Aerenden: The Child Returns (Ærenden) (4 page)

“No!”
she yelled, and then slapped her hand over her mouth, too late to muffle the
noise. The footsteps upstairs quickened.

“Meg,”
her father spoke again and her eyes filled with tears. His voice was no more
than a whisper. “Trust Nick. He’ll keep you safe.”

She
nodded, and then shook as her father gathered his last breath. The footsteps
reached the top of the stairs. Her father shuddered into stillness, but she had
no time to mourn before Nick grabbed her hand and yanked her out the front
door.

Cold
air bit her face. Black clouds gathered overhead, shadowing the day in
darkness. A gust of wind whipped leaves across the yard, building small funnel
clouds, but she ignored them. She focused on the back of Nick’s head, then on
her car when she realized they would need it to escape. They had nearly reached
the driveway before she remembered she did not have her keys. She skidded to a
stop. Turning back toward the house, she caught her breath when she saw their
pursuers exiting the front door.

There
were three of them, each taller than the last. Dark brown cloaks covered them
from head to foot and they all carried heavy wood clubs stained with blood.
They moved with an unnatural speed and disjointed grace, as if they floated
instead of touching the ground. A putrid, rotting scent emanated from them in
waves. It rolled Meaghan’s stomach, pitching her breakfast mid-way up her
throat before she controlled the reaction. Nick grabbed her arm and pulled her toward
her parents’ SUV.

“The
keys,” she gasped, daring a glance behind her. The creatures grew closer. “We
don’t—”

“I
have them. James gave them to me. Get in the car.”

She
heard a beep as Nick deactivated the alarm. She ran to the passenger side.
Yanking open the door, she slid into the seat while he turned the key.

Releasing
the parking brake, Nick threw the transmission into reverse, and then stomped
on the gas pedal. The SUV squealed down the driveway seconds before their
pursuers reached them. At the road, Nick yanked the wheel, spinning the car
onto the blacktop so it pointed toward the highway, then shifted into drive,
and gunned the engine once more.

A
thud echoed through the vehicle as one of the creatures jumped onto the roof,
gripping the edges of the car with long, skeletal fingers that gave the
illusion of skin suctioned to bone. Meaghan screamed and tore her eyes from the
creature.

“Hold
on to something,” Nick told her. “I’m going to try to shake him.”

She
grabbed the door handle with both hands and Nick accelerated again, swerving
left and then right before taking a sharp corner at full speed. The creature
still held. It inched across the car, moving down the windshield so Meaghan saw
his face. The monster staring back at her appeared worse than any of the
horrors she had seen in her nightmares. His eyes shone crimson red, pools of
blood sunken into ashen skin. His mouth appeared to be no more than a black
hole filled with fibrous webbing. A mass of disfigured scar tissue filled the
space where his nose should have been. He lifted his fists, then brought them
back down, pounding on the window in an attempt to break it.

“Put
your seatbelt on,” Nick commanded. Heeding his warning, she clicked her belt
into place and he slammed on the brakes. The monster flew from the SUV, landing
on a car parked in the street. A burglar alarm blared an incessant, alternating
pitch that drew neighbors into their yards.

Nick’s
maneuver halted one pursuer, but the other two had not given up. From the side
mirror, Meaghan could see them gaining speed. Nick jammed his foot onto the gas
pedal again and headed north, as fast as the roads would allow.

Meaghan
kept her eyes glued to the mirror, watching the creatures fade into specks of
brown until Nick turned onto the highway. He seemed relieved, but she could not
shake her fear.

“They’re
gone for now,” Nick assured her after she had checked the mirror for the fifth
time in the same number of seconds. “They’re powerful, but they’re not very
bright.”

“They’re
not very…” she echoed, her voice trailing off when she
realized the underlying meaning of his words. She shook her head. “You can’t
possibly know anything about those things. They aren’t real. They can’t be.
None of this is real.”

