Darkness in Green & Gold: A contemporary fantasy adventure (Green & Gold, book 3)

by Jo Holloway

  They sat in silence for a moment.

  “Jenyx still doesn’t know we’re doing this?” Wes asked.

  “No. He thinks we’re going to the mall like we planned.”

  “Are you sure you want to go behind his back? You’ve always trusted him before. This could make things awkward when he finds out.”

  Her stomach tightened. “I know. But he and Tomyx kept so much from us for so long. I can’t control all these feelings I keep having, which can’t be a good thing. I want to talk to the elders without him around and see if they’ll tell me more than what anyone said at the council. If Jenyx were here, he’d only interrupt when he thought we’d heard enough. I don’t want enough. I want everything.”

  “Okay. Just checking.”

  CHAPTER 6

  WES CLIMBED OUT OF the car and shrugged on a sweatshirt he’d pulled from the back seat. Cara zipped up her jacket in the biting wind. Together, they hustled into the park where the trees offered some shelter, and stopped in front of the large pine.

  Wes rubbed his hands for warmth. “Anything?”

  “No strong feelings. All I feel is cold.” She peered up the trunk into the thick branches. “Hello?”

  After a moment, a large shape shifted in one of the high boughs. “Cara, isn’t it? I wondered if I’d see you here eventually.” The porcupine lumbered down to a lower branch.

  “You did? Where are the other two elders? What happened to the one in the tree?” She’d become oddly accustomed to talking to the Pyx who used to live in this tree, and was surprised to find her gone.

  “Ah, they’re off on important business. And she had no reason to stay in the tree once you sorted out that other Pyxsee.”

  “He was only trying to save his sister.”

  “What important business?” Wes asked.

  “Oh, nothing related to what you came here for. Nothing related to the one watching you.”

  Wes cast a side-eyed glance at Cara before craning his neck up the tree again. “You know about it. So who’s watching us?”

  “Not both of you. No, no. What would anyone care about you? No, she’s watching the girl. Cara’s the interesting one.”

  Cara glanced over at Wes at the insensitive words, but he didn’t seem perturbed to be called uninteresting.

  “Interesting how?” he asked.

  Ouch. Hurtful. He didn’t have to spread it around just because the Pyx said no one would care about him. Was that what he thought about her? Huh. Maybe she’d been rude one too many times lately.

  “Those eyes—”

  “Yeah, yeah. My stupid crazy-colored eyes. Unusual intensity. Blah, blah, blah,” she interrupted. “Get to the part where it matters.”

  “There have been others with extra abilities like you.”

  Her insides froze. She knew there had been others with the same intense gold eyes. Her dad, for one. And Jenyx had said Pyxsees like her were rare, not unique. But this was the first she was hearing about enhanced abilities like her empathy. Why hadn’t Jenyx ever said anything? How many secrets and lies were still out there?

  “How many others? What kinds of abilities?”

  “Several. We find a few in every generation of Pyxsees. Come back to see me anytime, and we can discuss it.”

  “Why? What’s wrong with right now?” Her fingernails dug into her palms.

  “Cara? You okay?” Wes had his hands pulled into his sleeves for warmth, but still shivered beside her. “Are you picking up something again?”

  “What?” The harsh tone registered as it came across her lips. He could be right. She didn’t usually sound so snarky. “Sorry. Maybe. Or maybe this is all me. I have no clue anymore. We can go. You’re obviously freezing.” This rude defensiveness wasn’t going to help keep her friends. She snapped her hood up and stomped back the way they’d come.

  Wes caught up and fell into step beside her. A woman walked across the park with her head bowed and her coat drawn around her. Clouds of breath floated in front of all their faces, and Cara’s came out in tense puffs. The woman passed them without looking up.

  There was something familiar about her.

  Cara froze. She whirled around.

  “Lydia?”

  It hit her.

