Guardian of the Gate (17 page)

By the time we make camp for the night, I am in a state of hyperawareness. I feel as if I could not sleep even if given the opportunity, though I have never been so physically exhausted in my life. Once Luisa and Sonia are ensconced in separate tents and everyone else has settled into quiet, I become convinced that it is only constant movement together with constant thought that keeps me awake.

I begin circling the diameter of the campsite while Edmund and Dimitri settle the horses in for the night. Later, Edmund will sit outside Sonia’s tent to keep watch, as has been his custom these past nights. I still do not know if he watches her continually to protect me from her or to protect her from herself. I have been too tired to ask.

While I pace, I think. I try to project myself forward,
through the last leg of our journey, to the time when I will see Aunt Abigail at Altus, and forward still to the journey after that — the one that will take me to the missing pages. It is good to occupy my mind, and it has the added benefit of providing me with a glimpse of possible obstacles where I might still design a way around them.

“Would you like some company?” The voice is at my shoulder and causes me to jump, so deep am I in thought and tiredness.

I do not stop walking, but when I turn my head, Dimitri is keeping pace on my right.

I shake my head. “It’s not necessary, Dimitri. You should sleep. I’m fine.”

He chuckles. “I feel quite well, actually. More alert than usual, in fact.”

I smile at him. “Even still, I am counting on you to see me safely to Altus. If you become overtired, the both of us might end up on a different island entirely!”

He reaches down and grabs my hand. “I assure you, I am as alert as the day I met you with the Hounds. I told you; I don’t need sleep the way you do.”

I tip my head to look at him as we walk. “And how is that, exactly? Are you not… mortal?”

He tips his head back and laughs at the indigo sky. “Of course I’m mortal! What do you think me, a beast?” He bares his teeth and growls playfully.

I roll my eyes. “Very funny. Do you blame me for asking? How else can it be that you do not need sleep?”

“I never said that I don’t need sleep at all. Just that I can go considerably longer without it than you.”

I give him a sly glance. “I think you are avoiding the subject. Come now, surely we do not have secrets at this juncture!” I am enjoying the mischievous banter. It makes me feel less odd. As if we might be walking in one of London’s many parks on a beautiful summer day.

He sighs. When he looks back at me, his smile is a little sad. “I am mortal just as you are, but I am descended on one side from one of the oldest lines in the Grigori and on the other from one of the oldest in the Sisterhood. In fact, every one of my ancestors dating back to the Watchers has formed a union with a member of the Sisterhood. Because of this, my… gifts are extraordinary. Or so I’m told.”

“What do you mean, exactly? To what gifts do you refer?” I cannot help feeling that he has kept something significant from me.

He squeezes my hand. “The same gifts you have — the ability to travel the Plane, to scry, to speak to the dead… The more closely we are descended from the original Watchers and Grigori, the more of that power we retain.”

I stare into the night, trying to put a finger on what gave me pause. When I find it, I turn back to him.

“You said ‘we.’”

“Yes.”

“What did you mean?” I ask.

He looks at me with a small smile. “You, too, are descended from an old line. A pure line. Didn’t you know?”

I shake my head, though there is a realization, something hidden in the murk of my lethargic mind, fighting its way to the surface. “I only found out recently that my father was a member of the Grigori at all. There hasn’t been time to ask questions about his lineage.”

Dimitri stops walking, tugging on my hand until I stop beside him. “He was as powerful a member of the Grigori as your mother was a Sister, Lia. You, too, are descended from a long line of unions between the Sisters and the Grigori. It is why you are so powerful.”

I shake my head and begin walking, so fast now that he has to trot to catch up. I don’t want to find the connections that I am already beginning to find, though I cannot put a reason to it.

“Lia… What is it? This is nothing. . . Well, this is nothing that should upset you. If anything, you have a better chance of ending the prophecy than anyone before you because of your lineage. It is the reason your Aunt Abigail was so powerful and your mother, too.”

I nod. “Yes, but it also means that Alice is probably more powerful than I imagined, and I already imagined her very powerful. Plus…”

“Plus?”

I feel his gaze but do not meet it right away. I keep walking, trying to put words to the sadness I suddenly feel. Finally I stop walking once again. “Plus, I am beginning to understand that I never really knew my father at all. That he must have
felt very alone and did not believe he could share his worries with me.”

“He was trying to protect you, Lia. That’s all. It is all any of us in the Grigori endeavor to do for the Sisters.”

I can do nothing but nod. Nod and walk.

We do not speak again, but Dimitri does not once leave my side. We walk the whole night through, sometimes in silence and sometimes in murmured conversation, pacing circles around the camp as the sky fades from midnight blue to lilac to the palest orange in the distance. We walk until it is time, once again, to ride.

An hour into our ride the next morning, I smell the sea. Knowing it is so close makes it possible to fight the insidious call of sleep, though I have given up the notion of dignity and do not ride erect in the saddle, but slumped against Dimitri’s chest. I do not even know if Sonia glances my way or pays me any attention at all. I long ago stopped expending my precious energy worrying about her attention. For the moment, she is quiet, and that is good enough for me.

The forest passes in a blurry haze, and every moment I desire only to close my eyes. Only to sleep and sleep and sleep. But the briny smell of the ocean gives me cause to hope that the end is near.

