Eli feels the wind. In his hair. In his lungs. Impossibly, he breathes. Then he realizes he is the wind. That it passes right through him, in and out, like a needle and fine thread. Like a red ribbon connecting everything — thoughts and body . . . though he’s not sure if his body is a factor any longer.
He is standing in a spiral of white pebbles, which makes a path to a shrine of tokens left behind by tourists, wanderers, those rare few people who still believe in magic. Playing cards and coins and paper clips. He bends down and sees the remnants of a gold tooth lodged in the dirt. He tries to extract it, but his fingers — what he thinks are still his fingers — pass right through.
You cannot touch a memory, he thinks. If that’s what this is, anyway.
He stretches back up, feels the wind tugging him around in a slow waltz. He knows the place, even though it is shrouded in mist and damp and almost two decades’ worth of time he seems to have lost between then and now.
The Fairy Glen.
He grew up not far from here, in a croft, he remembers. There was a woman there, spitting and wailing. She had a terrible secret, one that she passed down to Eli before he was even ready. He was like a boy trapped in a fairy story with the ending ripped out. In his tower he waited, but he never felt ready to leave.
When the wind spins him around again, he is facing a boy who stares at him as if he can see him. Or through him. Eli doesn’t wave, and even though the boy is moving towards him, he moves around him entirely.
Eli remembers something else vague, about children. Children with desolate eyes and crimson smiles, children with coals beneath their skin. They followed a creature — a man — a creature that had once been a man, and where there had been screaming people, suddenly there were trees . . .
Eli shakes his head, and the wind whispers. He follows the boy up the hill.
On the hill is a well-worn switchback. A child’s mountain pass. The boy has come here many times before, but Eli thinks — knows — he’s come here now because the boy has followed someone here. Someone who will be at the top of the hill. Eli’s heart quickens and sickens, like a child’s does as they prepare for the jump-scare and hide behind their hands, tensing. Something inevitable waits at the top of that hill. The ending that Eli isn’t sure he wants to see.
The boy stops and looks over his shoulder, right at Eli. Not through him, this time. His eyes ask, Do we have to? And Eli doesn’t know what to say, even as the wind sifts the boy’s hair, his clear eyes that are his own wincing with the cold. Let’s just go home. Under the covers. Someone else will save us. Save her.
They turn as one to the sound of errant sheep bleating below them, and from up here they perceive the tourist shrines more clearly. Even though they haven’t come very far, Eli realizes they are high enough up now that, if they fell, they could get hurt.
The boy continues going up, closer to harm, and Eli has no choice but to follow.
They come to a dark pass in the rock. The boy wriggles through like the path was made for him, and then there is a climb. Eli watches the boy struggle, all skinny arms and wheeling legs. Eli knows that, looking down at his hands, made of the same silver fog of winter breath, he couldn’t help the boy up even if he wanted to. Eli truly is a ghost. And knowing any physical limitations are gone, he lets go of gravity’s hold and floats to the surface of the rock, just as the boy emerges.
The boy is not alone. A figure stand stands on the precipice of the caer — the castle, she had called it, in her lucid moments when she held him while the nightmares readied for the next salvo. Those moments when he could believe it would all be all right.
Her arms are out, as though they could be wings. She is trembling.
“Go home, Eli,” she says. His heart catches; her voice is clear. For once her mind is knowing. “You have to go home now.”
Eli the ghost almost opens his mouth to answer, but the little boy does instead. “You have to come, too.” He is twisting his shirt in his hands. The wind calls through the pointed hills beckoning.
The woman turns. Her hair is a wild, furious tangle, but her eyes, Eli’s own eyes, are serene. “My brave boy,” she says. “I know what you dreamed of. I know the stone is calling for you. But you have to promise Mommy you won’t go after it. No matter what anyone asks. Please promise.”
Little Eli nods. He is being brave. He is always so much braver in this dream when Eli watches it, over and over, though he knows that the boy is raw with terror. She is so close to the edge. “Okay,” he says. “Let’s go home now.”
