“What are you doing over here, Wyatt? You can’t break eyesight.”
Wyatt feigned an apologetic shrug. “Sorry, I thought I saw Grenleck. I got a little… carried away, I guess. Sorry, Mr. Alec.”
“Alright, head it back to the group; we’re going in for lunch now anyway.”
They walked back the way Wyatt had come, back across the parking lot and past the diminutive playground. The rest of the dorm was lined up and marching single file back to dorm.
“What’s a Grenleck?” Mr. Alec said as they passed the jungle gym.
“Gren’s a bog imp, from the bog,” Wyatt said as if it were no more remarkable than the color of grass.
“That some fantasy crap?”
Wyatt ignored the slight. “No, Grenleck’s from Hagion. I told you about him.”
“You do realize that that crap isn’t real, don’t you?”
“Who’s to say what’s real and what’s not?” Wyatt responded with a grin and leapt dramatically over a parking space stop.
“This is real. Hagion or whatever you’ve been talking about isn’t,” Mr. Alec said. “There’s nothing wrong with having an imagination, but you gotta know when to stop and get back to the real world.”
“What if Hagion is real and this is fake?”
“It’s not.”
“Says you.”
Mr. Alec sighed and threw his hands up in mock surrender. “Whatever you say… Wizard.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
IT WAS THE first thing Mrs. Heclar asked him about during Monday’s session. Wyatt glared at her over the cacti and piles of manila folders. She was frowning, her eyes screaming ‘crazy crazy crazy.’
She was wearing a white collared shirt under a plain gray vest. It made her look masculine and uptight. She tapped her pen against the desk impatiently as she waited for him to respond. A million voices shouted in his mind, but he forced his mouth shut. He enjoyed watching her squirm. He could almost sense her racing heart echoing against her skintight vest. It pulsed in time with her pen. Tap tap tap tap…
He knew he should deny what he had seen. Mrs. Heclar would never understand, and he didn’t want to give her the satisfaction, but Wyatt just couldn’t help himself. Eventually the dam at his lips gave way behind a million spectacular thoughts and, talking fast enough to sprain his tongue, Wyatt told her how he had seen Grenleck prancing around the school yard. She scribbled hastily in her notepad as he recounted the brief story. The more he spoke the more alive he felt. His body was practically buzzing with energy when he had finished.
“Do you see other things, Wyatt?” she said when she finished writing.
Wyatt screwed his face into a frown. “Uh, yeah. I see lots of things. I see you and this green plant and that yellow one and this desk and-”
“That’s not what I meant,” Mrs. Heclar said with a stern look. “Do you see other… weird things… like the imp?”
Wyatt sighed. She had no sense of humor. Athena would have found it funny. She enjoyed joking at the staff’s expense. “Not here, no. I don’t even know how Gren got here. He doesn’t have a Druid’s pendant. I’ll have to ask him when I get back.”
“When you get back?”
Wyatt stared at her a moment. “Oh, who am I kidding? I can’t understand him. All he does is chirp and shriek. How he understands me I don’t know. Maybe he’s faking it. I bet he can talk. I just have to get him to do it.”
“Wyatt, do you truly believe that you can travel to another world? You don’t think it’s just a very real dream?”
“Uh, yeah, I’m sure. I know what a dream is. And this isn’t. Well this might be, I don’t know, but Hagion is real and so is Grenleck.” And Mareck and Gareck and Rozen. Especially Rozen…
“Uh huh,” Mrs. Heclar said and resumed her hasty writing. “Wyatt, when you see these things, or when you, um, go to Hagion… I’d like you to write down what happens, soon as you can, in a journal. It may be helpful in sorting it out.”
Wyatt frowned. He hated writing. Sure, he could write and likely even write well, but he hated to do so. And what was there to sort out? “I don’t write, I draw.” He reached into his pocket and drew out a crinkled piece of loose leaf, crudely folded in quarters. He unfolded it and pressed it onto her desk. “This is what Grenleck looks like. It was hard to get his colors just right, they sorta shift as he moves, like a hologram, but it’s something like that.”
Mrs. Heclar picked up the drawing and examined it closely. “This is quite good, Wyatt. I had no idea you were such an artist. You know, I do some drawing myself.”
