A Fractured Light (6 page)

Chapter 8

T
he front hallway was dark but for a faint light from the kitchen. It took me a moment to get my bearings before walking toward it.

What was I going to tell her? Where had I been?

The kitchen was deserted and still. The sink was clean and empty, the counters were spotless, the cleanest I’d ever seen them. The floor was so shiny that I could see my reflection in the polished wood. Was Aunt Jo out on a trip with Into the Woods? My stomach sank at the idea of coming home only to find myself alone again—like I’d been right before I’d left.

In all my life, I’d never known my adopted guardian to be such a neat freak.

Something was wrong. Something didn’t feel right at all.

But then I began to notice small hints of life here and there. A wet tea bag resting on a spoon on top of the microwave. A book with an envelope holding the reader’s place. Some neat stacks of papers on the kitchen table, with the topmost page pulled slightly askew, as if someone had been looking at it recently and hadn’t put it neatly back in place. I walked over to the table and picked it up.

My birth certificate.

Heart pounding, I riffled through the rest of the papers on the table. Xeroxes of my passport, Social Security information, and my adoption papers were sorted and stacked into piles, along with paperwork from the River Springs Police Department for filing a missing persons report.

I started when I heard a voice, and seconds later Aunt Jo came into the room talking on the phone.

“. . . about five five, black hair, gray eyes, a champion skier, sort of intense, but once you get to know her—” When she saw me, she stopped. She clicked the phone off and it fell from her hand and clattered to the floor.

“Skye,” she whispered. Her eyes filled with tears. There was such a mix of emotions on her face: sadness, relief, anger, regret.

“I’m . . . ,” I started, not sure what I was about to say.

“Oh my god,” she said, running to me and squeezing me in her arms. “Oh, Skye, Skye, Skye,” she repeated, rocking back and forth. “Are you okay? Where the
hell
have you been? You are in a world of trouble, young lady, but I’m too happy you’re home to be angry right now.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said, burying my face in her hair and letting her hold me. “I’m so,
so
sorry. I missed you so much.” For the first time, I realized just how scared I’d been that I’d never see her again. She pulled away, looking me over as we both sat on the floor in the middle of the kitchen. She squeezed her hands up and down my arms as if checking for broken bones.

“What happened to you? Do you even know what you put us through? Do you have any idea how worried we were?” She wiped her eyes. “I should have been here. I should have said something, told you, I should have—”

“Aunt Jo,” I said. “Stop the crazy talk. It’s not your fault!”

“What happened?” she asked again, running her fingers over the cuts and bruises on my face. “My god, look at you. Are you okay? Do you need to go to the hospital?”

The time for that had definitely passed.

“No,” I said. “I’m fine. Really. Just tired. I missed my bed.”

“Of course,” she said, pulling me in for an air-sucking hug again. “Of course. You don’t have to worry. You’re home now. You’re safe.”

But how could I tell her the truth? I wasn’t safe. The white feather told me all I needed to know. I may have been back in the house I grew up in, with Aunt Jo there to take care of me and make me my favorite meals. But everything about home was going to be different from now on. “Safe” couldn’t have been farther from how I felt.

Upstairs, I took a shower—my first shower in days. I let the hot water spill over me, washing away the dirt and the knots in my hair. Washing away every trace, every memory of what had happened in the woods that night. I let every betrayal, every thought of Devin swirl down the drain. Steam billowed up around me and I let myself get lost in it.

After I wrapped myself in a big plush towel and padded back into my room, I took my favorite T-shirt and boxers out of a drawer and put them on my bed.

“Skye!” Aunt Jo called from the hallway. Her voice was nervous and didn’t sound right. “Everything okay in there? Do you need anything?”

“I’m fine!” I called. “I’ll be out in a second!” I turned to my full-length mirror and let the towel fall to the floor around me. My stomach was smooth and unmarked, as if I’d never been stabbed at all. I couldn’t believe it. I ran my fingers across my skin, but they felt nothing. Goose bumps prickled my arms and legs, and suddenly I had the creepy feeling of being watched. I quickly stepped into the old flannel boxers and pulled the T-shirt over my head. It felt like forever since I’d put them on, and I relished the feel of the soft cotton. I finished brushing my hair, pulling it up into a knot on the top of my head.

Suddenly I winced, pitching forward. The room seemed to spin and fade away into darkness. When I looked into the mirror again, I had to grab the dresser with both hands for support. A dark wet spot was blooming from the center of my shirt. Frantic, I lifted it, and what I saw made me scream out loud.

There was a gaping stab wound through my stomach, seeping blood onto my hands, the dresser, the carpet. My vision ran red with it. “Jo!” I yelled. “Aunt Jo!”

“What is it?” She came bursting into the room, and everything came back into focus. The light returned, and my dizziness cleared. “Skye?” she asked, coming to me. “Are you okay?”

“I—” I looked down at my hands, the carpet, my stomach. There was no wound, no blood. Everything was the way it had been. “It’s nothing,” I said. “I’m—I’m sorry. I thought . . .”

She looked at me with an expression I couldn’t read.

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. I had to stop dwelling on what had happened. I was home now. It was time to move on. “I’m fine.”

“Come downstairs,” she said. She looked so helpless, like she was running through a mental checklist of all the things she might have done to drive me away. “I made you something. We’ll talk.”

We sat across the table in the kitchen. Aunt Jo had whipped up my favorite snack while I was in the shower, and the warm, fresh-from-the-oven cinnamon cookies now sat, cooling, on a plate between us.

“I’m not going to push you,” Aunt Jo said. “You’re a good kid, Skye, and I trust you. You know that, right? I trust you to make your own decisions and not get influenced by a bad crowd.” She twirled the plate nervously in her fingers. “But I need to know where you were.” She paused. “And you’re definitely grounded.”

