Haven Lost

by Josh de Lioncourt

  She knows she should be afraid, or at least surprised, but somehow she is neither. This is joy. This is power. This is ecstasy like she has never known, and it fills her body with liquid pleasure. Her muscles tauten and relax, tauten and relax, as she soars through the cleansing fog.

  This is the knowing, she realizes. This is the knowing in its purest, most true form, and it is unlike anything she has ever experienced before. It makes the moments on the ice seem pale in comparison; it makes every instance of the knowing she has ever felt seem minuscule. This is the real thing; this is more than simply knowing—this is being.

  She tumbles through the mist, and for a moment, it billows around her, pulling her hair back from her face and caressing every inch of her body and mind with its soft, cool touch.

  As she turns, the mist before her begins to part, the edges tearing away and drifting off in long, phantom streamers.

  She tumbles out of the fog and onto soft white sand. Above her, the sun shines brilliantly out of a sky so blue and close that she believes for an instant she could reach out, pull it down, and wrap it around herself like a blanket. It would feel like the finest silken sheet, she thinks.

  She rolls to a stop, laughing with the sheer joy of it. The warmth of the sand is a revelation. It’s like the first sip of hot coffee on a morning when the mercury stands below zero. She soaks it in, and it fills her up.

  She comes to a stop and sits up. She feels oddly light. Sand clings to her clothes, and she brushes it away, looking out over an enormous lake. Its waters are so clear that they hardly seem like water at all.

  The lake is so large that she can only just discern its farthest shore, a mere shadow across a distant horizon. Small waves ripple across its clear, clean surface, before lapping gently against the beach.

  Far away, nestled amidst the waves like an improbable mirage, she can see an island. Trees seem to cover every inch of it, growing right up to its narrow, rocky shores.

  She hears something, and she turns on the sand to look down the beach to her left. There are two figures coming toward her. She watches them approach, thinking that there is something familiar in the way they walk and the way that they move. They are talking to one another, but Emily is too far away to hear them, or to make out their features clearly. She squints against the glare, trying to see.

  When they’re only a few dozen yards away, she finally realizes who one of them is. It is Michael. He is dressed in armor and carrying a shield with the mark of the Dragon’s Brood emblazoned on it.

  It is Michael, but not the Michael she knows. There is nothing dull or distant in his face. Gone is the lost, bewildered child who speaks in broken and confused fragments. This Michael is alert and talking animatedly with his companion. His gaze is bright and brimming with sharp intelligence.

  At first, she thinks the other boy is Daniel. He has the same type of horns spiraling out from his head, but as they grow closer, she realizes it can’t be. This boy is in his teens. His hair is dark, and he has the lean, muscular build of a well-trained fighter. He, too, is clad in armor, but his is less ornate than Michael’s, and the shield he carries is bare of insignia. Even still, there is something familiar about this boy as well, and she feels something stir inside her at the sight of him.

  The boys stop, still too far away for her to hear their conversation, and Emily gets to her feet, thinking of going to meet them.

  The boy with the horns looks sharply at her and holds up a hand. Wait, he is telling her. He turns back to Michael, and says a few more words to him. Michael nods solemnly and turns away.

  As the boy who isn’t Daniel resumes walking toward her, Michael moves down the beach toward the water, pausing when the waves touch his feet.

  The horned boy stops at last just before her, studying her closely. He is a head taller than she is, and his features are sharp and handsome. His eyes are a brilliant green that seem to bore into her own. His hair is a little too long, and the horns that spiral out from the sides of his head gleam a faintly yellowish white in the sun.

  “Hello, Emily,” he says, and he smiles easily.

  She finds herself mirroring that smile with one of her own. She does not know this boy, and yet she does.

  “Who are you?” she asks.

  “Questions!” he says with a laugh. “Always questions. You haven’t changed a bit. Has Corbbmacc threatened to strangle you yet?”

  Her smile falters.

  “How do you…” she breaks off, self-conscious about asking another question.

