TRIGGER WARNING: self-harm (scratching) from stress/anxiety; the character does not realize he’s doing it at first, but the character does cause minor (temporary, not permanent) bodily harm from doing so; also discussion of past panic attacks, big ones where more serious scratching self-harm was done that caused more serious bodily harm
Chapter 2
For the First Time
“You have to do it!” Astra exclaims, wings fluttering and vibrating. The grey spikes on her tail rasp across each other.
Jabez nods. “You should,” he says. “You should find Alex, and I think this is your best shot.”
“Do you really think the new Midnight Wolf will know?” I ask.
What if I should be here? What if Alex comes back here and I’m not here because I’m all the way on some other part of Ragdon and she doesn’t find me and she goes off searching for me and we’re always apart and one step behind because we’re always where the other just was and we never see each other again and—.
No.
No.
No.
I dig my nails into my arm. I can’t think like that. I need to think in steps. Neither Alex nor I would spend a forever doing something that was never working. Both of us would try something else. With an inhale, and then an exhale, I try to calm myself down a little bit.
Except that it doesn’t work. I can feel the panic rising in my stomach, in my chest, in my throat, curling through my insides like prickling vines and puncturing thorns. In an instant, I’m back to the foot of the Amethyst Throne as the Guard sent the arrows ripping through my body. Fear seizes hold at the memory of how warm my blood felt, how I almost laughed as it trickled down my back and across my abdomen, how hard I eventually had to fight to not lose the fear I’d felt in the beginning.
Jabez nods again, and when he speaks, I begin to be able to pull myself to reality and stay there.
“Let’s find Camden, speak with him, and then find the Midnight Wolf,” Ky suggests.
“All of us?” Myles asks.
Brook shakes her head. “No, I don’t think that’s a good idea. Astra and I should stay here.”
“I’ll stay too. I want to stay with Astra. And I shouldn’t go. Not…” Jabez trails off. When he speaks again his voice is far softer. “Not after the snake. It did a lot of damage. I can’t leave Astra, either.”
“I won’t make you,” I say.
It’s true. I wouldn’t make Jabez leave his daughter. Not after so long apart. Not when they’re family.
Jabez nods, something soft and grateful coming across his expression. Astra rubs her cheek across his throat. Jabez winces when she draws close to the back of his neck, but he still presses closer.
xxxx
I both want to sprint into the tent Camden and Katelin share and I want to drop to my knees and scream because Alex is gone and she’s not here and I don’t know what to do and what am I supposed to do and I can’t think and everything won’t stop and she’s not here and I don’t know where Alex is and I can’t breathe and my skin is too small and I can’t breathe and we never should’ve gone to the Erebus Tree and we never should’ve gotten the necklaces and what went wrong and Alex did nothing wrong and we were just trying to get by and how did everything go so wrong that now Alex is missing and I don’t know where the fuck my own sister is and we’re supposed to be at each other’s sides because we’re supposed to be there for each other.
Ky walks beside me, close but not touching, which I appreciate. He takes a soft breath, glances my way, then mulls over his words. I wrap my arms around my sides and try not to pay too close of attention to my surroundings. There are only a scattering of tents in the Sea that remain fully intact, and mangled bodies lay all around. A few people mingle about, most searching, and some loose horses trot through the rubble. When a small group of Guard try to round up the horses, they’re descended upon by the closest people. Phoenix cackles, but I can only close my eyes and take a shuddering breath, clenching my hands into fists and digging my nails into my skin until they break the flesh. The malachite medallion heats up on my chest as my healing powers kick in.
“I can’t make it hurt less,” Ky says, pulling my attention away from the fallen Guard, “and I’m sure the not knowing helps nothing. It bothers me deeply and I’ve only known Alex for a short amount of time. I can only imagine what you must be feeling. But we’re all here. I know words cannot magically bring Alex right here, but we are here. Lean on us, ok? We are all here for you, and we will do everything we can to help bring Alex home where she belongs.”
“Where even is home?” I whisper, voice cracking. “I’m sure our tent is gone. We lived in the Sea, but we sure as hell can’t live here any more. We don’t have anywhere any more.”
