A Quarrel Called: Stewards Of The Plane Book 1 (27 page)

73. MELODY

I just didn’t know what to think. I thought we were out here
in the desert to close some stupid vortex, to prevent the entities from
streaming in, and now we were supposed to pull Matthew out of another
dimension? I had just gotten used to the idea of him being a ghost. What was I
supposed to do with the idea that he might still be alive?

“You don’t think he made it up, some sort of cruel joke, do
you?”

Tara looked at me
weird,
and even
G. shook his head.
“No way, Mel.
Were you even looking
at his face when he was telling your Gram? His face was pale. He looked almost…
scared.”

“This whole thing, it feels so…” I threw a rock into the
dunes and kicked the sand with my toe.

“Surreal?” G. finished for me.

“I was going to say contrived.
Made up.
Like this is some sort of bad movie script.”

“You’re just having a hard time wrapping your head around
it,” Tara said, reaching up to me.

I sidestepped her. “Maybe – but how come you guys aren’t? I
mean both of you just glibly go along with whatever. Neither one of you is
freaked out, just the tiniest bit?”

Tara shook her head, but G. shrugged and nodded.

“I wasn’t at first. For me it was just a sudden surge of
energy and motivation. Which was great, because you know, I needed a reason to
get in shape. But then, that thing happened with you and the entities, and I
had some sort of sword of light, and that’s when it got to be too much to take
in all at once. So I buried myself in exercise for a little while and tried not
to think about it too much – let my mind sort
itself
out. But you know what made the most difference?”

We shook our heads.

“I asked my martial arts instructor a little about it – like
the sword of light and stuff – and he said that there’s a whole shadow world
out there, in sync with ours, in which impossible things happen all the time.
And then he just looked me in the eye and said, ‘maybe you saw a piece of
that.’ And I was like… whoa. And it made me look at everything in a new way. I
was sure he was going to laugh it off or tell me it was a dream, but that isn’t
what happened at all.”

He paused, digging a hole in the dirt with the heel of his
shoe. “So I decided, right then and there, to just go with the flow. I’m pretty
good at that anyways – I hate conflict. Which is weird right? For me to be some
guardian type and hate conflict…”

“Well, that’s just great for you guys,” I said bitterly,
feeling like bitchy was the only mode I could do right now. “But I can’t just
go with it
.”

Tara put a hand on my arm. “That’s because, Mel, you feel
like you’re out of control. That’s always been the thing with you, you know?
Control over something, even if it’s only what color shirt you’re going to
wear… and now you feel like everything’s changing and…”

“There’s nothing I can do to stop it,” I finished.

“Yeah,” said Tara. She sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry about
the Spirit Board. I’m sorry for everything.”

“Seriously, Tara.
Could you not
make this about you right now?”

The hurt look on her face and the surprised look on G
.’s
made me feel instantly terrible. I glanced away, my
shoulders hunched. “I’m going for a walk.”

There was a sliver of moon out now and a slight breeze to
break up the overly warm Texas night, but the thing that made me most surprised
was how much of the starlight was reflected by the sand. Miles of sand dunes
stretched in every direction, as far as I could see. The glimmer of our
campfire was a distant reminder of human contact. Out here, I was alone,
perfectly alone, with nothing but my terrible thoughts for company.

There was a strange energetic buzz around me, and I couldn’t
place its source at first, but then I realized that it was everywhere. The
earth here, the feeling of the earth, was so much more intense that I could
feel the energy through the soles of my shoes, up my legs and in my hands. And
once I realized what I was feeling, it was as if I had given the sensation
permission to come on full force, and then I was awash with the energy. “Holy
Cow,” I whispered to no one in particular.

I plopped down atop one of the dunes and took my shoes and
socks off. I buried my feet in the sand and waited quietly for my body to
understand that I was plugged into the circuit.

And then it came – the rush. I felt as if my head were going
to detach from my neck and float away, my awareness inside my body felt like a
balloon bobbing around inside my skin, and I knew, just knew, that if I relaxed
a little bit more, I could pop right out and fly up into the sky.

