I was a little jealous. The exhaustion that had become ever-present in my life was clawing at my eyelids, but I couldn’t actually fall asleep. For one thing, sleeping when squished in between two other people was hardly comfortable. For another, my chest was still tight and sore from my burns, in spite of Alicia’s attempts to nurse me with some burn cream from a first aid kit (she had also given me a spare t-shirt of hers to wear so I didn’t have to walk around in a burnt and holey sweatshirt). And, of course, I was routinely reminded of my need to stay alert and ready whenever Tara would slip into a scry to update me on the movements of the various people trying to kill us.
The updates, thankfully, were never very eventful. Destiny appeared to be wandering the woods, searching for a signal. The giant wolf was still with her. Tara wasn’t sure, but she said it looked like it might be trying to guide her, which struck both of us as strange. Even more bewildering was that Warg was there at all — between the poison and the length of time since we had left Destiny behind, the creature should have been long since gone.
Eventually, Destiny fell off our radar. We weren’t sure if it was a simple matter of us having driven too far away, or if she had actually gotten a ride to somewhere.
With each update, however, I found old questions resurfacing in my mind. We still didn’t know why or how Destiny had Patrick’s Warg with her; Tara insisted that Arman had taken Patrick’s stone for himself and would never give anyone working for him a second stone. It didn’t look like anyone else was travelling with her, either, based on what Tara saw when she scryed. Otherwise, why had she spent so long wandering with no help?
I tried to shake the thoughts from my mind. There wasn’t anything I could do about them right then. At the moment, we just had to focus on making sure we stayed safe on the road.
Tara checked in on Eden as well, but they were deep in the woods and hard to really pinpoint. Maybe they were following us. Maybe they were heading toward Destiny to help her. Maybe they were set off a different task entirely. There was no way to really know for sure.
“Are you able to check where Arman is, too?” I asked.
“Oh. Uh… sure.”
Tara’s eyes glowed once more as she narrowed in on Arman and whatever he was seeing right now. When her eyes faded back to normal, she looked almost queasy. The hand she ran through her hair was shaky (was it from nerves? Exertion of scrying so much? Probably both) and she said, “He’s on the move. But he’s not headed toward us — or at least it doesn’t look like it. I’m not sure what he’s doing.”
“Somehow that’s not comforting.”
“Sorry. I — I can check in again, but I think he might be getting too far away soon.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
She was shaking her head, staring at her lap and muttering, “Sorry.”
“Hey, look at me.”
Tara did so, eyes wide and startled.
I offered what I hoped was a comforting smile. “You’re doing you’re best. That’s all I can ask. That’s all any of us can expect from ourselves and each other, honestly.”
“O-oh. Um…” She half-hugged herself with one hand gripping her shoulder, trembling and a little paler than normal. Definitely a sign of stress from using too much magic.
“You can probably take it easy for a little while,” I said. “We’re almost to Moncton. We’ll check in again once we’re there.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. Paranoia only gets us so far. And…” I paused, not quite sure of what I wanted to say, or if I should even bother saying it. But she looked so nervous and I knew she was wearing herself down more than she let on by doing all this scrying for us. So, nudging her gently with my shoulder, I said, “Thanks for all this. We never would’ve made it this far without you.”
“Oh — I — uh—” Her gaze fell away from mine, knuckles turning white as she hugged herself even tighter. Just before her head bowed and her dark hair fell in a curtain that obscured her face, I saw the tears spilling down her cheeks. So softly I almost didn’t hear her, she whispered, “You don’t mean that.”
“I do,” I said, reaching up to squeeze the hand that was gripping her shoulder.
She shuddered, shoulders shaking as her sobs broke, but she pulled away when I tried to put an arm around her to comfort her. She pressed up against the door, keeping her head bowed and her face turned away from me.
It hurt to watch. To see her so scared to trust someone, to accept comfort.
‘She’ll come around,’ I told myself, trying to shift my attention away to the scenery passing by outside Farida’s window. My eyes caught on Farida’s peaceful, sleeping face instead. ‘She’ll come around.’
~
I had visited Moncton a handful of times growing up — a lot of Islanders would take trips to Moncton or Halifax for the sake of getting to a real mall, especially before online shopping became cheap and easy. Mom had forced me to accompany her a few times, though I had never been a particularly enthusiastic shopper.
So as we entered the city and made our way through the downtown center, I observed our surroundings with a vague sense of familiarity. I wouldn’t have been able to navigate my way to any specific place, but the city didn’t feel as alien as Fredericton had when I first visited. The only landmark I readily recognized was the river, whose water was a thick, muddy red-brown. We passed squat brick buildings, vacant and graffitied store fronts, and churches of mottled stone with looming steeples.
Eventually, we found our destination. The store we pulled up to was hardly remarkable. It was red brick, like a lot of the buildings downtown, with only one display window to the left of the door. Behind the glass, little pillows and pedestals held glittering brooches, rings, and necklaces. It was the kind of place where I would admire the items in the window but never enter; it wasn’t like I would be able to afford anything there.
