The Angel of Elydria (The Dawn Mirror Chronicles Book 1) (62 page)

“You won’t? Oh. I guess that…makes sense.” Penny hung her head, trying to swallow the sadness that kept threatening to bubble over. Before she could let her emotions get the better of her, she shook her head and gritted her teeth. “Yes. I’m sure, let’s go.”

“All right…remember, hold on tight. I don’t know what’ll happen if you accidently let go and I’m not sure I want to find out, either,” Hector said, opening his arms for Penny. The whirlpool of emotions within her calmed somewhat as Hector laid his hand over her back and gripped Penny tightly to his chest. She smelled his familiar cedar pine scent as he reached out with his other hand.

The world seemed to rip apart at the seams and they were plunged into the raging torrent of soundlessness that Penny remembered in vivid detail from the first time she had traveled between worlds. This time, however, as she passed through the intangible wall between Earth and Elydria, she felt not fear, but sorrow.

A tranquil scene snapped into Hector and Penny’s view, along with the feeling of being spit out of a tube. Penny stumbled away from Hector, feeling dizzy as her eyes attempted to refocus. It took a moment for her eyes to decide to work, and all the breath left her body as Penny beheld her home. She stood still, taking in the image of the house that for so long had seemed like a memory from a faraway dream. Her eyes fell on the spot where she had sat on her last morning here and she could not suppress an emotional, bubbling laugh. Unable to contain herself, Penny raced toward the front door and Hector followed, unlocking it with a wave of his hand and a sparkle of golden runes.

Penny flew inside as the smell of home filled her nose. Though it was wonderfully nostalgic, it seemed different somehow, as if something vital had been altered.

“
Mom! It’s me!
” Penny hollered at the top of her voice as she ran deeper into her house, her eyes seeking the familiar and comforting sights. The squishy couch, the TV, and her mother’s kitschy figurines in their glass casings were illuminated in the pale lights dotting the ceiling. There was no answer from the second story or anywhere around her, so Penny ran into the kitchen.

“Muffins! Oh, my mom’s muffins! Hector, come here, you’ve gotta try these!” Penny cried, swiping a chocolate one from the counter and shoving it into Hector’s face as he stepped into the kitchen. He removed it from his mouth and gave Penny an amused look.

“Best thing you’ve ever tasted in your entire life, right?” Penny laughed, not waiting for him to answer as she grabbed a muffin for herself, turned a sharp corner and put her foot on the bottom stair. Hector called her name, halting her ascent. A heavy pressure weighed down on her heart as she turned to face him. One look at his expression and Penny knew what he was going to say, and discovered that she adamantly did not want him to go.

“Penelope,” he said softly, stepping across the room and grasping her arms, “I think it’s time.”

Penny tried to hide the fact that her heart felt as if it were splitting in two and smiled at him. She began speaking very fast, feeling that the more she spoke, the more it would fight off the sense of loss threatening to tear her apart. “You’re leaving already? You’ve got to at least stay to help me explain to Mom where I’ve been. Without your magic as proof, she’ll think I’m cr―” Penny stopped herself as she listened to what she was saying. “That’s a complete lie, of course she’ll believe me, but I still thin―”

“Penny, you and I both know that wouldn’t be a very good idea,” Hector interrupted.

Penny’s eyes stung. “B-but…you can’t leave. I―what am I going to do without you?” she murmured, looking away to hide the sudden onslaught of tears. Hector laughed and stroked her hair, a sweet and unexpected gesture. Penny wanted to throw herself into his arms and beg him not to leave, but she could not make her body obey.

“You’ll be fine, I know it―goodness knows you’re brave enough,” Hector said and laughed again, but it was an empty sound.

“You―you’re not going to forget about me, are you?” she asked, meaning to sound humorous, and knowing she ended up sounding pathetic.

Hector frowned. “I don’t think it’s possible for someone to forget their dearest friend―and owing to the look of brazen disbelief in your eyes I feel compelled to add that I truly mean that.” He raised his eyebrows, took his hands off Penny and stepped back a few paces.

She turned back toward the stairs, squeezing her eyes shut as she began the climb. “Just go―I don’t want to watch you disappear,” she called back. Not waiting to see if he would speak to her again, Penny climbed up the stairs louder than necessary, making sure her footsteps blocked out any sort of sound Hector might make as he vanished forever.

Penny meandered through the dark halls of her house, fighting back tears all the way and thinking of the nightmare that had visited her time and again. She stepped in front of the door to her room, half expecting to see it full of filth and dead insects, but when it swung open, Penny saw all of her possessions almost as she had left them. She walked inside with trepidation, surprised to find she felt frightened. Moving past her bed covered in stuffed animals, Penny picked up
Murder at Woodrow Manor
with a dry laugh. The bookmark was still inside, like her mother had known that someday Penny would return and want to pick up reading from where she left off.

Penny stepped over to her desk and looked over her mismatched oddments and computer, unable to bridle the intense feeling of eeriness weighing down on her. It was as if this room that had once been her sanctuary from the world was now sterile and unwelcoming, and she had no business being here. She almost felt nauseated with bittersweet emotion as she looked at the photos of her and Maddie stacked on the table beside her college books. She backed away from it all, wishing that there had been bugs and dead leaves instead of this unsettling sensation.

What’s wrong with me? I should be overjoyed. I’ve been wanting to come home for months now, I―

It hit her like a punch to the gut. The color drained from her face as she swayed in the center of her room, surrounded by the ghosts of her past. It did not take long before urgency overtook her and she was down the stairs in a heartbeat.

