Between (13 page)

“You’ll have to excuse her, Joe,” Alexander says. “She’s never been around treefolk.”

“What a shame!” Joe says, and the tree’s mouth spreads into a grin. If Santa Claus were a tree, this would be him. His leaves rustle as he spreads his branches wider. “Go ahead, then. Check me out.”

Alexander steps aside, and I walk right up to the tree. My fingers drift across the bark and examine the length of the tree, as high as I can reach all the way down to its roots. I timidly touch my finger to Joe’s nose. He scrunches up his wooden face, and we both laugh.

“The treefolk are one of the oldest magical races in existence,” Alexander tells me, holding his hands behind his back. “Their centuries of experience observing people make them excellent judges of character. With only a look, Joe can tell more about you than people who have known you for years.”

I look from Alexander to Joe. How much can he know about me, when so much of me is a secret and the rest is a lie?

“You need to know your story,” Joe states.

“That depends on your version of my story,” I mutter, and Joe releases a deep, rumbling laugh.

“Treefolk are natural historians,” Alexander says, circling behind me, “and secret keepers. They existed long before the Fellowship, even before the mystical realm. Joe knows your story better than anyone.”

I look to the ground, gathering my thoughts. “Alexander and Seth have told me
what
I am. I’m having trouble figuring out
who
I am. I need to know what’s real. How much of me is
me
and how much of me is the Fellowship?”

I raise my eyes as I finish the last sentence. Alexander steps in line beside me, watching my interaction with Joe.

“Who you are is very much tied to the Fellowship itself. To understand that, you will need to know a bit about the Fellowship’s history.” Joe’s eyes soften, and he lowers his branches to my knees. “Have a seat, loved one.”

I slide onto his outstretched limbs and settle into him. He stares at me, through me, and it takes some getting used to. Alexander takes a seat directly across from me, his enormous body taking up most of Joe’s branches.

“Years ago,” Joe begins, “before the formation of the Fellowship, creatures were sighted all the time in the mortal realm. Fairies, mermaids, leprechauns—they were spotted so often that humans became obsessed with finding them. There are stories of fishermen capturing mermaids and ripping them to pieces, certain they were demons.”

I recall what Seth had said yesterday about how legends are born from too many encounters between the mystical and the mortal.

Joe’s branches move while he talks, and it reminds me of the way Mom can’t tell a story without using her hands. “Four Ellaurians—Alexander, Marian, Max, and Whalen—realized mystical creatures would have more luck staying under the radar if they worked together under one system. That way they could communicate with each other and coordinate the best times to slip in and out of the mortal realm unnoticed.”

I look at Alexander when Joe says his name, but his eyes stay down, focused on his lap. I know he’s a founder, but until now I haven’t considered the implications of his title, aside from the fact that it makes him Seth’s boss. But this whole thing—the organization of the Fellowship, the weekly meetings Seth had mentioned, the different roles to be filled—he helped create that. I wonder about the other three founders, but Joe continues before I can ask.

“It took a while to bring the entire mystical realm together under the Fellowship. Some creatures refused to take part—they didn’t want to be told when they could travel to the mortal realm and when they couldn’t. Those creatures were eventually banished from the mystical realm.”

“Banished?” I ask.

“They can’t return,” Alexander explains. “They’re no longer welcome here.”

Wow. They didn’t want to go along with the Fellowship so they were kicked out of the realm completely? Away from their home? That seems a little harsh. “Where do they live, then?”

Alexander shifts on the branch, smoothing the front of his dark-green tunic. “It depends. The obvious creatures find remote areas of the mortal realm to reside, but some of the more human-looking ones live out in the open. We keep an eye on them for our own safety, but for the most part, they’re on their own.”

He must see the disapproval on my face, because he sits up straighter and quirks his eyebrows. “Not going along with the Fellowship puts the entire mystical population at risk. Everyone that lives in the mystical realm must agree to be part of the Fellowship.”

