42. Ballroom Dance V #2
“It’s Skal,” I said. “There’s too much of it here. It’s building up inside her body and burning ulcers in her stomach lining.”
“How do you know this?” Iseult demanded.
“Trust me,” I said. My own built-up magick tore at my every fiber, and Fana was so much smaller than me. Her tiny body couldn’t hold nearly as much as mine.
“It hurts,” Fana whispered.
“You have to use the magick to get it out,” I said. “The ulcers are already there, but they’ll start to heal once you get the Skal out.”
“I can’t,” she cried through gritted teeth. “It’ll blind you.”
“We’ll cover our eyes,” Orla suggested.
“Not enough,” Fana said.
I looked around the room, and my eyes landed on the kitchen.
“There’s a freezer back there, right?” I was already running for the back.
“Was that the cold room?” Iseult asked.
“Yes!”
I found the walk-in freezer in the back of the kitchen and started salvaging what food I could from its shelves. I wasn’t sure exactly how powerful Fana was, but I knew enough to know the freezer probably wasn’t going to survive.
Orla ushered Fana forward ahead of Iseult and Ciarán, and Fana’s eyes widened. She hugged herself in the cold air that spilled out of the freezer.
“Will this work?” Iseult asked.
“It keeps the cold in,” I said. “It should keep the light in too, shouldn’t it?”
“You tell us, Saergrim,” Iseult said, helping Fana to fasten a thick strip of wool around her eyes. “None of us knew what a freezer was an hour ago.”
Orla put her goggles on Fana over the woolen blindfold, and Iseult added Lyria’s helm over that.
“Can you see anything?” Orla waved a hand in front of Fana’s face.
“No,” she whimpered back.
Orla led her into the freezer. “Remember, Skal is easy to wield. Concentrate it in your hands and let it go.”
“Okay.”
Orla stepped away and closed the door behind Fana. “Whenever you’re ready!”
Silence hung over the kitchen.
“How do we know if she’s doing it?” Ciarán hissed.
“I’ll tell you when I am!” Fana snapped back from inside the freezer. “I'm trying to figure it out!”
“Imagine the light, and it’ll come,” Iseult instructed.
“Feel it in your hands!” Orla said again.
Fana’s scared whimper sounded distant from behind the freezer door. “I want Tiernan.”
Orla and Iseult glanced at each other with crestfallen looks. I leaned against the freezer door.
“Breathe, Fana,” I said. “You’ve been holding all that Skal in. Let go. It’ll do what it needs to, but you need to let it go.”
“I can’t.”
“I know you think that, but I promise you can. Just breathe.”
More silence.
And then the lights overhead flickered, and a thin strip of light bled from under the freezer door. We stepped back, and the light faded.
“Fana?” Orla prodded. “Do you feel better?”
The door creaked open, and Fana stood inside the freezer with Lyria’s helm, Orla’s goggles, and her blindfold in hand. Water dripped from the ceiling and the shelves, but it was tears that slid down Fana’s face.
She stepped forward, dropped her blindfolds, wrapped her arms around my waist, and cried.
The freezer was now broken, so I moved most of the food we’d salvaged from its shelves to the refrigerator in the back storeroom.
The tub of vanilla ice cream, however, had nowhere to go but our stomachs, and I was more than happy to invite Orla to try one of Keldori’s finest delicacies.
Fana cheered up considerably when I introduced her to chocolate syrup, even though she still couldn’t stomach too much food.
I managed to slip away while they were distracted by dessert, not wanting to make my friends feel inclined to stand out in the rain with me. They were fed. They were comfortable. Now I needed to figure out the puzzle of the stone that filled my grandmother’s shop.
Rain soaked through my cotton t-shirt and my new jeans stuck to my legs, stiff with rain water. I pressed my hands against the stone again. I couldn’t tell if the heat was coming from the rock or from the built-up Skal swirling just beneath my skin.
An off-kilter pulse thrummed against my palm, like two heartbeats overlaying each other. I pushed my forehead against the rock and closed my eyes. Rain water collected in the grooves along my nose and cheeks before spilling down my face.
There had to be a way inside.
“Wren.” Ciarán’s voice sounded behind me, and I curled my hands into fists.
“You shouldn’t be out in the rain,” I said.
“Neither should you.”
I turned around and leaned my back against the rock. Ciarán’s bun had collapsed in the weather, and he stood with his rain-soaked hair around his shoulders.
“What are you doing out here?” I asked.
It wasn’t unreasonable to think he’d followed me to help or make sure I stayed safe, but the tether buzzed with a new anxiety. There was another reason.
