The Waking Dreamer (12 page)

It eventually ended, Sebastian’s bucking frame going limp. His breathing was labored as he tried to settle himself. Keiran withdrew his hand tentatively, and Emmett was startled to see the wide, gaping wound had been cauterized completely underneath a painfully long scar.

Emmett looked at Keiran, who looked at him with resolution. “We need to leave now.”

“And Amala? We just leave her?”

Keiran’s green eyes became glassy, withdrawn, and to Emmett it seemed that some measure of strength had drained out of his face with the effort of healing Sebastian’s wound. He bit his quivering bottom lip and looked away, tilting his head closer to Emmett to whisper in his ear. “She’ll find us when it is safe to do so.”

“No!” Ellie screamed hysterically, a wrenching, painful screech that echoed down the corridor. Keiran and Emmett looked up in time to see a robed figure turn the corner swinging a wickedly curved blade. Troy threw an arm up to shield himself from the blow, but the blade sliced through his arm and into his neck.

Keiran leapt in front of Emmett and Sebastian, raising an open palm toward the Revenant. He cried out a loud, discordant note. The man was hurled violently back against the tunnel wall. The limp body slipped to the ground, a swath of blood smeared along the wall.

Ellie screamed, nearly collapsing against Sebastian, who reached up through his own overwhelming pain and tried to hold fast to her. She flailed madly, screaming hysterically for her brother, whose mangled body fell forward, detached mostly from his head, and disappeared into the rushing water.

With his arm still outstretched, Keiran collapsed backward. He steadied himself against the cavern wall, and Emmett could see that Keiran was terribly drained. His unfocused eyes and slack jaw took several moments to return, during which time his body jerked spasmodically.

“Keiran! Are you okay?” Emmett shook him.

Keiran finally responded with a loud cough, rolling forward and heaving deeply as he lowered his head over his knees to steady his breathing “No more time,” he croaked.

Ellie was alternating between fits of hysteria and catatonia, and Sebastian’s trembling body had drained away most of the color from his dark features. Emmett stepped over Keiran and lifted Ellie off the ground. She kicked and screamed incoherently, but Emmett persisted and raised her over the floor opening. He had no way of knowing if she would live or die. But an icy prickling was already crawling up his spine. He knew what was coming, understanding the approaching paralysis and dread and seeing that neither of the Bards with him had much strength left.

“Take a deep breath,” he said to her as he lowered and released her into the rushing river. Her screams died away just as she disappeared in the torrent of water.

His muscles began to constrict, his movements slowing. Sebastian and Keiran were barely moving. There would be no help arriving, no special powers to protect him from the approaching Underdweller.

He grabbed Sebastian by the arm and heaved him over to the floor openings. He nodded to Emmett, drawing a deep breath just as Emmett pushed him headfirst into the river. Emmett then put his arm around Keiran’s waist and pulled him up. “Come on,” he struggled, lifting him to the water. Keiran was trying to speak over his continued coughing, but Emmett pushed him headfirst into the river.

Emmett took a step forward just as the Underdweller rounded the corner. He felt his body become rigid, his mind screaming against muscles that refused to comply. Drawing a deep breath, Emmett fell into the floor opening, his frozen form engulfed by the icy-cold waters rushing around him. Within moments the world was dark again, his body hurtling face-first down a smooth, wide tunnel.

CHAPTER 11

As Emmett was swept away, the distance from the Underdweller somehow returned some control over his body. He struggled to roll onto his back, gasping for air in the exposed tunnel. The water careened sharply to the right and then to the left before straightening downward. Emmett had no conception of the river’s direction or the distance he had traveled.

His descent slowed as the tunnel floor leveled off, emerging into a waist-deep riverbed. Gasping for air, he felt a strong hand grab onto his arm and pull him from the water until he was sitting upright on a sloping, muddy bank. “Up you go, mate.”

Emmett saw that they were in a heavily wooded inlet with a wide embankment and thick evergreen canopy on both sides. They stood at the base of a towering mountain range, at the bottom of which was located a large hole that water steadily poured from. Beside the river was a small cove. Sebastian was resting against a large boulder, his skin so pale that Emmett feared he might soon die. Ellie was huddled against the wall with her knees drawn up to her cradling arms as she rocked rhythmically in mute terror.

Keiran hobbled past Emmett into the cove, opening a crate seated inside underneath a pile of dead shrubs. He pulled two lanterns and matches out, lighting each and setting them down. “I’ve got enough left in me to sort Sebastian,” Keiran said, returning from the crate with bundles of towels and clothes. “There’s a small boat with a motor kept here. The Columbia River is downstream. We’ll use the boat to put a safe distance between the Revenants and us.”