Alexander may have a point, but all I hear is “Follow our rules, or we’ll throw you out,” and I can’t decide how to feel about that. What if the banished creatures aren’t able to stay in hiding on their own? What if they have different ideas about their safety? Would it matter? It seems extreme to throw them out of their homes when they aren’t really given a choice about how to live their own lives. I know how it feels to be thrown out of your world unexpectedly. Even if the mortal realm was never supposed to be the one I belonged to, it’s the only home I’ve known.

I’d give almost anything to be sitting on the green wicker loveseat on my front porch, sketching the panoramic views of the neighbors’ farms.

I never did finish that sunset.

I close my eyes as the deep ache returns to my chest. I want to go home, and I can’t. I want to go back to everything I knew, before I realized I knew nothing.

“Where did I come from?” I ask, looking at Alexander. “Don’t say from magic. Who are my parents?”

“You are the daughter of two of the founders—Marian, a muralet like you, and Max, a mureling,” Joe replies.

The daughter of founders. I sit up a little straighter.

Alexander’s expression turns wistful, and the longing in my chest is reflected on his face. What is he longing for?

Marian and Max. Max and Marian. My parents. The names seem too foreign to belong to the two people who created me. “What’s a mureling?”

“All muralets are female,” Alexander says, his voice quieter than usual. “Males born to the bloodline were called murelings. They were much less powerful, without the elemental control or blood characteristics of muralets. Murelings had the ability to converse with every creature in existence. No language was foreign to them—human, animal, or otherwise.”

I catch the past tense. The murelings are gone too? “Were?”

“The murelings died out after the muralets,” Joe explains. “Muralets are rare to begin with—only born once every few generations. As their numbers dwindled, the bloodline eventually came to an end.”

I stare across the rippling water of the Source, its surface silver under the sun’s light, and process his words. I feel empty. It’s not grief, really. I never knew Max and Marian, but there’s a sense of loss for the parents I will never have a chance to meet. I’ll only know them through the memories of others. Just like the man I knew as my father.

“What about William?” I ask. The man Mom had always recalled so fondly. The one supposedly responsible for Sam’s curls and my double-jointed thumbs. His picture sat framed on my bookshelf for as long as I can remember. The story of his death, in a three-car pileup in the middle of a highway only weeks after Sam and I were born, plays in my mind any time I see a car accident. “Who was he?”

Alexander shakes his head. “There was never a William. He was an invention of the Fellowship.”

“But the pictures? The stories?”

“It was all part of the mission, Charlotte. There had to be a reason Adele was a single mother.”

All part of the mission—of the elaborate backstory created by the Fellowship. It’s like losing the father I never knew all over again, except this time the sadness is tinged with anger. I’d mourned a completely fabricated loss my entire life. Every Father’s Day. Every anniversary of his so-called death. All for nothing. I grip Joe’s branch as if it’s the only thing grounding me. “So who’s Sam’s father?”

“Another jourling,” Joe states. “Thomas. He died before Sam was born.”

The ache in my chest becomes a churning in my stomach. When we were little, Sam had mentioned his want for a father more than once. He was constantly picking out Little League coaches or school teachers for Mom to date until we got old enough to realize Mom wasn’t interested in dating. I
wanted
a dad, but Sam needed one.

I fiddle with the red bracelet on my wrist.

“So there’s you,” I raise my eyes to Alexander, “Max, and Marian. Who was the last founder, again?”

“Whalen,” he says. “A shapeshifter.”

“And where is he?”

“Gone,” Alexander declares firmly. I watch his eyes harden, but he doesn’t say any more.

“Whalen was in love with Marian,” Joe tells me, and the shape of his eyes becomes pointed with sadness. “It was useless, of course. She and Max were completely devoted to one another, but she was beautiful and charismatic, and Whalen believed she had feelings for him too.”

Alexander’s eyes follow a scattering of leaves blowing through the open space between the Source and the forest. “It became an obsession for him. He would look for hidden messages in her words and actions, anything to support his delusion that they would be together.” A shadow passes over his features and he goes quiet, staring at nothing. The emptiness in my chest grows bigger.