  A wave of hostility nearly took out her legs with its ferocity. Her mind flashed back to the hospital room last year after Lydia had run into traffic. Cara hadn’t been able to enter the room in the psychiatric unit, let alone visit her mom’s friend, thanks to the feelings overwhelming her that day. Nothing had prepared her for it then, and it was just as unexpected here in the park. Her ribs tightened. A blast of cold wind sucked out her last breath and she choked in a gasp, struggling against her body’s response.

  In a rush, it all connected, her thoughts tumbling over the hundred times she’d snapped at her friends lately without meaning to. Bitter hatred flooded through her. This was it. This was the one she’d been feeling.

  The woman stopped walking.

  She didn’t turn around.

  Cara heard her mom’s voice again, shaking as she’d filed the police report for her missing friend. Lydia hadn’t been seen since her broken leg had healed. Unable to face whatever she was going through, the woman had vanished. After Sandra had helped nurse her back to health, her only thanks had been the mess of unfinished cases Lydia had left her with at work, and a filthy apartment to deal with. All at once, Cara understood exactly what Lydia had been going through.

  She flung herself at the woman, grabbed her shoulder, and spun her around.

  “Get out of her, you evil piece of—oh, shit!” She recoiled.

  Lydia’s face glared back, but it wasn’t Lydia looking at her, not anymore.

  Her eyes glowed a solid, unyielding green.

  Wes rushed to Cara’s side, pulling her back. It all happened so fast. One moment, she was staring into the unblinking green glow. The next moment, Lydia lunged. Dull silver flashed in the flat winter light.

  Knife.

  Her brain registered the movement, and she ducked before the thought finished processing. Wes fell back. Lydia stabbed out again as Cara leaped around her and tried to wrap her arms around Lydia’s to pin them to her side. The woman was absurdly strong. She shook Cara off, throwing her to the ground, where Cara scrambled back to her feet to lurch forward again.

  Lydia hurled the knife, barely missing Cara’s shoulder, and then spun around and ran. Cara took off after her in a blind rage. This Pyx was not getting away with this. Lydia deserved her life back, even if she hadn’t fought for it. Tomyx was right. No one deserved to be used like this.

  She sprinted past the car and onto the street. Lydia was faster than she had any right to be. The Pyx must be influencing her body, the way she’d seen Thomas leap higher and further than a cat his size should be able to. They raced down the sidewalk. Then Lydia stopped.

  She’d wrestled another knife out of a deep pocket and whirled on Cara, slashing at her. The blade cut through Cara’s sleeve, barely missing skin. Coppery fear flooded her mouth. She backpedaled and stumbled.

  A streak of black-and-brown fur flew over her shoulder, colliding with Lydia. Jenner’s jaw clamped down on the woman’s forearm. The knife clattered to the sidewalk. She flung her arm, and Jenner tumbled to the ground with a yelp. A crack from Lydia’s direction sounded like a bone breaking in her arm from the force. Cara burned with rage at the Pyx who would treat her pyxis with such disrespect, but Jenner’s unexpected appearance broke her focus and his safety kept her from giving chase again when Lydia fled.

  She scrambled across the frozen grass to her dog. “Jenner.”

  He rose to his feet and shook himself off.

  “Jenyx, is he okay?”

  “He is. Are you?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. But what the hell? And where did you come from? Did you know Lydia was one of them? One of the zombie people?”

  “Are you sure you are uninjured? Jenner smells blood.”

  “What? From Lydia, right?
Jenner bit her.”

  “No, it is too much for that.”

  Jenner sniffed the air and whimpered. He darted across the road. She followed, running back to the park.

  No. Not Wes.

  The red tinge vanished from the edges of her vision. Cold fear brought the world into crisp focus so the snowflakes that had begun to fall descended in slow motion, held in stark white contrast against the steel sky. Wes leaned against the car.

  His right sleeve clung to his arm, plastered in place by the crimson blood soaking through.

  “Wes.” She stumbled over to him with ice streaking through her veins.

  His left hand gripped his right arm around the biceps. His arm. Relief flooded through her that she hadn’t discovered him with a knife in his chest, but fresh guilt quickly chased it away. Blood trickled between his fingers. How could she have left him? Why had she chased after Lydia?