“Where are we going?” Emmett stuttered through chattering teeth.

“Somewhere safe.”

“Okay,” Emmett accepted, noting how Keiran deliberately looked away and said nothing else. “What do you need me to do?”

Keiran turned to him with a smile, pained though it was by the obvious weakness in his face. It was an expression not only of confidence but appreciation. “Get Ellie to dry herself off, and then come help me with Sebastian.”

As Emmett turned his head and followed Keiran’s sideways glance, he saw for the first time what was floating in the water in front of Ellie. Emmett’s stomach turned inside out at the sight of the headless corpse, the surrounding water muddied with the blood and insides that radiated outward from the body.

Emmett barely breathed as he looked to Keiran. “Shouldn’t we do something with his body?”

“I don’t want to be caught defenseless while digging a grave.”

“But Keiran,” Emmett said as he lowered his voice.

Keiran glanced at Ellie once before looking solemnly into Emmett’s eyes. “Life is for the living, Emmett. We have to be getting on.”

Emmett finally nodded, taking the towels and clothes and walking to Ellie. Her hair hung dripping against her face, her tiny body trembling under heavy, soaked clothes.

“Ellie?” he whispered, kneeling down to eye level. “We need to get you out of those wet clothes. Can you stand up?” Her stare was unresponsive. Emmett followed her eyes to her brother’s remains. She nodded vacantly as she slowly stood.

Emmett considered the awkwardness of the situation and placed the clothes on the ground, unfolding the towel in front of her. Looking away from her, he said, “I’m going to hold this up while you change, okay?” Emmett turned his head and watched Keiran whispering to Sebastian, cradling his limp neck in one hand as his other passed over his midsection. Keiran was singing a low melody.

Sebastian gasped aloud, his body buckling. Keiran continued his song, closing his eyes and straining to hold Sebastian’s body. Sebastian kicked his feet and coughed founts of blood into the air, his arms continuing to thrash in Keiran’s strong embrace.

After several moments, Sebastian’s body fell limp. Keiran’s melody waned until Emmett heard only the nocturnal movements of the forest. He cleared his throat, chancing a glance down to see if Ellie’s exposed legs were covered yet. He felt the towel taken from his hands, and he finally looked to see Ellie wrapping it around her hair, wringing the water out with a lifeless expression.

He stepped back to Keiran, who sat with his back to the cove wall with Sebastian in his arms. Keiran’s face was unrecognizably tired. At Emmett’s approach, Keiran looked up to see Ellie drying herself off, wearing the overalls provided.

“I managed to pull out the poison that was on the blade that cut him. Help me get him changed.”

Keiran lifted Sebastian’s massive torso, and Emmett helped remove his torn clothes. His arms were both encircled in thick, tribal tattoos beginning at the wrist and wrapping all the way up past his shoulder and around his neck. Their patterns were varied and complex. Blood stained a torso crisscrossed in slashes—some new, others old and already scarred over. The tears along his midsection were closed underneath a layer of scarred, burnt skin reaching from his navel down his pelvis.

“I wish I could have done more, but I’ve expended too much energy tonight. He’ll have to mind the scars,” Keiran said, motioning to Sebastian’s stomach. Emmett thought of the deeper scar, of Sebastian losing his twin, the man who finished his thoughts with words that flowed in tandem with his own.

As they dressed Sebastian, Ellie returned to an upright fetal position against the cove’s far wall, staring blankly out into the forest with unfocused, lamenting eyes. Keiran laid Sebastian down on the ground as he slept.

Keiran stepped behind Emmett and quickly pulled his pinstripe slacks off. Emmett held a towel up, averting his eyes out of modesty. Keiran stretched his back with an audible sigh before shaking his head and running his hands through his wet hair. As Keiran pulled an identical coverall over his body, Emmett caught a fleeting image of similar tattoos—deep, tribal patterns swirling in dark inks—around and contrasted against Keiran’s athletic, if pale-skinned frame.

“I’m going to get the boat ready and put Sebastian inside. There are dry socks and shoes in the trunk.”

Emmett waited until Keiran had left before changing, his skinny body feeling overly exposed in front of so many strangers. He changed quickly, drying his floppy hair. He found several pairs of soft shoes of various sizes with wool socks. Once dressed, he put his wallet into his back pocket and grimaced as he pocketed his soaked phone.

“One last thing,” Keiran said, stepping over to the crate and withdrawing a phone from it. “I hate these bloody things,” he mumbled, turning the phone on and taking pictures of each of them.

“What are you doing?”

