TWENTY-SIX
It was day two, and Angela had learned it was useless for her to panic or behave like a child. It didn’t fix anything, except stress her out. Zarek tried to help her, even though he’d treat her like he’d just inherited a unicorn and wasn’t sure it if kicked, bit, or gored.
Even under their treaty, which sounded civilized and mutually negotiated, nothing erased the fact that she had been stolen from her world, like a sack tossed over his shoulder, and told afterward that it was for her own protection.
Angela did not just disappear. Not when she was well trained to leave messages if she was going somewhere. Afterall, she was a person who paid bills, met deadlines, and created goals as a functioning adult in the real world. She had a job back home. A routine. And an aunt who’d notice her absence.
But in this new world…
Zarek had assured her that time moved differently here. One minute in the mortal realm could stretch into one week in Paradox, give or take a day or ten.
If her flailing calculations were correct, given that math was never her strong suit, she had been gone less than a minute.
But if this time-thing failed, her aunt would have called hospitals, started search parties, and demanded the police put out a missing persons alert.
Angela would have done the same if her aunt went longer than 24 hours without reaching out after one of her many dates.
Although she’d be more worried her aunt had gotten married again without Angela forcing Claudine’s future husband to sign a prenuptial agreement.
It happened so often that Angela kept blank copies in the bookshop’s safe for such emergencies.
Most of all, an enemy existed. And Zarek, the incredibly disciplined, battle-tested warrior, absolutely believed that Angela was not only in danger from the Black Cloaks, but also that what she carried was worth protecting. And they wanted to find out what that was.
It still didn’t explain how she could feel his emotions to know he wasn’t lying, like he could tell when she was about to suffer a panic attack, or when she was suffering a nightmare—like she had last night, when he’d showed up making her room’s strange magical lights to flicker on.
It was a struggle to settle down when she didn’t know this place, and she still couldn’t recall the nightmare that plagued her nights, leaving her too scared to sleep.
So, she needed to focus on a goal instead.
If she could find and understand what her supposed magick was—or lack of it—she could use it to defend her case, allowing her to return home sooner to a world that still ran on electricity and predictable working hours.
Learning was leverage.
Leverage created options.
And options led to home.
She could not control time, but she could control how she used the time she had inside this castle known as the Vanguards Keep.
So far, most of her morning had been spent pacing inside her chamber. It was narrower than Zarek’s, where her bed stood against the wall in a room with two doors, one to the outer hall and one directly to Zarek’s room.
The door to the hallway she could lock, and she did.
But the door between their chambers remained unlocked, because it had no lock.
She had tested that as well.
At least her bathroom was private. But it missed the one feature she liked in Zarek’s quarters—a deep stone bath large enough to disappear into.
And his room carried thicker furs, rugs, and comfier chairs, but it also held an assortment of weaponry, armor, and boots.
Although, having access to all those weapons contradicted the idea of her being a prisoner.
She did get tall windows that opened, only to tease her with a drop too far to consider any escape.
But it allowed her to take in the view that stretched endlessly across Paradox, with its rich valleys saturated in green, pillowy slopes, thick dark forests, and a horizon that seemed too vast for a single realm.
This morning, she stood there simply to breathe in the sunrise, and to remind herself that her world existed beyond these walls, even if she had yet to step outside.
One night trapped inside the Keep, when the moon was a visitor at her window, she’d stared at that blanket of trees and called it the Forest of No Hope.
Occasionally, she’d see small lights flicker and get lost among the trees as she tried to imagine its secrets, or that feeling of freedom she used to have, before she got dragged into this realm.
Today, they’d dressed her.
Gone were her jeans, boots, and belt with Zarek’s teeth marks.
In their place, a floor-length gown, as if showing bare legs and arms were a crime.
And they’d lined up seven of them in the wardrobe, all the same deep storm-plum color, reminding her of the skyline right before night bleeds into dawn on the horizon.
Its fabric moved with the weight of a uniform rather than decorative couture. But the detailing in the cuffs was filled with weaves of subtle silver threads embroidered in geometric combinations of runes and staves and other fine patterns.
With her clothes gone, all she had left of her old world was the medallion.
