by Lindsey Duga
“I know. Alder was helping me,” I said.
Izzie’s eyes narrowed. “Helping you? How? Mouth-to-mouth doesn’t work on rashes.”
“For the last time,” I groaned, “we weren’t kissing.”
“Briony, I’ve been worried sick about you all day. I finally got so scared I took your Gran’s truck to look for you at your old house—my next stop would’ve been the sheriff by the way—and then I find you tangled up with some Ralph Lauren model? I would like answers. Now, please.”
“We…” My words trailed off, unable to keep up with the lie any longer. I couldn’t think of what to tell her that would make sense, but more than anything, I was tired of lying to my best friend.
I looked over to Alder and he seemed to be staring at me, somewhat alarmed, as if to say, you’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking.
“Is there a way you could show her, please?” I asked him.
Bathed in the yellow glow of the headlights, Alder opened and closed his mouth, his gaze jumping from me to Izzie.
“Show me what?” she said.
“Briony…” Alder trailed off, clearing his throat, his eyes silently communicating to me that this wasn’t a good idea.
“You said you trusted me. Well, I trust Izzie. Ipso facto you can trust her.”
Alder and I locked gazes, a silent war going on between us.
“Will someone please tell me what is going on?” Izzie hissed, stomping her sneaker into the gravel.
“Where is Gran?” I asked.
“She fell asleep watching Dateline,” Izzie said, folding her arms. “Now what is going on?”
“So yesterday, when I went to my old house, I hadn’t exactly gotten lost,” I started.
“No shit, Brye.”
“I met Alder, and he…” I directed my gaze back to Alder, pressing my palms together and pleading. “Please will you just show her? It’ll make this so much easier.”
Heaving a large breath, Alder took a cautious step forward, thrusting out his hand. “Hi, I’m Alder. Um, Briony’s childhood friend.”
Izzie cocked an eyebrow at me as if to say are you for real with this?
“Iz, please.”
Lip curling, Izzie stepped forward and shook his hand.
At once, silver mana roared up and off his skin, merging into Izzie’s. She gasped, tearing away from Alder and stumbling backward. She waved her hands as if trying to shake off the sensations that I knew she’d just felt.
“I can hear hawks and smell pine needles and taste wild honeysuckle—” Izzie rattled off, her breath coming out in short quick bursts. Then her gaze swiveled toward me, and she squeaked. “Brye! You’re glowing!”
No question she could now see the red mana rash luminous on my skin.
Isabelle Jennison now possessed a small dose of nature spirit mana.
“Oh my God. What is happening?”
“Iz.” I glanced down the lone dark road and back to my friend. “Why don’t we get off the side of the road? This could take a while.”
Chapter Thirteen
To Izzie’s credit, she took the whole story fairly well. She only freaked out twice.
Izzie sat in the front seat while Alder and I occupied the back. The three of us had gotten into the CRV and pulled it off the shoulder into the grass. There, we sat in the dark of the car and I talked until my throat got sore. She’d been silent for a solid six minutes now, just staring ahead and watching the wisps float about in the dark outside the car. At some point, Alder had taken my hand again, sending gentle waves of mana across my skin.
At least he no longer seemed to be drawing out any poisonous mana. The red welts had stopped glowing twenty minutes ago. In fact, I had a sneaking suspicion that all the mana was gone and it was just a regular poison ivy rash now.
But I kept my hand where it was.
“A landslide. A landslide was the opening of a spirit gate?” Izzie finally muttered, rubbing her forehead.
“The earth one,” Alder clarified.
Izzie stopped, turning all the way around in her car seat and glaring at Alder. “Yeah, I remember hearing about the scary deer monster that almost skewered my friend.”
“It wasn’t a monster, it was—”
“So not the point!” Izzie snapped. She turned to me. “You still have to unlock more of these things? What’s the next one? I want to come.”
I gaped at her. “You… Why?”
