Earth/Sky (Earth/Sky Trilogy)

by Macaulay C. Hunter

  “Zakia, I’m up here,” I called.

  “Oh, thank God!” he exploded. He climbed out of the pit and embraced me hard. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay,” I said, throttled by his arms.

  The hunters stood on the road, guns down but with their eyes trained to the emptiness above us. I called for Cadmon to come to me, but he wouldn’t with one of the cut at my side. Eyes wide upon Zakia, Cadmon ran over to Silea and Radeo to take their hands. Radeo jerked away like Cadmon was poisonous and snapped for Silea to make him let go. She shook her head slightly and allowed Cadmon to hang on to her.

  “He is cut,” Cadmon said to Silea while the two of them walked to the pit.

  “I know what you are,” I blurted to Zakia. “I’ve known for a while.”

  An angry heat came to Zakia’s eyes. “No one had the right to tell you that. That’s my personal business.”

  “The Ripper,” Silea called. We looked down to the hole. I spotted what was left of the chair, tipped over on its side by the trapdoor. My heart fell. It was empty.

  Chapter Twelve: The Move

  “We can move her to the compound in Oregon,” Radeo was saying to the others in the kitchen of the Kreelings’ home.

  I was listening from the living room. It was the least comfortable living room imaginable, no armchairs or sofas, only hard wooden chairs that encouraged someone not to remain sitting for too long. The walls held no pictures or paintings, or personal touches like knick-knacks. The television was old and small, and the entertainment center it sat upon had empty shelves. Movers would have needed no more than five minutes to empty the contents of this room into the back of a truck. I was curious if the rest of the house was like that, too. Nothing but the bare bones necessities.

  Cadmon was sitting on a big pillow in the corner, his eyes closed as he listened to music through an old CD player that belonged to Silea. Drina had checked his leg carefully for burns, but the scorching was only to the fabric.

  Feeling like I had said this twelve times already, I made it a thirteenth and called, “I’m not going to any compound!” Everyone wanted me to rest in the living room, but it was my life that they were discussing and I had a right to be a part of it. I got off the chair and pushed open the swinging door into the kitchen to join the group. Around a plain table were Drina and Adriel, as well as the four Kreelings. The counters and windowsill were bare; the refrigerator was unadorned except for a handful of plain magnets kept in a tidy line. As they turned to me, I said, “Look, I can’t just pick up my whole life and go somewhere. I have school and a family-”

  “That is irrelevant,” Radeo said dismissively. He adjusted an icepack behind his back and leaned against the chair to pin it there. “If they get their hands on you, you’ll have nothing.”

  “But these two chased them off,” I said, putting my hands on Drina and Adriel’s shoulders. He needed to have the burn on his face treated. “I heard you guys talking about that. They’re gone.”

  “That doesn’t mean they won’t come back, honey,” Drina said soberly. “I know what Rippers are like. I was one long ago, very briefly.”

  “You were not,” I exclaimed. I would never believe that of her, not when she was so loving with her family and Cadmon especially.

  She squeezed my hand. “My wings were growing coarse, and the color was changing. I was on my way, not as far down that path as these four, but heading in that direction. When you’re stuck here for an eternal life, forever cut off from your true world and unable to make much by way of connection . . . the resentment and the bitterness of it can twist you. Easily.”

  “What do we know of them?” asked the woman named Evanyi. Her leg was propped up on another chair, the burn on her shin a deep red. Her husband Collan was treating it with a tincture. Although it must have been excruciatingly painful, she never flinched. Nor did she acknowledge anything I had said about not wanting to go to the compound. Even their wedding rings were simple, plain gold bands around their fourth fingers.

  “We’ve cobbled together our kreolos information with what Drina Graystone knows of them,” Silea answered. I hadn’t realized Drina knew any of them, but she was extremely old. “Barasho and Makala are very peripatetic. They don’t stay anywhere longer than a few weeks.”

