The Dark Light (13 page)

I’d barely processed his words before he walked away from the door. Rip and Delane did the same.

“She can sleep upstairs,” said Rip, sounding relieved that the
discussion was over. “As soon as dawn hits, I’ll go out for grains. We might get lucky. But we should all get some rest. Tomorrow could be a long day.”

I had no choice but to go along with their plan tonight, but there wasn’t a chance in this world, or any other, that I was leaving this place without Jay.

Reluctantly, I followed Rip upstairs to a bedroom at the front of the house. The wooden floor, like the beams in the ceiling, was buckled and bowed. I perched on the bed until Rip had left, then crept back to the door and opened it a crack. Rip’s steps sounded on the staircase. Then the three resumed their conversation, their voices muffled.

“So how much do we tell her?” asked Delane.

A pause followed before Sol replied. “I don’t know,” he said, his voice deep, weary. “What’s the point, when she has to go back?”

I
waited until the house fell silent, then tiptoed downstairs into the darkened room below. I had a two-point plan: Find Jay, then get the hell back to Crownsville. I’d almost made it past the table, when—

“I wouldn’t do that.”

Heart pounding, I spun around. A candle lit near the hearth. Sol became visible in one of the fireside chairs. Busted.

“I knew you’d try to leave,” he said. There was nothing cocky in the way he spoke. He was calm, resigned, as if he’d seen me coming from a mile away. He leaned forward, elbows resting on his thighs, his hands dangling between them as he watched me.

I folded my arms. So he’d guessed what I was up to. It didn’t
matter. I’d made my decision and nothing he could say would change my mind. Nobody was searching for those boys. Alex Dash had been gone for a week, others for months. Surely they would have been found already if someone had been looking. But Jay had only been gone for twenty-four hours. He couldn’t have gotten that far. Every second I waited here was a wasted moment.

“I have to find him, Sol.”

Determined to remain composed, I turned for the door. I could cope with the insanity of stumbling into another world, but only if I focused on Jay. Sol would get no tears or tantrums from me; I wasn’t going to beg for his help. He’d known the boys were being brought here from the moment we’d first talked at school. He’d had plenty of chances to help. He’d done nothing.

“I’m going to start with the streets,” I said, determined he accept that I was going to find Jay. “Then I’ll check the Ridge. Someone must have seen him.”

The door was both latched and locked, but a small black key hung from a hook to the right. I took the key and placed it in the lock. Sol’s hand slammed against the door. My heart leapt into my mouth. Refusing to turn around, I felt him close behind my shoulder. I hadn’t heard him cross the room.

“You don’t trust me,” Sol said, his voice low, and close to my ear.

“Can’t imagine why you’d think that.” I tugged at the door handle, ready to strike him with an elbow if he didn’t back down.

I tugged again. Sol’s hand darted to the lock. In one swift motion, he palmed the key, and then forced his fist back against the door. On the other side of my body, his other hand smacked against the wood. I was caged.

“Believe of me what you will,” he said, his breath warm on the side of my neck. “But I can’t let you go out there. I won’t.”

I studied the prison he’d formed around me, the muscles in his arms straining as he pushed against the door. There was no way he was going to give up.

Cautiously I turned to face him. I no longer believed Sol wanted to kill me, and that was something. But with him standing this close, I felt like I had on the day he’d given me a ride in his truck. His presence consumed the space between us. The way he loomed over me—there was just something so physical about Sol.

“I don’t understand why you won’t listen to me,” I said. He wasn’t going to scare me. “What do you expect me to do?”

The only light in the room came from the hearth. It caught just one side of Sol’s face. The golden flecks in his eye glimmered. His jaw cast deep shadows across his chest. Darkness and light.

“I want you to trust me,” he said, towering over me.

But how could I, when all he’d ever done was lie?

Defeated, I lowered my head. This wasn’t real. It wasn’t my life. Life was school. It was Mickey’s. It was going with Andy to prom! For once, everything was how I’d wanted it to be. And then Sol had entered my life. Now I didn’t even know where I
was
.

“I don’t know what to think,” I whispered. “Is any of this even real?”

Though I remained between Sol’s outstretched arms, he didn’t once touch me. I could smell him all around me. It was the scent from the shirt in his bedroom and from the cabin of his truck. It reminded me of Crownsville.