“I don’t want you doing this alone.”
“She’s not going to be alone,” Alder countered.
“Does this guy have an off switch?” Izzie asked. Then her eyes snapped pointedly to my hand in his.
I slipped out of his grasp, swallowing. “Alder, can you give us a minute?”
Something passed across Alder’s face that I couldn’t quite pinpoint. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” He paused on the way out the door. “Don’t use calamine lotion—it’ll irritate your skin.”
How did he know that? Was that a nature spirit thing?
“Use the all-natural stuff.” After opening the car door, he stepped out into the darkness and the wisps seemed to swim around him the moment his foot touched the ground. The glowing spheres followed him, reminding me of tiny fairy lights from Fantasia, as his silhouette disappeared into the woods.
Izzie let out a low whistle. “It’s like a scene from… What’s that movie with the blue people called?”
“Avatar.” I frowned at her as I climbed up into the passenger seat. “You were rather rude.”
Izzie raised her eyebrows, placing a hand on her chest. “Moi?”
“Iz.”
“C’mon, Brye. The guy pumped you full of spirit energy when you were a little kid, then next thing you know, there’s a spirit after you that lights your house on fire. And now he leads you into the spirit world, takes you to a gate with an all-powerful creature that almost kills you, then he sets you in magical poison ivy. What I wanna know is: why aren’t you angry with him?”
It was a good question. Why didn’t even the smallest part of me blame him for my lost past? If he had just left me alone as a child, I might’ve never lost my memories. A mysterious spirit never would’ve followed us out of the ethereal plane and gone after me, and destroyed my house, and later, my family.
But whatever had happened, the truth was I didn’t blame Alder. I didn’t trust him, but I didn’t blame him, either. Just within the last hour, I’d experienced his own worry—the fear and anxiety he had for me—and more and more I was beginning to see just how close we had been. Through his eyes. And I had to imagine that “ten-year-old Briony” would never have blamed him for anything that had happened.
As for the “current Briony,” my heart simply wouldn’t let me. Every time he was near, that gap in my chest reverberated with longing and loss.
Like Alder had said, we’d both been kids. We hadn’t known any better. Alder didn’t seem to know much at all about the spirit world, and I was reminded of Raysh’s words, “You’ll never be one of us.”
While I was struggling to find an answer to Izzie’s question, a car zoomed past us, shining its high beams across the dark road. We both jumped, suddenly and cruelly reminded that real life moved on outside the car.
Izzie stayed in her CRV while I took Gran’s pickup. We drove slowly back to Gran’s house and parked. As we came through the back kitchen door, Dateline blared from the den.
We peeked into the room to find Gran snoozing in her chair. Izzie and I headed back into the kitchen. She gestured to my poison ivy rash. “Go put on some of that all-natural lotion and change into your pajamas. I told your gran that you were sick, and it’s been ridiculously difficult trying to keep her from climbing the stairs to check on you.”
As I hurried up the steps, I heard Izzie turn off the TV, then Gran’s groggy voice say, “I w
as watching that, Isabelle.”
“Sorry, Mrs. Kaftan. Do you want me to turn it back on?”
“No, no, that’s all right. How’s Briony? Is she feeling better? Maybe I should call her father.”
“Oh, she’s feeling a lot better. In fact, she said she’d be down in a bit.”
I shut the attic door with a soft snap, then quickly rubbed lotion up and down my arms and calves. It helped calm the itch, but it didn’t come close to the soothing touch of Alder’s hands and nourishing mana. My ears grew hot, thinking about…everything.
After I was sure the red welts had reduced to nothing more than light pink splotches, I changed out of my T-shirt and jean shorts and threw on a night shirt and athletic shorts. I couldn’t let Gran think I was lying in bed all day in normal clothes—that was just inhuman.
Trudging down the steps, trying to look as sick as I could, which wasn’t exactly hard—I was pretty darn exhausted—I found Izzie and Gran sitting in the living room.
