Baehrly Alive (8 page)

“Goldie, are you asleep?” Thomas asked.

I realized that I still had my eyes shut. “No, just daydreaming.” I laughed. “I was trying to imagine having a real herd of mastodons here at the preserve. Did you know that the newborns have purple fur?”

Thomas stared at me. “They do?”

I nodded. “When I found Petunia she was all fuzzy and still lavender.”

I didn’t tell him that Petunia had probably been the reason the herd had been moving slowly enough to be cornered and slaughtered by poachers.

“When do we leave?” Donovan interrupted my morbid thoughts.

“As soon as we can get ourselves packed,” I told him. “The only thing we don’t have enough of is time.”

“Time seems to work that way,” Gwyn said thoughtfully. “There’s always too much or too little—you’re either sitting around twiddling your thumbs or trying to cram a whole lifetime into a few days. Sometimes it feels like a little bit of both—like you’re waiting impatiently for life to happen and then it’s over.”

Silence greeted her statement. We were all too aware of how literally she was speaking.

“Please,” I thought, looking again at how frail and delicate she had become, “let me be able to save her. I couldn’t save Aria and I couldn’t save Paige… I couldn’t save Dad. Please, please don’t let me lose Gwyn, too. If there’s one thing I get to do before it’s my time, let it be that.”

In the small hours of the morning—before Donovan and I even had a chance to finish packing our kits—everything changed.

It happened, as it so often does, in a flash—a moment that could never be retrieved again.

Gwyn woke up, as she often did these days—her illness would not let her sleep properly. She had been sleeping in the same bed as Thomas for weeks now—something that seemed to reassure both of them. I had become used to peeking in and seeing them curled together like two small puppies.

I heard Gwyn scream from my bedroom, all the way on the bottom floor of the house.

Donovan and I got there in the same moment.

My heart leapt into my throat—my mind instantly full of all the horrible possibilities.

All except the truth.

Thomas was unconscious and not responding to Gwyn at all.

We’d missed all the signs. The clues had been there if we had looked hard enough, but we were too absorbed in our own lives to realize what was under our very noses.

I looked at my little brother with my other sight and prayed that we hadn’t made a fatal mistake.

Thomas was sick—with the same illness that had attacked his mother—and the disease had progressed much faster in him than it had in her.

He lay there, still and pale as a corpse in the middle of his bed. His face, so like my father’s, was already drawn and sunken in around the eyes. He didn’t look like he was sleeping.

He looked like he was already dead.

I dragged Donovan out of the room so I could call the healers.

“I’ve read that this could happen,” I muttered, yanking on one of my curls and wishing I could throw or break something to make myself feel better—but knowing that it wouldn’t really help. “I knew that this illness could wipe out families, but—“

“You couldn’t have expected it to hit so close to home,” Donovan murmured, folding his arms around me and creating a small haven where—at least—I could find the space to breathe.

I laughed bitterly. “Shouldn’t I have? Take a look at my life lately, Donovan. If something horrible is even slightly possible it’s going to happen to me and my family.”

“You can’t talk like that,” Donovan said softly. “Gwyn needs you to be strong right now.”

Strong? How was I supposed to be strong? Why was I the one who had to shoulder the load and carry on—as if the world weren’t shaking apart one second at a time?

How could I even keep breathing?

I kept waiting for life to just become too much—for the world to just… cease to exist. Surely, so much pain and hurt couldn’t be ignored—surely, our pain couldn’t be so small.

But the world kept turning.

And I was life’s designated driver. I had to keep hope strong, even though I could scarcely find it within myself. It was so far away that I felt I could only imagine a memory of what hope might be.

The darkness in me feasted on my despair, roiling up eagerly, devouring the little peninsulas of light that had thus far held off the invading force. Agony ripped through me. I had felt this before—when my Magic had been ripped right out of my body.

It had nearly killed me before.

But Thomas needed me.

It was Thomas that led me back—which gave me the strength to slam down my defenses and fight back the darkness. My bear whined in terror as I smote at the foul miasma that sought to destroy my soul. I drew on her strength to make a last stand and fortify what remained of my soul from the vampire venom.

I was safe, for now.

But I had lost a good chunk of what was left of my soul.

“Do you want us to stay here with you?” I whispered to Gwyn as the Healers took our house by storm, asking questions, leaning over Thomas, scanning his aura, and debating what should be done. The business was reassuring. I knew it was all a sham—none of us could do anything to fight this disease—but the clutter of thoughts and actions fooled me into believing that we were doing well. We could lick this, the business said—we can fight this.

I didn’t mind buying into the illusion.

“Go,” Gwyn whispered back. “Now, more than ever it’s urgent that you find something—anything.” She grabbed my arms in both hands—her face a study in a mother’s agony. “Please, Goldie. Save my baby.”

I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t squeeze a sound through the heaviness of my throat. I just nodded and squeezed her arms back.

On an impulse, I leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek.

I prayed that it wasn’t a kiss good-bye.

Travel by Magic removed all the stress about visas and passports, though it did limit luggage to what we could comfortably carry through one portal and out another. It had its own challenges, though—motion sickness being a big one for me.

At least Donovan didn’t seem bothered by that side effect. He had that absolutely unreadable expression of his on his face as I gagged and heaved into the grass—grateful to not lose what little breakfast I had snatched on the way out the door.

I really hoped he wasn’t laughing at me behind that still mask.