“My darling,” she whispers, and it is not her voice, but the thousands that came before. The ones that have tried to wrap their silvery tendrils around Eli’s heart since a girl he once hated helped him cast them out. The voices that ruined everything. “Don’t you want Mommy to stop hurting?”
“Please.” But there is no boy anymore. Only Eli. Reaching, as she backs nearer to the edge. He is close enough to count the lines around her mouth, carved from too many nights screaming, crying. She touched the Moonstone, and it hurt her. It had chosen the little boy when he was still inside her, and the stone would not be refused.
She turns her back on him again. He rushes to her, feeling that perhaps this time, in this dream, he will be able to pull her back to safety. He’ll take her down the hill to the fisher’s croft and make her up some fresh broth, and put her to bed, and he will read the only book there — Island Birds — until the pages crinkle with his drying tears, and all will be as it was, because desolation is better than nothing at all.
But, as always, his hand is too late, and he feels her dark hair just missing his grip as she leaps, turns over, face finally at peace as she shuts her eyes and lets the air take her back to the earth.
Eli woke still screaming, full of a pain he couldn’t quantify. His arms, his wings, were twisted around him, and he could still hear the wind . . . but he couldn’t move, like he’d been encased in glass. One eye looked out into the dismal world in front of him. A smouldering plane wreck. And trees, black trees, reaching and reaching, as he was, to the darkening overcast sky. Trees whose minds, he knew, were trapped in nightmares like the ones he’d just barely surfaced from.
Trees that were once Owls, and one that maybe was his father. And now him, too.
Eli screamed, but in the dead forest, there was no one to hear but the wind.
Phae barely shifted, even when a blast of wind cracked the trees around her in the fading crepuscular dusk. It wasn’t uncommon for a summer windstorm to rise out of nowhere in Manitoba, and both she, and her subjects in the field past her hiding spot, were accustomed to the temperamental prairie elements. To the changing world around them.
She raised the DSLR to her eye, adjusted the lens and the shutter, popped off a few shots. Focus. Another batch. She scrolled through the display. Sunset, she felt, even after only a few months dabbling with photography, was one of the best kinds of light, especially now at the start of autumn. She came upon a shot she was particularly proud of, and with that same surge of pride came disappointment, because there wasn’t anyone she could really show it to right now. Not her parents, who still resented her for taking the year off rather than going directly to university and the med school track she’d been preparing for. Not Barton, who was more preoccupied than she’d ever seen him, training endlessly with his new running blades and throwing himself into his still-new powers.
And not Roan, who, even though her image and voice had been so close on their recent FaceTime call, was the farthest away of them all.
“There you are!” Phae had said into her phone, trying to put on the cheer. “I’m out in the shed for some privacy. I put in a new router so the connection should be better . . . Where are you?” She mentally calculated what time it could be with the six-hour time difference — afternoon, judging by the background in Roan’s screen, which seemed to be a restaurant of some kind.
“Oh, I’m in a café . . . just needed to get out of the flat.” Her voice was lowered, and she looked around a bit anxiously. She looked like she hadn’t slept.
Phae immediately cottoned on. “I tried calling you yesterday as soon as I saw the news. That . . . that was the restaurant you worked in, wasn’t it?” The minute she’d seen the flames and the words freak explosion in Royal Mile pub all over her Facebook feed, she knew right away. “Was it . . . ?”
“I don’t know what it was. Honestly.” Roan exhaled like the breath she’d been holding was a painful one. “I came here for answers, and after months of nothing, I’m suddenly knee-deep in way too much something.” She got up, seemed to move to a quieter corner with her cellphone. “I couldn’t help it, Phae. There was this guy . . . he seemed to know who I was. What I was. But there was something wrong with him. He gave me this warning . . . I have no idea what it meant. For a second I could’ve sworn it was Urka’s voice — it’s stupid and bizarre, I know. But what about our lives is normal anymore, really?”
Phae nodded, consciously loosening her jaw at the mention of Urka. Things had happened so fast when Roan came back out from hell just last spring, and the images she’d painted would certainly haunt Phae’s nightmares for a while yet. There was no telling what it was doing to Roan, who rubbed her face now, that same pain evident in the crease between her mismatched eyes. All Phae wanted to do was push herself through her iPhone and do something to erase that — even if she had to use the powers she’d been secretly resenting lately.
