Shadowed Ground (5 page)

He calmed down, repeating his newly found mantra: It’s not her fault, she doesn’t know anything, she doesn’t know what not to ask. Eliot found himself skulking in the doorway, watching Chloe as she read, sitting cross-legged on the floor. She’d twisted her hair into a loose knot at the nape of her neck and stuck a pencil through it to keep it in place. Dark tendrils escaped anyway. She looked incredibly sad. He wished he could spare her. Callista had warded it for a good reason: him. “Find anything interesting?” he asked, keeping his voice light.

She tore her attention up to him with effort, and made no mention of the previous incident. “Yes, I think, though much of it doesn’t make sense. There’s a useful but confusing bit about sensing the land.” She looked pained. “But the history part, I don’t have any reference for, and some of the people she writes about…I don’t know who they are. I think I’m getting a picture of the Abandoned, though. Who they are, how they got such a hold on your world.”

“Our world,” he corrected with a touch of bitterness.

She didn’t notice. “Right,” she agreed absently. She flipped pages, not looking at him. “I’m just trying to understand them. Their motives.”

“The Abandoned’s motives?” He shook his head in anger and disbelief. “What about them, Chloe? I can tell you their motives. Hate. Evil. Total destruction.”

She looked at him, eyes narrowed in anger or exasperation or both. She sat hunched over the little book in a way that didn’t look comfortable, the perfect picture of an absent-minded scholar. Eliot thought then that his own Magister of a father, had he lived, would have liked her very much. Maybe even more than he liked me.

“Don’t do that,” she said finally, uncurling her shoulders and rolling her stiff neck. “You’re too smart to do that.”

“Do what, exactly?”

“Fall prey to cartoon villain syndrome.”

“What?”

“You know. The idea that the bad guys are just flat, one-dimensional cartoons with no real motives other than being bad guys. Evil for evil’s sake alone.” At his puzzled look, she sighed and leaned back over the diary. “Well, I don’t believe it, anyway.” She flipped more pages, annoyed. “I’m trying to tease out some real motive. Something they want, some reason to explain their actions. If I can find one, maybe it can help us stop them.”

“I know their motives, Chloe,” he snapped, locking down fury with effort. “I dragged you through a wall of it, even if you only remember in nightmares. Fire. Destruction. Murder. Hate. Have you found that part, yet? The part where people die? Because I know it started long before we were born. The Abandoned didn’t burn the entire world in a day.”

She chewed her lower lip as if deciding between picking at a band-aid, or just ripping it off. “It’s so terrible, Eliot, and everything fell apart and who’s Taran?” she finally blurted out.

Eliot froze. Not yet, he thought. Not today.

Instead of answering, he tossed her an olive green knapsack. “Pack what will fit. We’re leaving.” She stared at him, unbalanced by the sudden shift. Before she could get angry or sad or both, he tried to lighten his tone. “Hey. On the bright side, we get to buy a new car. Or rather, a new used one.”

“What’s wrong with the car we have?”

“It’s stolen, for one thing.”

“Oh-kay.” She drew the word out, playing with it. “This begins to explain things. We’re both petty criminals now, running from the law? So in addition to evil arch-enemies of fire, you actually care about driving a stolen car?”

Her chin crept up defiantly, and he sighed. “Look, don’t fight me on this, ok? There’s a plan. What do you know about the Delta folkways?”

She dropped her head down into interlaced hands, bouncing impatiently on her crossed legs. Eliot fought an urge to call on her, as if she’d raised her hand in class. “Folkways: a mode of cultural transmission where ideas, beliefs, and practices are disseminated.” Her smile was blinding and disgustingly academic. “It’s also the name of The Smithsonian’s non-profit record label.”

“You’re such a nerd.”

“Better than a petty criminal.” She actually sniffed. “I sat through an entire lecture to learn that. My father even asked me to help him write a paper on it later.”