  The boy laughs again, but his mirth is friendly and kind.

  “I’m Derek,” he tells her. “You don’t know me, but I know you. I know you very, very well.”

  He turns on his heel and sinks down to the sand, staring out over the water of the lake. He pats the ground beside him.

  “Sit down,” he tells her.

  She does, and her gaze follows his to where Michael stands with his back to them. He’s waded a little farther out into the water, and the waves lap at his knees. He seems to be looking for something in the depths of the waters that shift and swirl around him.

  “You’re in the mines at Hellsgate now, aren’t you?” Derek asks, looking back at her.

  She nods, meeting his gaze.

  “Then we don’t have a lot of time.”

  He pulls a dagger from his belt, and she flinches away. Derek laughs again.

  “Don’t worry. This isn’t for you.”

  He starts drawing a series of lines in the sand with the point of the blade.

  “Look,” he says, tapping a wavy line that meanders from the heel of his boot to just beyond her knee. “This is the main tunnel. The one where you sleep.”

  He taps various points along the line and continues, talking faster. “This is where the cell is. This is the shaft that you and Corbbmacc came down. And this,” he points to a vertical line intersecting the first just past the shaft, “is where the guards’ quarters are. Go either way down that tunnel, and it’ll lead you out of the mines. One end comes out of the side of the mountain. The other end comes to a shaft that you’ll have to get up, but both ways will get you out. Are you following me?”

  She stares down at the little map he has drawn in the sand and nods again.

  “There will be quite a few guards. The important thing is to get them distracted and…” He turns and grasps her shoulders in his strong hands, and she looks up into his face. Dimly, she thinks that she should be alarmed by this gesture, but she is not. She does not fear this boy, and she wonders why. It is as though she has known him her whole life.

  “And?” she prompts him.

  “And you can’t get everyone out. Don’t even try. The only way you’re going to be able to help anyone is by getting yourself and Corbbmacc out and finishing what you started.”

  “But I haven’t started anything, and I don’t have any idea what I’m doing,” she says, her fists clenching at her sides. The world around her ripples for a moment, as if there is a layer of clear water between her and reality, and then everything comes back into focus again.

  “You have a choice. You can go east, over the mountains. You can take Michael and find the lake.”

  “This lake?” she asks, gesturing toward the water but not taking her eyes off of him.

  “No, not this one, but one very much like it.”

  He bites his lip, as though debating how much to say.

  “Tell me,” she says, throwing up her hands in frustration. “I’m tired of being in the dark. Tell me.”

  “I was on my way there,” he says slowly. “Michael and I were. We were caught and sent to the mines.” He looks away from her, and she follows his gaze. The water is halfway up Michael’s thighs now, and he is still scanning it, a hand shading his eyes against the glare of the sun.

  “I died there,” Derek says softly. “The crystal affects us in ways it doesn’t other people. If you are near too much of it for too long, it will make you do things…terrible things.”


  Emily looks back at him, unease threading its way into her heart.

  “What do you mean, ‘us’?” she asks.

  “People like you and me. People who know. Isn’t that what you call it? Knowing?”

  She nods, and they stare into one another’s faces for a long time.

  “What’s my other choice?” she asks at last.

  He only stares at her for a long time. Sweat trickles down his forehead, and he wipes it away with the palm of one callused hand.

  “You can choose to go home,” he says reluctantly.

  “How?”

  “You’ll know when the moment presents itself.”

  There is a splash from the water, and they both look. Michael has waded out into the lake until he is submerged up to his chest. Beside him, floating in the water and reaching out to embrace him, is the most beautiful creature Emily has ever laid eyes on.

  The mermaid has long golden hair tied back from her face by a length of green and yellow seaweed. Warm human flesh gives smoothly away to glistening scales at her waist. Her tail flicks out, splashing the water and reflecting the light in a cascade of rainbow colors that dance and shimmer in the water. It reminds Emily of the crystal.