  “How bad is it?”

  “Bad enough. You’re driving.”

  “What?”

  “Hospital.”

  Crap. Of course.

  “Right. Hospital.” She opened the passenger door for him. “Here.”

  He lowered himself into the car, not letting pressure off his arm.

  “Do you need a tourniquet or something? Should you let me look at it?”

  “Drive, Cara,” he said through clenched teeth.

  She shut his door and raced to the driver’s side. She climbed in and reached for the ignition where her hand brushed the key slot, expecting a push button like her mom’s car.

  Double crap.

  “Key?”

  “Pocket.” He shifted his hip forward so she could fish the key out of his front pocket.

  He grimaced when she jostled him.

  “Sorry, sorry.” She started the car and checked around her. “Oh my—Jenner.”

  She leaped out of the car again, yanked open the door to the back seat so he could jump in, slammed it behind him, and dropped back into the driver’s seat.

  Wes gave a confused glance, but his pinched face and clenched jaw made talking difficult.

  “I don’t know where he came from, but he saved me. Oh, Wes, I never should have chased her and left you. I didn’t even know you were hurt.” She slammed her hand against the steering wheel. “I was literally seeing red. I didn’t think. I shouldn’t have let her affect me that way, but the feeling was stronger than any of the other times.”

  He blinked with a tiny sideways motion of his head, and she swallowed. He wasn’t mad. But he was in pain and still bleeding badly. She carefully put on the turn signal at the end of the block and made the left turn toward the hospital.

  “Where did you come from, Jenyx? How did you get to us?”

  “A friend opened the gate for me.”

  “I thought Ryx was at Whalton manor, keeping an eye on the area.” The raven had let Jenner out of their backyard many times before she’d found out about it.

  “Squirrels can be equally adept at unlatching things,” Jenyx replied.

  Cara gripped the wheel harder, driving along the main road. “I didn’t think the elders knew I was coming.”

  “The elders often know more than we realize. We did think we had more time, however. We did not expect you to go directly to the park, and of course, no one expected for one of the outlaw Pyx to show up.”

  “Outlaw?”

  A car sped by them, passing inches from her side mirror, and Cara swerved. Wes took a sharp breath, and her eyes darted to him. Only three more blocks. Driving wasn’t helping calm her shot nerves.

  “Indeed. As law-breakers, they will face a council of eleven when they are caught. Our laws are sacred for a reason, and we do not take this lightly.”

  “So you didn’t know about her. You didn’t know my mom’s friend was one of the people they’d taken over?” A wave of sorrow came from Jenyx when he didn’t bother to answer, but there was no guilt with it. He hadn’t known. “I should have put it together. Once I started feeling all this hostility, I should have remembered how it felt outside her hospital room last summer. I should have realized.”

  Wes grunted his disagreement.

  “Wesley is correct. You cannot blame yourself. Even if you had made the connection, what could you have done? She was already gone.”

  The sign for the emergency department flashed by her window as she made the turn into the hospital. She pulled up to the entrance, ignoring the no-parking signs, and switched off the car. Slamming the door behind her, she raced to the other side, past a man in scrubs standing at the entrance.

  “You can’t park—”

  “Help me,” she shouted at him, opening Wes’s door.

  When he saw the blood dripping between Wes’s fingers, the man stepped inside and emerged a moment later with a wheelchair.

  “I’ll be back soon,” she whispered to Jenyx as she closed the passenger door and followed them inside.

  The man wheeled Wes past the triage desk without stopping and called out a few orders. Other emergency staff crowded around, and they took Wes in right away. He’d gone pale, and held his eyes closed as they helped him onto the bed and began to cut away the blood-soaked sweatshirt.

  Cara was left to do the talking for the next while, especially once the policeman showed up. “Yes, it was a knife. That’s what I said.”

  The encounter with the Pyx in Lydia had left a sharp bite to her voice. She understood they had to deal with a police report, but she didn’t care about any of it. All she cared about was Wes and how she could have screwed up so badly and left him behind.

  “Is he going to be okay?”