Gran had a Sudoku puzzle in her lap. Her brow furrowed when she saw me. “Sugar pea, how are you feeling?”
The look on her face and the term of endearment jolted me. It was what she’d called me in that very faint memory. The one with the fairy figurine.
I bit my bottom lip in an attempt to hold back a tide of emotion.
She really had been worried about me all day.
“I’m feeling much better, thanks,” I said, collapsing into an armchair across from her. The lie sat uncomfortably in my stomach. “What did you guys do today?”
“Mrs. Kaftan taught me how to knit.” Izzie held up what I assumed to be a potholder.
I smothered a bubble of laughter, and Izzie scowled at me.
“It’s harder than it looks.”
Gran leaned back in her chair, smiling. “She’s doing very well.”
“I have no doubt, but don’t get any ideas for Christmas, all right? I’m all set on sweaters.”
Izzie stuck her tongue out at me, and I laughed.
“Your father called for you today, Briony. I told him you weren’t feeling well.” Gran closed her puzzle book and nodded toward the kitchen. “He wants you to call as soon as you’re better. He sounded quite worried, so I told him that it would be all right for you two to go home. As I’ve been trying to tell Izzie, I could easily hire a home nurse to come help me.”
She was worried about me, and yet she still continued to push me away. Not wanting to start an argument, I got up and crossed into the kitchen to the only phone in the house. I dialed Dad’s number by heart—he’d made me memorize it when I was eleven—and waited for the voicemail. I guessed he was probably working late for the business trip. To my surprise, he answered on the second ring.
“Brye?”
“Hey, Dad,” I said, hoping to sound as chipper as possible.
His breath of relief crackled over the receiver. “Are you all right? Willa said that you weren’t feeling well?”
“I’m fine, I—”
“Is it that place? I’m starting to think this was a bad idea. I mean, you had such a trauma there, and asking you to go back—”
“Dad!” I interrupted, terrified he’d say I needed to go home. I didn’t need another person wanting me to leave.
“I’m fine, I swear, it was…just really bad cramps.” Again, I didn’t relish lying to my father, but I couldn’t imagine telling him I’d found the love of his life, the woman that had left us both, trapped in a spirit world nestled within the Smokies.
“Oh. Oh.” Dad’s voice went up a little, as it usually did when we needed to talk about feminine hygiene and health. He’d been really great about it growing up, but it still made him a tad uncomfortable.
“Well, do I need to call the gynecologist?” he said.
Quickly I explained that I’d forgotten my usual painkillers, and all Gran had was stuff for her leg, and I hadn’t wanted to take any of that. “Izzie and I will run to the drugstore tomorrow.”
After promising to call again soon, we said our goodbyes and I hung up. Walking back into the living room, I caught Gran showing Izzie how to redo her knots in her mess-of-a-potholder.
Seeing the two of them together, I was actually jealous. I wanted to be with Gran, sitting and learning how to knit. While I was happy to hear her call me “sugar pea” and know how worried she’d been about me, I could still feel this wall between us.
I just wished I knew why.
For the millionth time, I wondered what my time in this valley had been like. What my relationship with my Gran had been like and what my time with Alder and the spirits had been like. Besides the spirit that had gone after me, the other spirits didn’t seem evil…just…
I thought of the charging buck, the vines and leaves decorating its branches, the chaotic green eyes, and the unrestrained power of its hooves.
It had been wild.
“Briony?”
I looked up, realizing that I’d been staring at nothing, lost in the events of today and the mystery of my past, present, and future.
Gran peered at me from over her readers.
“Are you hungry? Izzie made some excellent chicken noodle soup.”
Wow. They’d even fixed something for the “sick” me. “Izzie only knows how to make spaghetti.”
“Not anymore. Willa taught me. So get ready for two perfected meals.”
I grinned. “Make way for the next Top Chef.”
