The Dark Light (20 page)

“What did the people here do?” I asked, thinking of my father, a warrior withdrawing to this remote spot.

“Many things,” said Sol. “Years ago, the Freemen signed a covenant with the king. Anything they made, grew, or found here was theirs. No taxes. No levies. It meant they were on their own. But that’s exactly how they wanted it.”

I tried to picture the place bustling with life. It was difficult. “How far to the house?”

“Not far,” said Sol. He glanced at the golden explosion above the mountains. “We should reach it before dark.”

Daylight faded to dusk, which lingered on and on as if to give us one last chance to reach safety. I was nervous, both about what horrors might still pursue us, and to see the place where I’d been born.

Signs that life had once thrived here appeared. Fence posts. Tumbledown cabins. Wagons abandoned on the overgrown, cobbled roadside. And then bones, in the grass and on the road. Some were large, as if from cattle or horses. Some were so twisted or overgrown that I couldn’t imagine what creatures they’d come from. And then there were the human bones. Femurs. Skulls. Left here like garbage on the side of the road.

The golden dusk faded to peach, pink, and then lavender. Distant shrieks—not human, not animal—carried from the forest and higher ground.

“That doesn’t sound good,” I said.

Sol agreed, if the look on his face was anything to go by. He scanned the forested slopes, then shot me a reassuring smile. “We’re almost there.”

The road veered left, and a narrow track emerged through the undergrowth. Weeds choked the broken-down fences. The trees thickened along the path. The track again turned, opening onto a huge clearing. There was a barn, a paddock, and a pond, all of it shrouded in the mist from the magic conjured long ago.

But it was the house that held my gaze. It was bigger than I’d expected, with two floors and a wraparound porch. Its dark wood was slightly bleached by the elements.

Stunned, I held my breath. I knew it was the place. Truly, I did. Or was my mind just playing tricks? I
wanted
it to be this house—a picture-perfect cabin lodged between the forest and the mountains, home to a Freeman of Welkin’s Valley.

This was the house where I’d been born.

C
an I go in?” I asked.

Sol squeezed my hand. A couple of hours ago I would have done anything to have him touch me again. Now I was so numb I could hardly feel him there.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Look around while we get the place ready for tonight.”

It sounded simple, but like so many things in life, when it came down to it, it was harder than it looked.

Sol watched my first tentative steps. After my meltdown earlier, I was determined to appear strong. I dropped my pack on the porch, then opened the door and stepped inside.

I entered into a kitchen with a range, wood burning, I guessed.
Did they have oil or gas? And a table, like the table where I’d sat with Pete and Jay a thousand times. Pots on a dresser. Dust covered every surface, but other than that, it was untouched by time or nature. There were two other doors: one to the left, one to the right. A narrow staircase stood in the corner.

I inhaled deeply, thinking maybe I’d catch a whiff of something familiar. You know, like animals who can tell their kin by scent. All I smelled was damp, musty wood. But had I really expected anything more? I’d been born here, never lived here. Any notion that I knew this place was plain old crazy.

The floor creaked beneath me as I crossed the kitchen. Through the door to the left was a larger room with a stone hearth and chairs upholstered in fur and hide. It was like a stage set for a show with the lights dimmed and with actors waiting in the wings. Or it was a museum. Bromasta Rheinhold’s museum. My dad.

“It’ll wear off.”

I’d been so enthralled I hadn’t noticed Sol enter. He’d rolled up his sleeves, lean muscle visible in his folded arms.

“What did you say?” I asked.

“You said, ‘This is too weird,’” Sol replied, his expression soft. “I said, ‘It’ll wear off.’”

So I was talking to myself without realizing it. Not a good sign.

He smiled warmly, the gesture so open it left me aching for him to hold me again. “For what it’s worth,” he said. “I think you’re handling all of this really well.”

“You do?” I asked, surprised.

“Yes,” he said. He didn’t expand on his comment, but drew a deep breath and turned to the table, almost as if to hide his face. “We’re going to move this outside so there’s room for the horses. Can you check upstairs? Especially the windows.”

“Of course,” I replied, grateful for the task. “It’ll give me something to do.”

