized he’d forgotten it downstairs. He’d hoped the McKenzies would forget too, but Mr. McKenzie had asked him if he’d done his homework. Damien hadn’t been able to lie, scared they would check.

  He’d gotten the chair. They would tie him to it sometimes, when he was bad and didn’t sit still. It didn’t help him concentrate, though. It just made things worse.

  “Sorry,” Damien told the teacher with a shrug. There was a moment of silence.

  “Do I need to call your parents?” she asked. Everything went flat and still.

  “Sure. You got a Ouija board?” Damien said. He could feel the confusion in the pause before it clicked.

  “Oh—sorry. I—sorry, Damien, I forgot. Your foster parents, then.”

  “Not foster parents. Foster carers,” he bit out.

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” The silence piled up. He listened to the kids in the other dimension. He wanted to close his eyes.

  “Well…Damien, I just want you to push yourself a little harder, okay? I’m only saying this because I know you can do it. You need to try.” Her voice was soft and cajoling. Damien didn’t reply. After a moment, she sighed.

  “Okay. You can go,” she said. Damien didn’t linger.

  He headed to the school library where all the other losers spent their lunchtime. It wasn’t as good as the public library, but it would do.

  He grabbed one of his favourite books and went to sit in a corner. He was small, made of bird bones and pale skin covered in freckles. He folded easily into cramped spaces where he could disappear for a while.

  He cracked the book open. It was big and heavy, filled with diagrams of flora from around the world. Damien liked to look at the pictures and learn about the properties of each plant. You could do a lot with plants. They had a sort of magic. He’d tried asking the McKenzies if he could take up gardening, but they’d told him that wasn’t a good idea. He’d track dirt everywhere. Maybe when he learnt not to be such as mess.

  Damien was trying. He tried to be silent and still, but he had to try harder at that too. It was hard to disappear completely.

  Damien wished he could.

  **********

  Damien didn’t like going to sleep. The world followed him there, tucked in the folds of unconsciousness. It would be distorted and corrupted by the night and come out in nightmares that woke him, desperate for air.

  Most of the time, he could keep the noises that crawled out of his chest subdued. Others, they would surface like undead, putrid creatures. Damien was defenceless against them. The hard soil in his chest would open, and he’d be buried underneath.

  It was bad to make noise. Especially at night.

  He hadn’t been there for the accident, but he could still see it. He’d heard a policewoman say that his father had bled out slowly. He’d been trapped with the body of his wife. Her death was the last thing he must have seen.

  The earth in Damien’s room was shaking. It was unearthing sounds from the deep. Damien was dying too.

  The door of his room opened. A rectangle of light casting a man’s shadow. Damien yelped, bolting upright.

  “Hey. Hey! Calm down!” the shadowman barked in Mr. McKenzie’s voice. Damien couldn’t breathe. He was being covered in dirt.

  The shadowman strode into his room. Damien tried to curl away from him, but a dark hand gripped his shoulder painfully, pressing him flat on the bed.

  “Breathe!” Mr. McKenzie’s shadow face said, but Damien was a wild and broken thing. The caves of his lungs had collapsed. There was no air in the room.

  Suddenly, Mr. McKenzie slammed a hand against Damien’s mouth, pressing
there. Damien cried out, raising his hands defensively but not daring to touch Mr. McKenzie. Damien breathed wildly through his nose, eyes wide.

  “Are you going to calm down?” Mr. McKenzie asked. He wasn’t a large man, more on the slim side, but his hand felt enormous and imposing on Damien’s mouth. Damien nodded jerkily, his whimpers caught in a painful tangle at the base of his throat.

  After a moment, Mr. McKenzie removed his hand. Damien tried not to gasp for breath, but it still sounded overwhelmingly loud in the still room. He concentrated on the lingering pain of Mr. McKenzie’s hand. His breathing quieted, although his stomach remained a tight and rotting thing.

  “See. You can do it if you try hard enough,” Mr McKenzie said. Damien nodded again, staring down at the shadows of the bunched-up sheets. The world stilled, and then Mr. McKenzie turned around. He stepped into the hallway light and dissolved as Damien’s bedroom door closed.

  Damien screwed his eyes shut, pressing his own hand against his mouth. Breathe. Breathe! he ordered himself firmly, trying to imitate Mr. McKenzie’s piercing tone.

  It didn’t quite work, but he didn’t make a sound.

  *****

  Sometimes, when the ghosts were too loud. Howling, howling in his room. When he was buried under the earth and he thrashed to get out. Sometimes, he’d be tied to the bed by the McKenzies like he’d be tied to the chair. He’d stay with the creatures of the night until morning came.

  Even then, they followed him into the light.

  *****

  Here is a memory.

  You are seven years old. The world is painted in primary colours. Every emotion is deep and singular, untangled from the rest. At least, that’s how you remember them.

  Things were simple, then.