The WishKeeper (The Paragonia Chronicles) (7 page)

A swirl of red light slowly formed above his head as he sat. It flickered like an old light switch was flipped on again after years of non-use. Fluttering to life, a red ball of light appeared above him. The red light twinkled and reflected upon the grey snow and yellow street lamps. Grayson didn’t notice the visible light, but its burning blistered within him.

Breaking down into tears, Miranda pushed herself into her car, trying to catch her breath. The crying overcame her as she stared at Grayson through the frosty windshield. How could this be happening? I’m leaving the love of my life. My best friend, she thought.

As she sat in her frozen front seat, fighting and choking back the tears, a red light flickered above her, swirling into shape and finally twinkling to life. Breaking each other’s gaze, there was nothing left to do but leave.

Between them, hovering in the air in the middle of their frozen front yard, the two red, flickering bulbs of light connected and morphed into one powerful red light. The wind picked up and swirled through the cul-du-sac. A True Love Wish was growing between them and whipped the snow into a whirlwind. It popped into form and spun in a circle between the two heartbroken lovers. Faster and faster, it whirred and spun, creating a loud hum that echoed across the neighborhood until it exploded into a giant red beacon. It fired up into the winter sky.

The beacon blasted its blaze for a short time and finally disappeared, leaving a wild stallion of a True Love Wish spinning between Grayson and Miranda. The still winter night rushed back in as Miranda started up the car. The roar of the engine sputtered grey, foggy condensation into the street. The wheels crunched through hard-packed snow as she backed out of the driveway and drove away. Grayson couldn’t stand watching her leave. He picked himself up off the frozen front steps and limped back into the house.

The wish stopped spinning and zoomed toward Grayson only to be cut off by the front door slamming in its face. Turning on a dime, it zipped down the wet street, chasing after Miranda’s car. It was bright red, oblong in shape. Its aerodynamic form assisted its ability to flash through the air faster than any other wish, but even though it gained on Miranda, getting close to her rear bumper, slushy grey snow splashed and crashed it to the pavement.

Dizzy, the wish popped up out of the mud, shook the slush off and searched for Miranda’s car. No sign of her. It looked in the direction from which it thought it came, but Grayson’s house was out of sight. The lonely, wet street glistened under a Christmas star decoration dangling from a street lamp. The star blinked a slow, pulsing red and green. Icicles hung from its lowest point, frozen, stuck in a perpetual fall. A winter wind buzzed the little wish’s fuzzy, oblong shape and as much as it searched, desperate to find a glimpse of its Makers, the True Love Wish was lost. Confused and not knowing where to go, the sad little wish floated away into the cold winter night.

Away in the corners of the neighborhood, the darkness rippled with movement.

10

The Beacon

BLEEP…BLEEP…BLEEP

Something woke Beren from a soft snore. Groggily reaching for a star-shaped device on his bedside table, he grabbed his wand and fired a soft spell at it. He sat up, rubbed his eyes and ducked as the device exploded a holographic image out of its top. The image showed a WishSentinel failing at keeping his cool and a wild Fairy Intelligence Agency behind him with staff members running about, papers floating to the ground and panicked yells from Keepers barking orders.

“Easy!” yelled Beren, still trying to wake up.

“Yes sir, sorry sir!”

“What’s going on over there? You know how early it is?”

“Yes, right, very early. Sir, there was a signal and all the lights on the panels are blinking and it might be because of the signal but it can’t be, sir, because that would just be crazy, but then we noticed -,” the Sentinel wasn’t exactly a professional at this point.

“Officer. Officer! Speak like a normal fairy being. Please!” Beren begged. “Tell me what’s going on…slowly.”

Down the hall from Beren’s bedroom, Shea could hear her father’s voice. She was lying in bed, still awake. She perked her head and sat up in her loft bed and listened to the garbled voice, but couldn’t quite make out what Beren was saying. Jumping from the bed, grabbing a rope and swinging down to the bedroom door, she landed as quietly as she could and cracked it open just an inch. Putting her ear to the opened crack, she listened.

Beren was standing now and definitely awake as he barked responses to the panicked Sentinel. “Erebus is always busy at night. You know there’s nothing--.”

