No matter how far we run,
he thought,
we can’t escape ourselves.
He had one more call to make.
And a long flight in the morning.
Chapter 27
Hadenford, New Jersey
As rain began to fall, Fallon and Logan entered the house and found Liana in the kitchen alone, making a fresh cup of tea. Before they could ask, she informed them that Chelsea was asleep in the downstairs guestroom while Thalia had returned to her attic studio. “Strangest thing,” Liana said. “It’s as if Thalia worked some magic on Chelsea.” Fallon must have had bad poker-face because Liana became alarmed and waved off her assumption. “Figurative magic, Fallon, not literal. I suspect Chelsea is simply overwhelmed by everything and her mind simply needs a time out.”
“A sanity break,” Logan said humorlessly.
Fallon said, “Can’t get enough of those around here.”
Liana cocked her head at Fallon. “Speaking of sanity breaks,” she said. “You’ve come straight from the déjà vu department.”
“That’s me, Boomerang Maguire,” Fallon said with more lightheartedness than she felt.
“I was about to join the boys, but Logan and I can take you home again.”
“That’s okay,” Fallon said. “Brought my own transportation this time. Although… I may regret this, but is it okay if I listen in?”
“Don’t see why not. The more the… I don’t know”—Liana frowned—“the less scarier?”
“Works for me,” Logan said.
They filed into Ambrose’s office where the old man sat facing Barrett and Chief Grainger in the twin wingchairs. The young men offered their seats to Liana and Fallon, but both women declined. Fallon didn’t plan to stay long. Frankly, she could use her own sanity break, from everything the Walkers had told her and all that she’d seen. But first, she needed to know what would happen next.
Chief Grainger had the same question on his mind. “What now?”
Ambrose sighed. “We wait.”
“That’s it?” Grainger asked incredulously. “Your family has spent centuries fighting these rifts, and your plan is to wait?”
“Oversimplification, perhaps,” Ambrose said. “While we wait, I will research our records for prior mentions of Carnifex.”
“Who?” Fallon asked Liana, who stood to her left, sipping tea.
“According to Thalia,” Liana whispered, “Carnifex is the demon responsible for what happened tonight.”
“How could she—?”
Liana tapped her head. “Walker talents.”
Fallon made a silent ‘Oh’ with her mouth and gave a nod of understanding before returning her attention to Ambrose who was elaborating on the nature of rifts to Grainger.
“—important to remember that, at this moment, the rift does not exist in our reality. It’s simply not here—anywhere. We must wait for its return, or for one of us—Logan, probably—to sense its imminent reappearance. We must use this time, a grace period if you will, to learn what we can about the exact nature of the threat, to be ready to face the challenge by whatever means necessary.”
Liana added optimistically, “And Thalia may recall more about Carnifex in time to help us.” She sighed. “Unfortunately, her memory is jumbled at best.”
“And her coherence is hit or miss,” Barrett said grimly.
Ambrose wagged an index finger at him. “Except that this threat seems to have given her more focus than usual.”
“Regardless,” Barrett said, “we can’t count on her to lead the way, or even point the way. You want a plan? It’s simple. Next time this hell dimension rift appears, we cross over and rid ourselves of Carnifex once and for all.”
“Hell dimension?” Fallon whispered to Liana, a little more stridently than she’d hoped.
Liana frowned, unwilling to answer that query. From Fallon’s right, Logan whispered, “Not a happy place.”
“Each time the rift appears,” Ambrose said, again directing his answers to Grainger. “It will be larger than the time before. Eventually, the rift will be wide enough to allow Carnifex passage into our dimension. Our goal, obviously, is to stop him before that happens.”
“He’s done enough damage already,” Logan said bitterly. “Imagine if he has free rein of our world.”
Fallon visibly shuddered at the thought.
Okay,
she thought,
that makes one too many nightmare-inducing moments for one day.
“I’d rather not imagine it,” she said to everyone in the room. “Home and bed beckon, though I seriously doubt sleep is in my immediate future.”
“Try though,” Ambrose said sympathetically. “We all need our rest.”
“Long day,” she said with a nod. “School tomorrow. Apocalypse the day after.”
“I doubt it will come to that,” Ambrose said reasonably. “But there are no guarantees.”
“Gee, thanks for that warm-fuzzy moment,” Fallon said. “And you can skip the Latin stuff about hope in the air or whatever it was.”
Ambrose gazed at her solemnly and spread his arms wide, “Life without hope is nothing.”
“Don’t remind me,” Fallon said, but she knew he meant well. She heaved a sigh. “Maybe I shouldn’t have come back, after all.”
No, that’s wrong. I needed to come.
No matter how comforting the thought, she refused to bury her head in the sand. At the same time, the view aboveground had become more frightening than she could have ever imagined. “I’ll—I’ll be fine. I think. Don’t worry about me. Okay?”
Ambrose nodded, thankfully remaining silent. His unflagging compassion and understanding were freaking her out. The more he urged calm, the more panicked she became. And she hated being the only hysterical one in the room. She was new to this world of shadow walkers—a fledgling unbound catalyst prescient dreamer—and her initiation couldn’t have come under more extreme circumstances.
Grainger was dealing with the string of paranormal revelations with irritation rather than fear, but he didn’t have to deal with a quantum shift in the nature of his own humanity. He was anchored in the strange new reality, while Fallon felt hopelessly adrift.
In a whispered moment of chivalry, Logan offered to walk her to her father’s pickup truck. Fallon was too unsettled at the moment to detect any sexist agenda in his offer. Even so, she would have overlooked any protective intimation simply because she wanted the company. She nodded and followed him out.
The rain had stopped, but a misty haze hung in the air and an oily sheen glistened on the blacktop. Fallon leaned against the driver’s side front quarter panel of the rust-spotted Ford pickup truck and crossed her arms under her chest. She sighed and stared at the row of streetlights without speaking.