“We need identifications,” Keiran said, squinting his eyes as he scrolled through the phone’s menu. “Ah, here we are, then,” he said, pressing a button and waiting a moment before bending down and smashing the phone onto a rock.

“Let’s get moving.”

Keiran navigated their boat along the shallows with a single oar for twenty minutes, the river eventually deepening enough that he could use the motor. Lying between Keiran and Emmett, Sebastian slept with effort, the occasional moan escaping his lips. Ellie hunched at the bow, staring blankly out at the passing trees before also falling into a coma-like sleep. Emmett’s mind numbly recounted the evening’s events as a silent, black and white picture show in his mind. He glanced at each person in turn, feeling selfish that his mind rebounded back on the direness of his own situation.

“How are you holding up?” Keiran whispered.

Emmett looked at his hands and cleared his throat, wiping his eyes and pushing his hair out of his face in one motion. “No idea.”

Keiran drew a hand through the gentle current and refreshed his face with the cold water. There was exhaustion evident in his eyes, green eyes that had until now brightened with the promise of adventure but had been dulled by the darkness they had witnessed.

“We’ll reach Portland by sunrise.”

“And then what?” Emmett asked.

“Amala wanted you hidden somewhere safe.”

“But shouldn’t we go back for her?” he asked, concerned that his almost pleading sounded accusatory.

He watched a dark shadow pass over Keiran’s face.

“My word means everything, and I gave my word to Amala that I would protect you. Even if it meant abandoning her. And she knew that it might be so.”

If it weren’t for me, you would have stayed to fight with her.
Closing his eyes, Emmett lowered his chin to his chest.

Though he had said nothing aloud, he felt somehow that Keiran’s silence confirmed what he was thinking. Emmett laid his head in his hand, feeling the approaching emotion. In the encompassing silence, he swallowed his own guilt and found the taste bitter in his uneasy stomach.

You wanted an intrinsically alien life.

He’d gone searching for answers about his mother, for meaning in a journey he’d seen in countless films. What he’d found, though, were people acting of their own interests, interests he did not know and whose outcomes he could not fast-forward to the end to determine.

With all that he had already learned, and with so little he was certain that he yet knew, Emmett wondered how the Children of the Earth did what they did … when even he, with so little to offer the world, found himself lacking any belief that he could make a difference.

Emmett shook his head as he looked down at his hands, willing the nihilism to leave his thoughts. He needed to be strong.
Now is not the time
.
Not now
.

His inner reflection was punctuated by raindrops, as if the sky were tapping him on the head to distract him from contemplation. The raindrops fell heavier and more frequent. He looked upward. The night was still relatively clear above, and farther down the river he saw no significant storm clouds, either.

“What the hell?” Emmett began, turning his head around to look to Keiran and gasping as his eyes grew wide with the sight forming behind them.

Directly above the mountain’s pinnacle, a swirling mass of turbulent clouds as black as an oil slick spiraled inward toward a central point. It was as if a great titan in the heavens were drawing the whole of the sky to it. Lightning sparkled across the edges of the storm as the spiral grew, winds seeming to pull the trees from the ground and fling them into the air. As Emmett stared at it, he felt once again small and insignificant, dwarfed by a raw power that was greater than anything he had experienced before.

“It looks like a hurricane,” he said, his eyes unable to steal away from the terrifying scene. Wind churned the river around them, and Keiran rotated his hand on the motor to the highest setting.

“It’s the fulmination of the Dark Fire. It is not of this world, and so when it is conjured, it consumes itself in a storm like that.”

Lightning strikes fired down as if the angered heavens meant to rend the mountain in two. The earth growled in response, and with a heavy grumble that seemed to upend the world around them, a sheer face of the mountainside separated and raced downward in a landslide of rocks, trees, and snow.

Emmett felt like he might vomit, watching the rock rain down the mountainside. He watched in mute horror as the clouds loosened, slowed, and suddenly dispersed. As the mountainside still heaved with falling debris from the landslide, the storm overhead disappeared into the otherwise clear, starry winter night.

He felt numbness, a total lack of any semblance of feeling. Not only from the bitter chill on the air and the smattering of rain but also from the awareness of wholesale destruction witnessed. No film, no matter how grotesque or violent, could ever match the reality of what had just occurred. Never again.

Emmett wondered if Amala had been trapped in the landslide, yet even before he could acknowledge the wrenching horror of losing her, he dismissed the thought entirely from his mind. Only the untold death of so many nameless faces remained in his thoughts, chilling as much as the Oregon winter air. Emmett’s fatigued body drew another long yawn and shuddered with the discomfort of the Rot, the danger of their predicament and uncertainty of their destination accentuating both the pain and loss.