Check out all the sections by clicking HER(fix)E
Chapter Four: My Mei - Part Three
Rowan
“Rowan?” he heard Calla call for a third time.
He didn’t look back.
Instead, Rowan thumbed the rock that was fisted in his hand. He didn’t want to talk to her. He’d woken this morning with his head feeling about six times too big and his stomach turned inside out while his throat felt ripped raw. And though he knew it was entirely irrational to blame her for the hangover, he needed someone to blame.
He was having a bad day.
“What are you doing out here?” Calla moved to sit cross-legged next to him where he knelt on the ground between the gates.
Together they stared at the trails of tiny stones that faded out into the horizon, disappearing beyond the hills. There were others, tens of matching pebbled paths, that swirled and circled back to this spot.
This exact spot.
Every time.
No matter which way he turned. No matter what path he took. About a dozen or so kilometers past the back exit of the hotel, the front of it appeared. Go out the front, you eventually hit the back. Walk far enough east and, in a couple of hours, you’d hit the west wall and find nothing in between.
Rowan had hoped to find the forest that he’d stumbled into when he’d been chased from his home, but—somewhere in the change between the grassy plains he’d woken up in and the tropical lushness that surrounded him now—it had been wiped from the hotel’s altered map.
Calla picked up one of the small, shiny rocks and studied it. “Trying to Hansel and Gretel your way out, huh? Nice idea,” she told him. “Had it too, the second day I was here.” She smiled wanly. “I used yarn, stolen from Mrs. K’s knitting kit—boy, did she whinge about it when she found out. I took it and twined it everywhere, looping it around trees and dragging it along all over the place. Used, like, sixteen skeins. There were long rainbowed lines crisscrossing everywhere. Looked like a friggin’ grid.”
She flicked the pebble with her thumb and forefinger, watching it sail through the air. “I was so sure that if I just kept trying, I could find that one special path that would lead back to home.” She shrugged. “Made sense. There was a path—a way—that brought me here; there ought to be one that leads out.” She shook her head. “It took me a real long time to figure out that my brand of logic didn’t really mean much here.” She scoffed. “A real long time. I was at it all day, until everyone around here was tripping all over my yarn, mucking up my marks. Gave up then; not much use anymore.”
Calla stretched out her legs, admiring her floral flip-flops, flicking her feet so the pretty, pink, silk flowers that were perched above both sets of delicately painted toes bounced jauntily. “And, after all that, all I got were sore feet and a headache from staring at that much haitch-ing.” She looked at Rowan, who was still watching the flopping flowers flip avidly. “Get what I mean?”
Rowan sighed and turned his gaze to the stone that was still warm in his palm. “I have to get home, Calla. I’m sorry. I just can’t give up. I can’t.”
“So what’s it back home then?” she asked him. “Girlfriend?”
Rowan shook his head.
She shrugged and hedged, “Boyfriend?”
Rowan jerked and looked at her incredulously. “No.”
She just shrugged again. “So?”
“You’d never believe me,” he told her.
“We’re living in some magicked-up, wayward home for the lost. For all you know, I’m some figment of your twisted imagination; and you mine,” she said with a laugh. “So, tell me, what wouldn’t I believe?” she asked with a cocked-up brow.
He acknowledged that for the truth it was, so he told her. Told her of his family’s history. Of the curse. Of his place in the thick of it. He told her what it meant for him to be gone and where that left his family. And, sniffling and stifling back useless tears, he told her of just how much he’d failed them.
He laid his shame out before her, let it crawl naked and sad for her inspection. He felt flayed by his disgust with himself, torn apart as it clawed out from under his skin.
And too right, he should.
“I don’t think they’d blame you for running, Rowan,” Calla said softly. “Definitely not the attack. It wasn’t your fault. You can’t blame yourself.”
“But it’s my fault,” he told her, “that I left. I let bad luck leak into their lives. They’ve never known hardship. Never known danger. And the world—even our small corner of it—is full of threats. It was my job to protect them from that. How can I do that when I’m here?” He threw out a fist, slamming it hard into the unforgiving iron gates. He grunted and hissed as he pulled back his injured fist.
Calla tsked, a patient girl-sound, as she grabbed his hand to inspect his torn, slightly bloody knuckles. “Well,” she said, “at least we know we can bleed here. Good to know.” She shrugged as she let go of his hand. “Well, not good, but at least your hand will be fine.” She tilted her head toward the hotel. “Come on, let’s clean this up and get us some food. You’ve got to be hungry after peppering the place with pebbles all day.”
Rowan grunted as he wiggled his throbbing fist, glad for the first time in his life that he couldn’t throw much of a punch. But it still hurt! At least nothing was broken.
“Come on, Rowan.”
He wouldn’t give up. Not on his family. Not on finding a way back. Never. “I have to go home.”
Calla sighed as she brushed herself off and stood. “I know. I’ll help, but this isn’t the way.”
Rowan locked his jaw stubbornly, still kneeling beneath the twisted iron.
“Fine,” Calla snapped, her hands on her hips. “Should I go dig up more stones to lay about or should you?”
He looked away and sank down further on his knees. He could lay down rocks until the whole place was paved and still never find a way out. He knew that. If there was a path out through the grounds, he would have found it by now. If there was an exit somewhere in the lush Eden, it wasn’t open to him.
Rowan sighed.
He looked up when he felt Calla lay a hand on his shoulder. “We’ll find a way to get you home. To help your family,” she said. “But not like this.”
Rowan opened his palm and stared at the stone it held, heavy and warm against his skin. He studied the smooth, flat, three-sided stone. A perfect skipping rock—it would fly across a river’s surface, he knew.
To a Drury, stones were sacred. His countrymen had once built sacramental stone temples and carved mystical runes with them.
Rowan Drury grew up believing in the power and knowledge built into age-old stones. And the one in his hand may not have been from his motherland, but he could still feel a connection.
The small triangular rock, in the heart of Rowan’s hand, in the middle of the gate on the edge of the Elysium estate, pointed like the arrow of a compass. Pointed toward his answer. Pointed toward his future.
Pointed toward the hotel.
Pocketing the rock, Rowan stood with a resigned sigh and nodded to Calla.
“Come on then,” she told him, holding out her hand to him. “My horoscope told me today to stop trying to push fate. It has a nasty habit of pushing back.”
Taking her hand, Rowan allowed himself one more look out into the unknowable, unreachable space beyond those inescapable iron gates. I will find a way, he thought. I will go home.
READ PART FOU(fix)R
WANT MORE?
No comments:
Post a Comment