  “So these are friends of yours,” Evanyi said to Drina with dislike. I looked at Evanyi and felt a great deal of dislike myself.

  “Not friends. When I knew them, which was quite long ago,” Drina said, “they were low-level Rippers. What they did today, the outright flagrancy of it, was something they never would have done before. Now and then they ripped a human marked for death and kept that person as a servant. They didn’t actively seek them out, it was only by chance if they came across one, so it happened only now and then over the centuries.”

  “How did they treat the human?” Radeo asked.

  “Neither cruel nor kind,” Drina said. Sensing how upset I was to hear about this, Adriel put his hand over mine. Words could not express how I had felt to see him walk through the door to the living room, with no more injuries than the burn to his cheek. Drina leaned back in her chair and then forward immediately. The chairs were no more comfortable here than the ones in the living room. “In truth, I didn’t know why they bothered to rip the human at all. They derived little pleasure from it.”

  “Why did you rip yours?” Evanyi asked. I looked down to Drina in horror.

  Stiffening a little in her seat, Drina said, “Loneliness.”

  “And that was all?”

  Drina remained polite, even though Evanyi was being rude. “That was all. After a long time spent in a hermitic life, I was desperate for some companionship. I came upon a man in the desert. He was nearly dead from dehydration, and I claimed him on an impulse. I took him back to my home and treated him, thinking I could have a friend.”

  “And then what?” I couldn’t help but ask.

  “He asked while he was recovering that I take him back to his people. And I realized that I could not keep him willfully unto myself, for my own purposes with no consideration to his. Rippers keep humans for lovers, for friends, for victims or slaves . . . it depends on the Ripper in question. But I couldn’t do that, not any of it.”

  “How noble,” Evanyi said. I glared at her, but she didn’t afford me a glance to pick up on it.

  “I didn’t want a friend this way. He was a human being, not a stray dog. Nor could I take him back to his home, for as the tapestry was woven, he was meant to die out there. This man was raising an anchor as a son. The breach would have been incredible. So I concocted a draught for pain and gave him so much that it killed him. He fell asleep and never woke up. Then I returned his body to where I found him in the desert. The color and texture of my wings slowly returned to normal.” Drina added, “Makala was not the instigator when they ripped; at the time she expressed little affection for humans. She blames them for her fall, even though it is obviously not any human’s fault. She made her choice, as I did, and for a similar reason. But she didn’t accept the consequences.”

  “And Barasho?” Evanyi asked. The only hint that what her husband was doing to her leg hurt was that she closed her eyes briefly after speaking.

  “He didn’t blame humans but the Thronos, who punished him over a splitter. I think that he ripped hoping a confrontation might be borne of it, for if a fallen angel behaves badly enough for long enough, our authority will step in. Had he found my man in the desert, I believe that he would have returned that fellow home to affect the anchor son, provoking the Thronos to respond personally and destroy him in battle. Barasho has nothing to live for, and an eternity in which to live it. I wouldn’t describe either of them as malicious, although by ripping they were doing malicious things. Our acquaintance ended since I loathed to see the unhappy lives of their ripped humans, who Barasho killed when he tired of them.”

  “What was his method?” Collan grunted, which was all he had said until now.

  “He flew
straight up into the sky with the human, let the music lull them to sleep, then let go. They fell to death fairly unaware of what was going on. Today . . . that was far more aggression from the two of them than I ever saw in our long-ago acquaintance.”

  From the other room came Cadmon’s voice, humming along with the music through the player. Downloading more information through her strange kreolos tools, Silea scanned it and said, “His methods have changed. One of their temporary homes was discovered many years ago, and within it the slain body of a ripped human. He had been stabbed in the stomach, and his body showed signs of torture.”

