42. Ballroom Dance V
I was running across rain-soaked pavement before I realized I’d even leapt from the moving van. Ciarán shouted after me, but the aggressive wind rolling in from the harbor dampened his voice.
I slammed into the rock where it jutted out from the shop’s doorframe.
“Mom!” I screamed. Why was there a rock where my mother was supposed to be? Where had she gone? Was she inside? Was she dead?
This wasn’t part of the plan. We’d done the hard part. It was supposed to be easy from here.
Panic propelled me down the narrow alley between Gams’s shop and the neighboring building. The back deck was awash in a deluge of rain. In the harbor below, abandoned boats slammed against their moorings. A few of them had started to fill with water and were sinking into the marina.
Broken glass crunched underfoot, and I looked up to see more rock had punched out Gams’s back windows.
There was no way in. The entire shop was full of the strange blue stone. I’d come so far only to be stalled by a mysterious boulder sitting where my mom was supposed to be waiting for us.
I readied my fist, preparing to punch the rock, at a loss for what else I could possibly do, but firm fingers wrapped around my wrist and pulled me back.
I punched Ciarán’s chest instead, but he took the blow well and wrapped his arms around me as I collapsed against that familiar Von Leer hoodie.
“We’re so close,” I whispered into its folds.
“We’ve figured out worse. We can figure out this too.”
“Can you feel her?” I pushed away from him and pressed a palm against the rock. It was warm beneath my palms, emanating a gentle heat from its pale blue surface. “You’ve summoned my mom’s Nightmare before.”
“I’m sorry. I haven’t heard her since—”
He cut off, and my panic swelled.
“Since I ashed her in our cave outside Willow’s Grave?” I prompted.
“I know what you’re thinking, but this isn’t your fault,” Ciarán said.
“We don’t know that!”
“Of course we do. Ashing Nightmares doesn’t make mysterious boulders appear where they shouldn’t be. I know you love your rocks, but this one has nothing to do with anything you did. I’m sure of it.”
Rocks.
Of course.
I pushed past Ciarán, running back to the road.
Iseult, Fana, and Orla were pulling the last of our packs out of the research van while Maxwell kept the engine running. I slammed into the driver side door and ripped it open.
“You have to help,” I said.
His eyebrows hitched. “I just drove over twenty-four hours to get you here on threat of broken fingers. I did my part, now you get to do yours and leave me the hell alone.”
He tried to pull the door closed, but I stood in the way.
“You’re a world-renowned geophysicist. What can you tell us about the rock in the shop?”
His eyes flitted from me to the craggy stone jutting from the door and windows, and then to Iseult, walking on a glowing leg of Skal as she inspected the shop with Fana and Orla.
“I can’t tell you shit,” Maxwell spat, “because you drugged me. And quite frankly, I’m not entirely sure I won’t wake up and discover this is all just another bad dream.
You better hope for your sake it is, because as soon as I’m home, I’m calling every geophysics program on the planet to ensure you never get in anywhere. ”
“You,” I seethed, “are not nearly important enough to drug. You can help us. Just look at the rock, tell us where it came from, what it—”
He raised a foot and, in a shocking display of flexibility, kicked me back so he could close the door.
It was more surprising than painful, but Ciarán charged at the van with an orange weapon in hand as rubber tires spun against wet pavement. I held Ciarán back, and Maxwell Brenton, PhD peeled out of Main Street to hightail it back up the hill.
“Are you okay?” Ciarán asked. “Are you hurt?”
I took a steadying breath and pushed rain-soaked hair back from my forehead. I didn’t need my father to figure this out.
“I’m fine.” I turned back towards the shop.
“It’s made of Skal,” Fana murmured, pressing her hand against the stone. She held Jonquil over her shoulder, and the cat meowed dolefully.
Iseult braced herself and put both hands against the rock. She gritted her teeth, and a ripple of light radiated out from her palms across the stone’s surface, but then she staggered back and shook her head.
“I can’t skalbreak it.”
“We’ll figure it out.” Ciarán’s words felt as hollow along our tether as they sounded out loud. “For now, we need food and shelter. Wren?”
I picked my backpack up off the wet pavement and led the way down the street. I glanced through every window, looking for signs of Mom.
“Wren, your home is beautiful.” Orla took my hand as I led the way down the road. “It is more incredible than I could have ever imagined.”
I glared down the barren, storm-weathered street. “Thanks, Orla. I’m glad you like it.”
On my other side, Ciarán matched my stride. I’d walked this path with him before, on my way to a dinner I didn’t want to attend while he did his best to annoy me. Back then, I had thought Skalterra to be a bad dream and Liam to be nothing more than an obnoxious coworker.