“It’s not just Fingal’s Pint that’s been weird,” Roan went on, lowering her voice. “I’m . . . seeing things. Not just visions, like what I usually see with the spirit eye. I’m seeing . . . memories. I think the stone is showing me Cecelia’s memories. And they’re vivid, like I’m in them. Then I’m pushed out, and I wake up in places I don’t remember being. But I feel like I have to keep watching, keep letting the stone show me. Like Cecelia is trying to tell me something.”
Phae frowned. “Or the stone is trying to control you, Roan, the same way that Eli’s did. You need to be careful.” She didn’t want to call it wishful thinking, that Roan’s grandmother was trying to communicate with her from beyond the grave. Phae knew a raw wound when she saw one.
Roan’s smirk, however weak, was followed by the same old sardonic tone. “I know you’re dying to encase me in bubble wrap, Phae, but I do still know how to take care of myself.”
“Hardly.” She smiled, but it was brief. “The guy who confronted you, the one with the warning. What was weird about him? I mean, aside from the usual. Weird can encompass too many factors.”
Roan glanced around, brought the phone closer, and made her voice quieter. “That other thing on the news. You know, the Cinder Plague?”
Roan was right to whisper that in a public place. The Cinder Plague had become more widespread than SARS, with twice as much panic as the news spread the word faster than the disease itself. Roan could get kicked out of the café for even mentioning it.
“Sinusitis erysipelas? You mean he had it? Did he touch you?”
“Yes. Well, no. Look, he touched me, but I’m fine, see?” She showed her hands. “No black gunk, no sudden fever. Again, fine is a relative term. But like you said before, Denizens don’t seem to be affected. Just, you know, regular people who don’t have a supernatural immunity.”
Still, Phae felt her heart speeding up. “Did he —”
“Yeah, he definitely exploded right in front of me, and that’s when the rest of the restaurant followed suit.”
The worst part of some of these isolated cases was that those with already-compromised immune systems seemed to literally combust. Incidents had been isolated, and some had speculated that the illness was caused by some biological weapon rather than just a skin fungus. Researchers and governments were already hastening to manufacture a cure, but what was most sinister was that its origin remained vague, though it was striking Western countries and not the usual developing countries. And cases seemed to be popping up more and more in Scotland, of all places, since Roan appeared there.
“It can’t be a coincidence,” Roan said, voicing Phae’s greatest worry. “I show up here, this freak virus pops up, some guy with it issues me a warning before making me blow up my restaurant . . . and I saw some of my co-workers after. No one died, Phae. But I thought one of them, Ben . . . I thought he had . . .” She winced, neck tensing as she bent forwards like she was about to throw up.
Phae leaned in as close to her phone as possible. “Roan? Roan, are you okay?”
“ — fine,” she heard, when Roan’s face was back in the picture, and though Roan had tried to hide it, Phae had seen her clutch her chest before quickly dropping her hand. Roan sighed raggedly. “I’m just tired. It’s all been a lot. But I guess I asked for this, didn’t I? I wanted action. Now I’ve got it.”
Phae let that sink in a bit before she said, “Roan . . . you don’t have to do this alone, you know. You went out there by yourself. I’m sure you’ve kept your aunt and uncle at arm’s length. We’re all stronger together, remember? We should be there with you. It’s obviously getting too much —”
“Phae,” Roan cut her off, voice wavering but hard. “I can’t chance it. Not if I’m going off like an atom bomb. I’m trying to stay in control. I can’t let what happened to Eli happen to me. I could hurt someone. I don’t want it to be you.” Phae knew that was as much as she was going to get on the subject. “Speaking of which . . . where is Mr. Know-It-All-Before-You-Know-It?”
Phae’s mouth twitched. “Geez, you must have it bad if you can’t say his name.”
“Oh knock it off, will you? Eli and I don’t have . . . a thing. Anything! I don’t hear from him and I don’t want to.” Roan had told Phae about how he’d shown up at the airport. She’d thought the gesture was sweet and didn’t mind letting Roan know every chance she got.
