Beyond the Grove, page 12
“There you are, sis,” Harold said, beaming with a grand smile.
Benny pinched my cheeks. “A lot of nerve you have forgetting about us in York for all this grandness.”
Harold draped his hand over my shoulders. “Hear hear, sis. A whole year without a visit. Mother’s been crying herself to sleep.” He frowned, growing serious. “We miss you, Alex.”
I shrugged. “You know how it is. The library has me busy.”
Benny cackled and gave Harold a nudge. “We know who keeps you busy.”
Harold took a drag at his cigar. “Indeed, we know. Lily told us all about her.”
I flicked Harold in the ear. “I missed you, too. So much so that I plan to visit next weekend.”
Their faces lit up. “You mean it, sis?”
I gave Harold’s waist a squeeze. “I mean it. I promise.”
It felt good to be laughing and jesting with them. They were right. A year’s time had been too long. I missed their mischievous, charming company. I missed getting pranked by their wild ways. I missed Lily.
The terrace rolled. Lily. The fog lapped over the edge like a wave and swallowed the girls Benny and Harold had been chatting up. Neither of them seemed to notice. They were too delighted with our reunion. A high-pitched ring deafened my right ear, followed by a sickening alarm that took hold of my shoulders and squeezed. The nausea returned; ten times worse than before.
“Where is Lily?” I said, bracing myself from the vertigo that threatened to send me stumbling off the terrace.
Harold said something with a bemused chuckle, but the fog came around his shoulders and made his words trail as it claimed him. The nausea took hold of my throat and head, sending me kneeling to catch my balance. The pitch in my ear got worse, demanding all my focus as I noticed a little girl standing on the edge of the terrace, facing the fog like a reflection, ashy and translucent, looking like a ghost. Lily. She was still a little girl. The fog opened up and drew a pathway from the terrace to a dark tree line in the distance, cast in shadows and moving figures.
A strand of shadow around her waist tugged on her.
I reached for her. Lily, but my words got lost in the fog that slipped onto the terrace and glided through the guests like a silent omen, shrouding them from my immediate view. Harold and Benny vanished to it. I heard them laughing and telling stories about Mr. Hillborn and Lily’s long wrought courtship, but they were far off, defused, there in my mind but too quiet to keep me.
She stepped off the terrace and the fog folded around her, taking the pathway to the trees with her. Stay, Lily. Stay with me. I got to my feet, staggering from the nausea, and stumbled into the weighted presence of knowing something else was out there. Something in the trees. Something far more sinister than fog. It waited in the woods for Lily, drawing her closer to it and farther from me.
The fog pressed around me like a curtain, crushing me in a quiet that spread on for miles. The solitude made my corset tighter, more pronounced in the way it dug at me and wanted me to conform. If I strained, I could hear the ball, but the sounds were dull and far off, a buzz in the distance. All I could see were the ribbons on the top of my shoes and the uneven dents of the ground. Stumbling with my hands outstretched, I met an erect object. It felt like stone. Moss crept all over it. Cracks. The ground softened. One of my shoes sunk into a muddy patch, and I slipped, landing on my knees and one elbow. The fog moved and lifted just enough to reveal my surroundings. I knelt, ankle deep, in an intimate cemetery beneath a blossoming, old oak. Grave-heads littered the earth.
Did I know this place? It felt familiar. Had I been here before? The name of the headstone said, Lord Charles Patrick James. Below his name, 1553-1615.
Using the edge of the stone, I teetered up, only to hobble and discover my shoes were stuck in the mud. I slipped out of them and sunk my bare feet into the cold, soft earth. Abandoning my shoes to the mud, I stumbled free of the cemetery, clamoring for the sight of the trees in the near distance. Mud stained my satin dress. I felt for the knives. My fingers brushed the rose hilt and the decorated sheaths.
Lily’s scream shattered against the pine trees and sent them bending in a lawless wind. I hurled into the trees, all knees and bare ankles, and immediately found myself in the depth of thick pines. Some of the fog dissipated, getting lost to the branches and slinking off to thinner bodies of the woods.