“Here we are, Miss. Fresh from the garden. I thought you might like these.” Tamarr had brought flowers in a carved wooden bowl, as if glass and utensils were too dangerous for the prisoner.
“Thank you, Tamarr. They’re pretty.”
Angela had to give Tamarr credit. The poor thing clearly had questions. But, unless it concerned the Keep, clothing, or food, Tamarr asked nothing. She simply hummed softly, smiled a lot, and got on with things as the friendliest, freshly promoted prison guard Angela had ever met.
Tamarr moved the bowl of flowers to the side table near the hearth.
She didn’t know what varieties they were, but their bright purples, oranges, and yellows were startling against the subdued tones of this room.
She normally did a bang-up job of killing plants, where her kitchen was the place Aunt Claudine’s plants went to die, so who knew how long Tamarr’s flowers would last.
Angela stood in front of the tall mirror, checking the fit of her new gown, surprised at how it muted not only the color of her gown but also significantly dulled the bright flowers’ reflection.
Holding the medallion between her fingers, she leaned closer to the mirror. The glass wasn’t dirty or aged, yet it somehow reflected differently.
The morning sunlight shone into the room, enough to hit the ornately Baroque frame that was both a beautiful and slightly sinister mirror at an angle. And there, tucked into the lower corner, sat a small sigil.
“Tamarr? What is this?”
Tamarr glanced over. “Oh, that’s the blocking sigil, Miss. All mirrors in the Keep have them. It stops anyone prying or trying to use them to pass through.”
Which made complete logical sense for a world where magic was real and mirrors were apparently doors if you weren’t careful.
You’ve gotta lock them, hon, Aunt Claudine would say. Every time you clean them. Don’t roll your eyes.
Yet, here she was, standing in a different realm, staring at a sigil in the corner of a mirror, thinking about her aunt who put sigils on every mirror in their family homes and bookshop and simply called it housekeeping.
Not once had Angela said you were right, Auntie. Instead, she’d rolled her eyes and let the office door swing behind her as she sat at her workbench to restore the broken spine on a second edition Dickens.
The reflection of the flowers blurred slightly in the mirror, while somehow magnifying the hollow in her heart at how much she missed her aunt. And her life.
She pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth and held it there until the feeling passed. “My aunt does the same. She calls it locking them every time she polishes our mirrors.”
Tamarr’s smile shifted into what Angela recognized as I am filing this under strange and unusual conversations regarding the woman from elsewhere.
A soft, bell-like sound drifted through the chamber, reminding her of a cell phone’s message notification.
Angela looked up, trying to place the sound.
A thin silver thread descended slowly, as if it had been released from the ceiling. It floated in front of her, then drifted closer until it brushed her wrist. For the briefest moment, it caught against the silver-thread patterns along her cuff like thread meeting thread.
“You have a thread message.” Tamarr pointed.
“A what?”
“It is how they communicate in the Keep.”
Angela opened her palm, where the silver thread curled like a silkworm in the air, to land ever so softly. “What do I do?”
“Tug on it. It will only open for the recipient. No one can copy, open, or read them, just you.”
“Who’d be sending me a message?” Angela’s fingers closed gently around the end of the thread, and it simply unraveled to weave itself into word on a patch of fabric to read:
War Chamber. Now.
Z
The message dissolved back into a single filament, then simply threaded itself into the silver embroidery on the cuff of her gown, as if it had always been there.
“The thread caught on my sleeve.” Was that even the right way to describe it?
Tamarr nodded with a bright smile. “It recognized the weave of the threads on your sleeve as identification.”
“Huh?”
“If I may, Miss.” Tamarr pointed to her sleeve.
“Please, interpret away.” Angela held out her arms. The patterns on the cuffs were almost identical.
Tamarr studied them with the careful attention of someone reading a document rather than admiring the embroidery.
“The thread along the cuff’s edge makes up the outermost band, this is the communication thread.
Anyone with the same weave in their cuffs can send and receive.
Think of it as—” she paused, searching for the words.
“Like an address, Miss. That is why it caught on your cuffs. It recognized the weave.”
“Like a postal code, or a phone number?”
Tamarr shrugged. “I don’t know what that is, Miss, but if it means what I think it means—yes. I guess.”