Chapter Thirty-Nine
THIRTY-NINE
MAVEN
I run all the way back to Blackthorn Manor without stopping, pumping my arms and gulping the cold November air, frantic to leave the church and its dark visions far behind me.
When I reach the house, I’m drenched in sweat. I barge through the door, run straight upstairs, pull my suitcase from the closet where Q stowed it when we arrived, throw it onto the bed, and start pulling clothes off hangers.
“Bea!” I holler toward the open bedroom door. “Honey, come here!”
A few moments later, she wanders in. Nonplussed, she stares at me as I race back and forth between the closet and the dresser, cramming everything into the open suitcase on the bed as fast as I can.
“What are you doing?”
“Packing. We’re leaving.”
“Leaving?”
“Yes. Right now. Go get your things packed, honey! We’re taking the next train out.”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
My laugh sounds crazed. “What’s wrong? I’ll tell you what’s wrong. This town is driving me nuts!”
When the idea of her mother’s impending mental breakdown doesn’t get her moving, I switch to logic. “We have to get back to Manhattan. We’ve already stayed too long. You need to go back to school. Things need to go back to normal.”
“But you pulled me out of school.”
I stop short and stare at her, a sweater clutched in my shaking hands. Swallowing nervously, I whisper, “What?”
Standing in the doorway in her pretty pale-blue church dress and shiny patent shoes, she stares at me in genuine confusion and possibly a small amount of fear.
“You said you were going to homeschool me. You sent a letter to the principal at my school. You told them I wouldn’t be back.”
That thudding noise I hear is my pulse pounding in my ears. My mouth has gone bone dry. My knees are weak.
When I don’t say anything, Bea prompts, “Last week you sent a letter. Remember?”
“A letter,” I repeat slowly, hoping saying the word aloud will lift the fog in my brain, and I’ll be able to understand what she’s talking about.
No such luck. I remain as confused as ever.
My daughter, on the other hand, is beginning to get angry.
Eyes flashing, she walks closer, her mouth drawn into a hard, strangely adult line.
“You said I didn’t have to go back there, Mom. I told you I wanted to stay here with Q and the great-aunties, and you said okay. You said we were moving here. You said I didn’t have to go back!”
She shouts the last sentence, her voice high and shrill. She’s as panicked about going back to Manhattan as I am about staying in Solstice, though I have no idea why.
I pull her against me and hug her tightly. “Sweetie, listen to me. I don’t know what’s happening, but we have to go home, okay? We’re not moving here. We can’t stay here. It’s time to leave.”
She shoves me away and backs up toward the door.
Eyes brimming with tears, she says accusingly, “You never care about what I want. It’s always about you.
What you want to do, where you want to live, what you think is good for us.
I’m not a baby anymore! I don’t have to do what you tell me to do!
I don’t have to listen to you when you’re being such a stupid bitch! ”
Stunned, I stare at her with my mouth open.
She’s never spoken to me like this before. Never. I’ve never even heard her raise her voice in anger.
Her face red and her mouth screwed into a knot, she turns and runs from the room.
I listen to the sound of her furious footsteps pounding down the stairs, then a door slams, and the house settles into deep, satisfied silence.
Covering my face with my hands, I whisper, “Get it together. First, pack your bags, then pack her bags, then find her and go to the train station. One thing at a time. One thing at a time.”
Frazzled and out of breath, I finish clearing out the drawers and closet of my belongings, shoving it all into a haphazard mess in my bags and zipping them up in a rush.
I repeat the process in Bea’s room, waving the white cat off her bed so I can check for any stray socks or clothing under the blankets.
When that’s done, I drag all the bags downstairs and leave them by the front door.
Then I go hunting for my daughter.
I don’t find her in the kitchen.
I don’t find her in the great room.
I don’t find her in any of the labyrinth of rooms on the first floor, so I return upstairs and look there, my panic rising with every passing moment.
Finally, I have to concede that Bea is no longer in the house.
The aunties and Q are nowhere to be found, either.
Everyone has disappeared.
The feeling of impending doom I had in the church is creeping back over me again, gripping me close with clammy hands and reeking breath. I force myself to remain calm and think, though my nerves are screaming at me to do something fast.
I go outside to search the yard.