“It’s real, Mia,” he said.

Finally, he lowered his arm and backed away. He wandered across the narrow room to the fire. After placing the key on the arm of the chair, he reached for a brown bottle on the hearth.

It was only then that I realized how fast my heart was pounding. And it wasn’t from fear of all that had happened since the Ridge. It was
him. He
did this to me. It wasn’t the same nervousness I felt when I was with Andy—those feelings were explainable, understandable. They were right. With Sol, the feelings were deeper, more mysterious. It had been easier to avoid those feelings in Crownsville. I could just stay away from him. Now I couldn’t escape them—couldn’t escape
him
. Sol was my only link to Jay.

I glanced at the bottle on his lap. “Poison?” I asked.

“Almost,” he replied. “Rip makes it. It’s not good.” He offered me the bottle.

Resigned to the fact that I wasn’t going anywhere, I sighed. I mean, what could I really do? I didn’t know where to find Jay. And even if I could find him, I’d then have to return to the Ridge and get us both to Crownsville in one piece. I didn’t even have my necklace, which clearly was part of the reason I was here.

I headed for the fire, dropped into the opposite chair, and took the bottle from Sol. I drank a long swig. A spicy, burning liquid set my tongue aflame and brought tears to my eyes. Almost choking, I handed it back. “You know I’m not twenty-one.”

Sol smiled. It was the first smile I’d seen from him since we’d stepped through the lights on the Ridge. “Me neither,” he said. “I won’t tell.”

“How old are you?”

“I’m nineteen.”

So I’d been right. He wasn’t seventeen.

“Then what the hell were you doing at Crownsville High?”

He looked away. It was a classic Sol move. But as trapped as I was, Sol was trapped here too. This time he couldn’t escape my questions. “You promised you’d explain,” I said, dipping my head to reclaim his gaze. “When we were out there before. You said you’d tell me everything.”

“All right.” He pulled back his shoulders. “Mia, I was in Crownsville because of those missing boys. We believed they might snatch someone older next. We needed to be on the inside.”

Okay. It was something, including a confession that he knew exactly what was going on.

“Then you know who’s taken them. You know who has Jay. Sol, you have to—”

“He calls himself the Suzerain,” Sol said, before I could finish. “And he’s taken over Brakaland from here to the mountains.”

I paused. It wasn’t just because he’d answered so openly. It was the tone of his voice, heavy and filled with distaste for this person who’d taken Jay. I shivered. It was like finding Sol’s sword in the trunk. I
had
to know. But did I really
want
to? “Brakaland?” I whispered.

He nodded. “That’s the name of this country.”

This country? The country I’d tumbled into. Suddenly I felt very small.

“The guy who has Jay,” I asked, needing to understand. “When you spoke of him, it didn’t sound like you were much of a fan. Why?”

Candlelight flickered on Sol’s face as he drank deeply from the bottle. He stared distantly at the candle’s flame, frowning as if he saw something I couldn’t see. “Because he wants to destroy your world,” he said.

* * *

“We live in the spaces you don’t use,” said Sol, “in a parallel world hidden by the Barrier. But our world is shrinking. As your populations and cities grow, we lose more of our land. There were some who wanted to send emissaries, to bargain and keep the peace. Another force wanted to fight back.”

Just a moment ago, I’d thought no further than Jay and the Ridge and the twisted cobbled streets of this godforsaken town. Now a whole world opened up around me. One I didn’t know. One I didn’t understand. One that had taken Jay.

But, in debate class, Rifkin always said that the crux of any argument was knowledge. He taught us that the speaker who truly knows a subject, who can interpret it, bend it, examine it from every angle, was the speaker who won. If I was going to find Jay, I needed to know everything.

“The Suzerain is a man called Finneus Elias,” said Sol, as if sensing that I wanted him to continue. “He’s a man of magic and persuasion. He knows your world. He has been there many times. He convinced some that if he were in control we could fight to hold back the boundaries of your world and protect our own. Many disagreed and the two sides split. It turned into a great war. Eventually, he was defeated, but Elias didn’t give up his cause; he just went underground. He abducted those who were skilled in magic to build a new force.