A presence in the middle of the woods had Lily. He stood taller than the heads of the trees, his top half leaking shadows that wrapped around the branches and made them wither. One of his multiple head-arms clutched Lily, drooped and unconscious, in a cord of shadows.
Ike Wraith, Prince of the Asgrool.
I drew the knives and edged closer, bare feet crunching the mulch. His entire presence tilted to one side, looking at me without eyes, but in a way that let me know it saw me, it felt my fear, it sensed my trembling resolve. The trees knotted and mirrored the grotesque gesture, under a bind of obligation as the shadows twisted and mangled them.
His voice reverberated, using the woods to carry it, using the roots and the crackle of leaves and the silence of the fog, entwining them to form words beyond my understanding but that got into my pulse and insisted on causing damage, inky and deep.
This is what he said, “How very long it took you to find me.”
His shadows dove forth and hit me, getting into my eyes and around my arms and coiling my kneecaps, knocking me back a step. Grunting against the great force, I pressed in and felt the dirt sustain me and the earth rise up to aid me.
I maintained a shaky hold on the knives and yelled against his shadows, “Give her back to me.”
The cords around her tightened, bringing a painful moan from her limp body. “This little thing?”
I bent down, falling to one knee. The wind peppered me with clumps of dirt and twigs, some of them snagging my dress and leaving cuts. A branch the size of an arm untangled from a gaggle of vines and flew at me. I dodged, but it sliced across the top of my head. I cried out and protected my face with an arm, rendering one of the knives useless.
“Come and get her,” Ike taunted.
More than fifty shadows rose up behind him, out of the dark spaces in the woods where the sun could not reach and the fog had gathered. His minions, the Asgrool, in multitudes, dripping shadows and sucking up dead, fallen trees to take shape. They were an army of scattered bits of shadow, stretching from one side of the woods to the other, a wall of memories waiting to be leached and suckled. There had to be hundreds of them, wriggling and hungry. I moved against Ike’s voice, trying to get momentum into my failing knees. The tinkle of the ball in the distance pervaded upon the woods, sending a pull of laughter and music over us. The Asgrool dripped.
Ike gave them their orders. “Start with her family. Liberate them of their memories.”
I grimaced against the pounding force of his voice. I had to stop the Asgrool from feasting on my family. Lily hung in one of Ike’s twitchy, oozing extremities, a ragdoll, barely alive. Had he already sucked her of her memories, or was he waiting to strip them from her in front of me?
I gathered what I knew of Ike Wraith, the shadow Prince of the Frey. Em had killed his son, Poroforia, for being a menace and impulsively sucking London society of their fondest memories, which was not the Asgrool way. By nature, the Asgrool were discreet and ate only what they needed to keep the Frey in order. Fred told me that Em and her family had been at war with Ike for centuries. There must have been something else that happened before Poroforia. If I could get answers out of Ike, I could use them.
“Wait!” I yelled. “Why me? Why my family? What have we ever done to you?”
Ike’s presence tilted with curiosity, and the Asgrool paused in the same disturbing way he did. They were an extension of him. “Has the Gatekeeper not told you?”
I had no time to think about his meaning. I had to keep him present, keep him talking. “Did you love your son?”
His shadow tightened around Lily, and she let out a fragile moan. “I am shadow. We do not understand love the same way you do. We do not feel. Love is a concept to us. We do what we must. We take.”
“Were you human before you were shadow?” The Asgrool hummed around him, hanging onto his every move and tilting their shadows at me as he did. They were mirrors of him. “The Asgrool have no form,” I ventured. “They are simply shadow, wreaking havoc on this world at your command. But you. You must be different. You have control over them, but… are you not separate from them? You have a shape. You have legs and a head full of shadows.”
It was hard to tell how a monster without eyes and several tentacles for a head reacted to such a presumptuous statement. He did flinch, which I think warranted some form of discomfort from him, meaning I might have got under his leathery skin. I pressed further.
“Did they…” I had to take my chances. I had to learn what made him weak. “Did they corrupt you somehow? Perhaps, as a little boy when you lacked control, when you were not able to stop them?”