The wood fades a little at a time, the trees at first becoming only slightly less dense, eventually thinning to the point
where it seems we are no longer in a forest at all. Finally we cross some invisible threshold and are on the beach.

The horses stop all at once, and the sea stretches, moody and gray, into the infinite distance. We stare at it in silence.

Luisa is the first to dismount, dropping to the ground with characteristic grace and unlacing her boots. She pulls them off, followed by her stockings. When her feet are at last bare, she wiggles her toes in the sand, watching them before looking up at me.

“You’re not too tired to dip your toes in the sea, are you, Lia?”

There was a time when her mischievous grin would have been catching, when I would have jumped to join her. Now her words come from very far away. They take a long time to reach me, and when they do, they barely make a dent in my consciousness.

“Lia?” Dimitri’s voice is husky in my ear, his chest hard against my back. “Why don’t you go with Luisa? The cold water will do you good.” The air is chilly on my back when he dismounts. Once on the ground, he holds up a hand. “Come.”

I take his hand out of instinct and swing one leg over the horse’s back, stumbling a little as I hit the ground. Luisa kneels, reaching for one of my feet. “Here. Let me get this.” She taps the side of my boot, and I obediently lift my leg, bracing myself against Dimitri’s horse.

She proceeds to remove first one boot and stocking and then the other. When the sand, gritty and cold, is at last against my bare feet, Luisa rises. She takes my hand, pulling me toward the water without a word.

I have not lost all my faculties. Even as I stagger to the water behind Luisa I am wondering how we will get to Altus, what is next in our journey. But I do not have the motivation to ask or even to wonder for very long. I allow Luisa to pull me toward the rushing waves until they swallow my feet. The water is frigid, and I get a jolt of something like pain mixed with euphoria as my toes are enveloped by the slippery slickness of it.

Luisa’s laugh is carried on the wind, all the way out to sea, it seems. She lets go of my hand and wades farther out, scooping handfuls of water and spraying it in every direction like a child. Even now, I feel the loss of Sonia, for she should be in the water, laughing and rejoicing at how far we have come together… how close we are to Altus. Instead, she is a virtual prisoner, carefully watched by Edmund and Dimitri behind us. Sadness and resentment war within me. It is a losing battle no matter the outcome.

“Wait a minute…” Luisa has stopped playing in the waves. She stands a few feet in front of me, gazing through the mist in the distance. I follow her gaze but see nothing. The fog stretches on and on, blending together with the gray of the sea and the nothingness of the sky.

But Luisa does see something. She continues staring before turning back to Edmund and the others.

“Edmund? Is that — ” She does not finish her sentence, but turns back to the water.

When I turn to look at the rest of the group, Edmund is walking slowly toward us and peering into the same distance.
He walks right into the water, unmindful of his wet boots, stopping right next to me.

“Why, yes, Miss Torelli. I do believe you’re right.” And though he addresses Luisa by name, he seems to be talking to everyone and no one in particular.

I turn to him. “Right about what?” My tongue feels fuzzy in my mouth.

“Right about what she sees,” he says. “There.”

I look in the direction of his stare and, yes, there is something dark making its way toward us in the water. Perhaps it is my lack of sleep, but I feel suddenly frightened as the object comes closer and closer. It is monstrous. A large, hulking thing all the more frightening for the utter soundlessness of its approach. I feel an irrational, hysterical scream building in my throat as the object breaks through the last of the mist hanging over the sea.

Luisa turns to us with a grin. “See?” She bows dramatically, rising to hold an arm out toward the thing now bobbing silently in the water. “Your chariot awaits.”

And then I understand.

As we rise and fall with the waves, I do not remember why I believed the ocean would be an improvement over the horses. We have been at sea for some time, though it is impossible to tell how long; the sky is the same gray it has been all day. No lighter and no darker. From that, I can only guess that we have not yet passed another night.

I do not even try to keep track of our progress. My tiredness is too deep-seated to allow clear thought, and, in any case, the fog soon swallows the shore. I settle for a vague belief that we are traveling north. I am carried so close to sleep by the rhythmic rocking of the water that I feel an irrational urge to jump into the water, to escape the hypnotic swaying of the boat in any way possible.

We boarded the boat soon after it arrived on the beach. Edmund and Dimitri took it in stride, as if it is perfectly natural for a boat to appear suddenly out of the mist and whisk us, without a word, to an island not shown on any map in the civilized world. But I wonder how it knew we were there.

I also wonder what will become of Sargent and the other horses, though Edmund assured me they would be “taken care of.” I wonder about the robed figures standing at either side of the boat, propelling us almost noiselessly through the water. They have no distinguishing characteristics — I cannot even tell if they are male or female — and have said nothing. And though I have many questions, I ask them silently, for I’ve not the soundness of mind to form the inquiries aloud.

Sonia is at the front of the boat while I am at the back. The longer we are at sea, the more subdued she becomes. Eventually, she stops looking over her shoulder to shoot me angry glares, choosing instead to stare into the mist. Edmund is never far from her side, while Dimitri is never far from mine. I take comfort in his presence, however silent. I lean against him, trailing my fingers through the water as Luisa dozes, head in hand near the middle of the boat.