Wyatt didn’t care whether she drew or not, but his face lit up at the compliment to his work. “I have others. I drew the Children and a Fallen Regent and I drew a map, well I tried to. I couldn’t quite remember the whole thing, but I drew what I could. You want to see them?”
“That would be great, Wyatt. Are they in your room?”
“Yeah, can I go get them?” The question was a formality as he was already out the door and skipping to the back of dorm.
He returned in a matter of moments with a binder crammed full of loose papers and a pair of worn comic books. He pushed a cactus aside and dropped the binder on her desk. Mrs. Heclar steadied the cactus just as it began to fall. Wyatt didn’t notice, he had opened the disjointed folder and was rifling through a deluge of papers. He would tug one out every so often and thrust it at Mrs. Heclar. She looked over each one, remarking on the skill and color in her sweetly soft voice. He knew how good they were, he didn’t need her approval, but it made him grin all the same. When he had unearthed all the pertinent Hagion related drawings he slumped back into his chair with the wide grin still slapped across his chubby face.
“You like them?” he said through his taut smile. “I drew them all from memory. I didn’t do them when I was there and to think of it, other than the map I haven’t seen paper or pencils anywhere. But anyway, Zuel might be a little off; I couldn’t quite remember how his ears went. And it was hard to draw his skin. It was sorta see through. Not bad, huh?”
Mrs. Heclar nodded, clearly impressed by his handiwork. Wyatt found it likely that she was jealous as well. She wishes she could draw as well as me. “They’re all very good, Wyatt. I especially like this one,” she held up a drawing that could be nothing else but a frowning Draygan with a long fire braid. “Does this one have a name?”
“Rozen.”
“She looks angry. Do you see her a lot?”
Wyatt nodded. “She travels with the Children and me.”
“Is she always mad like in the picture?”
Wyatt shrugged. He wasn’t sure she was mad to begin with. He merely drew the expression he most often saw, her deep frown and thin, twisted mouth, all overshadowed by her radiant golden eyes that saw everything. Could be she was happy. He couldn’t be certain. He shrugged again.
Mrs. Heclar was leafing through the pile of papers before her. “Do you see all these things?”
“Uh huh, they’re all part of Hagion and the realms.”
“Do they talk to you as well?”
Wyatt rolled his eyes and thought fleetingly of Athena. “Duh, of course.”
“In English? Don’t you find that odd?” Mrs. Heclar fixed him with her hazel eyes.
“What do you mean? I speak English and so do you,” Wyatt said, confused.
“Exactly. You say you travel to this new faraway place and there are all these weird creatures and monsters. Isn’t it strange that they just happen to speak the same language as you? There are thousands of different languages all over the world, not to mention how many may be in a magical new world.”
Wyatt stared back, head cocked to the side. He had never considered that. Every creature he had encountered who could speak spoke in English, and other than Rozen’s hissing they didn’t even have any accents. Could it just be coincidence? He didn’t like how the thought made him feel. His stomach turned and twisted.
“Isn’t it weird that you speak English?” he r
etorted, not knowing the words that came from his lips.
“How do you mean?”
“I… I don’t know. Maybe it’s weird that you speak English. Maybe this is a dream. Did you ever think of that?”
“Pinch yourself,” she said simply.
Wyatt glared. Pinch myself? He narrowed his eyes at her as he pinched his left forearm. A sharp pain shot up his arm. He frowned at her. “That doesn’t prove anything,” he spat, feeling increasingly agitated. “It hurts in Hagion too.”
“You’ve pinched yourself there as well?”
“Well, no, but I’ve fallen plenty and it always hurts.”
He thought of the painful blisters and cuts across his palms from climbing up and down the rope ladders in Métra, how it felt when Gareck swatted him, and how his stomach pitched and vomited at the sight of the slain Children. He had felt pain there, he was sure of it, more pain than he ever felt here.
“Are you sure, Wyatt? Sometimes when we are dreaming we fall and find ourselves jolted awake and we only think it hurts.”