“Maybe if you did talk to him, at least he knows what you’re going through.” But Phae didn’t know if he’d be back anytime soon to chat. “He’s gone off to Korea, I think. To face the consequences of . . . what’s been happening with his own stone.”
“It’s not his fault, though.” For someone she didn’t seem to care about, Roan was quick to defend Eli. Phae didn’t point it out. “The stone changes you. It’s, like, got a mind of its own. Several minds. And they’re all fighting for control. It’s like the stone knows what’s best. It has its own plan.” She looked away, biting the inside of her cheek. “Anyway. Don’t worry about me. You’ve all got your own lives to worry about. Like if you’re gonna do university or not.”
“If only I could take Supernatural Anxiety as a major . . .” Phae muttered. “At least it would be something to get my father off my back.”
“Hey,” Roan said, “it’s your life. Not theirs. You take as much time as you need, okay? I know you. You won’t be down and out long. Purpose is your middle name.”
Phae stuck out her tongue. “You know it’s Lakshmi.”
Roan’s face fell. “I’m sorry, Phae. It’s my fault. I dragged you into all this . . . stuff.”
Stuff, like weird, didn’t exactly cover it, but Phae had just shrugged, remembering that field in the snow what seemed like years ago, when she’d made a choice to save a stranger, who had become an ally, who had become a boyfriend, and now was something she couldn’t qualify. It was the same field she sat at the edge of now, as the deer she’d been photographing scattered back into the brush with the tangle of her thoughts.
“It was still my choice,” Phae said to no one.
“What was?”
Phae startled to her feet — luckily her camera strap had been around her neck, otherwise she’d have destroyed what she’d traded a whole year’s tuition for.
“Sorry.” Barton held his hands up. “I’ll be less stealthy next time. And by stealthy I mean I’ll trip over more logs and get stuck in more bog puddles, since my actual approach only scared every deer in the forest . . . except you.” He lifted one of his running blades to show her the mud and debris he’d tracked with him.
“You didn’t have to come all the way in here!” Phae admonished as she led them back out to the main path through drier ground. “I thought you were supposed to be taking better care of your equipment.” She took his arm, even though he hadn’t asked, and steadied him.
“Ah well, if I’d broken anything, it’s not like I don’t have a world-class demon-slaying healer for a girlfriend.” He leaned down to kiss her, but at the last second she turned her head, and it landed perfunctorily on her jaw.
Barton pulled away, still holding her by the arm. “You okay?” he asked. He’d been asking that a lot. Phae forced a smile up at him — she was still getting used to how tall he was, since he used his wheelchair less and less.
“Fine. Just lost in thought again.” She took his hand when he offered it as they walked back down the path towards the forest’s entrance, but she stared at the ground. “How was the meeting?”
It was Barton’s turn to go a bit quiet before he replied. “Complicated.”
“What’s wrong? Did something happen?”
He seemed to be searching the sky for the words, and when he slowed his pace, Phae knew it wasn’t because of any discomfort in his legs. “Yeah. A lot of somethings.” He’d grown used to the blades already — had been running with them, barely taking them off . . . a boon of the sports scholarship he’d graduated with. No, he’d told her there was no pain in his legs now. Said they were a part of him. But there was still something she saw flicker in his eyes.
“I’m going away for a while. I dunno how long. And . . . well, I wanted to ask if you’d come with me.”
They’d stopped altogether, and Barton was still holding her hand. She extracted it gently. “I’ll need a bit more than that to go on, karagosh.”
He grinned at her pet name, but the smile faded quickly. “It’s the Rabbit Paramount. It’s what Arnas came over to talk to me about. My parents already knew something was going on with the higher-ups, now that they’re more involved with the Family again, but official word has just come down. He’s . . . well . . . they don’t know where the current Rabbit Paramount is. But they do know that his stone is missing. The Serenity Emerald.”
Phae’s chest tightened. The first person she thought of was Roan. “What does that mean, it’s missing? Did someone take it? And how could they — I thought the stonebearer and their Calamity stone couldn’t be separated?” What Phae didn’t know about this bizarre world of Ancient could fill a library.