Eliot baited his trap with an easy smile. “And why do you think that was?” She bounced some more. “He wasn’t smart enough to do it himself?” he taunted.

Her eyes flashed. “You arrogant son of…”

He was in her face before she saw him move, his fingertips sealing her lips shut. “Careful,” he cautioned. “You don’t know who I’m the son of. Not yet.” He leaned back into a half-crouch. “Is it just remotely possible that your father thought you might have to travel them some day?”

“Oh,” she said, considering. He could almost see her mind deconstructing his words. She bit one side of her lower lip when she did it. It was cute.

He waited for the onslaught of her argument, then talked right over her. “So if your father thought you should understand them, then perhaps it’s worth taking them seriously as a means of saving our asses.”

She tried on at least three different expressions before settling for guarded interest. “Why, though? We’re talking about the Delta here. It’s a river. It meanders. Plus it’s at least one state away. If the world’s about to catch fire, and people…uh, things…are trying to kill us, why not go straight up the Interstate in the fastest car you can steal? Straight north, back through Atlanta, then northwest into Gray’s Landing, guns blazing?”

He was moving again, shoving t-shirts and jeans in a knapsack of his own. ”Because it would almost certainly get us killed. But traveling through the region that created jazz, blues, Creole cooking, voo-doo, Mardi Gras, soul food, and Elvis? It’s the perfect hiding place. Who’s going to notice two sort-of alien refugees, in the middle of all of that?”

“I was with you until the Elvis part.”

He spared her one sharp glare before rummaging in the darkest recesses of an overstuffed closet. “The Delta has a heart, Chloe. It’s magic. Literally. People still believe you can stand at the crossroads at midnight and make deals with the devil. They stick glass bottles on tree limbs to catch evil spirits.” Something fell on his head, and he muttered a curse. “We’ll head west of Mobile. Then it’s Delta country until we hit the foothills, backtrack east, and hit the Landing.” He stumbled backwards out of the closet and twisted sideways like a cat, a black case clutched to his heart. His hair stuck up wildly and he sneezed as a cloud of dust settled around him. “It’s the safest way. Not the fastest, true, but the Abandoned are entrenched to the east of the Landing, on the Ravenwood side of the river. We’re coming in through low mountains and forest, from the west, with the magic of the road at our backs.” He peeked into the case and grinned.

“You know I have no idea what you’re talking about. Are you sure it’s the best way?”

“It is, and it’s the safest,” he promised, and she suddenly saw a world of torment in his hazel eyes. “As safe as it can be, anyway. It’s just…” he looked away. “I should tell you I have these, uh, protective instincts. They’re not entirely rational.”

She had the feeling he was trying to tell her something important, but she couldn’t quite make it out. Perhaps he didn’t entirely know, himself. She half-nodded, considering, while he darted around the room, making piles and packing.

She thought of her absent mother, putting her life in danger to secure land she didn’t want. She thought of the dead woman who had been her aunt. Eliot was most certainly protective. But then, so was she, in her way.

Chapter Six: Other Worlds Than These

Chloe eyed the truck stop from across the parking lot. When she traveled with her father and mother, they’d always avoided truck stops, picking smaller stations and keeping her close. I suppose I know why, now, she mused, empathizing with her parents as she eyed the bustling boxy structure across from her. With people coming and going at all hours to places all over the country, it would be the ideal place for a small child to go missing. She wondered how much of their lives they’d spent looking over their shoulders, worried that they’d be found. All that time, and I never knew.

She burrowed into her borrowed sweatshirt, hiding in as many shadows as she could pull towards herself. She reached for a spark of curiosity or excitement, but felt only flat despair.

“We’ll be fine,” he reassured her, brushing her shoulder with his knuckles. He did things like that often since carrying her away from the little house by the beach where she’d come to trust him and believe in the possibility of a new reality. Belief, she was coming to realize, was harder won than trust.