Nick
set his jaw, and for a brief second his eyes met hers before he turned them
back to the road. “It’s real, Meg. I wish it wasn’t, but it is. The creatures
are Mardróch. Now get some sleep. You’ve been up all night and we have a long
drive ahead of us. We can talk when we get there.”

Sleep
was the furthest thing from her mind. She wanted to scream, to run. She wanted
to shake Nick and break him out of whatever spell held him firm and emotionless
beside her. She wanted to wake, but the pain she had felt when she saw her
mother on the stairs, heard her father take his last breath, still ripped
through her and she knew this nightmare would never be over.

Only
Nick could decipher what had happened, but his white knuckles on the steering
wheel and hard gaze on the highway told her there would be no conversation. He
remained focused on escape.

Meaghan
opted to do the same. Closing her eyes, she let tears ease her into a dreamless
abyss.

S
CREAMS ECHOED
across
the cold air, startling Meaghan awake and shredding the small amount of peace
she had found. Yanking open her eyes, she gasped when blood filled her vision,
then eased from her sight in thick, crimson rivulets to reveal the dark wood of
her living room floor and the white risers of the staircase, stained pink with
her mother’s blood.  

Logic
told her she should be in the car with Nick, escaping to an unknown
destination, but her mother’s body lay before her, twisted and tortured, bent
and bruised in death. Footsteps pounded the floor above her, but she ignored
them, dismissing the peril to focus on her mother’s pale face and the red hair
splayed across her shoulders. Meaghan reached out a hand to brush the strands
aside, to feel the softness of them between her fingers, but a stirring of her
mother’s body froze her.

It
had not been much, only the slightest inflation of her mother’s chest, and Meaghan
would have credited it to imagination except it came again, this time accompanied
by rattling breath. Meaghan stepped back, and then froze once more when her
mother’s eyes opened, fixing Meaghan with a heavy stare.

“Meg,”
her mother’s voice rasped. Red spittle escaped from her mouth, spraying the
front of Meaghan’s sweater. “Meg,” her mother repeated as she lifted her hand,
her fingers coated in dark, dried blood.

Meaghan
swallowed hard. Her heart raced, but her hand drifted forward on instinct,
seeking her mother’s comfort.

“Trust
him, Meg,” her mother’s lips moved, though her father’s voice escaped them. “Trust
Nick.”

Meaghan’s
fingers closed around her mother’s. They felt hard, unyielding, like plastic.

“You’re
in danger, Meg. Danger…There are things…I have to tell you….”

Meaghan
fought to hold on to her mother’s words, but they faded, lost to the drone of
an unseen engine, the sound of rocks crunching somewhere beneath her. Then all
sound, including her mother’s voice, succumbed to silence. She squeezed her
eyes shut, opening them again to search for her mother’s face.

She
found a black dashboard. Her eyes coasted along the smooth plastic to the car
door at her side and the handle grasped beneath her white knuckles. She
released her grip, turning her head when Nick coughed beside her. He watched her,
his eyes rimmed red, and she knew he was real and what she had just seen had
been a dream. Or rather, a nightmare.

Her
mother was dead, and any secrets she had held had died with her.

The
thought stabbed through Meaghan’s heart and her eyes drifted from Nick’s face,
seeking solace in whatever lay beyond the windshield.

Dark
clouds had overtaken the sky, fulfilling their earlier promise with an onslaught
of rain and snow. Beyond the haze, she could make out the outline of tall trees
and low-lying brush that formed the edge of a thick forest.

“What
time is it?” she asked.

“Five,”
Nick said, his voice as hollow as her mother’s had been in her dream.

She
nodded, too numbed by her own pain to acknowledge his. “Where are we?”

“North
of the house by several hundred miles,” he answered. His voice grew stronger
and steel returned to it. “We need to go. We have some distance left to go
tonight and we need to walk it.”