  The mists begin to close in around her again, and she looks back desperately at Derek. He’s watching her with a sad little smile. He speaks, but she cannot hear the words. Still, she can read them on his lips.

  “Remember your friends,” he says, before the mist closes around her once again.

  * * *

  She hit the floor with a jolt, crying out with pain. Her fingers closed instinctively over the crystal in her hands.

  “Emily,” Corbbmacc said, and she felt his hands rolling her over.

  She opened her eyes and stared up at him. Over his shoulder, she could just make out Daniel and Maddy watching too. Daniel looked scared, but Maddy’s expression was only one of mild interest.

  “Are you okay?” Corbbmacc asked, helping her to sit up. The sharp edges of the crystal bit into her palms, and she loosened her grip.

  “I’m okay,” she said, her voice a little shaky. “I’m okay.”

  She forced her fingers to open and looked down at the uneven, broken piece of crystal. She hadn’t noticed before, but now there was no way not to see it, like one of those pictures that morphs into something else as you stare at it. The outline was vague, misshapen, and entirely unmistakable.

  The crystal was shaped like the proud, upraised head of a stallion.

  Or a knight.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Emily jerked awake on the rough stone floor. Her heart thundered in her ears, and sweat ran down her body. She shivered and slowly sat up. For a few seconds, she was a top spinning wildly out of control, and then the dizziness slowed and faded away. The sounds of steady breathing surrounded her as the other prisoners slept on. From deep within the mines, she heard the ceaseless hammering of the dead miners toiling on. It was an eerie sound, unaccompanied by any human voice.

  She was sick. There was no denying it now, and it was only getting worse. Her head ached, and her mouth was dry and tasted like a mixture of ash and the foul slop they’d been fed before being locked up in the cell for the night.

  She shivered again, and the movement became a series of shudders that racked her frame. She must be feverish. She clenched her fists, feeling frustration welling up inside her. There wasn’t time for this, dammit.

  Beside her, she could see Corbbmacc’s sleeping form. He was facing toward her, using an uneven section of the rock floor as a sort of pillow. He looked worn and tired, but not ill. The stubble on his cheeks and the dark circles under his eyes, far from detracting from his looks, only seemed to accentuate them. She’d never understood the attraction Casey had found in Edward Cullen, Angel, or the other vampires girls her age were always swooning over, but she thought she saw a small fraction of it in Corbbmacc’s face as the torchlight played across it.

  She’d been dreaming again, but she could no longer remember of what. Only her racing pulse and a sense of disquiet remained to declare its nature. She wanted to move; she wanted to put some space between herself and the nightmare, whatever it had been.

  She got to her feet unsteadily and picked her way through the maze of sleeping bodies on the floor. Her muscles ached. Every part of her did, for that matter. She felt like she had when she, and the rest of the team, had come down with the flu in seventh grade. She hadn’t moved for a week. But she didn’t think this was the flu.

  She stood at the iron gate, grasping the bars and staring down the tunnel. The yellow torchlight gave everything a strange and sickly pallor. She assumed, since they’d been taken to sleep, that it was night, but there was really no way of knowing for sure. Time had grown strangely malleable and almost elastic here. If you wanted to imagine it was mid morning, you could. If, in the next instant, you wanted to believe it was midnight, that was possible too. Without the sun and stars to delineate between the days and nights, time meant nothing.

  If the periods they were given to sleep were to be counted upon as night, they’d been here now for three days. In all that time, she’d been watching, trying to form a plan to use the information Derek had given her to escape. Of course, that assumed the vision of Michael and Derek had been something more than just a crazy hallucination conjured up by her traumatized and feverish brain.

  It had seemed real, though, and over the last few days, it had become more real in her mind as she turned it over and worried it. That could just be the effects of her worsening illness, she supposed, but she didn’t really believe that.

  A giant moth, nearly the size of a small bird, flew out of the darkness and directly into her face. With a gasp, she batted it away, her ears full of its low buzz. Her fingers closed around its twitching body, seemingly of their own accord. She felt its delicate white wings flutter against the sides of her hand and the crunch of its body as she crushed it.

