Chapter 27 Hello There, My New Friends.
Sapphire
Niklaus stares out the window covered in condensation, crossing his arms and zoning out.
He just lost so much respect for the father who raised him and the father who died before he was born.
Both devastating, but Aurick Demechnef being physically abusive to my mom shoved an invisible sword a little deeper through his heart.
After seeing what Uncle Niles has done in the past, I think he was hoping to see his birth father in a better light.
I chew on my apple slices slowly as the sun begins to rise from the top of the Demechnef estate. Honey rays of light are amplified through the water droplets collecting over the glass that surrounds us, warming the air like a small furnace.
“Do you think—”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Niklaus cuts me off. “I just want to go home.”
Me and you both.
I set my apple down in the gravel, tapping the tips of my fingers together in thought.
“I’m so scared I’ll never be able to control this,” I whisper in defeat.
The muscles in Niklaus’s jaw tighten, but he doesn’t turn around to look at me. It’s as if he’s searching the land he will own one day for answers. Wondering how he could have been so wrong about Aurick Demechnef.
“You know, Uncle Niles was only the way he was because of the Mind Phantom experiments your birth father issued on—”
“Stop. Talking.”
Niklaus turns his head slowly to peer down at me with bloodshot eyes.
I avert my gaze back down to my hands, nodding at his request.
“Just work harder on getting us out of…” Niklaus trails off, cranking his neck forward to look out of the window, narrowing his eyes in small slits to get a better look.
“What is it?”
Niklaus shushes me with a hand in the air. He tilts his head and glances down at me in surprise.
“There’s no fucking way,” he utters.
Before I can respond, the shift in the air is faint. So faint in fact, I almost miss it. The minuscule added pressure behind my eyes. My fingertips are numb. And there is a weight leaning on my lungs, like breathing in old dust from another century.
“What?!” I groan and huff through the sharp bursts of pain, pulling myself up to face the window with him. “Oh.”
I instantly shudder at the man standing in the center of the garden, boots sinking in mud, and hands clasped together below his waist.
It takes me a heartbeat to connect this figure with the one who stood among the carnage in our ambush with the Vexamen Breed back in the woods.
Dressed in a funeral’s finest—coal pinstripes, polished shoes, and a bowler hat shadowing that terrifying display of paint on his face.
It’s a dirty, off-white, gray, and yellow painted into a skeletal face.
And how could I forget those eyes? Black and precise, stretching out to haunt me, like relics behind a protective sheet of glass.
“That’s the man behind the last attack,” I say quietly.
Niklaus doesn’t respond.
“How could he have possibly followed us here? We traveled through time…” I add.
This doesn’t make sense. It’s not like we moved from one forest to another on foot. We were yanked through the fabric of time and thrown into another year altogether.
The man whistles a tune that sounds like an old nursery rhyme, and he just…stares at us.
“I’m going to talk to him,” Niklaus finally says.
“Wait.” I tug at his wrist. “Let’s think about this for a second.”
“Mmm, yes, okay. Let’s think. This disturbing skinny man dressed like a gravedigger or dead funeral director might have been following us through time.
Time. But maybe we should try and sneak out and hope he isn’t capable of following us from this greenhouse to the main street. Have we thought it through?”
I drop my head. “Proceed.”
Niklaus studies my beaten, swollen, and bruised face once before offering a curt nod. He steps around me, brushing his shoulder against mine as his determined footsteps stomp through the greenhouse gravel.
The stranger is hard to look at in the glow of the sunrise. The paint crusted around the edges of his chin and jaw. The stringy mousy-brown hair hanging from around his bowler hat. The way his coat flutters though there isn’t any wind.
He’s an eerie painting no one remembers hanging.
“Why’re you following us?” Niklaus asks calmly, though his stomping footsteps through the wet grass say otherwise. They begin to drag the closer we get.
And I see why. There’s a faint warmth building at the base of my throat now, the kind that precedes a fever. Does he feel that too? It’s aberrant. Invasive. A slow creeping, foreign germ clawing into my pores.
The man tilts his head, blinking quickly, studying us like an equation gone wrong. Like our very existence disturbs the rules he lives by.
“Why weren’t you covered in blood when you…moved?” the man asks.
I cringe at the way he speaks.
Each syllable is annunciated with surgical care. Slow. Unnatural. His voice is a foreign sound to him. It’s as if he’s forcing his tone to be higher, like when one would read a character out of a book for a child.
“What?” Niklaus blurts out.