Joe speaks up when it becomes clear Alexander can’t continue. “She rejected him over and over, politely at first and then with more force. His obsession turned to hatred. He threatened to kill her, repeatedly, and told others about all the things he would be able to do after he drank her blood.”

I chew on the inside of my lip. Hearing about what my mother went through makes it even more horrifying. It must have been terrible to be a muralet—to constantly look over your shoulder, wondering if you could trust the creatures you met.

“Shapeshifters don’t have an active power—they can change their shape to mimic another creature, but Whalen wanted to become more threatening,” Joe continues. “The first rule Principal Command put into place when the Fellowship was formed was that drinking muralet blood results in automatic banishment from the mystical realm. As soon as PC realized a founder was hunting one of the creatures he was sworn to protect, they took the extra step of ordering Whalen to be stripped of his powers. It’s the only time in the Fellowship’s history that a creature’s powers have been forcefully removed.”

My shoulders become too heavy to stay upright and I fold into myself, leaning against Joe. What would it be like to live in a world where everyone is a threat? Is that my world now? Marian’s downfall was being born a muralet. Like me.

I clutch my stomach. “What’s going to happen to me?” I whisper. The tears surprise me, crowding in my eyes, and I look down, letting them fall on my lap.

“This is why we’ve hidden you,” Alexander says quietly. “When Marian found out she was pregnant, she and Max went into hiding. Until then, she had refused to give in to the fear of living as the last muralet. But they didn’t want that life for you. If no one knew Marian had a child, no one would come looking for you.”

I sniff, shaking my head. “What happened to them?”

I don’t ask what I really want to know—why did my parents leave me?

“They fled Ellauria to areas of our worlds so remote we hardly remember they exist at all, but Whalen never stopped looking,” Alexander says. He reaches into the pocket of his tunic and retrieves a folded cloth handkerchief. He presses it against my arm until I take it.

“They were constantly looking over their shoulders, waiting for the next attack,” Alexander continues. “Your father died defending Marian from a couple of minotaurs. His sacrifice gave her time to get away, but she realized you would never be safe with her.”

The tears fall more quickly now. I unfold the handkerchief and press it to my eyes. Max died to save Marian, to save me. It’s a huge responsibility to know I’m alive because of someone else’s sacrifice. He did what a father would do for his child and the woman he loved.

Again, all for me. They were in hiding because of me. She was attacked because of me. He had to protect her.

Because of me.

Alexander tilts his head. “I suspect Whalen is behind the Mothman’s appearance on your lawn. He must have had tracers in place to detect muralet magic. When the binding spell slipped and exposed your powers, Whalen must have thought he’d finally found Marian.”

I twist the handkerchief in my hands. “Tracers? You said he was stripped of his powers. How can he do anything?”

“Whalen joined forces with other banished creatures still in possession of their powers,” he grumbles, “like the Mothman. They do his dirty work. When the prize is muralet blood, nearly any creature can be convinced to play the game.”

Joe’s branches curl around me, the leaves brushing against my arms and neck. Tiny twigs rub against my back. The gesture of kindness makes me more emotional, just like Mom’s hugs always do.

“Where is Marian now?” I ask, my voice teetering between talking and crying.

Alexander leans forward. “After she gave birth to you, she brought you to me. No one has seen or heard from her since.”

I finally raise my eyes from my lap to look at him. He’s not saying she’s dead. Is she still alive? Could she still be out there?

Alexander’s gaze becomes alert and he straightens, looking past me. I turn to investigate.

Seth’s walking toward us in a black T-shirt that looks completely out of place here. He waves when I look at him. My mind switches gears from my official family to my adopted one. I ease myself off Joe’s branch and meet Seth just outside the tree’s reach. Alexander stands, too.

“Did you find anything?” I ask. I bite my lip, searching his face for clues. Please say yes. Anything would be better than nothing at this point.

A crease forms between Seth’s eyebrows, and he shakes his head. “No. But there are more of us out looking right now.”

I look away, swallowing my anxiety. They’re out there, somewhere. We have to find them.

“What have you two been doing?” Seth asks.

“Charlie wanted to know more about her family history,” Alexander says.