“Hector, Hector! Wait, please! Don’t go!” she screamed at the top of her lungs, her heart crashing away in her chest. She had never felt this desperate before, not when she was being assaulted by the merciless vententula plant in the woods outside of Dewthorne, not in the cemetery beside the wraith, nor when she had stolen Deimos’s memories, or even stood up against Nestor on the palace balcony in Hulver.

“Hector!
PLEASE!
” Penny shouted, hot tears pouring down her face as she landed downstairs and found nobody there.

“Please, please don’t be gone…
HECTOR!
” Penny cried, rushing through the living room and out the front door. The tears were coming fast and with stinging pain now. She could see nothing outside but the blurry, meager glow of twilight on her driveway. There was no sign of anyone. Pure anguish hit as Penny fell to her knees, covering her face with her hands and sobbing. She had made the worst mistake of her life, and realized it moments too late.

Hector’s not coming back…I’ll never see Annette, or Simon, or anyone ever again. I’ll go back to my empty life and be forced to continue on as if nothing ever happened,
thought Penny through her tears, feeling that no amount of willpower could make her return to her dead-end college or resign herself to a mundane future. She was close to a complete collapse when a strained voice called out from behind her, coming from the front door of her house.

“Penny?” the voice cried, accompanied by hurried footsteps on gravel. At first she was sure it was her mother and was confused as to how her voice had altered so much in the months that she had been gone, but when she looked up through her watering eyes to see Hector racing toward her, Penny almost passed out with relief.

“Hector! I thought you left! I thought you’d gone,” she sobbed, getting up and wiping the tears away from her eyes as surging happiness swept through her. “Hang on, why didn’t you leave? What were you doing in there?”

Shyness crossed Hector’s face. “Well, it’s a bit embarrassing, but those muffins―I wanted to take a few back with me, I…I didn’t think you’d mind,” he stammered, his face turning pink. Penny laughed out loud and wiped the last of her tears away.

“Leave it to you to be thinking of sweets at a time like this,” she laughed in relief and Hector became more flustered.

“N-never mind that! What’s wrong, why were you screaming?”

Penny looked at her feet and sighed. It was not going to be easy to make him understand. “Let’s go back inside. I’ll make some tea for you and you can have a muffin or two while I explain.”

SHE COULDN’T HELP but feel redeemed as she put the kettle on the blue flame of the stove and sat down in front of Hector with her hands folded. “I think I may have made a mistake. I…I want to go back with you and stay in Elydria.”

Hector’s jaw dropped. “What?! All you’ve wanted since we ended up there was to get home, and now that you’re here you want to go
back
to Elydria? Are you feeling quite well?” He stretched out a hand to test her forehead’s temperature, and she batted him away with a frown.

“Look, it’s hard to explain but…well, in Elydria I kept having a dream that I would come back to my room and it would be filled with all this weird stuff…things like dead leaves and bugs, bones and dirt, you know?” Penny told him, and Hector nodded, looking as if he could not understand how the two were connected. Penny cleared her throat and went over to the counter as the teapot began to hiss.

“Well, I couldn’t understand what it meant before, but I do now. When I said I wanted to come home all those times before, I was confused. I didn’t just want to
be
home…I wanted to go back to the time before. I wanted the simplicity of not having to live with danger around every turn or the responsibility of carrying out Adrielle’s orders. I wanted to go back to being the person that I was before this happened, not to this place,” Penny elaborated, shutting off the stove just as the teapot began to whistle and pouring the steaming water into two cups.

“But I can’t do that no matter how much I want to. My old life has been erased. This place, this home―I don’t fit into it anymore. Not when I’ve been to Iverton and flown on the back of a giant moth or had conversations with dragons. This life, no matter how nice it was then, doesn’t have a place for me in it anymore. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“I think so,” Hector said as she handed him a mug of steaming tea. Penny sipped her drink and looked around at the green kitchen and its collection of houseplants that no longer belonged to her.

“The person that I was―she’s as good as dead now. I must’ve left her sitting on that curb that morning. I’ve still got more to do in Elydria. So, that’s why I have to go back. I want to help you look for the missing parts of Seival, and I want to learn all the answers to the questions that will be sure to drive me crazy in the meantime,” Penny explained with a small smile, her heart fluttering.

Hector smiled back with genuine emotion. “I’m…well, I’m glad, though I’m still not
quite
sure about your reasoning.” He lifted his eyebrows again, taking a bite of the muffin and savoring the taste.

Penny blinked. “Y-you’re glad?”

“Of course I am! I was certainly not looking forward to telling Annette that you weren’t going to be back,” Hector confessed, taking a long drink of tea and watching Penny with calculating eyes, as if to gauge her reaction. She shook her head and got up to locate a pen and a piece of paper, then sat down at the table and began to write, taking a break every few seconds to take a sip of tea or a bite of muffin.

“What are you doing?” Hector asked, trying to make out what she was writing.

“Writing a note to my mom; I don’t want her to think I’m dead or something like that,” she explained, nibbling on the end of the pen as she thought of what to put down next. Hector looked astounded for perhaps the hundredth time that night.

“You’re not going to wait for her to return?”

Penny frowned. “She’ll never let me go, and don’t think I want to see her crying and begging me not to leave, even if I do miss her more than anything else in this world. I―” Penny found it hard to go on as terrible sadness welled up within her. She cleared her throat. “I’d love to see her, but I know it’s for the best that I don’t―not right now. I can’t let anything change my mind. I know we’ll see each other again, and when we do it’ll be at the exact right time. You can meet her then, too,” she added with a grin, and resumed writing.