Ky gives a sad smile, and Phoenix flashes his teeth at his brother who doesn’t appear to notice. “Yeah,” Ky murmurs, “I know the feeling.” He looks up at me for a moment, before he slumps his shoulders and his whole body seems to lose all air. “Really, I do. But home is where you make it. Home can be anywhere. A house is any one of the tents here, logs you stack in the woods, a hole you dig in the ground, a cave you find. But a home is wherever you decide it is. A house is a location; a home is a feeling. You’ll find a new home, Grey.”
Brook comes up behind me and voices her agreement. Myles does, too.
“Camden’s right up here, isn’t he?” Wyatt asks, walking up ahead.
“Three ahead of you on the right,” I say automatically, all the years of living in the Sea coming back to me. “Er, well, the only one still mostly standing.”
“Hey, Camden?” Myles calls, taping his fingers on the singed fabric of the tent Camden and Katelin share. There’s a few holes in the sides, and one of the supporting logs leans far to the side, but it’s upright and in more or less one piece.
“Yeah?” Camden says. He pokes his head out. The top half of his hair has been pulled back into a ponytail.
“Do you know where Alex is?” I ask, hoping my voice doesn’t shake as much as I think it does.
“I’d assume she’s with you…” Camden trails off, frowning. He opens the flap of his tent further when he sees the rest of the group with me. He scratches his side, then steps out of his tent, letting it flop shut behind him with a stiff rustle. Several small cuts and injuries cover his body, but he looks mostly unscathed. “Since it seems she is not, I’m guessing you’re all trying to find her?”
I nod. “Yes. Have you seen her?”
A spark of fear bursts to life in my gut, crackling and bristling and fizzing with anticipation, nerves, the feeling I can’t shake of what the fuck is going on? The only other logical thought I could’ve come up with was that Alex had wound up with Camden.
“I think I might have caught a glimpse of her during that fight with the King’s Dragon, but before that, the last time I saw Alex was when I helped fix those ties on your tent before y’all found your necklaces and ended up as the Wolf and the Dove and the King was trying to kill you both. Katelin told me bits and pieces, but it sounds insane.”
I fight the urge to drop to my knees. Alex needs me to stay strong and listen.
“Who’s Katelin?” Phoenix asks. Fire glows on him, and he stands with his legs wide and his back straight, tail flicking back and forth and expression set into something still yet fully alert.
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Camden eyes the black cat for a moment before responding. “My sister.” He frowns. “She works for the King?”
“Does she, now?” Phoenix presses, moving forward. One of his paws breaks a small board in two.
“Not like that,” I jump in, holding out my hand. “She doesn’t like the King.”
“Katelin can speak for herself.”
“Are you all speaking about me?”
Katelin pushes her way out of the tent. Long brown hair falls in loose waves down her shoulders and back. She’s tall, almost as tall as Camden, and strong. Her makeup enunciates her features subtly. She wears a collared, button-down shirt and skirt outfit that hugged her tall frame. The short heels she wears look out of place in the ruins of the Sea, and they sink into the loose ash and dust that covers the ground, smearing the surface of the shoes. The outfit may have once been neat, but now it’s been scratched and cut up. A gash carves through Katelin’s arm and a few small burns litter her skin. Wyatt eyes the injures with careful eyes, and I can almost see them thinking over each one.
“Yes,” Phoenix growls. “Do you work for the cream puff?”
Katelin hesitates.
“Well?” Phoenix snorts, taking a step closer and tilting his head to the side. He raises his eyebrows.
“Not in the way you seem to think.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Katelin sighs, fixing her hair and smoothing out her shirt and skirt in a nervous movement that she seems to have done a million times. When she pulls her palms away, she wipes off some of the dust that’s smeared on her skin. “I’m basically a glorified secretary. My job is mostly looking busy so I don’t have to go see the King. I know my job is to report to him, but… I think you all can agree that not seeing the King is the better option. Honestly my job doesn’t really need to exist, but I think the King wants to have someone to go send off on tasks since he already has everything he needs without him having to ask with his Generals, Guard, Soldiers, and the landscapers, cleaners, and so on.”