Ciarán chewed on his bottom lip as he squinted up at the rain and sighed. “I was hoping you might take me home.”
“Home?” For a horrible moment, I thought he meant he’d made his decision to stay in Skalterra, but then he looked down the street.
He took a heavy breath, and his furrowed brow softened. “I don’t know which one was mine. I only remember as far back as your grandmother giving me the chicken on the train platform.”
“Oh.” My breath caught. I was so stupid. I’d been so focused on the rock in the shop and finding shelter while we sorted it out that I’d completely forgotten this wasn’t just my homecoming.
In fact, Keel Watch Harbor was more Ciarán’s home than mine. I’d only lived here for the summer. He’d spent his entire second life on this street. The only difference was that I actually remembered my time spent amongst its shops.
I took his hand in mine and led him down the sidewalk.
“This way,” I said. “At the end of the street.”
His fingers clenched. Nerves mixed with a nostalgic ache for something he couldn’t name, and the concoction of emotion washed over me from his end of the bond.
The door on the side of the bagel shop was unlocked, the same way the tavern had been. I stepped aside and let Ciarán turn the doorknob and pull the door open to a set of wooden stairs.
Jackets hung off hangers next to the door, and shoes lined up on a low shelf. Ciarán paused on the doormat, staring at the shoes with a strange look on his face.
He jolted out his reverie, then ushered me inside after him.
“Sorry,” he breathed. “I didn’t mean to leave you out in the rain.”
He wrung his hands and looked up the photo-lined stairway. He slicked his wet hair back from his face, slipped out of his boots, and started up the steps.
I thought about offering to leave, but not even the illusion of privacy existed between us at this point, so I followed him up the stairs, giving him space when he stopped to inspect every framed picture of his aunt, uncle, and cousin that decorated the wall.
He inhaled sharply at a picture near the top and pulled it down to better look at it.
Liam grinned back at him from behind the glass, his arm around the shoulders of a slightly taller boy with darker hair. They both wore Von Leer University hoodies, and I recognized the main school hall of the campus behind them.
“Daithi.” Ciarán blinked several times in rapid succession, and his throat bobbed. “I didn’t think I’d see him again.”
“It’s called a photograph,” I offered. “We use cameras to take pictures and capture images exactly how they look to us.”
“Yeah, that sounds familiar.” He put the picture back on the wall and took the final steps into the living room.
Gray light filtered through a freshly renovated kitchen with white countertops, and a cozy living room boasted a well-worn couch, T.V., and another wall of photos. Ciarán pivoted slowly, taking in every foreign detail of his home.
“Do you remember any of it?” I prompted.
“No.” He looked down the darkened hall towards the bedrooms. “But do you feel that?”
“Feel what?”
He took a slow step down the hall, walking as if a single misstep might make the apartment disappear.
I prodded at the tether, trying to feel what it was he said he felt, but came up only with his own nauseating anxiety.
He stopped in front of a closed door, and I recognized it as his bedroom from the one time I’d been here.
Ciarán turned the knob and pushed inside.
Two twin beds pressed against opposite walls, and shelves bowed under the weight of books and knickknacks. Gray light pushed through the window above a writing desk, and I could see all the way to Gams’s shop through the rain.
Ciarán stood perfectly still in the middle of the room facing Riley’s bed. The cover was neatly made but had a cold, unslept-on quality. The bedside table was empty but for a glowing digital clock.
Liam’s side of the room was much more lived in.
Books piled on the bedside table as if Liam had been meaning to get around to them.
The bed, while as cold as Riley’s, had a t-shirt draped over the headboard and a crinkled to-do list on the pillow.
The last item Liam had crossed off was “Pack for Von Leer”.
A doodle of what I was pretty sure was Jonquil sat in the corner of the page.
The sound of a slamming drawer made me jump.
Ciarán stood over the desk with his hand pressed against the drawer, as if to contain some monster trying to fight its way out from inside. He’d gone pale, and a muscle in his jaw jumped with the force with which he gritted his teeth.
“What was that?” I asked
He shook his head in response but stepped back to make space for me at the desk.
I pulled the drawer open slowly, half-worried something might jump out at me. The light of the digital clock glinted off the glaze of nearly two dozen porcelain chickens.
My heart beat in my throat as I stared at the chickens. They were gifts from Gams, given to Liam over the years, and their Skal-imbued glaze had preserved Liam’s memories from day-to-day.
It was how she’d made it so non-Lucid Nightmares could exist normally in Keel Watch Harbor, and the last time Ciarán had held one, he’d regained Liam’s memories held in that chicken.
Now Liam’s complete collection sat in front of us. All of his memories were at Ciarán’s fingertips.