Chapter 14 The Bridge
The Bridge
The moment I agreed to help them once and for all, things seemed to happen very quickly.
Octavian took the relic from my hands and draped it across the top of my head. Apparently it was some sort of headpiece, meant to sit upon the crown with the chainlike “arms“ dangling down across my hair—which certainly made a lot more sense than it being a metallic sea creature.
“We don’t know how much exposure it will take,” Octavian rumbled, his big fingers gentle as he adjusted the headpiece on my hair. “We might have to drape your entire body with things from our world.”
“Or just dump a bunch of Nectar on me.” It was meant to be a joke, but out of the corner of my eye I saw Radven turn and dart across the room as soon as the words were out of my mouth.
Octavian’s eyes were still on me, and when he was done fiddling with the headpiece, he placed his large hands on my shoulders, locking my gaze with his. He didn’t even have to utter a word—I knew what he was going to say from look in his eyes.
“I’ve made up my mind,” I said. “I’m doing this.” And then, because I was genuinely starting to wonder, “Don’t you want to go home?”
“Of course I do,” he said immediately. “But…there is always a price to these things. I’d pay it myself a hundred times over, as would my brothers, but instead, it’s fallen upon you. It doesn’t feel right, laying that burden on someone else’s shoulders.”
“She’s made her choice.” Radven had reappeared with a small cask stuffed under his arm. Apparently he’d gone straight for the Nectar after all. “And we’ve made ours.”
He nodded toward Alastor, who’d come up on my other side with a book in his hands. I recognized it as the one he’d pulled down from the shelf last night—the one with the hidden compartment inside.
Octavian noticed it, too. His eyes widened. “Brother…”
“Nothing in our possession carries more essence that this,” Alastor replied without looking at Octavian. “And if she breaks the curse, it will return with us anyway.”
He opened up the book. Inside, tucked carefully in a bed of black velvet, was a medal of burnished gold.
Or perhaps an amulet of some sort. It was round, about as large as my palm, and delicately etched with strange, intricate patterns.
Along one rounded edge, three multi-faceted green gems sat in a row.
No, I thought, tilting my head. Not green…more like gray with hints of yellow. And when I tilted my head the other direction, they looked almost blue.
Alastor lifted the amulet carefully from its soft cradle, then took my hand. Before he placed the amulet in my palm, he looked into my face with his dark eyes.
“I am trusting you with the most precious thing in my possession,” he said, in a tone that suggested more of a threat than actual trust. For the first time, though, I saw a true crack in his stately, intimidating facade.
In his dark eyes, beneath the entitlement and authority, there was something almost vulnerable.
He placed the amulet on my palm, curling my fingers around it. The moment it touched my skin, a shock traveled up my arm, and I let out an involuntary sound halfway between a gasp and a whimper.
“Marigold…” Octavian said, but I shook my head fiercely, teeth gritted against the pain. I’d made my choice, knowing full well there would be pain.
And I could already feel it, rippling across my skin in waves, building beneath the surface in quakes and trembles.
“J-just do it,” I managed to spit out. “Do it-t all.” The faster this was done, the faster the pain would stop. My knees were starting to shake, and the vibrating in my skull was making the backsides of my eyes throb, and it was only getting started.
Still, Octavian hesitated.
“Listen to her,” Radven said. “There isn’t time to dally.” He uncorked the cask under his arm, then looked at me.
“D-do it,” I said, nodding, and even that small movement made me queasy. “Whatever it t-takes.”
Radven stepped toward me, lifting the cask, but it was Octavian who spoke.
“Listen to me, Marigold,” he said, his voice uncharacteristically strained.
“I don’t know how quickly the pain will incapacitate you, and this is the most important part.
You must open yourself to Therador. To essence.
Let yourself become the link. The sooner you do that, the sooner this will be done. ”
None of this made any sense to me. How was I, an ordinary girl whose proudest accomplishment was keeping two dozen succulents alive, supposed to link two worlds? Everything was just shivery pain, and it was hard to get my mind to focus on anything else.
And then Radven started pouring the Nectar.
The first splash of it on the top of my head was a shock, and then it rolled down my body, spilling across my hair and down the back of my shirt and a dozen other unpleasant places.