Her
focus came back to him. She frowned. “I don’t see how we can. It’s snowing. I doubt
our sweaters will be warm enough.”

“It
won’t be easy,” he admitted. “But once we start moving, we should be okay.”
Taking her hand in his, he offered a thin smile, though it did not hold any
encouragement. “I’m sorry. I wish we were better prepared.”

“How
do we prepare for something like this?” she asked, dropping his hand. “It’s not
like we could have known,” she hesitated, not wanting to say the words that
would acknowledge her parents’ deaths. “That we would be out here,” she finally
finished.

Nick
pressed his lips together, and then averted his gaze. In guilt, she realized,
though she did not understand why. They had found out about the intruders at
the same time. They had both seen the carnage and together, they had failed to
rescue her father.

The
realization stung her heart once again, burning hot tears in her eyes. The
tears coursed down her cheeks, splashing onto her hands before she saw Nick’s
blurry image move closer. She fisted her hands on the back of his sweater,
burying her head in his neck as sobs came fast, racking her body. Her grief
overwhelmed her until she had exhausted her energy for it and her body stilled.
Nick pressed his lips to the top of her head before he let her go.

“I’m
so sorry,” he whispered. Sorrow hung in his voice and she felt her throat
constrict with her own grief. She swallowed to erase the sudden feeling she
might choke to death.

“You
knew they were there,” she whispered, forcing her gaze to his face. His eyes
widened slightly and she continued to press him. “You knew, didn’t you? When we
were in your apartment, when I—”

“Not
the way you mean.” He placed his hand on the door handle and turned from her.
“We need to go.”

She
grabbed his arm to keep him from leaving. “What happened, Nick? What aren’t you
telling me? You feel guilty. I can tell.”

“Nothing.”
He yanked his arm from her fingers, facing her long enough for her to see the
anger now stiffening his face. “Stop, all right? I’m too exhausted to keep you
out right now, so stop reading me.”

“Reading
you?” She shook her head, confused. “I don’t even know what that means. What on
earth are you talking about?”

“Forget
it. Let’s go.”

Without
waiting for her objection, he opened the car door and stepped outside. She followed
his lead, moving around the vehicle to the driver’s side.

“What
are you talking about?” she asked again, frustration creeping into her voice
when he did not answer. “You can’t keep avoiding my questions.”

“I
can and I will. At least until it’s safe.” He opened the back door of the SUV
and pulled out the backpack. When he turned to her again, she felt a cold that
had nothing to do with the weather. Despite her talent for understanding small
emotional cues, she found his face indistinguishable. His posture appeared
impassive, his eyes vacant. His anger had dissolved in an instant.

“What—?”
she started to ask what had happened, but did not know how to finish the
question. It made no sense.

“I
blocked you,” he said before turning from her to gather branches from the
ground. “Help me hide the car. By now, the police will have found your parents
and assumed you’ve been kidnapped. Their theories on me won’t be great, so I’d
rather not give them an easy path to hunt us down.”

She
stood rooted to her spot. “What do you mean ‘blocked’ me?”

He
stacked the branches over the car, creating a nest. “Are you going to help?”

Her
hands shook, so she dug them into her pockets to warm them. “Not until you
answer me.”

“There’s
no time.”

“You
promised me you’d answer my questions when we got here. I’m not taking another
step until you do.”

“You
can’t be serious,” he said, then sighed when she moved to a tree stump and sat
down. “We’ll freeze to death if we stay here.”

“I’ll
run the car.”

“If
you do, you’ll draw attention. We have to worry about the Mardróch finding us.”

“You
said we lost them.”

He
threw another branch on top of the car, and then turned to frown at her.
“There’s nothing wrong with being cautious, but even if they’re gone, we still
have the police to worry about.”

“I
don’t have to worry about the police. You do,” she pointed out, crossing her
arms over her chest when he continued to collect branches without looking at
her. “And why do you? Why would they assume you had something to do with this?”