“It’s worse on airplanes,” I told him, once I had recovered enough to twist the cap off of my jug of water and gulp down a few mouthfuls. I rinsed my mouth out and spat into the grass. “Even cars, sometimes.”

“My brother used to get really motion sick,” Donovan said. He stepped closer to me and brushed his fingers under my jaw, pressing a surprisingly sore spot.

The residual nausea vanished.

As if he had Magic after all.

I stared at him. “You’re so full of surprises.”

Donovan shrugged. “I told you—my brother used to have trouble with motion sickness. It’s just a pressure point that I learned to keep him from barfing on me in the car.”

I laughed at the image.

“Yeah, well, you try sitting next to someone who insisted on gorging himself before every road trip. I swear he did it on purpose.”

I stretched onto my tiptoes to kiss Donovan’s cheek. He didn’t talk about his family very often, but I loved the little insights into the man that still remained so much a mystery to me.

Perhaps that was part of the fascination. There was nothing open and revealing about Donovan’s personality—quite the opposite, in fact.

But I never got the feeling he was hiding things. He just wasn’t the type to go around spilling his guts and laughing at the world.

The way Kodi did.

Sometimes I felt like it would take the two of them together to make my perfect man.

But, then again, that was like asking for a lifetime’s supply of gourmet chocolate and the chateau in the Swiss Alps.

As Marie Antoinette discovered—having cake and eating it, too, could be less than healthy for one’s survival.

With my nausea eased, Donovan stepped back, his eyes quietly taking in the scenery around us.

We were in the middle of nowhere—the silica-rich steppe grass in this season was still green and young. In the distance, I could make out a small herd of Mongolian ponies—impossible to tell if they were wild, or if they belonged to some nomadic tribe.

As I had figured, we were miles away from even the base of the sacred mountains, where the two artifacts we searched for were reportedly hidden—one at the head of a holy spring, the other buried with a warrior maiden, who—legends suggested—was responsible for protecting it through-out eternity.

Archaeologist might have the luxury of ignoring legends like that, but we didn’t. It was quite possible that—if the knife existed at all—we would have to fight for it, or find some way to convince the Guardian that now was the time it was destined for.

I was under no delusions that the spring was going to be any easier. Places of power were never left completely unprotected.

And we didn’t just have to worry about Magical threats. This whole area was forbidden territory and guarded strictly. We would have to stay under the radar—figuratively and literally.

With my Magic being less than dependable, we had to focus on making ourselves as camouflaged into the surrounding woods as possible. I did manage to send a whisper of Magic out from us that would suggest that, if we were seen, that the viewer would assume they had seen a deer.

That was the best I could do these days.

Though, I supposed, if I had to, I could always try to raise my bear enough to change and pray that no one would see and shoot me in that form.

Or that my bear wouldn’t immediately go on a rampage, searching the Mongolian countryside for honey.

Totally bear witch problems.

For a guy who had been impeccably dressed in a suit for the majority of the time I’d known him, Donovan was surprisingly good at getting down and dirty and literally up to the armpits in mud. I had to remind myself that he came from a long line of military-oriented men. His little brother was currently in the Air Force and based in Wiesbaden in Germany.

We didn’t have too much trouble shimming under three different areas that were stranded tightly with barbed wire. We didn’t get to the other side entirely unscathed, but we did manage to get through without garnering any unwanted attention.

If it hadn’t been for the urgency, and knowing that my little brother was deathly ill, it would have been the perfect day—trekking through nature with one of my favorite people in the world.

It reminded me a little of the summers when my dad had still been alive.

Except having to dig into my pack for sunglasses.

I hated wearing them—they always made me feel like I was miles separated from reality—but I had no choice. My eyes had recently become very sensitive to light.

Vampire bear witch problems.

“What are you thinking about?” Donovan teased. “You have the oddest expression on your face right now.”

I shrugged. “Thinking about my strange life amuses me, I guess. How far have we come?”

Donovan frowned down at the map he was carrying. “About five miles,” he said. “Unless they have some unusual patrols out and about right now, we should be able to take a direct route straight into the center of the mystical mountains.”

I could tell by his voice that he, too, was bemused to be talking about such things. A year ago, Donovan hadn’t even known that Magic existed.

And now he was searching for a healing spring in the middle of forbidden territory in Mongolia with a girl named after one of the most useless fairytales of all time.

“Altitude sickness,” I realized. “We switched altitudes too fast, that’s why we’re being giddy.”

I tried to look, with my other eyes, at my Magic to see if I could muster out one more spell. Surprisingly the Earth here offered up a good trickle of energy and I was able to work a minor healing spell—adjusting our bodies to the higher altitude and oxygen availability.

Donovan immediately sucked in a deep breath. “Ah. That feels great. You know, I didn’t even realize how woozy I was getting.”

I shook my head. “Me neither. I’ve gotten so used to having headaches lately, that I didn’t even realize that I was getting short of breath. I can’t believe I didn’t think of that detail. My dad would have lectured me for hours for forgetting something as important as that.”

“You can’t think of everything,” Donovan said gently. “Why don’t we take a break and eat something? I know that working Magic makes you starving.”

That was an understatement. Magic burned an insane amount of calories—especially if I was using my own energy and not plugging into the earth.

I grateful dropped down on a rotting log and dug into my pack for some jerky and dried fruit. We hadn’t planned on being gone overnight, but I had prepared for that much.

Even if I had forgotten about something like needing to breathe.