His words felt hollow and inadequate as she stood, wrapped in shadow. She knew he carried a darkness of his own. She wanted to probe it, this feeling, his words, but she didn’t. There will be time, she told herself. Besides, I don’t know how many more dark secrets about the past, his or mine, I can stand to hear right now. Instead, she pulled her hands all the way into her oversized sleeves. “How can you be sure?”

He didn’t spare her a glance, but she felt him tense. Good. I’m getting better at reading his body language. “I did a lot of growing up on the road,” he said. His hand settled lightly on the small of her back. The touch felt apologetic and proprietary at the same time. “A lot of running away,” he murmured. He continued to scan the parking lot intently, eyes skipping over their stolen vehicle to the others parked father away. Whatever he found, or didn’t find, in the parking lot seemed to satisfy him. He settled against her lamppost, slowly unfurling his taut muscles against the flaky metallic paint.

She pulled the hood of the voluminous sweatshirt, last worn by a deadly man she’d never met, down even farther and took a few steps back, deeper into the darkness. “What now?” she asked so quietly she hoped none of her apprehension leaked through.

“Well, first you explain why you’re looking and acting like a serial killer.” Chloe shrank into herself a little bit more. Stupid Guardian, with his stupid Guardian instincts. Eliot made no move to pull her out of her sheltering shadows, but, as always, he stayed a sword’s length away from her. She didn’t know whether she found this distance comforting or oppressive. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

Behind him, in the distance, she could see the interstate. Traffic moved across I-10 in a steady pulse of color and noise. The asphalt ribbon, raised high above Highway 59 on huge concrete pillars, had never seemed so fragile. She’d traveled it many times without really seeing it, her nose always in a book or focused on the destination. Highway 59 was just a sign that meant home was hours behind or hours ahead of her. Signs, she realized, her eyes glazing as she looked past the boy against the lamppost. I’ve spent my life looking at the signs, but never the road.

She bounced a little, in her boots. Her favorite boots with their square heels and bare inches of added height. “I thought these were lost or ruined, you know.” She shook a foot at him, then started grinding at the pebbles strewn along the parking lot’s border. “They’re the only things I have left, from home. My home, in Decatur.”

”Chloe.”

“I’m trying, ok? It’s complicated.” She eyed a smoke-belching eighteen-wheeler. It swerved around a row of Diesel pumps and flowed onto the highway with the practiced jerky grace of a caterpillar. “Holly calls these my super hero boots, because they make me a little bit taller.” Eliot waited. “I put them on in my own bedroom. The only bedroom I can ever remember having. And then I had the worst night of my life. I nearly… I mean, I almost… died. And… Griffin.”

He responded to her growl with a soft “Ah,” as if he’d found her pulse. Maybe he had.

She whipped her head up, squinting through halogen to find stars, but they were obscured by light pollution. “In a way, I did die. The life I had did, anyway. And then I woke up here. Well, not here, exactly. But close enough, in a little house, with you. I had a whole new fucked up history, mortal enemies, a dangerous future, and even brand new freak scars. But I was safe.”

His entire body relaxed when she said the word, connecting it to him. He leaned towards her as if “safe” from her lips was a deliciously scented liquid and he wanted to drink it. He was actually heavy-lidded, leaning towards her slightly like a purring cat. A very deadly, weapons-carrying cat.

Maybe it was a Guardian thing.

She shrugged and plunged ahead. “So, from my point of view, I’ve only been two places in over a week. A horrible nightmare death party, and your little house. Where I woke up an alien, able to do things I shouldn’t be able to do, with weird scars.“ She stomped her heel for punctuation. “Damn straight I’m freaking out. What if people can tell I’m not normal?”

He opened his mouth to speak, shut it, then opened it again. He turned to scan the parking lot one more time before closing the distance between them. He brushed her chin with thumb and index finger before pulling her face up to his. A pair of dragon flies tornadoed around them. They were skeletal and ugly in the harsh industrial light. “Do you like hot chocolate?” Eliot finally asked. He was deathly still and completely serious.