“No one knows much. Or else, no one’s saying much.” Barton shrugged, then staggered as a fresh blast of wind nearly knocked them off the path. “You spoke to Roan recently, though, didn’t you?”
Phae nodded. “Just a couple days ago. She seemed . . . she was alive.” Phae had told Barton about the explosion. He’d already said, after it happened, that the Fox Family would probably be looking into it, according to Arnas — but since the Families didn’t seem to cross lines to speak, it was tough to know what they would do about it.
“Par for the course.” Barton zipped up his track jacket against the cooling evening air. “And has she heard from Eli?”
“Why?” Phae knew where this was going, though she’d just asked Roan the same question on their call. “I don’t think so. He was going to Korea, I thought?”
“He was.” A dark look passed over his face. “But he’s missing now, too.”
So. It was as she feared. “Someone’s targeting the Paramounts. And the stones.” They walked for a bit in silence until they reached the parking lot and Phae’s car. The two got into her sedan, buckled up, and headed towards Wolesley.
“Do they have any idea who it is? Or what? Or why?”
“No,” Barton said. “This is all happening too fast. Everyone’s already saying that the Cinder Plague might be something darkling-derived, since it popped up so quickly after we got rid of Zabor . . .” He smirked. “Things were simpler, back then.”
“Right.” Phae didn’t say what she really thought about times past she’d never get back. “So what does this have to do with us going away together?”
“Well . . .” Barton was playing with the door lock, so Phae figured it was something she would already have a hard time going along with. “A gathering’s been called. There hasn’t been one in a long time, apparently. It’s a meeting of the Rabbit, Owl, and Fox Families. The Seal Family hasn’t mentioned if it’ll come. And there are no human representatives of the Deer Family, really. Can’t exactly trap a bunch and not expect a democratic stampede.” She caught him looking at her meaningfully from the corner of her eye, but she pretended to be focused on the road.
“And where is this meeting? When?” Phae knew there had to be a catch, that he was trying to get her to go back out into the Denizen world since she was so useless in this one. She felt like she’d always be straddling a line between them.
“A place called Magadan. In Russia. In a few days.” Barton said it all quickly, like it’d make it seem less than seven thousand miles away. “It’s around the place Eli’s plane disappeared. It’s not just a meeting to talk. They want to form a coalition. To fight.”
This time, Phae did look at him. “To fight? Fight what?” She felt the panic rising, remembering their last battlefield and what had been lost there. “Do they think this is something to do with Zabor?”
“Like I said, no one knows. But they want to be ready. If something is out hunting the Calamity Stones, it can’t be good.” His mouth quirked. “I’d be less concerned if they were called the Fuzzy Bunny Stones, but apparently they’re dangerous if in the wrong hands.”
“Anything is. Even a fuzzy bunny.” They were on Academy already, making good time towards the Maryland Bridge. Maybe too good.
“Hey, you know it’s only fifty here, right?”
Phae checked her speedometer and took her foot off the gas. Even her subconscious wanted this conversation to be over.
“You want to go halfway across the world to join up with the magical army corps to fight an enemy you can’t name?” Phae didn’t mean for it to come out bitter and sharp, but she didn’t retract. “And you think I’d want to come with you? To do what, exactly?”
“Phae . . .” Barton said gently. “I know things have been tough lately. And that your parents haven’t exactly made it any easier.” His hand tentatively moved to her knee. “You could use a break. To go away. And I thought, maybe, this might show you that you do have purpose. Even if you seem to think you don’t.”
It was a good thing they were both belted in when Phae slammed on the brakes at the Wolesley intersection — the light had suddenly turned red and brought with it a wave of pedestrians who were nearly bludgeoned by the hood of her car.
“It’s okay,” Barton was saying, trying to bring her back down. “Phae?”
But Phae’s hands gripped the steering wheel, lighting up with flickers of blue and white. Her hair had crackled instantly into a crown of antlers too big for the driver’s side to accommodate. When the pedestrians had continued on unharmed, she knew they’d all been too preoccupied to notice they’d been saved by the shield she’d automatically generated.