  “We change with time, like humans do,” Drina replied. “Yet that is not the Barasho I knew. He never tortured his ripped humans, save for the torture of not allowing them to go home. Except for giving orders to fetch shoes or something to eat, Makala barely spoke to them. They were lost souls, Barasho and Makala. Their wings and fire were ugly then, but they are hideous now. Something changed drastically in our long time apart.”

  “Something is likely Japheem, and he may have been the one to do the stabbing,” Radeo said.

  “I don’t know him, or the one named Zofia,” Drina said.

  Evanyi looked at Adriel no more pleasantly than she was treating Drina. Adriel said, “I’ve never met any of the four of them until today in Seataw with Jessa.”

  Radeo readjusted the icepack and said, “Japheem was cast out for reworking large portions of the tapestry itself in secret, from what we know. While most angels live to listen to the music, to move with the wind and await their next task, he was severing threads and retying them to suit his purposes. He did this in his non-corporeal state-”

  Both Drina and Adriel were wearing expressions of absolute aghast, and she said, “So the Thronos would not see him!”

  “Yes. He was clever. By making himself invisible and plunging in and out of different times to rework threads, he made it very difficult for them to discover who was causing these changes. The tapestry itself almost collapsed when he severed an anchor thread from five thousand years ago. It changed every facet on the face of this world.”

  “Adriel, you said something to me about a fallen angel who used to live with you doing something like that. Jacquiel,” I said.

  He shook his head violently. “Not on that level, not by far! And not with the actual physical tapestry itself! Jacquiel was playing with extremely minor matters belonging to extremely minor people. You can’t compare the two: it’s a snowflake to an avalanche.”

  Cracking his knuckles one by one, Radeo said, “For long the Thronos blamed an anemoi and increased their guards upon the tapestry. Japheem blew right past them to go on with his evil work. It was not until the Thronos thought to investigate individual angels that they found the culprit. He was cast out at once, and the vote was as close to unanimous as they’ve ever come, eleven to one.”

  “The Old Guard should have taken him apart!” Adriel said forcefully.

  “But they did not. They needed one more vote for that. So now he continues his mischief as a fallen angel. This group is almost impossible for kreolos to track. They change locations swiftly and at great distances. By the time a kreolos gets there, they’re long gone and the trail is cold. The Council hasn’t bothered assigning hunters to this case in the last few decades, since it’s such a waste of time and effort. Japheem leaves a symbol behind in every place he alights, of a crescent moon pierced by an arrow. Hunters have come across those places by accident, as my father once did. This one wants people to know that he’s been there.”

  Thinking of that jangling music, I said, “It is physically painful to be around him. It felt like I was being pulled apart on the inside.”

  “That is a consequence of what he did with the tapestry,” Radeo said. “Angels do not lay their hands on the threads, yet he did many times. What he warped, it warped him in return. It gives him unusual insight into the souls of humans.”

  That was how he knew that I fell. “What were his purposes in doing what he did with the tapestry?”

  “There was none,” Silea said. “I explained already that he’s insane. He didn’t do it for love or vengeance; he did it just because he could.”

  “It made him feel powerful,” I guessed. “He couldn’t create the world itself, but he could fashion a different one.”

  “But none of this concerns you,” Radeo said. “All that we have to decide in relation to you is where you should be hidden. Now the underground compound we have in-”

  “Absolutely not!” I cried. I hadn’t just won my life back from the cliff to lose it on a chance encounter in Seataw. “Look, I’m not going to hide out in a compound for the rest of my life. My life is essentially over then! You just said that they move swiftly and go far away. How long do you think they’ll hang out here?”

  “The point is-”

  “The point is that the decision is mine,” I said. “I’ll hide out this weekend; I’ll hide out all next week if you think that’s smart. But I am not hiding out forever, especially not underground! That’s ludicrous.”

  As Evanyi lifted her leg down to the floor, Collan put a cap on the cream and said, “You realize the risk you’re taking? If they were to come back and capture you, we won’t follow. You’re gone. No one will come to save you from them. We won’t ever catch up. That’s the reality of the situation here. So you should think about this a little more carefully than a test you might have next week or wanting to stay around for a boy you like.”