  A doctor turned to answer her. “We’ll have to see about his arm, but he’s not in any danger now. The bleeding has mostly stopped.”

  “Did you know your attacker? Was it a fight?”

  She stared at the officer asking her questions while her friend received treatment beside them. Her head turned toward Wes, and she met his eye. With a blink, he gave her permission to lie.

  “No, we don’t know the guy. He was just some crazy guy in the park. Came out of nowhere. Can I go move my car now?”

  The policeman asked her a few more questions, and she provided a vague description, saying she’d been too freaked out to notice much, which was basically true. She hadn’t even noticed her friend get stabbed. When he finally said they were done, she moved into the space beside Wes’s bed. The activity around him had died down, and his face was looking less pinched.

  “Did they already call your parents?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You good for a few minutes?”

  He gave a slow nod, painkillers kicking in.

  By the time she moved Mak’s car, made sure Jenner would be warm enough in the shelter of the backseat, and arrived back at Wes’s bedside, his eyes were closed, so she stood to the side and brought out her phone. She stared at the black screen. She couldn’t bear telling Jory yet. Maybe when Wes woke up, or after the doctors came back to talk to his family when they arrived and to finish stitching his arm.

  Her uncle was the only person she could think of to confide in. They couldn’t tell anyone else about Lydia. She’d be arrested if they ever found her, and it wasn’t her fault. But Cara obviously couldn’t explain to anyone that there was an immortal being in Lydia’s mind, using her body for its own purposes. Not unless she wanted another visit to the psychiatric unit for herself this time.

  She sent Josh a text asking him to call as soon as he woke up. At fourteen hours ahead, it was barely morning in Indonesia and this didn’t feel like a text message conversation.

  When she looked up, Wes was watching her.

  She jumped. “I thought you were sleeping.”

  “And you were just going to stand there like a creepy stalker, watching me sleep?”

  Tension eased from her chest with a snort. “Good thing you’re hurt so I can’t punch you.” She put away her phone and grabbed his hand—the uninjured one—between hers. “I’m so sorry.�
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  “Why?”

  “She was coming after me. I don’t know why, but it felt personal. But you’re the one lying in a hospital bed all because I couldn’t see past her anger and walk away. I had to let it turn into my own psycho rage and go after her.”

  “Of course you did. You wanted to help her.”

  “I shouldn’t have. What was I going to do if I caught her? I don’t know what I’m supposed to do if I can’t control how I react to them. I put you in danger.” She ignored the look he gave her and let the silence go on until she could speak without a break in her voice. “Your parents should be here soon.”

  “Mak’s gonna pitch about his car.”

  “Mak should be more concerned about his brother.”

  “Yeah, well, if you’re still standing there, he’ll concern himself plenty.” He cast a meaningful glance at her hands clutching his.

  She could have lost one of her best friends today. It didn’t matter what assumptions people made. It wasn’t up to them to set Mak straight.

  “Your brother’s not always the sharpest, is he? I don’t care if you don’t.”

  He frowned. “You don’t care? What about Rhys?”

  “Why would he notice . . . or care?”

  Wes watched her with lowered brows.

  “What? Does it matter to you? Is there someone—?”

  His laugh turned into a wince. “Ow. No.”

  CHAPTER 7

  THE PHONE RANG IN HER pocket soon after Wes's family arrived. Mak barely had time to make a face, let alone any comments. She gave Wes’s mom a hug and then left the Vanneau family to speak to the doctor, who had reappeared. By the time she hung up and headed back inside, she wasn't sure she should have told Josh anything. He sounded like he might be on the next flight home from Indonesia. She had promised repeatedly to stay safe and stay around people at all times.

  Finally, she couldn't put off telling Jory any longer. She typed the message, hit send, and braced herself.

  Jory’s replies and questions kept coming well after Mak had driven her home from the hospital, leaving his parents to bring Wes home when he was released. Between the annoyed, “You let my brother bleed on my seat?” and the comments about how her dog came to be in the back of the car, she was irritable all night and through to the next day when her mom drove them back to school.