  With a grimace of disgust she forced her fingers apart, already moving to wipe her palm on her jerkin.

  There was nothing there. Her hand was entirely empty. There was no crumpled form, no twitching insectile legs or smear of glistening guts. Her palm was clean.

  She leaned forward, resting her hot forehead on the cool metal of the bars. She closed her eyes and tried to force her scattered thoughts into order, but they fought her efforts to tame them.

  Seeing things, Em, she thought. Oh dear God, you’re seeing things now.

  She had to get out of here before she entirely lost her mind. How much longer could she cope with this?

  What they needed was some sort of diversion. They needed something to cause all, or at least most, of the guards to leave the tunnels that led out of the mine. If they could clear those tunnels, they could try to make a run for it.

  All of this would have to happen while they were working. There was no way out of this cell during the nighttime hours.

  How to do it, though?

  The most obvious diversion she could think of was to try to cause a cave in by knocking out one of the supports that reinforced the tunnels. She’d rejected that idea almost at once though, as it risked their own lives, not to mention trapping all these innocent people in here. And there was Daniel to think about too. In the last few days, he’d regained a little of the mischief she’d seen from him back at Seven Skies. True, she suspected it was mainly an attempt to raise her own spirits that the boy pulled trivial pranks on Maddy and some of the others, but they had made her smile. She liked him, dammit.

  “You can’t get everyone out,” Derek had told her. “Don’t even try.”

  But the idea of leaving all these people behind to suffer ate away at her. What made her and Corbbmacc so special that they should live while the others were condemned to die?

  Derek had told her that she could help others if she finished what she’d started, but she hadn’t started anything. She felt like a pawn on someone else’s chessboard, being sent this way and that with n
o idea why, or for what cause, she was fighting. She hadn’t asked for this, goddammit. She hadn’t.

  “Are you all right?” a voice whispered beside her. She opened her eyes and turned from the bars to see Corbbmacc standing there, his hair tousled and his face looking drawn.

  Fury bubbled up inside her. It was hot, sudden, and absolutely complete. What the fuck kind of a question was that? Was she all right? Was she fucking all right?

  There was a splice in the film of reality. At first, she was merely looking at Corbbmacc, feeling the rage building and stoking a fire in her gut. Then she had leapt upon him, punching his face and pulling wildly at his hair. Her fingers screamed with pain as they connected with his jaw, but she hardly noticed. How dare he ask if she was all right? She would show him just how all right she was.

  He stumbled back, taken entirely off guard. He raised his hand to shield his face, but she grabbed his wrists, digging her nails deep into his flesh and raking them downward. Shallow red tracks, glistening scarlet, appeared in his skin, and he let out a surprised grunt of pain.

  He took another step backward, and tripped over the legs of an emaciated old man with silver hair. He hit the floor with a cry, and the old man let out a hoarse shriek of his own before scurrying off across the floor.

  Emily watched him go, the sight of him fleeing into the shadows like an oversized roach only fanning the flames that blazed inside her. Disgusting creatures, she fumed, scuttling away like worthless, cowardly insects…

  The thought fluttered away as she fell on Corbbmacc, hammering her fists on his chest. He twisted beneath her, and she snatched at his collar, winding the fabric into her fist. It tore with a loud wrenching sound, and she found herself staring down at the image of the dragon tattooed upon his skin.

  “Traitor,” she hissed, and she brought her fist down on the curved head of the dragon, just where its crest met his collarbone. Corbbmacc grunted again.

  A strange keening filled the cell, echoing off the walls and away down the tunnel. The sound lanced into her head like a dagger. She had only a brief moment to wonder what it was before Corbbmacc had grabbed her by the arms and flipped her roughly off of him and onto the floor. The impact as she hit the cold stone drove the air from her lungs, and the keening sound abruptly ceased. She gasped for air as the remnants of her cries died away.