…
“So…” Izzie said, as she put away the large soup pot under the counter. “How are we going to swing tomorrow? We could say that I need to drive you back home to get something—”
“Iz, you’re not coming,” I said with a sigh, turning off the faucet.
“What? Of course I am.”
I looked up from the sink to peer outside the window, seeing the wisps drift around lazily in the garden. In the window’s reflection I could see the look of frustration on my friend’s face.
“Let’s sit on the porch,” I suggested.
Out in the Tennessee summer night air, the anxiety that came with the chaos from the day and the unknown smacking me in the face at every turn, seemed to fade. The temperature was warm, but not stuffy or intolerable thanks to the mountains, and the music of the crickets and frogs was a distant background buzz—calming like an air conditioner’s soft whir. The wisps flitted here and there, drifting to the bushes and alighting the plants with sparks of mana. Transferring energy, like bees with pollen, from flower to flower.
Izzie and I sat on the rocking bench and I pulled my legs up, hugging my knees. “So, be honest. How much are you regretting being my friend at the moment?”
Thwack—Izzie hit my arm with a bench pillow. “If you ask me another question like that, I’ll block you on Instagram. You got that?”
“Got it,” I chuckled. “I just, if you weren’t friends with me, you wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place. You wouldn’t be giving up your summer to…to learn how to knit.”
“First, your gran is delightful, and second, that’s not the way friendship works, Brye. You can’t pick and choose the things you want in a friend. You have to accept all their burdens and baggage and annoying tendencies. If you love them enough, they’ll even become endearing. Like how you always, always sing the wrong lyrics to Maroon 5 songs.”
“Adam Levine is impossible to understand.”
“My point is I accept all of you, Briony Redwrell. Nature spirit powers, dangerous missions, terrible at lyrics, and all.”
I twisted my hands in my lap. “And what about Alder?”
Izzie’s teasing smile turned into a frown. “What about him?”
“Do you accept him, too?”
“That’s different—”
“It’s not, actually. You just said you can’t pick and choose the burdens of a friend. Well, Alder and
I were friends. And I didn’t pick and choose only the human part of him. I accepted the nature spirit part of him, too.”
“But you were a kid.”
“Exactly. We both were. He didn’t know what he was doing to me. In fact, when I came back here, he tried desperately to get me to leave. And it’s my decision to unlock these gates and go after my mom.”
Izzie was quiet for a long time. A wisp twirled through the air in a delicate pirouette and landed on a shrub of bright red begonias.
“Okay, I get it,” she said softly. “Using my own argument against me. Clever girl.”
Laughing, I bumped my shoulder against hers. “Thanks.”
She scowled. “I’m still coming, though.”
“I don’t think that’s going to be possible. You need a lot of mana to be able to pass through the barrier into the ethereal world, and Alder only gave you a little.”
“Then he can give me more.”
“He won’t.”
“Uh-huh. And why wouldn’t he?”
“Because,” I said confidently, though my heart ached at what I was about to admit, “he regrets bringing even me. There’s no way he’ll want to bring another human along into danger. He’s…a good guy.”
Feeling Izzie’s stare on me, I looked back at her. “What?”
“Giiiirrrl, you better not be falling for him.”
My cheeks lit with heat and I almost fell off the rocking sofa. “I’m not falling for him, and I wasn’t kissing him!”
She raised her hands into the air in mock innocence. “I’m not saying you were—I’m saying you wanted to.”
“No, I didn’t.” But that didn’t sound believable, even to me.
Izzie raised one eyebrow. “Look, all I’m saying is, in all the time I’ve known you, you’ve never had sparks like that fly with any other guy. And that includes Eric—mister-I’m-too-good-for-musicals.”
I laughed, remembering Izzie’s rivalry with the last guy I’d been close to dating. “Izzie, you’ve got to let that go.”
“Never. Hamilton is the voice of our generation. Anyway, my point is…you had your hands on his face.”