The bravery of my prying resulted in a downward grind of sorts. The wind stopped, the trees went still, the Asgrool blurred, and Ike lowered from his stance at the top of the trees. He took a knee and bent toward me as everything else in the woods froze and tilted to his will. Without any words, the squiggles of his head stretched out and opened into a mouth of…what should have been a skull with a brain if he indeed was once a human. Instead of a skull, a span of swirling dots that looked like a current running along a black riverbank stared back at me. The mouth looked like a portal to the riverbank, and for a moment I feared he was going to swallow me with it.
But then the mouth snapped shut and the tentacles lashed at me, causing the woods to erupt in a windstorm that shook the roots of the trees and the foundation of the countryside. Everything that had frozen while he demonstrated his superiority, sped up and flew toward me. The ground beneath me disappeared and I shot backward. Flinging, I drove my knife for the ground and made contact, slicing through layers of twigs and muck, and screeching to an uncoordinated halt.
The Asgrool executed his orders, rising from behind him and sweeping forward, taking forest and brush with them, anything dark and dead. I squeezed my eyes shut and swung a knife, expecting one of them to attack me, but they swept by, leaving me untouched. When I opened my eyes, Ike had vanished. The trees shuddered with the absence of his presence. Where he sucked them free of life, they fractured and writhed, shrivels of what they once were.
I found my footing. The severed head of a tree crashed against other dead trees and fell toward me. I ran free of it before it collided with the forest floor. I had no time to question, to plan. Ike had Lily, again. If I went after him, I would lose my family. There was only one of me, and it was impossible to be in two places at the same time.
I leapt for the border of the woods, choosing the rest of my family over Lily. Shrills of fear pealed from beyond the trees. With the disappearance of Ike, the fog lifted, and black smoke swelled on the horizon, setting through the trees. I emerged from them relatively unscathed, save for a poke or two from branches hidden in the forest mulch. The adrenaline rushing through me numbed any pain to my bare feet.
Flames formed around the old mansion established in the grove. Orange and black smoke plumed through the windows of the ballroom, escaping the entry, and riddling the terrace with embers and dense air. Shrieking and coughing guests flew about, some of them taking cover in the grounds and beyond. A very few helped each other out of the ballroom and attended to those who had been injured. Most of them had been compromised and overwhelmed by Asgrool prowling through the flames and pouncing on them, holding them down and sucking them dry of memories.
The horror left me breathless, but it was more than the scene of guests being leeched by Asgrool that gave me pause. I had seen this mansion before, and I suddenly felt foolish for not recognizing it sooner. The ballroom, puking out guests and burning with flames, got me churning. Outside of this ghastly memory, it was the burned down West Wing of Hearthwood Grove––before it burned. Which meant I had visited Hearthwood Grove for a ball, and someone had invited my family to attend. Emmaline James. Had I been wrong to trust her? Was she behind all of this? Had she led the Asgrool to my family?
Hot rage pinched my chest. I gripped the knives, ready to use them on anything that came at me, but the anger flickered out over a worse evil. Sorrow knocked me down as I noticed two figures close enough to the flames to be kissed by them.
Benny knelt in the orange terrace light, weeping over the body of a boy with red hair and freckles smeared all over his cheeks. Harold. Benny held his hand and rocked back and forth.
“Harry,” he whimpered. “Wake up, Harry.” He slapped Harold’s cheek. “Stop your jesting, you fool. Wake up.”
An Asgrool loomed over them, becoming apparent in the flicker of flames. I growled and charged the lurking monster, swiping my knives with the fury of a thousand. It backed away from Benny, who had failed to notice the Asgrool in his grief, and it came for me instead, flaring up at the appeal of my memories. I swirled one knife and dug down with the other, using them as counterparts, two of a whole, and attacked the Asgrool with an anger that shook the ground and sent a shiver of lightening through the blades as they encountered shadow.
The Asgrool gargled and shook apart, falling to mud at my feet that turned to tar and oozed into pores of the earth.
Harold’s face was ash. His nose bled. An Asgrool had sucked him dry. His skin was ice cold. Benny kept shaking him, trying to wake him up, but I knew, and I had to think about Benny. Benny was still alive. A cold determination drove me as I grabbed Benny’s hand and dragged him into a low brush on the side of the terrace.