The inside was small and dim, aside from the underlit display cases that held more jewelry. Alicia greeted the clerk, who eyed the group of us skeptically, but didn’t question anything. I had a sneaking suspicion she probably wasn’t in on the secret of magic, but also probably didn’t care enough about whatever Alicia was doing to bother challenging her, even when she walked in with a group as ragtag and dishevelled as we were. Especially since Alicia seemed to have a significant amount of seniority over the business.
Alicia led us through the store to a door at the back, which opened to a musty, echoey stairwell with steps leading up or down. We took the section heading down into the basement, our footsteps reverberating off the whitewashed brick and making it sound as though there were a dozen of us in the tiny space. I shivered and had half a mind to ask Tara to scry one more time for good measure — but she had done so as soon as we entered the city. Destiny had already fallen out of range, and now Arman had, too. Eden was the only one she could still see, but they were still deep in the woods. I tried to take comfort in the fact that, even if they were following us, they had to still be a fair distance away.
‘That doesn’t rule out Imani,’ a voice in my head whispered. ‘She could be anywhere.’
We stepped through a heavy fire door into the basement proper. The temperature felt like it had dropped a few degrees and it was even mustier than the stairwell. When Alicia flicked on the overhead fluorescent lights, they highlighted millions of little specks of dust floating in the air. The space appeared to be mostly used for storage, with row after row of metal shelving piled with boxes, as well as one wall lined with filing cabinets. Alicia marched past all of this to another door. There was a little gold plaque on the brick wall declaring it the office of Alicia Barry.
“This is where you keep your office?” I asked, glancing around the cramped, messy area of the main basement. It was so cold I was surprised I couldn’t see my breath.
She waved a hand dismissively as she fussed with a set of keys. “I do most of my actual office work at home. Being down here just means hardly anyone ever tries to visit
my official office.”
Once she had gotten the door unlocked, she opened it and stepped back, gesturing for us to enter. The office was about the size of a modest walk-in closet, with a small desk crammed in against the right wall and a couple grey metal filing cabinets squeezed in along the left. There was barely room for all five of us to fit; I hugged my arms around myself to keep from accidentally touching anyone’s butt.
Alicia unlocked one of the cabinets and pulled open the drawer, rifled through it, and then produced a simple, spiral bound notebook. She handed it to Farida. “Your grandmother wrote several of these. She gave them to the company — er, well, to the insiders of the company — for safekeeping.”
“Oh my god,” Farida murmured as she took the notebook. She opened it, flipping through the pages. Her breathing had grown shaky. “That’s…”
I didn’t mean to read any of the pages — I didn’t want to assume any of this was my business — but we were standing so close it was hard not to see. I blinked in confusion at the images on the pages. “Is that… Are those hieroglyphs?”
“Masika was very careful to protect her information,” Alicia said as she slid the filing cabinet drawer closed once more. “Even though she trusted us to protect her documents, she didn’t trust us to read them. So she wrote them in a way that only family — and maybe a few Egyptologists — would understand.”
“I — I’m gonna need some time with this,” Farida murmured, turning through the pages more slowly now. “I’m better at speaking ancient Egyptian than reading it. It’s gonna take a while for me to decipher.”
“Take that one with you. You can always come back for the rest.”
Shutting the notebook, Farida hugged it to her chest. Her voice was choked, thick with emotion when she said, “Thank you.”
Alicia smiled softly and offered her a slight nod. “It’s what I was hired to do. I only wish I could do more.”
“You’ve done more than enough.”
“Awesome,” Emily grunted, already trying to shuffle past me toward the door. “Can we get out of here, though? Close quarters are not pleasant with an injured arm.”
There was a lot of fumbling and stumbling as we all hurried to get out, only succeeding in getting ourselves more jammed up in the process. Somewhere in the chaos, I accidentally elbowed Tara in the boob and Alicia unintentionally grabbed my butt when reaching out to steady me as I stumbled. For the next fifteen minutes, she showed hitherto unseen levels of flusteredness.
Chapter Nineteen
We didn’t spend much more time in Moncton after that. All of us agreed that we needed to get back on the road sooner rather than later, lest someone sneak up on us. If we did end up in a fight (and I really, really hoped we didn’t — Farida was still in no shape to use her magic, and no one else was much of a fighter), it would be better to do so outside of the city, where there was less concern about witnesses and bystanders.
Though I could tell she was still tired, Farida stayed awake for the rest of the drive. She sat beside me, notebook open in her lap, muttering to herself and fidgeting with her bottom lip as she tried to work through a translation of Masika’s journal. It was endearing to watch, but it felt wrong to do so even though there was no way in hell I could actually read anything in the book, let alone get a peek at something personal or private that she didn’t want to share. I tried to force myself to stare out one of the windows instead of at her, but I quickly got bored of the passing scenery.
As we got closer to the Island, traffic picked up and we found ourselves caught up in a slow-moving line of cars. Part of the problem came with no longer being on a divided highway, which made opportunities to pass other vehicles extremely limited; occasionally the solid yellow line became dotted and you could slip out past a vehicle when there was no oncoming traffic, but the timing had to be just right. The line of cars ahead of us was growing steadily longer, and the speeds were comically slow.
