The Stargazers (28 page)

Aster
let out another throat-scraping wail a
nd dove for the edge,
but the darkness and her still-adjusting
eyes prevented her from seeing beyond the first couple steps. “Bryon! I’m coming!” Standing up, mindless of the air on her naked bottom half, she grabbed the railing on the other side and made her way down the steps as f
ast as she could
,
aware that a simple misstep could send her to a similar fate
.

She cried out his name again, but only crickets, completely oblivious to the horror nearby, answered back
.

He wasn’t on the first landing. How far had he fallen? Her eyes, still hadn’t adjusted to the dark, and she tried desperately to see further down
.
She stepped onto the next set of stairs and
a hand wrapped around her ankle and pulled.

Before she could let out
more than a squeak, she went down hard on the landing,
knocking the wind out of her lungs and rapping
her head on the sharp edge of one of th
e stone steps. More blood
from a new wound
trickled down the back of her neck
.
The flavor of more blood filled her mouth from where she’d bitten her tongue. Her thoughts and reflexes felt muddy as she struggled to get away and sit up. How many times had she hit her head since all this began, anyway?

Bryon leapt on her again. One side of his face was obscured by a mask of blood, where the stone must had cut him
as he went down. His eyes had a milky shine
in
the scant moonlight, with red and swollen lids fr
om the pepper spray
. They looked
like a demon’s e
yes. One of his shoulders was
bunched up higher than the other as if it had been dislocated. He pinned her down with his knees and dealt three blows to her face with his good arm.
One of her molars flew from her mouth with the second blow, and her nose crunched under his hard knuckles on the third.

Three more hits to the head. You won’t be able to take much more of this
.

“You’re a crafty little cunt
, but I’m still ready for you, Aster.
Hard as a fucking
hammer
.
Can you believe it?”

Aster’s face throbbed
like a giant aching tooth,
and one of her eyes was beginning to swell shut. Blood dripped down her throat from her bleeding nose, and she was dizzy from the repeated blows
to the head
, but she reached up and grabbed his shirt and pulled him down to her face so she could look directly into his eyes.

“Bryon, listen to me. I know you’re in there and that you can hear me. You’ve been poisoned by my aunt, who wanted to use you and Ruby to get to me. Please,
hear me.
I love you. Don’t do this.”
She reached up and kissed him as deeply as she could, despite the pain that shot through her head from her broken nose. Maybe she could
break through the cloud of madness that had infected his brain with her love
.
Please let it be so. I love you, Bryon. Please hear me
.

He softened against her, and they continued to kiss. Her pain was forgotten as she threw as much of herself into him as she could. She remembered their night under the stars and how tender and sweet he’d been.

Come back to me
.

He pulled back and Aster was relieved to see the
madness in his eyes had faded, leaving behind
bemused pain.
Then he saw her face, which must have looked lik
e a badly damaged melon, and he
gasped. “Oh…oh my god. What happened
to me
? What
…what
have I done?” He
jumped back from her
, wincing as he tried to move his bad shoulder. “There’s something in my h-head, Aster! Make it stop!” He wrapped his good arm around his head and crouched down, his body shaking
with
sobs.

Aster
reeled back again, gripped with dizziness
.
When she thought she could see straight again, she
touched his shoulder. “Bryon, it’s okay. We can fix this.”

He reared up like a feral dog. “Don’t
touch
me!
You
did this to me! I can’t believe I ever—.” In his raving, he leaned back a little too far and
grabbed onto the railing, but it turned traitor again, this time snapp
ing in two. Bryon struggled to maintain his footing and cried out. “Aster, help!” Then he tumbled backward a
second time.

Aster sprung forward to grab his shirt, but it pulled away in her slippery fingers.

He didn’t fall as far this time, but s
he heard his head hit the stone stair
s
with a sickening crunch,
and his body flipped over once. He didn’t stir again after that
.

“
Bryon!
”

When she reached him, she found his head turned at an impossible angle. His eyes were still open, and a pool of blood was spreading around his broken head. Cradling him in her arms, she rocked him back and forth while pressing as much healing energy into him as she could,
crying out the incantations with a hoarse voice. But the magic only
bounce
d
off
him
.

“Let me fix him let me fix him let me fix him,” she muttered over and over, pressing her hands against his head
and starting the incantations over again. B
ut
she couldn’t connect her spirit to his. He had passed on to wherever the people of this world go, and right then all she wanted to do was follow him.

Her howls of grief and
agony fill
ed the night
, but the moon only stared back, its
half-concealed
face
as
impartial as the stone now drinking Bryon’s blood.

-25-

Something had kicked up Oleander’s dust, but she couldn’t figure out just what. She knotted her hands into pudgy brown fists as she paced back and forth in the privacy of her bedroom. “The pink-haired bitch. It’s always that harlot, is it not?”