“But I—”

“No buts. That’s not negotiable. I was worried sick about you. What was I supposed to think? Do you even understand how selfish it was to disappear like that?”

“I guess not,” I said hoarsely. This was the worst—getting yelled at, feeling guilty for something that had been beyond my control. I wanted to yell, “
None of it was my fault!”
But I held it in for my safety—and for Aunt Jo’s. Who knew what the Order would do to her if I told her the truth?

I was sick of everything being
out
of my control. Anger burned through me as I clenched my fists under the table.

“So. Where were you? Not even your friends knew. Were you with those guys? The two you were telling me about?”

I wondered, for a moment, if I could get away with telling her an
abbreviated
version of the truth. The idea of continuing to lie to Aunt Jo—someone who had always treated me like I was her real, blood daughter—made me feel sick.

“There’s a cabin, in the woods. It’s not too far from here. I . . . discovered it. On a hike.” I swallowed. “I was scared.” And that, at least, was the truth. “I was standing there in the hospital with Cassie, and it looked like she might not . . .” I found myself getting choked up. “It looked like she was going to die, and it felt like my fault. Like I wasn’t there for her when she needed me this semester.” Aunt Jo murmured something to herself. “But it felt like everyone needed something different from me
.
And I didn’t know how to handle it all. Like everyone had a different idea of what my life should be. I had to get away.”

“Skye,” she said softly. “What happened to Cassie was
not
your fault. One thing has nothing to do with the other.” I wished right then that I could have told her everything, but that’s how Cassie had gotten hurt in the first place. If I broke down and told Aunt Jo, I’d only be putting her in danger, too. And after seeing Cass in the hospital that day, her face bruised and her arms and legs in casts—that was something I couldn’t face.

I just had to handle this on my own.

Not on your own
, a voice in the back of my mind whispered.
You have Asher now. You have the whole Rebellion on your side.

“A cabin,” Aunt Jo mused, breaking me out of my thoughts. “What kind of cabin?”

“Kind of old. There was one of those toilets with the chains and weird closets with lots of little drawers. But someone was living there much more recently: there was coffee from at least the nineties or something.”

Aunt Jo got a funny look in her eye. “I know that place,” she said. “I put that coffee there. Into the Woods has been trying to buy it for years, to use as a trail stop.” A small smile spread across her face. “How funny that you ended up in that cabin. That’s really where you went?”

I nodded.

“Thank you for telling me,” she said. “I’m not happy that you felt you had to run away for a few days instead of talking to me about it—”

“You were never here!”

“—but I understand that I was gone a lot. Jeez, Skye, I was just about to say that. I’m so sorry I left you alone for so long. I’m here now, and I’ll be here when you need me. Just talk to me, okay?” She eyed the cut on my face. “Believe it or not, your old Aunt Jo was a teenager once.”

“Please,” I snorted.

“All I’m saying is, I may know what you’re going through better than you think.”

“Fine.” I slowly let my fists unclench under the table. “I’ll try.”

“Good, but for now, you should go to bed,” she said. “You look exhausted.” She stood up and walked toward the door. When she got there, she turned around. The light from the stairs cast a fuzzy halo around her blondish-gray hair. There was something in her eyes that I couldn’t figure out.

Things were definitely different between us now. First Ian, now Aunt Jo.

I realized that the look in her eyes—it was worry. Fear. It was different from the looks she’d given me earlier in the winter, each time she was about to go away and afraid of leaving me alone. No, this wasn’t about what might happen to me. It was, I realized, about what
I
had done—or might do.

It was the same way Asher had treated me at the cabin. Like I was something fragile and yet unpredictable, something extremely precious.

I glanced at the window, wondering if he and Ardith—and Gideon now, too—were out there. Watching. Keeping me safe.

When I turned back from the window, Aunt Jo was still staring at me.

“You look older,” she said. “You know that?”

I thought about all that had happened to me since I’d turned seventeen.

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess I am.” There were dark circles under her eyes and the lines in her forehead looked deeper than I’d remembered. She looked older, too.

“G’night,” she said.

“Night, Aunt Jo,” I whispered back.

I couldn’t really remember what it felt like to be with my mom, but if I’d had to guess, I figured it probably felt exactly like this.

I stayed in the kitchen for a few minutes longer after Aunt Jo went upstairs, absently nibbling on a cookie. The spicy sweet taste reminded me of everything from before. Suddenly my stomach flipped, and I didn’t feel so great. A shiver ran down my spine as I remembered that time in the kitchen, at night, alone, when Raven had first confronted me. Was she out there right now? What if they all were? Waiting in the bushes and behind trees. Poised to attack the first chance they got.

I stood up quickly, turned the light off in the kitchen, and sprinted up the stairs to my room.

It was freezing in there, and it took only a second to figure out why: my window was wide open. I rushed to it—but instead of closing it automatically like I might have a month ago, I stuck my head out the window and looked up toward the roof.

“Asher?” I whispered. “Are you up there?” I heard a rustle of feathers in response, and then he appeared in my window.

“Hey.” He winked, his eyes glittering with mischief. “Want a hand up?” Grinning, I threw on a hoodie and sweatpants. I put my hand in his, and he pulled me up with him to the roof.

“Nice look,” he said.

“Shut up,” I replied. He put his arm around me, and I sank into the warmth of his body. All the tension I’d felt talking to Ian and Aunt Jo melted away, and I knew, right then, that this was home. Being with Asher. That was all that mattered.

As long as we were together, everything would be fine.

“They’re out there,” Asher said under his breath, looking out at the field below. “Do you see them?” I looked down at the field.