  I didn’t think I had ever heard myself described in such shallow terms. Drina and Adriel winced, but there was nothing I could do about how my soul was blazing. “I think that’s pretty rotten that hunters don’t even bother with the people that these Rippers take! You’re hunters, so hunt. Or else what good are you?”

  “You can think whatever you want,” Collan said, and I could tell from the crease of his brow that he didn’t like me one bit. “But the fact is that a hunter goes after prey that he or she has a chance of bringing down. We could spend our lives stopping a great amount of other evils this world has, or make no impact at all by chasing those Rippers. Precious few kreolos hunters chase Rippers, and we’re not those few. Yes, they are most likely to just move on from here. Rippers tend to go for who is easy, and you weren’t today. I still wouldn’t stake my life on that, and neither should you.”

  “It is her decision though,” Silea said in the ensuing silence. “We can’t hold her against her will in the compound.”

  Collan slapped the table so hard that it rattled, the container of cream jumping onto its side and rolling off. No one went after it. “By all means, let a seventeen-year-old girl decide how best to manage her life, and endanger innocent people because she has school on Monday. If you’ll excuse me, I want to check some equipment.” He stalked out of the room and went up the creaking flight of stairs to the second floor. A door slammed.

  Drina said, “They know my first name and Adriel’s; asking around this area will eventually lead them to us on the off chance they decide to pursue it. I don’t know if offering our home as a safe place for Jessa is wise. Nor is it safe for her to stay in this home. Would the Coopers-”

  “No!” Adriel burst.

  She held up a finger sternly and he fell into a sulky quiet. “Would the Coopers agree to let her stay in one of their homes for the next week or so? My family can spread out around Spooner and keep watch for the Rippers’ return.”

  “With full understanding of what they are, you suggest this?” Radeo asked.

  “I understand they have been stable for a very long time,” Drina said. “I also understand that there are only four of them with this problem among dozens of family members. Those dozens have accepted the immortal among them and live here without fear of their company. For kreolos hunters to tolerate this situation speaks well to what solution these four are using to cope with their . . . issue.”

  Radeo and Silea exchanged a look, which I understood as meaning that they did not like
to tolerate this situation. He cracked his last knuckle and I swallowed on a scold that he was giving himself arthritis. Putting the icepack on another spot of his back, he said, “This was an agreement made almost one hundred years ago between the Coopers and the Kreeling hunters. We do as we are bidden by our elders.”

  “But you do hold to it,” Drina said, “despite your personal feelings, and there have been no lapses, I assume, since I don’t sense any fear in you of them.”

  “A lapse and they would be destroyed at once,” Silea said strongly.

  “So I don’t believe that this would be an unsafe place for her to hide out for a little time, if they permit it. Also, should the Rippers come back, this is your backyard.”

  I couldn’t believe that I wasn’t going back to Grandpa Jack’s home tonight, and to have my life proceed like normal. Listening to them speak of arrangements, I felt like I was spinning out of control. Adriel stood after a glance at me over his shoulder. “Let’s go to the other room.”

  Having turned himself into a tiny ball of boy, Cadmon was asleep on the pillow without a single limb touching the floor. Sunlight shined through the window upon his dark hair and sweet features. Classical music continued to play from the earphones, which were clutched in his hand.

  The chair creaked under Adriel. He touched his cheek and flinched. I dampened a washcloth in the bathroom and brought it back to press against his face. It wasn’t often that I was without words, but this was one of those rare times. Everything in Seataw had been so magical until I stepped off that last bridge.

  “I don’t want you to stay here,” Adriel said with resentment. “We could put you in a hotel for a week.”

  Hearing the others speak, I said, “I think the Kreelings almost like the thought of getting another crack at the Rippers should they come here in search of me. Cadmon said you hit one of them?”