“Yes, but sir, the signal!” replied the Sentinel now inches from the camera. His faced almost pressed up against it.

“How many times have I trained you in how to manage the WishPanels? It’s old equipment. You have to jiggle the -,” Beren was refusing to listen to the Sentinel.

“It was a beacon! Sir,” the Sentinel barked.

“A beacon?’ replied Beren, uncertain.

Opening the door a bit more, Shea whispered to herself, repeating her father’s question. “Beacon?” With delicate toes and risking the inevitable bending of the floorboards, Shea crept to her dad’s door and leaned her head against it.

“Show me the WishPanels,” ordered Beren. The Sentinel hesitated. “Now!”

Shea pushed her father’s bedroom door open just a bit. She couldn’t help it - curiosity was getting the best of her. Through the crack, she watched the hologram image swerve and show the main surveillance room of the F.I.A. A massive system of panels lined hundreds of feet of wall space, all showing maps of various towns and cities. Blue, green, purple dots, pink ones too - they covered each panel except for one.

The particular panel of Beren’s interest showed a black fog slowly moving across a radar screen. The fog edged closer and closer to…

“The cul-du-sac. Show me another panel. The city,” ordered Beren. Worry was building inside of him as the camera moved to an adjacent panel. Though more dense with various buildings, regions and populace, it was almost entirely clear of the black fog. “It has to be a glitch. None of the other panels…why would Erebus go back to…” said Beren, thinking out loud.

“But sir, it’s impossible and, well, it just can’t be,” the Sentinel moved the camera closer to the fog-heavy panel. It was obvious to what the Sentinel was referring. Two red dots blinked - one pacing within a small cottage, another moving quickly down a small neighborhood street.

Shea, spying through her father’s door, stared wide-eyed at the image. Luckily for Shea, Beren was too engrossed in the panel to notice her.

“The WishMakers. It’s Grayson and Miranda, sir,” said the Sentinel stuttering in his own disbelief as a pop-up bubble of words appeared on the screen above each red dot. Grayson Brady: Home, Alone, Despair. Miranda Brady: Car, Alone, Confusion/Despair. Shea couldn’t read the notes on the screen, but Beren could.

Beren sat, pale faced, unable to comprehend, but he knew his Sentinel wasn’t lying and that his WishPanels were never wrong.

“How many fairies know?” Beren asked as calmly as possible.

“Uh…”

The Sentinel turned the image toward an office full of WishSentinels, office fairies, Keepers and then some. They huddled in a corner, staying as far away from the panel as possible as if the two red dots might bite. Beren groaned.

“The Keepers on The Other Side. Get them back here. Immediately,” ordered Beren. He threw on a robe and hurried out the window. The star-shaped device shut off as Shea slowly opened the bedroom door. She watched her father fly away. Breathless.

11

The Captain

“Mom!” yelled Shea, standing at the edge of the blackness. A decade’s worth of time couldn’t erase the echo of her daughter’s voice. The haunting of a daughter’s plea.

It swarmed her ears as she looked at Beren and felt the quivering, doomed True Love Wish in her arms. It was too painful to look at Shea, she thought. She forced herself to keep her eyes, her thoughts, on her husband. The only one who would ever understand. Her WishMaker’s true love, their future, their most important wish, rested weightless in her arms and she was going to destroy it.

“I love you,” Elanor whispered, and though Beren couldn’t hear the words over the surrounding storm, she knew he would feel them. Most often, a goodbye needs nothing more than a wordless look. Her wand charged up. The spell wrapped itself around her wrist and sparked, inches from the True Love Wish.

Erebus roared toward her, and tossed Beren to the ground. She watched her husband struggle to stand and with the fog rushing toward her, Elanor’s eyes never strayed from him. Her wand charged and charged. Its power was so strong, she could barely hold on. She wished it hadn’t come to this. She wished she didn’t know…

When she watched Beren dive on top of Shea, it woke her from her stare. “Shea,” she said quietly through a sudden bursting of tears. Erebus’ blackness consumed her as she looked down at the True Love Wish and closed her eyes. The wind whirled and raged around her.

“I’m sorry,” she choked.