Phoenix squints his eyes. “How long have you worked as the cream puff’s so-called secretary?”
“Why?” Camden asks.
Phoenix fixes him with a glare. When Brook and Wyatt move in to say something, Ky shakes his head. Myles gently ushers Astra back to Brook, who nuzzles her into a foreleg. Curling up and wrapping her tail around her legs, Astra leans into Brook, and Myles wipes a few ashes off of her wings.
“You could’ve left.”
Katelin studies Phoenix for a moment.
“That’s very easy for you to say, Phoenix.”
Phoenix lifts his head. “No, it isn’t.” His voice is low, flat, tight with a tension I haven’t heard before.
How much more of this before we can find Alex? I know it takes time, but I want Alex now. I don’t want her waiting while we’re searching. I don’t want her stuck in situations… stuck in something terrible. Stuck in some unspeakable… no, Grey, we can’t go there.
“You have magic.”
“I do,” Phoenix agrees, “and I will use it. But I never asked for magic. I did not give it to myself.”
Katelin chews on her lip for a moment. Brook pulls Astra a few paces away and whispers something to her that I cannot hear. When Jabez sits down with a stifled groan and a grimace, Wyatt makes their way over to him and kneels by his side.
“I have worked as the King’s secretary for…” Katelin glances at Camden. “Fifteen years? Gods, it’s been a while. At least fifteen years. A very long time, regardless.”
Phoenix’s expression bursts with rage. “You know every single one of the Generals, then.”
Katelin furrows her eyebrows, confused. She nods. “I do. There used to be more, but I do. “There are Spyro and Daeva. Outis used to be one, but the King determined he cannot do his job and so he bound his mouth.” She shudders. “That was rough event. I know the others, too.”
Astra gasps and her whole body lights up. She interrupts Katelin before she can continue. “You used to be a General, Phoenix!”
Phoenix flinches, eyes widening. For the first time I’ve seen it, fear flashes across his expression.
Neither he nor Ky responds, but they look at each other with pain.
Camden licks his lips. He clears his throat and cuts in before anyone else can speak. “Uh, no. I, uh, don’t believe Phoenix was a General. All the Generals I know of, which I’ll admit are only Spyro, Daeva, and the former General Outis, have been Generals for decades. Phoenix appears to be about the same age as Grey and Alex.”
Astra’s ears fall back. “Oh,” she says.
When Phoenix speaks, his voice is gruff, stiff in a tense sort of way, like he has to force the words out, as if they’re lodged in his throat, resisting being spoken. “I’m not a General, Astra. I never was. I’ve never worked for the Ki-cream puff.”
I watch, rocking on my feet and rubbing at a forearm as Phoenix’s gaze falls off to the side and he slouches, eyes unfocusing to stare into nothing until he’s seeing something that’s not here. When Ky folds his ears to the sides of his head and runs his cheek over Phoenix’s jaw, his brother jerks back, then smiles, a genuine smile, not one of the wicked grins that’s all snake teeth and bloodied lips.
“So, to confirm,” I say, sighing as I return to the original reason why we came here, “Camden, you do not know where Alex is?”
Camden shakes his head. “I’m sorry, Grey. I do not. I wish I did. Do you need help searching? She might just be hiding somewhere to try to get away from all…” Camden gestures vaguely all around us. “This, you know? It’s a lot.”
I twist my lips. “She might be.”
I want to search there, but I also want to search for the new Midnight Wolf, like Ky suggested. Both seem like possibilities. Both feel plausible. I pause for a moment, trying to feel within my heart, my soul, my being, as to whether one feels more true than the other, but neither does.
Brook steps forward. “Since we need to split up regardless, how about we do both. Astra, Jabez, and I can stay here, while Ky, Phoenix, and you, Grey, can search for the new Midnight Wolf. Myles and Wyatt, you can choose. And Camden and Katelin, you can, too.”
“I cannot leave my job, as much as I would like to. And speaking of, the King will be expecting me. So excuse me, but I must see if I have an outfit he will find acceptable. I sincerely hope you can find your sister, Grey. If I hear anything from the King or those in his castle, I will pass it along to Camden and do my best to make sure it makes its way to you and your friends. Word spreads, but you have to be listening right.” Katelin inclines her head, then ducks back into the tent she shares with Camden, who subtly moves to stand in front of the opening to block it.