Sitting atop the iron bench under the grove of birches, a red fox watches me run into the greenhouse and back out again, desperately calling Bea’s name. When it jumps off the bench and vanishes under a hedge, red tail flashing, it feels like a sign.
In my jumbled state of mind, it seems as if the fox wants me to follow it.
Past the hedge, the forest starts abruptly.
I push through wild brambles until a narrow, barely discernible path appears, strewn with fallen leaves and dappled with shadows from sunlight filtering down from the dense canopy overhead.
Stepping over a rotting log festooned with gangly black mushrooms, I call out Bea’s name.
My only reply is the caw of a lone raven.
I walk deeper into the forest, shivering when a cold breeze tugs its icy fingers through my hair. My desperation growing, I call for Bea over and over until my voice is hoarse.
I don’t know how much time passes before I realize that the light filtering down from the canopy is no longer bright but graying. The temperature is dropping, too, and the wind is picking up.
A storm is brewing.
I turn around to go back the way I came, but nothing looks familiar. The trees are different, larger and darker, their bare branches reaching toward me like skeletal claws.
In the gathering gloom, I catch a flash of red disappearing behind the huge stump of a dead oak. My heart leaping, I hurry to follow it.
I run, swatting away branches that lean down to scratch at my face and stumbling over the tangled roots on the forest floor, fear rising like a frigid tide inside my chest, painfully constricting my lungs.
Leaping over mud puddles and dodging the tangled, thorny bracken that wants to tear my clothing, I chase after the fox.
I suck in air, smelling pine needles and damp earth, loamy soil and mossy rocks, until I catch the scent of something else that makes me falter.
It’s the smell from the greenhouse. That distinctive scent of charred wood and metal heated until it’s red hot, smoldering ash and burning coal, and a pungent, animal musk unlike anything I’ve ever known.
A low, inhuman growl echoes through the forest, rumbling the ground beneath my feet.
I whirl around, but the forest behind me is empty.
The full moon peeks through the canopy high above. Night is falling fast. But how? Only a few hours ago, it was morning!
The crackle of twigs breaking makes me spin in a circle, searching for the origin of the noise. Was it the fox? Another small animal darting through the underbrush?
Or something else?
A larger predator, perhaps?
“Bea?” I whisper, my heart hammering. “Bea, is that you?”
The preternatural growl comes again. Closer this time. Hungrier. Shivering up the trunks of the ancient trees surrounding me, making every leaf and branch tremble.
I’m frozen for a long, breathless moment, until the shadow of a gigantic creature falls over me, blacking out all light from above.
A pulse of hot air washes over my body, bringing with it the scent of something sharp and electric, almost like lightning, but with bonfires and burnt metal mingled in.
Brimstone.
I think the word at the same moment a spray of glowing embers wafts past me, and I realize the pulse of air was caused by the beating of a giant pair of wings.
Scared stiff and hyperventilating, I turn slowly to glance over my shoulder.
There I see a swirling cloud of black smoke and burning embers, painting the forest floor in a subtle, shifting red glow.
The cloud of embers and smoke solidifies into a form, towering easily eight to ten feet tall.
Its body is cloaked in sinewy muscle. Its skin is deepest obsidian, streaked in places with faint glowing veins of red. Encircling its massive wrists and ankles are glyphs that also glow red, shifting restlessly as if they’re alive under the skin.
Its hands are massive, with long sharp claws capping thick fingers. From its back sprouts an enormous pair of black leathery wings stretched taut between spiked bones.
Each monstrous wing is tipped in long black talons.
Before I can even suck in a breath, the thing is on me.
I’m swept up into its massive arms and forced to cling to it as it launches us into the air in a single, powerful stroke of its wings. My scream is lost on the wind as we burst through the canopy of trees out into the open night sky.
We fly in a dizzying spiral, the creature’s enormous arms pinning me to its body, its flesh hot against my cheek, rough and leathery. Solstice spreads out below us in a rapidly diminishing blanket of lights twinkling against velvet darkness.
Wind tearing at my hair and making my eyes water, we bank hard toward the mountains. My stomach lurches. My heart flips into my throat. I’m convinced I’m about to die, but am too terrified to care.
Then suddenly we’re slowing. The wind dies. The rush of cold air disappears, replaced by slightly warmer air that smells of wet earth and lichen. With one final beat of its giant wings, the creature lands softly on the ground.