The staircase loomed. I grasped the rail and headed up, imagining footsteps overhead. I’d always believed that a building could absorb its history, just as when I had sat in the empty gym at school and could almost hear the shouts and screams of a thousand games played there. Might some memory of my father stalk the upper floors of the house, his spirit embedded in the timber beams?

Off the upstairs hallway, I found a bedroom. A rug lay on the floor, blue with a white flower woven in the center. On a shelf sat a corn doll, about the size of my hand, with long yellow hair and a scarlet dress. It was the same as a doll I’d made at a craft camp years ago in Des Moines. I didn’t know where that doll had gone. I’d thought it had gotten lost in the clutter at Grandma’s, then tossed out with all the other junk after she’d
died. I stared at its painted face, suddenly convinced that this had been my room.

I had been a baby when Grandma had taken me. There was no way I could have remembered this place. And even if the room had once belonged to me, it didn’t now. It belonged to this house.

Mind adrift between the two worlds, I stepped up to the window and peered out from between the woolen drapes. The kitchen table stood in the yard. Delane had found buckets for the horses from somewhere and the water inside them glistened. But it was Sol I watched.

He made for the barn, head down, on a mission. Willie had nailed it about Sol. He
was
100 percent, sugar-coated, eye candy. But I was starting to think he was much more than that. He’d been so warm and kind when I’d sobbed on his shoulder, and then again, downstairs. He was literally a world away from the aloof newcomer he’d been at school. That Sol had been the one to tell me about my dad felt strangely intimate.

I sighed.

“Just check the windows, Mia. Get a grip.”

The next room was identical to the first. I rattled the window. It was secure. Feeling more confident, a little more like myself, I flung open the next door. I screamed.

A floor to ceiling, wall to wall mass of gray cobweb crawling
with huge, brown spiny legs confronted me. I say legs—I didn’t hang around long enough to take in much of anything else. I bolted out, slamming the door behind me. Chills coursed my spine. I slapped my hair, shivered and shook, as I tried to shed the creep factor from my skin.

Footsteps thundered up the stairs and Delane darted into the passage. “We heard a scream, a bang!” he gasped.

I pointed at the closed door. “There,” I squeaked. “They’re in there.”

Delane stalked to my side, his brow low, ready to fight. “What is it?” he whispered, his body tense.

“It’s about twenty huffing great big spiders!”

Delane paused, his eyebrows raised. “Mia!”

“What do you mean ‘Mia’?” I grabbed his arm. “Delane, there are twenty huffing great big spiders in there!” Clearly Delane misunderstood the seriousness of the situation.

“How big?” he asked.

“What do you mean how
big
?”

“Well,” he made a gap between his hands about the size of a dinner plate, “this big? Or, this big?” He widened the gap to the size of a garbage can lid.

“The first!” I squealed. “You get spiders that other size?”

“Some,” he replied, seemingly not the least bit disturbed. “Don’t you?”

“Not anywhere you’ll ever catch me.”

Before I could save him from certain doom, Delane opened the door. Legs scurried to all corners, forcing an encore of the
Mia Stone: Elastic Limbs
extravaganza. Several of the foul fiends held their ground. Motionless, they eyeballed me with legs outstretched. At least ten inches across, each spider had a scarlet slash along its hairy, brown back.

“Stripe-back nest,” said Delane. “Impressive.”

Not a description I’d use. “Are they poisonous?”

“Nah. Just ugly.” He closed the door. “They’re actually handy to have around. Stripe-backs eat scroachers—nasty little critters that chew their way through anything.”

“Can you get rid of them?” I asked. With one eye on the door, my mind contemplated an overnight stay in an already populated house.

“Tricky,” said Delane. “I had one in my bedroom when I was young. You could hear it in the walls. Thing is, they’re too fast to catch. This one demolished a chair in, like—”

“I meant the stripe-backs!”

“Oh,” he laughed. “Sure, you can get rid of them. Just pick them up and throw them out.”

Like that was ever going to happen. I tried to free myself from what Willie would call, “A State of Revoltitude.” I shook out my limbs and cried, “Blahhhgrhllahaa.”

“You’re having a good day,” commented Delane.

That earned him thump on the arm. “I feel like I’m on a twisted student-exchange program.”