I was getting high off of the energy of the earth.
If people only knew what they were missing…

I plunged the fingers of my left hand into the sand and felt
the trickle spread up my arm to my shoulder, and then to my head. I did the
same with my right hand and willed the energy back into the earth again,
causing the sparkling current to flow through me. And as I sat there,
completing the circuit, I could feel little bits of negativity flake off of me
and drain into the earth. Like little black flecks of creosote from a chimney,
they burned up as they hit the ground.

Holy cow.

As I sat there, calm returned to me and my frayed patience
knit itself back together. I could feel the deep pulsing of the earth in my
fingers and in my feet, and I knew, just
knew
,
that I was a part of something bigger.
Bigger than I had ever imagined, maybe even bigger than a
tesseract.
And the bigness made me feel small but it also made me feel
loved, so very loved.

The love was pink, peach, and gold. It was music. It was the
sunset and the dawn. It filled me to the brim, overwhelming my senses until I
couldn’t hold it in any longer. I began to cry with relief, and maybe, finally,
just a little bit of joy.

74. TARA

Orla was different than I had expected. It
was
a ghost town, and it was definitely
on a crossroads, but there were semi-trucks everywhere, zooming up and down the
highway, causing me to flinch every other second because I felt as if they were
watching us, watching our every move as if we were interlopers or spies.

“Are we sure this is the place?” G. asked as he leaned down
to talk in my ear. He looked around at the vehicles, the car that was so
clearly meant to be Sam’s, at Lily and Sam standing off to the side, taking
photos of a broken-down old building, and shook his head.

“This is definitely Orla. There’s even a green sign with the
town’s name on it over there,” I said, pointing. “Why?”

G. looked off into the distance, squinting. “There are no
mountains.”

I followed his gaze, and indeed, there weren’t. I had
wondered about that myself but had shrugged it off. “Sam says that not
everything in his dreams come true.”

G. nodded, but he didn’t look convinced. “What else is
there? You brought along the list, right? How do we know which spot is the
right spot?”

I pulled the piece of notebook paper out of my pocket and
unfolded it, holding tightly to it against the wind, which seemed to be picking
up. “So ah, besides the mountains and the crossroads, we have lightning
crashing into itself – obviously that’s not happening yet,” I paused to pull a
few strands of hair out of my face and tucked them behind my ear. “Though the
wind’s picking up… maybe soon?” I glanced up at the sky then back to the list.
“And a heavy metal door?
I think it was red in my dream, and
then the last thing was an arrow in the ground. I don’t know what that means
but, it seems like with all this scrub brush and stuff, that an arrow would be
pretty hard to see.”

“Melody, will you come here a moment?” said Gramps from
where he was sitting in his wheelchair, next to the SUV.

Melody looked at us and shrugged. “Sure, Gramps,” she said
and began walking over.

G. and I looked at each other and decided to follow.

Gramps was sitting with the sun to his back, a map spread
out in his lap and a thoughtful look on his face. When we finally joined him,
he looked at us, then to Melody. “This is a satellite image of Orla that I
downloaded from the Internet. I want to see if you can feel the same thing I
feel when you dowse it.”

“Dowse?”
Mel said, uncertain.

I knew what dowsing was – it was using your extrasensory
perception, or perhaps your subconscious, to give you information about
something. Some dowsed by using a forked tree branch to find water or a
pendulum on a string to determine if an unborn baby was male or female. I had
never heard of it being used with a map before.

“Remember the other day when you traced the line on the map
with your finger?”

Melody nodded.

“That’s a
nontypical
way to dowse
a map. Some people use pendulums or what have you – but you aren’t familiar
with those. So I just want you to do the same thing today that you did the
other day – use your own senses to determine the energy of the area on the
map.”

Melody seemed a little skeptical but knelt down by gramps
and put her finger on the map. “What line am I sensing?”

“Not a line this time, but the whole area… the whole town of
Orla.”

She nodded and closed her eyes. As we watched, she began
lightly stroking the map with her left hand, like someone would do if they were
trying to feel the static from a Van de
Graaf
generator in science class.

I was surprised at the change in Melody’s demeanor. She
seemed much
more calm
this morning, almost serene, as
if some sort of closure had come to her overnight. I was glad. I needed her to
be okay. And apparently, if Sam’s latest dream was anything to go by, Matthew
needed her to be okay, too.