His mind flashed to his last memory of Hagion, somewhere in the Shadow Forest. The bandit leader had punched him square in the nose. He had fallen and everything had gone black. Had he hit the ground? Did it hurt? He had woken on the floor of his bedroom with an agonizing headache, but had the punch hurt? He couldn’t remember. He was sure it happened. It had been so real, four hairy knuckles coming right at him. Could it have been a dream? he wondered and immediately felt sick.
“No,” he bellowed and gripped the edge of the desk, his face contorted in a pained frown. He wanted Mrs. Heclar to see how serious he was. “It is real. All of it. Real.” He wanted to say more, but the only sounds that emerged were grunts and animalistic groans.
“OK, Wyatt. I think that’s enough for today. Take a few deep breaths and we’ll get you back to school.” Mrs. Heclar was whispering again, her eyes shrouded in fear and uncertainty.
Wyatt glared at her. She was no braver than a duckling surrounded by wolves. He could leap over the desk and throttle her with his bare hands and she wouldn’t even fight back. She’d likely just whisper some cheap advice and hope he would have mercy. For a moment he entertained the idea, but the urge of violence scared him just as much as it would have her and he slumped back into his chair. The twisting in his stomach intensified.
“Wyatt, are you alright?”
Wyatt doubled over. It felt as if a thousand bees had tunneled through his ears and set to stinging his brain. Lances of white hot pain shot from one temple to the other and then back again. His stomach soured and a blast of hot air tore at his throat.
“I need to go to the bathroom,” he blurted suddenly and his stomach pitched in unison as he stumbled to his feet.
He wasn’t sure of her response. He bolted from the office and stumbled to the bathroom in the back hall. As he crossed the threshold the pain in his skull exploded. Ripples of pain wracked his head and he feared his spine would snap beneath the tremors.
He grabbed at the sink, steadying himself. He peered into the mirror, but saw only a blurred image of what must have been his own face, contorted in pain. His heart was throbbing and he felt scalding bile rise in his throat, climbing for freedom. He lunged for the nearest stall, but a lightning bolt of pain ripping through his skull sent him to the tile floor. His knees cried out at the impact and he rolled weakly to his side. His body was crawling with pain, every inch vibrating and screaming. His vision flickered with each pulse of pain and in another moment, he found himself blind, but the pain remained, each blast setting his body to tremors. He rolled back and forth in a disjointed effort to find relief and a warming sensation swept over his body, barely noticeable through the pain, but quickly rising, until his body felt as if it were on fire. He couldn’t move and he couldn’t breathe. And then he felt nothing.
Chapter Twenty-Three
IT FELT LIKE his skull was being torn in half and Wyatt would have welcomed it had it meant the pain would disappear. His eyes burned and his nose throbbed. His eyelids were laden with concrete, but he forced them open with a grunt and a whimper. Voices drifted along the cool air, like whispers, but he couldn’t distinguish the source.
He blinked slowly, wincing with each beat of his eyelids and begged his eyes to adjust. At first all he saw was blinding white, then pulses of red, and dancing spots of green, orange, and black. He struggled to move, but found he could only blink. And so, he did, and with each pass of his eyelids, the pain faded and his sight cleared until the pain was only a distant throb and he could see the sharp outline of pointed teeth. The sight startled him at first, but he was unable to flee. The teeth were smiling at him. Then they chirped.
Grenleck, he thought at once. I’m back, oh thank God, I’m back. But, my head, oh my head. His vision cleared and he was able to distinguish the bog imp’s form, crouched in the middle of his chest, peering intently with beady black eyes and grinning from ear hole to ear hole. Wyatt shifted, minutely at first, but was able to lift a hand to his head. He winced and moaned. Grenleck shrieked and jumped up and down, the blows setting Wyatt to a coughing fit. Every muscle in his body contracted at once, sending the bog imp rolling across the spongy blue moss. Grenleck chirped excitedly. Wyatt fought for breath.
With great effort, he propped an elbow beneath him and sat up as much as he dared. His head swam and dark trees danced across his eyes, twisting and contorting like reflections upon a lake. Slowly his vision steadied and he found himself sitting upright, his knees pulled tight to his chest. His face was swollen, he knew at once, but he dare not touch the inflamed area. His sight was narrowed by swelling along his cheekbones and his nose felt as if it were aflame. He licked his lips and found them sticky with blood. The metallic taste did little to moisten his dry palate.