I don’t think he knew what I meant. He leaned back against the wall and folded his arms. His grin faded. “Mia, just so you know, I always voted ‘aye’ on telling you about Bromasta.”

The stripe-backs momentarily forgotten, I nodded. “I know,” I said. “Sol’s the secret keeper.”

“He has a lot on his mind,” said Delane. “But Solandun’s no liar, Mia. He’s worried about you. This place isn’t like where you’re from.”

Talk about understatement. “No,” I said. “We don’t go around knocking each other’s blocks off, if that’s what you mean. Well, not most of the time.”

A little twinkle, like Pete’s when a good mood struck him, entered Delane’s blue eyes. “Do you miss it?”

“Sort of,” I said. As soon as I said it, I thought of the cafeteria at Crownsville High, my bedroom at home, and Rusty vacationing over at Reggie West’s Motor Repair and Salvage. I sighed. “Delane, I just want to stay alive long enough to find Jay.”

“Then you should help with some last-minute preparations.” He playfully slapped me on the back, no doubt revenge for my well-placed thump. “Want to try some magic?”

* * *

To me, magic meant wicked old witches and
abracadabra
. But that wasn’t how they did things in Brakaland.

I balanced an orb on my palm and gazed at the purple grain inside. Delane and I stood just off the porch. Sol perched on the railing, watching us with one eye and the valley slopes with the other.

“Ready?” asked Delane. He looked as excited as when Jay came home with a new game. “Just squash it.”

I wanted to—
I really wanted to
—but it was like holding a pin to a balloon and not knowing when you’d hear the
BANG
.

“I thought magic was banned.”

“That was way before,” Delane replied, waving the thought away. “Besides, this is basic stuff. We use whatever we can get our hands on these days.”

I focused on the orb. “Won’t I get cut?”

“Mia, I promise. Just crush it, and then throw it.”

Okay. I could do this. “One. Two . . .”

I held my breath, crushed the orb between my palms, and made a tossing motion, but there was nothing to toss. As soon as I’d applied pressure, the orb in my hand vanished and heat entered my palms. A flash of silver, like fairy dust, sparkled in front of my eyes. I checked my hand to find no blood and no orb.

“Told you it was easy,” said Delane. He pointed up. A ball of purple light was suspended above us. “Now watch.”

Purple rays radiated from the ball of light like spokes on a wagon wheel. They stretched rigidly in every direction, ten feet in length, an amethyst star twinkling in the air.

“I did that,” I said, and feeling rather proud of myself, I grinned at Sol. “That’s my spell.”

Sol laughed and flashed me a glimpse of an orb in his hand. “Watch this.”

He jumped from the railing, crushed his orb, and tossed it about twenty feet from mine. As if drawn by magnetism, the rays from Sol’s spell joined with the spokes from mine until an intricate lattice hung above our heads, glistening purple in what was left of day’s light.

“It’s a repeller,” said Delane, taking more orbs from his pack. “We’ll connect them around the house.”

“And the demons can’t get through?”

“Not a chance.”

That was more like it. “Then let me do another.”

“But space them apart,” Delane warned. “We don’t have that many. So aim well.”

The purple lattice grew. Heat radiated from its shimmering threads. Like a pretty version of the stripe-back nest, the entire house was soon cocooned in a web of purple light.

“We can pass through it,” said Delane, and demonstrated by slicing a hand through the beams. “But not demons. Repellers do dreadful things to their blood.”

“Good,” I replied. Anything to exact revenge on a shadow imp. As I rummaged through the pack for more amethyst orbs, my hand chanced on a yellow sphere that was slightly larger in size. “What’s this one do?” I asked, making a grab for it.

Sol leapt to my side. “Careful,” he said. He grasped my wrist before I could touch the orb. “These make a big bang. Blow us to the stars, and we won’t have to worry about demons.”

I didn’t get chance to apologize. A scream echoed through the valley.

Except for the spell of protection around us, it was almost dark. From what we could see, the trees stood silent and still. All that moved was the crimson mist.

“Just in time,” said Sol.

Delane bounded over. He grabbed the bag off the ground. “Who’s hungry? We’ve got Snickers.”

Now I really had heard it all.
“Snickers?”

“Tiamet brings them over,” he continued. He entered the house, leading us to the den. “For Rip. He loves them.”