I craned my neck anxiously, trying to see what the hold up was. If it was like this all the way to the Bridge, we were in trouble. I knew we could still pull over on the shoulder when we were ready to head out on foot, and I knew we would be heading into the woods to call Ddraig instead of doing so out in the open. Still, that didn’t mean it wasn’t going to be suspicious for the group of us to wander off into the trees, and I wanted to limit the number of people who saw us doing so.
Before I could get too worked up with anxiety, however, it became clear what the holdup was. As soon as there was a break in the oncoming traffic, several cars pulled out across the yellow line and started passing. The cars ahead of us thinned out until I could see a tractor trundling along, obviously from one of the nearby farms.
I couldn’t help laughing. Leaning forward, I nudged Emily awake in the passenger seat. She muttered and swatted at my hand, but woke up. I gestured to the tractor, saying, “Just like home, eh?”
She blinked tiredly at the tractor as we passed it before finally letting out a snort of laughter. “We’re not home until we see red dirt.”
~
Eventually, we pulled over to the shoulder next a patch of woods nestled between two farms. Farida thanked Alicia profusely again before pulling her in for a tight hug, earning a startled squeak.
“You be careful, okay?” Farida told Alicia as she stepped back from the embrace.
“Always.” Alicia patted her arm with a smile. “You be careful, too.”
We said our goodbyes, then watched as Alicia climbed back into the car and drove off before we headed into the woods. We had decided it would be best to walk in a fair way from the road — maybe fifteen or twenty minutes — before I called out Ddraig. I knew the massive dragon would still be visible from the highway, but some distance might at least make it harder for people to immediately realize what they were seeing.
Tara had attempted to scry on the various people following us, but had been unable to reach Arman or Destiny. When she tried with Eden, she reported seeing only darkness, which usually meant the target was asleep. It struck me as odd that Eden would sleep in the middle of the day, but I wasn’t exactly in a position to question it. The scry showed what it showed and nothing else — we would just have to proceed with caution.
Pine needles, fallen leaves, and twigs crunched under our feet as we trekked through the woods, which became increasingly overrun with underbrush the further we moved off the highway. It looked like a bad windstorm had swept through the area at some point, though it was impossible to say exactly how long ago. This didn’t seem like a place that would have regular upkeep, so the felled trees, broken canopy, and other signs of destruction could easily have been that way for months.
“You know,” Emily said, panting as she struggled over a fallen tree trunk, “I used to at least sort of like hiking. But this sucks.”
Farida rushed over to help her, saying, “I’m really, really sorry. I’ll heal you as soon as I can, but I—”
“Don’t worry about it,” Emily grunted. “You’ve got your own healing to do.”
“It’s only for a few minutes,” I said in my best attempt to be reassuring. “Then we hopefully won’t have to hike again until we’re all rested and recuperated.”
“Here, here!” Tara cheered sarcastically.
“And the faster we walk, the sooner we’ll be done.”
Tara made a face. “Boo! We’re already going too fast.”
Emily (who was somehow trudging through the woods faster than Tara despite her arm) let out a low whistle. “Look at you go, being all assertive and in charge.”
I shrugged awkwardly. My cheeks were burning. “I guess running for your life all the time has a way of toughening a girl up.”
“So,” she started in a conversational tone that I knew could only mean trouble, “now that you’re all tough and no nonsense, are you gonna stop being ridiculous and actually fully commit to your Master’s degree?”
“I wouldn’t say I’m no nonsense…”
“Don’t av
oid the question.”
“What were you studying?” Farida asked. “I can’t remember if you’ve ever mentioned it.” She frowned, eyebrows knitting together in thought. “Wow. That’s awful, isn’t it?”
“We kinda had other priorities.”
“I still should have cared about your life more. It’s my fault it turned into such a nightmare.”
“Ooh, trouble in paradise,” Tara said, slightly out of breath as she struggled to keep up with the group. “Do tell. I love drama.”
I glanced back at her with my eyebrows raised.
“What? I grew up in a village of, like, two hundred people. Drama is all you got there.”
“I made some choices that weren’t mine to make,” Farida said, “and Amber bears the brunt of the consequences.”
“Cool, fascinating,” Emily said, cutting off Tara pestering for more details. “Amber: Talk. Answer the question.”
I sighed. “I really haven’t thought about it much. I’ve had bigger problems to focus on.”
“You know I’m gonna keep harassing you about this until you give me a proper answer, right?”
I rolled my eyes and ignored her. Instead, I turned my attention to Farida and said, “I was studying sociology and cultural anthropology.”
She laughed and shook her head a little, cheeks reddening. “I shouldn’t have asked. I have no idea what that means.”
Emily clapped me on the shoulder, making me jump. “Great! Amber will be more than happy to explain it to you. Right?” Then she fell back until she was walking in step with Tara, of all people. Something was definitely up.
Oblivious to Emily’s scheming, Tara said, “Ugh, you’re not gonna start nerding out, are you? Nothing is more boring than — aah! Hey!”
Those Who Fall Page 15