“Years passed. No one thought Elias would ever return. And then he came back, only this time the force of his magic was much stronger than anything Brakaland had ever seen. He opened gateways, other Barriers to worlds within worlds, gateways that were not meant to be opened. He liberated the Warnon Mines in the southern deserts, which was once a Barrier to a demon world.”

“Demons?” I spluttered.

This was insane. It was a story from one of Jay’s games. It had to be. I reached for Sol’s bottle. Maybe that drink wasn’t so rotten after all. The initial sting from my first gulp had worn off. Now I just felt numb inside.

Sol leaned back in his chair, his gaze once again distant. “They’ve infested this place,” he said. “The Suzerain claims he’s the only one with the magical power to protect Brakaland from the demons. But the war between the Suzerain and the demons is a false one. He purposefully released the demons to start this war. To make himself irreplaceable. He is their master.”

And this was the man who had Jay. My panic rising, I could barely speak. “Was it him? The man on the Ridge?”

I only realized I was clutching the bottle when Sol gently took it from my hand. He watched me closely, like he was ready to catch me if I fell. I could only imagine the look on my face.

“I need to show you something,” he said. “It will make it easier for you to understand.”

He placed the bottle back on the hearth, then headed to the door beside the staircase at the rear of the room. With legs like Jell-O, I followed, my mind racing with visions of Jay on the Ridge. I thought of the night that Alex had disappeared. I should have done something more. I should have gone into the fields and stopped it, and then maybe Jay would never have been snatched. But why had he been snatched? For what possible reason could this Suzerain want a ten-year-old boy?

A small, shadowy room lay behind the door. Shelves lined the walls and the glint of bottles and jars was visible in the dim light. Sol must have known what he was looking for; a second later he returned with a large leather-bound book in his hands. He took the book to the table in the center of the main room.

“This is why the Ridge is so important,” he said, as I joined him.

He opened the book to a map, the same map I’d seen at Old Man Crowley’s with that line of tiny golden stars. I viewed it with increasing trepidation. Now I knew what it meant.

“It’s the way through, isn’t it?” I asked. It was a struggle, but I had to remain calm. Analyze. Understand.
Think.
Jay needed me to be strong.

“The Ridge is the weakest spot in the Barrier between Brakaland and your world,” said Sol. Every time he spoke, he looked at me, whether to check that I understood or to ensure I
wasn’t about to collapse, I didn’t know. But his presence beside me, his controlled expression—it was reassuring.

“There are many weak spots in the Barrier,” he continued, “but none more vulnerable than the Ridge. The weakness there has formed a true gateway and the power in the solens reacts to it.”

He turned the page to a drawing of an amber-colored stone with sunbeams radiating from its surface. “Solens are crystals,” he added, as I peered closely at the drawing. “A rare stone. They take thousands of years to form and can be mined in just one corner of our world. A complete solen is incredibly powerful, so most are ground into a powder. Each grain holds a weakened spell.” He closed the book.

“One grain will open the Barrier long enough for a man to pass through. It can be done here or at a couple of other places. Most Barrier weaknesses are no longer used; a grain isn’t strong enough to open them. But if Elias is to attack your world, he needs to bring down the Barrier. He can’t do that with grains, Mia. He needs solens—complete solens. And he’ll do anything to get them.”

Sol’s words were sinking in. This man planned to attack Crownsville! You couldn’t find a more harmless town, but trouble had found us. No one had any clue that a war was brewing on our doorstep. But then Bordertown was right next to Crownsville,
and Sol said that Brakaland shrank as we grew. Crownsville had grown a lot during the last few years. There was even talk of a mega-mall on some farmland off Route 6.

Thinking of home, my mind drifted to the image of me standing at the mirror in my bedroom, thinking about prom with seven golden stones draped around my neck. “My necklace,” I whispered.

“Mia, your necklace contains seven of the largest solens ever found,” said Sol. “It is the Solenetta. It alone has the power to fully open the Barrier and to keep it open—the Equinox.”

The velvet box on my desk. Pete had given it to me when I’d first arrived in Crownsville. For years, it had sat on my closet shelf, forgotten, buried beneath sweaters and empty shoeboxes. Increasingly uneasy, my voice trembled. “Sol, my mother left me that necklace.”