“Get down,” I said.
His bewildered stare broke my heart, and I yanked his arm, forcing him to crouch in the branches beside me, where we happened to be relatively hidden. I wiped Harold’s blood from his cheeks and urged him to dry his tears. A shock of grief had him dazed and shaking. His beautiful eyes burned with heartache. I wanted to hide there forever and hold him, tell him it was going to be okay, but I had to think about Mother and Father. They were still out there. Alive, waiting for me to come for them.
“Get out of the grove, Benny,” I said.
He shook with sobs. “And leave him? I must get to him.” He tried to get passed me, he tried to leave the shelter of our hideout.
I cupped his face in my hands. “Benny, Harry is dead. Gone. You have to listen to me. You have to get out of this grove. Your life depends on it. Go somewhere with buckets of light. Real light. Moonlight or the light of people laughing. Get to it and stay there. Let me make sure Mother and Father are safe, then we shall all come to find you. Do you understand?”
His nose dripped snot. “He needs me, Alex, he—”
“You have to go, Benny. You have to.”
A look of clarity came over him. “Is he truly dead?”
I nodded.
He wiped the snot from his chin, his lips quivering. “All right. I’ll go.”
“Now,” I urged.
He stumbled up and headed for the woods. I had to trust that he would be safe. The Asgrool stalked the mansion, not the woods. As soon as I got to Mother and Father, we would flee into the woods and be reunited––a feeble plan at best, but it was something, and I had to focus on what I could do.
Asgrool dragged guests from the burning ballroom and assaulted their memories on the emerald lawn. Mother and Father were still inside. They were still alive, I could feel it, sense it with the power rushing through me to protect them. I had to get to them. I had to get them out of the grove, back to York where I could protect them and keep them away from Emmaline.
“This may be the bravest you will ever be,” I told myself, slapping my cheek twice and pinching under my eyes.
Wielding my emerald knives, I swallowed the fear digging at the back of my throat and rose from the refuge of the brush. As I dashed forward like an empress in battle, dress flying and bare feet asunder, an insignificant detail took place that would render a different human unharmed.
A wasp flew by and landed on my neck. When I went to swat it away, it whirred and caught hold of my floppy sleeve, sinking its venom into my neck. I slapped it and pressed its stinger further into my skin, before wiping the insignificant bug away. It smeared my dress, guts and blood. Does not every living thing test its fate and endeavor to survive? It had used its only form of defense on me. And in doing so, I reacted in a similar fashion, only it looked much different––it looked like my body seizing up and failing me, constricting in on my throat and rendering me useless as I crumpled to the ground in the midst of the lawn and lost all movement to my legs and arms.
How had I forgotten? How had I been so dull? I happened to be a human who suffered from an acute aversion to the venom of wasps, and my body reacted to it by seizing up and attacking my airways.
Outside of this memory, up there, a wasp had been tapping on my subconscious all along, trying to get me to remember this horrid night.
In the chaos and gloom of innocent guests being sucked of their memories, my body failed, shutting down to fend off the poison travelling through my bloodstream. I could not move or breathe. The knives remained in my grasp, but I could not lift them. My lungs felt tiny and far away, unable to distinguish oxygen from burning smoke. I twitched as my throat swelled and closed in. Harold’s lifeless body lay on the lawn before me. As I groaned for air, the grief came crashing over me. Harold, oh Harold. Why him? He’d had his whole life ahead of him––dreams and girls and university waiting for him. All I could do was stare at his lifeless body and know that I had failed him. In the next moment, with my defenses down, my heart broken and my body locked up, the Asgrool pulled my parents from the black plume of the ballroom. Mother was unconscious, blue lips and listless eyes. Her arms dragged behind her as an Asgrool threw her on the grass and sank its shadows into her nose and ears, suckling any memories she had left. She convulsed and went limp. Her head rolled to the side and her eyes bore into me, empty. My chest burned with a sorrow beyond my understanding as I watched her give up and expire. Only her body remained. If I had the strength to scream, I would have torn the grove apart with my rage, my pain.