“No,” she said, taking the left sharply and heading mercifully closer to Barton’s house. “No, it’s not okay. I can’t just . . . I can’t go with you. It’s not my place. I need more information first. And there are things here I need . . . to do.”
“Like what?” Barton seemed to feed off her agitation. “You picked up this photography thing on a whim — and the Phae I know barely knows the meaning of the word impulsive. I get that this whole thing reads like some great power great responsibility thing, and you’re trying to find your place in it all. But we’re both in the same boat here. I wasn’t raised in the thick of this stuff like other Denizens and neither were you.”
He still hadn’t broken through by the time they’d parked in front of his house, and when his voice softened, Phae knew it was his last attempt. “We were both given gifts, Phae. Gifts that other people would kill for. And if we can help, especially after what happened here, with Zabor, why don’t you want to try? You wouldn’t have to be alone. I wouldn’t let you —”
“But I do want to be alone!” Phae’s voice, more a high shriek, pinged in their ears in the silence that followed. She didn’t know who was more surprised — Barton or herself.
“I see,” he replied flatly. “Well. I’m sorry I interrupted you, I guess.”
She didn’t even turn her head when he got out. But she rolled down the window after he tapped a knuckle on the glass, and she met his gaze, her own misery reflected behind his glasses.
“Just think about it, okay?” he said, trying to smile. Forcing it, like she had. “Even if you don’t come . . . I don’t want to leave like this.”
Phae exhaled, the numbness passing. “Neither do I.”
Barton’s mouth stiffened into a line as he patted the car door, turned, and went into his house.
Phae wanted to get far away from here, and as quickly as possible. Russia suddenly felt like a solid destination to do just that, but only if Barton wouldn’t be there. Or the black hole promise of more monsters and bad guys to go up against — a fight that Phae didn’t have in her to join. Not now, anyway.
She drove off. Had she always felt this anxious, deep down? Had she been burying it under a manufactured calm, protected by her scholastic achievements and the career path she’d chosen before she’d left kindergarten? You’d think the blinding heroics of last spring would have given her the same confidence boost it had to Barton, but to him this was all a comic book dream come true. Now Phae was the one who couldn’t move forward, let alone change. Power hadn’t made her feel stronger; instead it had done the exact opposite by exposing her weakness.
Just think about it. What was there to think about? Even if she was armed with all the information, which either wasn’t forthcoming or didn’t exist yet, given that Denizens on the elder level were scrambling — what would be the tipping point for her to jump into any kind of fray?
Roan had asked Phae to come to Edinburgh, even if the invitation was half-hearted. Phae knew Roan wanted to keep everyone away, just in case. But even with that request she’d felt more of a pull than she had from Barton just now.
Phae’s phone went off in the cup holder, and she pulled over immediately after glancing down, seeing who it was.
“Oh good, you picked up for once. Hope it isn’t a bad time?”
Phae closed her eyes, summoning hard-won patience. “Best not get into it.”
“Right, I won’t. You know I don’t like sharing.” She was thankful for Natti — always down to brass tacks. “If you’re not wallowing as usual, can you come to my place? Like —” There was a grunt as Natti seemed to drop the phone, then pick it up again. “Sorry. Yeah. Right now.”
“Is it Aunty? Is she okay?” She’d been hearing from Natti with more frequency these days because of Aunty’s condition, which Phae couldn’t do much about — and even the gruff Natti, who had trouble asking for help at the best of times, was grateful.
“Actually, she’s fine. But she’s not happy. And neither are the, uh, guests we’ve got.” The sound of something ripping, loud, near her ear and — what was that? A roar?
“Do you have the nature channel on?” Phae frowned.
“Something like that,” Natti clattered. “Look, it’s kind of an emergency. I know you don’t have anything else better to do. I’ll owe you. Well. I’ll owe you more.”
Phae was already shifting back into drive. “On my way.”
Wolesley, and all of Barton’s unanswered questions, faded in the rear-view as she headed north towards Portage, Roan’s words from their last conversation playing over the anxieties she pushed to the back of her mind: Purpose is your middle name.