She let the spell go and it ripped into the wish. The blast was enormous, and once the blinding light reached her eyes, Elanor only remembered the pain.

*       *       *       *

The darkness of the sky lifted and gave way to a silver screen of dotted stars. Elanor was lying on her back. The snow all around her was melted and barely a rustle of Erebus’ storm remained. Beren and Shea were gone. The wish was gone. Her life as she knew it only moments prior was as well.

Brown, wet grass surrounded her in a perfect circle and her wings - nothing but charred, mangled skeletal remains. The night was calm and windless. The stars blinked, but Elanor didn’t. She was barely breathing when a shadow stretched over her.

Limping, Erebus stopped and stood over her. As if shapeless, he was complete shadow, though retaining a demented form of a man wearing a pointed, hooded cloak. He looked down at the barely conscious WishKeeper, lowered a shadowed hand just a bit and wrapped black fog around her, lifting her up. Elanor was limp in his shadowed palm as he turned and stepped into the darkness of a tree’s stretching shadow. Morphing into the blackness, he disappeared.

Taking shape, Erebus appeared at the base of an ancient oak, and looked up. A Gate was flickering like a scrambled, broken image above him. He placed Elanor on a branch, setting her down. She stirred and moaned through the pain of a broken body.

“My Elanor. Wake up, my Elanor,” Erebus whispered.

She rolled on to her side and blinked through a crippling headache. Quickly sitting up, she backed away from the staring Erebus as he loomed over her.

“Shea. Where is she?” she pleaded, but stopped suddenly when she backed into the trunk of the tree. She felt for her wings. Looking over her shoulder, she saw the bones. Panic slowly set in.

“They’re gone. All gone now,” said Erebus.

“You did this. How could you?” asked Elanor exhausted and desperate.

“My research got the best me, Elanor. Literally, the best of me,” he smiled an evil grin. “That was quite the heroic act. A necessary sacrifice, if you will. You’ve helped me see the light, however,” he continued his ironic grin.

Elanor forced herself to stand. Every muscle ached and the throbbing in her shoulders pulsed with every drumbeat of her heart. She looked up at the blinking Gate above her and out of habit, tried to fly. Cringing, the skeletal bones of her remaining wings barely moved. Falling to her knees, she cried out in pain.

“Don’t bother. Your friends have done something even I did not expect,” Erebus said. “They closed the gates. All of them. Unprecedented, really. I will have to have a little talk with your husband.”

“Beren. He -,” tried Elanor, but the pain was too much.

“It’s just you and me.
My
Elanor.” A black fog rolled out of Erebus. Darkness reached up and out of him, swirling toward Elanor. She tried to back away, but it consumed her.

*       *       *       *

Within the Fairy Intelligence Agency, The WishSentinel watched through a hologram as his general flew out of his bedroom window, fresh off the news of a newly made True Love Wish. His General’s orders to retrieve all Keepers from The Other Side still rattled his brain as he grabbed a microphone device and flipped a switch. Two WishMakers had made a second True Love Wish. How could this be? He had heard the stories of their first True Love Wish and how it was destroyed, sacrificed if you will. But to make a second one - impossible. But was it? He was dizzy as he grabbed the microphone.

“All active duty Keepers, this is not a drill. All gates will close in T-minus five minutes. This is a breakout call. Return to headquarters immediately.”

He slapped the switch off and stared at various monitors. On the screens, he watched WishKeepers react to a device at their belts and bolt away. “Come on. Get out of there,” he said with what little composure he had left. He stared at another monitor. A WishKeeper was perched on top of a street lamp. He hadn’t noticed the breakout call yet and continued surveying his location. The Sentinel watched, impatient and desperate, as the street lamp Keeper didn’t budge.

Atop the street lamp, the WishKeeper watched a teammate tracking a lazy Ladder floating above a nearby home. To his far left, another Keeper was doing the same with an Athlete.

At his belt, his radar device blinked and beeped and finally he noticed. He looked at it, confused at first, but followed orders. He waved down his teammates and sparked his wand, sending a sharp red flare quickly into the sky. The lightly falling snow muffled the sound of a beater car rumbling along the unplowed street below as the two Keepers noticed the flare. They darted out of their positions and followed his lead.