It all started
this afternoon when that bullying peacekeeper
knocked on the door to tell h
er he’d dropped Aster off at
this Mama Iris’s house. Th
is had been
an unexpected development.
Who the hell was this woman who shared a common Stargazer name? It tickled
at the back of her mind, just as something familiar about this peacekeeper kept hitting her as well, but nothing was
coming forth and this infuriated
her beyond measure. 

It was obvious that the sheriff and Ivy had been friends, but she could tell by the concerned wrinkle between his bushy eyebrows, and the way he kept throwing glances over his shoulder as he walked back toward his car, that he’d s
niffed something wrong with Oleander as well. She let him leave, but only because she had been so stymied by his presence. If she’d been in the correct mind, one not driven batty by the theatrics and histrionics of the teenage girls she was surrounded with,
this Kennedy fellow never would have s
een the outside of Oasis house again.

The
certainty that
something
was
“off” in Oleander’s unive
rse was making her
bones ache.
By now the boy should have ingested the
potion, sending all of the dominoes falling as Oleander had intended them
. But the
re were too many bad omens
. The appearance of t
he cop and word of a new interloper.
And n
ow there was blood on the moon
. It seemed almost to be mocking her

A knock sounded at her bedroom door, making jump. “What!”

Ruby poked her head in. She looked
even
uglier than usual. Probably from worrying about her little girlfriend. “Um, have you heard anything from Aster?”

“W
hy would she contact me?
I should be asking you the same question.
”

The other girl’s face grew even paler and Oleander wanted to rake her nails across it just to make it bleed.

“I think I will
go try to find her.”

“She might try to kill you if you do find her.”
             

Ruby
gaped. “Why would she do that?”

“If her boyfriend didn’t fare too well tonight
and Aster is still alive and well
, then she
will know
you poiso
ned her. She might be heading this way
right now
,
intent on making you pay. Your poison may have done too well.”

“
My—that was yours! And you said it wasn’t
a poison!”

Oleander dashed across the room and slapped the girl’s idiot face. She took pleasure in the loud clap of her hard hand across the slack cheek. “I was willing to entertain your little lovesick fantasy insofar as it served my ends, but it just made my life far more complicated. I would kill you right now with my bare hands if it wo
uldn’t cost me the time it will
take to
untangle this mess. Now get out of here
!”

Oleander slammed the door on the stupid cow’s face and set about getting dressed
. She intended to see about this Iris person
first, and then finally deal with her wayward niece
. But first, she spent some time among her potions and herbs. Oleander never left on an errand without a flask or two in her pocket. Selecting a precious vial from her stores, she headed out the door, ignoring the few girls who were sitting dazed on the couch in front of the TV. She didn’t have to use herbs to sedate them. The endless work in the summer heat had done that all on its own.

She climbed into the Ivy’s car
and fastened the safety belt. The last thing she wanted to do was drive this infernal vehicle again, but the
trip would be short. The peacekeeper had mentioned the woman’s
rough address.
The one with the strawberry stand out front
, he had said, his suspicious eyes burrowing even deeper when Oleander hadn’t registered immediate recognition of the name or the place.
She thought she could find it easily enough, as it was the same road she’d come into town on.

A few minutes later, Oleander spied th
e strawberry stand in question. It was hard to miss, with its red and green paint, and a sign proclaiming,
Strawberries by the Pint and Flat
!
She
pulled into the drive before the house.
A
lone
dim
light
shone inside the front window
, but she couldn’t see anyone moving around in there.

Good. She wanted to catch her by surprise.

Oleander
climbed from the vehicle’s cabin. “I’m just going to knock, and we’ll have us a mighty short conversation.”

She
hadn’t taken more than thr
ee or four steps
when she heard a rustle and hiss
. Then something wrapped tight around her ankle, and the flesh began to burn
then immediately go numb
.

Sickle vines. An Ellemire exclusive
, as far as she knew. “That sneaky old cunt.”

Another of the intelligent plants encircled her other ankle, ju
st as her leg was going limp from the
paralyzing toxins the vines carried in their thorns. It was a milky substance Oleander had used plenty of
in her potion making, namely in poisons, or
tonics to treat people with tremor diseases. Sickles were also extremely effective in protecting the perimeter of a property from unwanted guests.

Oleander
might have been able to concoct an antidote if she’d brought he
r bag, but she’d left it at the house
, not anticipating something so stealthy.
Your arrogance is making you foolish.
Lily’s voice.
It only popped up
when she was at her most vulnerable, and she bristled against it. “Shut up, you bat,” she muttered.
She went down in the dry brush that lined the path to Iris’s porch.

“I only
just put them out today,” called
a raspy voice from just ahead
.
The figure was nothing more than a silhouette
before the doorway
,
and Oleander could see she was
stooped with age, or perhaps the crippled twist of spine caused by the transfer of Old Magic from mother to daughter
.