“I can help from here to try to find Alex, but I cannot leave my sister. Her job… it’s dangerous. The King, he… he is unpredictable. He has strange requests. Katelin hates it, but how is she supposed to tell the King of Ragdon that she doesn’t want to work for him? What reason is she supposed to give him? She thought it was a great opportunity all those years ago, but now she’s stuck.”
“What job do you do?” Phoenix asks, eyes narrowed.
Camden snorts and rubs at the back of his neck with a nervous chuckle. “I don’t really have one. I work the odd jobs now and then, but it’s mostly under-the-table. Someone fixes some clothes for me and I fix a broken table. Someone makes me new earrings as a gift for Katelin and I fix their tent. I can do most jobs well enough to get by. Katelin does the work for us, and so I do almost all of the other work.”
“Ooh, cream puff would get pissy if he found out about you,” Phoenix snickers, wrinkling his muzzle. “Can’t have you lazing about in the Sea when you can be a brainless fish in his Guard and Soldiers. Don’t worry. We ain’t gonna turn you in. I’m gonna kill the cream puff, you see. I’m going to make him feel every bit of what he has done over and over until he begs and begs for mercy that will never come. I’m going to see how far I can push his body until his heart gives out long before I am done with him. Lucius won’t know what to do with him. They won’t know what to do with so many pieces.”
Camden squirms at the sick smile splitting Phoenix’s face in two.
“I, uh… I won’t get-get in your way, ok?”
“Good,” the black cat agrees.
I start to scratch my arm, but I stop when I realize what I’m doing. Twisting my forearm, I can see the red lines appearing where I had drawn my nails across my skin. A few small droplets of blood bead together, but within moments, silver light shimmers from beneath my flesh and the red welts begin to knit back together and fade.
I can hear Alex’s voice in the back of my mind. I can almost feel her gently bringing my fingers from my skin as she tells me that she’s here in that tone that breaks through the fog and never sounds sharp, judgmental. We’ve known each other forever so of course she knows that it doesn’t take much to for me to go from uneasy to I can’t cope. She’s pulled me away when I went past what I could deal with on my own too fast for me to realize. She’s helped me come back from panic attacks where I scratched at myself, some times worse than the others, sometimes enough to scar.
Most times, fear over teaching pushed me over the edge. In my mind, I’ve seen my students walking away from the Sea and off to the Barracks to become Guard and Soldiers. Some to become lead Guard, those who rank just below the Generals; others to train incoming Guard and Soldiers in a more official manner than what Alex did; others to do less of the fighting and more of the strategizing and the work to keep everything running smoothly since the King will not do that himself. I always try to take deep breaths, to slow my racing heart, to focus on the present and what’s real, but my mind twists reality and I quickly have a hard time telling truth from fiction. I know my students, at least before I found the malachite medallion and lost my job as teacher, would all return home to their parents at the end of the day, but in the midst of my panic attacks, all I could see was them going from their parents to my classroom to the Barracks to Lucius’s claim in a chain, one-by-one, all in a single file line that never seemed to end and I knew every face.
My fear was always that I would never be able to keep my students from meeting Lucius before their time, because there had to be another way than an ever-growing army and far too many deaths that could always be prevented. No one needs to die like that. The King doesn’t need to be King. We’re one island. We don’t have to fight.
They don’t have to become Guard and Soldiers. The students don’t have to become Guard and Soldiers. We don’t have to fight. There’s another way.
I’d thought so in the past, and I still do now.
I feel the ghost of warmth as I imagine the rasp of Alex’s hand over mine, the firm squeeze to hold me in the present and tether me to something I can cling to.
“Take a deep breath, Grey,” she’d say. “I’m right here. Listen to my voice, and we’ll inhale together, ok?”
I close my eyes and focus on the warmth of the malachite medallion and I drag in as slow of an inhale as I can manage, but it shakes in my throat.
Alex, where are you?
My sister should be with us.