“You breathe like your mother,” Strange Man adds. “Same lungs, I expect.”
What the fuck?
“Are you going to answer his question or not?” I cut in.
The stranger moves his head to me slowly, woodenly, like the hand of a clock ticking to the next hour. Those black, shifty eyes inspect me as his cheek twitches. Unblinking stare travels down to my feet, then back up again.
“Do you hear voices like your father did?” Stranger takes a step closer to me, blinking like a reptile.
“No,” I answer coldly.
“Hmm.” He nods, seemingly disappointed. “I don’t either, even though my father also heard them.”
Who the hell is this man?!
“And who is your father?” Niklaus asks.
Bowler Hat Man considers the questions, tapping his index to his thumb as he thinks. I wonder if he’s contemplating lying to us or not.
“I believe your father referred to him as Val. But his full name was Valliticus Bear Edison. And my name is Vrath.”
Val. My blood stops pumping.
“Vrath,” Niklaus repeats.
A sticky dizziness curls around the edges of my vision like a shadow.
“I do not have a last name.”
Val.
“Was your mother’s name…” I hesitate. “Vinaley?”
I didn’t notice it before, but Vrath winces in my direction, though it is subtle through the paint on his face. He’s either disgusted by me or spooked.
“Yes,” he responds. He taps his fingers again. “Did you kill your mother, Sapphire S. Valdawell?”
“What? No?”
“You can obviously time travel too, otherwise you wouldn’t have been able to follow us,” Niklaus interrupts.
I’m still reeling from this new information. This man is Val and Vinaley’s son. The two experiments who came before my parents. The murder-suicide subjects. My mother didn’t tell me they had a child.
Vrath cracks his neck. “Yes, evidently.”
“Can you help us get home?”
I want to pull Niklaus to the side to tell him what I know. My gut tells me Vrath isn’t here to help us. That we shouldn’t show him our cards, or even that I don’t know how to control this yet.
“Why would I do that?” Vrath steps closer, boots mushing through the mud. “I am still observing.”
Niklaus straightens back and lifts his chin, catching on to the conclusion I’ve already arrived at. He clears his throat and attempts to swallow like it’s painful to do so.
“You’re observing us.”
“I don’t understand you. How have you not infected anyone? How—” Vrath peers down at me with that disgust wrinkling the corners of his eyes again. “That strand of hair is touching your collarbone. And the right isn’t.”
He points to the stray hairs closest to my face. I tuck them behind my ears.
“How have you not taken ill? Been soaked in blood? Disease ridden?” Vrath continues.
Niklaus exchanges a look with me. One that says, this man is fucking crazy.
“Is that what happens to you when you travel?” I ask.
Vrath exhales in annoyance, smearing the paint over his eyes in the agitated way a toddler would do when they are overtired.
Charcoal smudges over the backs of his hands, blending with cream and yellow colors down his cheekbones and eyelids.
It’s in this moment I come closer to identifying his age.
Vrath is at least ten years older than us. Maybe more.
“You left doors open for me, you know,” he tells us, still harboring that agitated tone.
“Doors?”
“Yes. I slip through and have to search for you. But you leave none of the usual signs. I see no blood, no maps, no symbols, no evidence of infections. How have you come and gone? How are you moving without them?”
Niklaus glances down at me again before huffing. “We have no fucking idea what you are saying. Do you hear yourself?”
An aged tiredness coils in my bones. And as I bring my hand to my chest, Vrath notes the movement with his eyes. As if he knows all too well the sensations that are unwinding in my body.
“Do. Not. Curse. At. Me.” Vrath’s thin lip twitches.
“How are you traveling, Vrath?” I interrupt before someone’s temper is set off.
The tall, slinky man shrugs a shoulder. “The same way I did at early birth. A mother’s blood is the only way I’ve come across.”
Sorry, what’s that now?
“I advanced faster than you, Sapphire S. Valdawell. I traveled for the first time while I was still in my mother’s womb. Third trimester.”
Niklaus parts his lips, flickering his stunned gaze at me, then back for Vrath.
“Can’t seem to return to the exact moment in time I belong.” Thumb to index finger, he taps then rubs them together. “And I can’t really change anything, yet I spoil and infect myself and others.”
“Spoil and infect?” I ask.
Vrath’s deep frown curdles the air between us. The particles to which he exhales into the air are out of place, toxic and deadly.
“I am often quite ill with infections. Possibly because I don’t belong here.”
“And what about others?”
“I infect them too. Sometimes before I am sickly at all.”
“How?”