It couldn’t have been long past noon, but the oppressive clouds and rain made it feel later in the day. The harbor was dark when we caught snatches of it between buildings as we walked, and something green flashed out in the water.
“Una’s here,” Ciarán murmured, pausing to watch her jade coat slip along the water’s choppy surface. He grimaced and looked away. “Looks like she’s caught a seal.”
I stopped under the overhang that protected the entrance to Siobhan’s tavern. The door was still unlocked, as it had presumably been the day Ferrin had come and ashed all of Keel Watch Harbor, sending everyone back to their real bodies in Darragh’s Watch.
“There’s food inside,” I said. “And an apartment upstairs where you can rest and wash.”
“Are you not coming inside?” Orla asked.
I looked down the dark street the way we’d come. “I have to look for my mom. She wouldn’t leave Keel Watch. She’s here somewhere, and she might need help.”
Ciarán made as if to step towards me, but I shifted away. Even without the help of our tether, he got my message loud and clear.
I would like to be alone.
He held the door open for the others as they hurried into the tavern’s dark entryway, and I felt his eyes follow me as I moved on to the coffee shop next door to try the lock.
Mom wasn’t in Keel Watch Harbor. Every home, every shop was empty, untouched for weeks. If she were here, she was inside or under the giant rock filling Gams’s shop.
And if Ciarán couldn’t reach her through their Nightmare connection…
I tried not to think about it, instead focusing on trying every door along Main Street and shouting for Mom inside every shop.
Magick mounted with my growing nerves. I’d been breathing in Skal since arriving in Keldori, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to contain. It begged to be let loose, burning at my insides, but the Skalterran mountains pushed back, and I let my magick fester.
I wasn’t sure which was doing more to eat at my stomach—the volatile magick or the uncontrollable anxiety.
When I came back to the tavern, defeated and soaked through by the rain, the others were huddled around a booth table, sitting in vinyl seats with steaming plates of hot food in front of them.
The large windows that looked over the bay offered a spectacular view of the raging storm, and the dull afternoon light pressed against the silhouettes of my friends.
“You didn’t want to turn on the lights?” I asked from the doorway.
Ciarán, Iseult, and Orla all looked up from their plates, but Fana remained with her head down on the table.
“The lights?” Iseult repeated.
I flicked the switch behind the hostess booth by the door, and they all winced as the overhead lights turned on.
“Electricity,” Orla said, remembering a long ago conversation from one of my first nights in Skalterra. “Little lightning.”
“Little lightning,” I confirmed. My boots echoed against warped floorboards as I approached, and I tried to not think about how I’d shocked Tiernan’s nose in my impromptu electrical demonstration when I’d first described the concept to Orla.
Tiernan deserved to be here too.
“Ciarán made us food.” Orla’s smile was sad, and I wondered if she was thinking about Tiernan too. “It’s very good.”
“‘Very good’ is respective,” Iseult said. “It’s at least better than the bread-dogs from the small market we stopped at on the way here.”
“The corndogs were probably old,” I said, then hesitated as I got close enough to see their plates. “What are you eating?”
It was rare to feel embarrassment trill along the tether, but it did so now, loud and clear. Ciarán’s blushing cheeks mirrored the emotion, and he avoided my eye.
“Ciarán made us burgers!” Orla grinned and gestured at her plate.
It was definitely an attempt at burgers. Each plate held an open hotdog bun with two circular burger patties nestled side-by-side atop the bread. Each patty overflowed with pickle chips and onion.
“Meat, bun, pickles, and onion,” Ciarán explained, remembering what I’d described when we’d sought food in Willow’s Grave. “No lettuce, unfortunately. It had turned brown.”
“It’s…” I cocked my head at the plates. “You did a good job.”
Ciarán pushed a fifth plate of his avant-garde burger adaptation towards the end of the booth. It probably tasted better than I was giving it credit for, and it definitely would’ve tasted better than rabbit jerky, but my stomach frothed and burned with unspent magick.
The thought of eating made it churn all the more.
“You need to eat too,” Ciarán murmured in my head.
“I’ll be fine. I’m not hungry,” I replied out loud.
Ciarán narrowed his eyes at me, and I knew he knew I was lying. He opened his mouth to argue, but then Fana cried out and curled in on herself.
“Fana!” Orla abandoned her food to hover an uncertain arm over Fana’s shoulders. “What is it?”
Fana’s curls bounced as she shook her head, refusing to speak.