Melody had scanned almost the entire map with her finger,
with very little change of expression, until she got to the far northwest
corner, where she paused with a frown. “This place here, there’s a sort of…
pulsing sensation. Not like when I complete the circuit but similar, more
staticky.”

I leaned over to see what she was pointing at. She was
further north of the crossroads than I expected her to be, but still near the
highway. There were a couple of small gray boxes there, and I realized they
were buildings. Turning around, I scanned the horizon. There they
were,
beige and white in the distance. “Hello, Othello,” I
said, squinting, with my hand over my eyes to shade them from the sun.

G. and Melody turned to look where I was looking, and G.
gave a low whistle. “I see a sign post there,” he said. He looked down at me
with meaning. “It has triangular pieces hanging off of it at the top, like the
fletching on an arrow.”

My heart skipped a beat.
“Really?”
Not for the first time, I wished I didn’t need glasses.

“Here,” said Gramps, holding a pair of small binoculars to
me. “See for yourself.”

I held the
binocs
up to my eyes
and adjusted them. Suddenly the buildings swam into focus, one tan,
one
white. And in front of the tan building was indeed, a
very tall sign that looked exactly like an arrow shot into the ground. “The
door is red,” I said, breathless. I handed the binoculars to Melody. “The
door
is
red
.”

Gramps crowed with delight. “And this, my young friends, is
just the beginning of a marvelous adventure.”

“What nonsense are you talking about, Harold?” Gram asked,
walking up with a compass in one hand and camera in the other.

“We’ve found the site, Margaret.” He jutted his chin in the
direction of the beige building. “How long do we have until the eclipse?”

Gram looked at her watch.
“A couple of
hours.
Long enough to grab a bite to eat before we set
up the circle.”

“Who is that?” asked Melody, still looking through the
binoculars. “A car just pulled up to the building and parked in front of it.”
She handed the binoculars to me. “Is that who I think it is?”

I took the binoculars again, re-adjusted them for my
terrible vision, and gasped softly as I recognized not only the vehicle but the
person unloading equipment from it. “It’s Esme,” I said.

“Esme?” said both Gram and Gramps together.

G. just looked at me with confusion. “What’s she doing
here?”

Gram swore a salty oath that I pretended not to hear and
said “Her damned politics. She’s going to ruin everything. Get in the car. We
have to go stop her.”

#

“Esmeralda, just what do you think you are doing here?” Gram
demanded in a very angry way.

I was caught off guard. I had known Mel’s grandparents for a
very long time, but I had never seen them get this upset.

“Margaret.
How sweet of you to join me.”

“What are you doing, Esme?” asked Gramps, only a little more
calm.

“I’m setting up a circle. I intend to close the vortex.”

I didn’t understand why everyone was so upset – closing the
vortex, isn’t that what we were doing out here? I mean, before we found out we
might be able to rescue
Matthew,
the whole point was
to close the vortex to stop the monsters from getting in.
Right?

“You can’t, Esme. Matthew’s in there.”

“Matthew’s dead, Harold. There’s nothing that can bring him
back.”

“That’s not true!” Sam said, suddenly animated. He stepped
forward. “He’s caught in the tesseract. He can be rescued.”

“And just what do you know, little boy? You’ve had a few
dreams and now you think you can see the picture clearly?” Her lips curled in a
sneer.

“I know what I saw,” he said firmly. “He can be saved.”

“What’s going on?” Lily asked, scooting closer to me.

I stared at her blankly, wondering what the heck I could
tell her that would make sense without making the rest of us seem like we were
crazy.

Melody shrugged. “We thought my brother was dead, but it
turns out that he’s trapped in some other… dimension?
Whatever.
Anyways, now we are trying to get him out and to stop monsters from coming out
with him, and Esme showed up and we don’t know why. We had to bring you along
because you showed up in Sam’s dream.”

“And mine,” G. said.

I gaped at Melody and then up at G. who just shrugged like,
what else are we supposed to say?
And I
thought that if this didn’t chase Lily off of Sam, then nothing would.

Lily rocked back on her heels. She looked from one of us to
the next, to the next, and then studied Sam’s back from behind. “Okay,” she
said.

“Okay?” I asked, practically squeaking in my disbelief.

She shrugged. “I’ve seen some weird shit. This isn’t any
weirder than that.”

I just didn’t have anything to add to that.