Last time, it took a few minutes before I felt the effects of the Nectar. This time, though, given the fact that I was already having a pretty strong reaction to the weird head piece and the amulet in my hand, my reaction was almost instant.
In less than a second, the pain went from awful-but-manageable to unbearable.
I’m pretty sure I screamed. My knees gave out beneath me, and I crumbled to the ground—or I would have, if Alastor hadn’t still clutched my hand. He partially caught me, and I’m pretty sure Octavian caught my other arm—but it was impossible to tell through the haze of pain.
There were voices on either side of me, but I couldn’t make out the words. My eyes were open, but all I could see was dark red with the occasional streak of color across it.
All I could feel was burning.
“Marigold.” My name cut through the agony just briefly, and with came it the soft pressure of breath on my ear. I knew that warm, deep rumble. “Marigold, I’ve got you. Try to sense the pull of Therador.”
There was no pull. There was nothing but suffering and quivering and burning.
“Let go,” came the voice once more, a deep rumble right at my ear. “Don’t fight it. Open yourself to Therador, Marigold.”
How?!?? I wanted to scream. But I couldn’t even form words in my agony.
And then the next words to slice through the suffering made things even worse:
“Tendrils!”
I don’t know which one of them said it. I may have imagined it, for all I knew. But the panic squeezed my chest, making it even harder to breathe.
I’m going to die.
There were shouts—one or many, I couldn’t have said—then a crash that shook the entire room. Or maybe I just fell again, because I couldn’t feel as many hands holding me anymore.
I’m going to die. In pain.
My skin should have melted off by then, I was sure. Or my body should have shaken itself into a thousand pieces, each one burning. I knew I was supposed to be doing something—opening for something, connecting to something—but I couldn’t remember what.
There were lips against my ear again. I felt them because they were soft when everything else was sharp and painful.
“I trust you,” a voice said, different from the last one. “I know you can do this.”
Those words shouldn’t have made a difference—why did it matter if someone trusted me if I still didn’t know what to do?—but somehow, miraculously, something broke through.
At first it was just a twinge—more than a tickle, not quite a full sensation—and I couldn’t have said whether it came from beneath, or above, or from some other place entirely. But that twinge grew, and expanded, swelling from deep inside me and pushing the pain aside.
I gasped, and my vision cleared. All of my pain was just…gone.
The room around me was in chaos. The lights flickered, and the air vibrated with that metal-on-metal shrieking.
Everywhere I looked, there were Tendrils—rising from the floor, protruding from the walls, whipping down from the ceiling.
The only place they weren’t was the huge window overlooking the bay.
Instead, the window appeared to have been invaded by a circle made of pulsing golden light.
As I watched, the circle rotated, then expanded, the light in the middle swirling and expanding outward until the center of the circle opened up like a giant golden donut.
And then it began to pull.
I felt it in my hair first. It tugged at the headpiece, which threatened to take half my hair with it. The pull was strong enough that it also lifted the drops of Nectar straight off my skin. They hovered briefly in the air before whizzing toward the golden light and disappearing.
“She’s done it!” That shout came from Radven, who was hacking away with his sword at a group of Tendrils just behind me. “Quick! Let’s go!”
After giving one last slash and lopping off half a Tendril, he bolted toward the golden light. When he reached it, he leaped through the air—
And was gone.
The lights flickered again, then went out completely. But the glow from the circle was so bright that the whole room was still lit up.
The headpiece finally tugged free of my hair, flying across the room and disappearing behind him. I could feel the tug on the amulet, too, but Alastor’s hand was still locked around mine, holding it closed.
Around us, other things were flying toward the light—the cask of Nectar, coins, even the huge table from the center of the room.
Oddly, most of the books stayed on their shelves, though a couple of the older-looking volumes whizzed by and vanished into the glowing circle.
I had to twist out of the way in order to avoid being clunked on the head.
Octavian was still slashing at the Tendrils, and his sleeves and pants were torn in half a dozen places and his skin inflamed with welts where he hadn’t been fast enough to avoid them. He threw a quick glance over his shoulder at Alastor and me.
“Go!” he said to his brother. “I’ll hold them off until you and the others are through.”
“No.” Alastor’s voice was authoritative, even now. “Go now. I’ll come through last.”
“But—”
“That is a command.”