A body lay in the shadows against a nearby tree. His stomach lurched as his mind went to Rozen, but in another moment, he saw a thick and mottled beard, dark against the blue moss. He let go of the breath he held and slowly forced himself to his feet, nearly tripping over his cudgel. He picked up the weapon, but it did little to steady his nerves. His eyes flashed around the dim lit forest. What happened? As if in response, Grenleck scaled Wyatt’s body, sat upon his shoulder and chirped, pointing at the slain bandit.
Wyatt rubbed the side of his head. He recognized the tree Rozen had been restrained against, not for its form, but for the two bandits that lay dead at the base. Wyatt took a couple of tentative steps forward and saw crooked smiles opened across both of their throats. The moss underneath them glistened wetly beneath the wisps’ flickering orange glow. They both wore the same expression, wide eyes and slack mouths. They were dead before they felt the blade, Wyatt knew.
Wyatt spun to his right and saw two more forms, lying prostrate, both with blue feathered arrows protruding from their necks. Wyatt’s mouth fell open and Grenleck pushed against his chin to shut it with a soft chirp. Wyatt swallowed hard, his throat dry and hard. Between the two pairs of slain men were Mareck and Gareck. He forced another swallow and walked toward them, finding his steps disjointed and crooked.
The body that lay between them was much larger than the other bandits. The Children had torn off his leather vest, revealing a wide torso covered in dark curly hairs. They pressed balls of linen, perhaps torn shirts, against his upper chest, tight against his shoulder. The man’s eyes were wide open, but his pupils had rolled upward, showing little but the whites. His mouth hung slack and a thick line of blood and spit flowed from a corner, only to be lost in his dense beard.
Mareck looked up at Wyatt, but said nothing. She had a pair of flasks and was mixing a liquid together in a shallow wooden bowl. When she finished she nudged Gareck who quickly pulled back the wad of linen he had been holding to the large man and leaned back. Mareck deftly poured the contents of her bowl onto the spot Gareck had been focused on. The clear liquid washed away the torrent of blood for just a moment, long enough for Wyatt to see the ‘X’ shaped wound punched into the man’s
flesh. It vanished as quickly as it had appeared and Gareck set to staunching the blood flow again.
“I, uh… what… he…” Wyatt stammered, unsure of what he meant to say.
Neither Mareck nor Gareck looked to him or responded, leaving Wyatt to wonder if he had spoken aloud. He stared at the pair as they fought to save the large man’s life. Why are they trying to save him? he wondered, but found he lacked the saliva to lubricate any audible words, and so turned from them, surveying the surrounding forest. Where’s Rozen? Is she hurt? Is she dead? Alive? He stumbled away, meandering wherever his misguided steps took him, eyes raking the surrounding shadows for any sign of the tall Draygan warrior.
“Where’s Rozen?” he said aloud, wincing at the coarseness in his voice and clutching at his throat in pain.
Grenleck chirped and dropped to the ground. The small imp spun in a tight circle for a moment before racing off into the shadows. Wyatt stumbled afterward with long, lurching steps. Grenleck continued to chirp, guiding Wyatt along his path as the bog imp vanished from sight.
He could have stumbled along for only a minute or an hour. Wyatt’s head was spinning and every moment seemed just like the last, abolishing any sense of time and space. Every tree looked the same, every step felt the same, but at last he saw her. She sat with her back to him, atop a thick gnarled root, swatting at the jumping bog imp that chirped excitedly at her side.
Wyatt sought to sit beside her on the root, but somehow found himself sprawled on the ground. With a grunt, he sat and leaned against the trunk and looked longingly at Rozen. She had her hood drawn tightly about her face and showed no notice of Wyatt’s impromptu arrival. Her bow was unstrung and leaning at her side along with her spear, the four-pronged tip glistening black.
“They’re trying to save him,” she said suddenly without turning.
Hearing her voice washed some of the pain and stiffness from Wyatt’s face. “What happened?”
The Druid's Guise: The Complete Trilogy (The Druid's Guise Trilogy) Page 18