“You okay?” Logan asked.
“Don’t see how I could be,” she said with a half-hearted grin. She looked at him seriously for a moment and asked, “Is it always like this?”
Now it was Logan’s turn to sigh. “No,” he said. “This is unusually bad. With the potential to be catastrophically bad. The exception that proves the rule.”
“Really?”
“Not that this helps much,” Logan said. “But sometimes all we need to do to preserve the ecological status quo is to… shoo harmless Outsider fauna back through a rift into its own dimension.”
“Like a poor, defenseless unicorn, maybe?”
“Wouldn’t call them defenseless,” Logan said, grinning. “Those spiral horns are more than decorative.”
“You’ve seen an actual unicorn? Living and breathing—and spearing with the horn even?”
“Well, not personally,” Logan said. “Been over a hundred years since the last unicorn crossing. But Ambrose has—would, he would know when that was, exactly. Keeps very, um, detailed records.” Logan cleared his throat. “Hey, listen. You don’t need to worry about all this. Nobody expects you to deal with it. You haven’t been drafted.”
She quirked a wry grin. “No?”
“Trust me,” Logan said. “We Walkers have been dealing with this kind of thing for an incredibly long time. We’ll take care of it. We always have and we always will.”
She looked at his face and saw the genuine concern for her well-being in his eyes. “Are you as confident as you sound, Logan Walker?”
He flashed an innocent smile. “Mostly.”
“Good, because you were beginning to sound like Barrett.”
“Please!”
“That guy really thinks he can fix the whole world.”
“Because he doesn’t have a choice.”
“What? Failure is not an option?”
“Yeah, something like that,” Logan said. “What Barrett lacks in experience he makes up for in determination. But who am I to criticize?” His mildly critical tone submerged into self-deprecation. “My role is to wait around for a queasy stomach.”
Fallon took his hand in hers and smiled at the pleasant tingling sensation that never failed to surprise and delight her. “Good enough to save Chelsea’s life.”
“Right,” Logan said but his voice trailed off with regret.
“She will realize that one day, Logan. And thank you.”
“Maybe,” he said, “but it’s not that important to me. The thanking part. Just glad she’s alive. Glad someone’s alive after all this.”
“Logan, what happened to your parents?” Fallon asked. “Were they…? I mean, did something from a rift…? Like Chelsea’s mom…?”
Logan pulled his hand gently from her grasp and interlaced his fingers behind his neck. “No, not like that,” he said quickly. “At least I don’t think so. There’s not much to tell, actually. We’re not sure what happened to them.”
“They just… disappeared?”
“More or less,” Logan said. “My father had active talents, more like Barrett’s than mine, in other words. My talents are reactive, mostly, even though my system usually reacts
before
something happens. Like offense versus defense. Anyway, the short version is that my father crossed into a rift and never returned.”
“What about your mother?”
“She could tap into magic, like Liana and Thalia. But she could also detect and track rifts from afar, even anticipate them and create her own.”
“She went after him, didn’t she?”
Logan nodded. “He disappeared almost… eighteen months ago. When my mother couldn’t create a rift to where he was, she left us to hunt rifts across the globe, trying to find a dimensionally identical rift, one that would take her to the same place. This went on for a while, about six months, and she would write or call with updates. The longer the search went on, the less often she contacted us. Days would pass with no word from her. We got used to it. Nothing unusual. Then a couple weeks passed with no contact and we started to worry that something had happened. After three weeks, we started to look for her, following in her footsteps, so to speak.” Logan shrugged. “But we never found any trace of her.”
“You think she joined your father in that same dimension?”
“Possibly,” Logan said. “Or some other dimension from which she can’t return.”
“They could be alive, Logan,” Fallon said, a sparkle returning to her tired green eyes. “Both of them.”
“Unlikely,” Logan said. “She could—if she had survived—she was good enough to find a way to return to us. Alone, my father could be stuck on the other side of a rift, but not her. She was… she should…”
“What?”
“He should have let her go through first,” Logan said. “Magic users always go through first. That’s the rule. Because, if the rift closes suddenly, magic users have the best chance of reopening—of returning.”
Fallon guessed the truth, “Your father went through first to protect her.”
Logan nodded. “How did you…? Yes, she had a scare once. Spooked her. Every crossing after that, he would go first. But then… that last time, the rift closed immediately after he crossed. She never had a chance to follow him.”
“That’s why she left you and your sisters,” Fallon said. “She blamed herself.”
“So we lost a mother and a father.”
“They must have loved each other very much, Logan.”
He gave a slight nod and she could tell he was having trouble speaking, forced to reopen old emotional wounds at her urging. On impulse—another choice made without considering the repercussions—she stepped forward and wrapped her arms around him in a gentle hug. Slowly, his arms came around her back, his hands falling on her shoulders. He rested his cheek against hers, seeking comfort there or maybe hiding his eyes from her. Again, with the flesh to flesh contact, she experienced the warm rush and tingling sensation and a sense of the ground swaying beneath her feet.
“I’m sorry, Logan.”
“Not your fault,” he whispered, his breath a gentle caress on her face and ear. “It’s… easier when you don’t dwell on the losses.”
She sighed but it became a shudder. “I know.” Her voice was soft and weighted with barely concealed grief as she thought of her mother, how she’d allowed her unusual life to overwhelm her and the desperate final choice she’d made, which wasn’t really a choice at all.
An end to decisions,
Fallon thought.
I can’t let this overwhelm me.
Fallon eased out of Logan’s embrace, but gripped his upper arms as she gazed into his eyes, forcing him to focus on her, on this moment. “This isn’t the end for me,” she said. “I really need to go home now—to study, to sleep, to decompress—but I will come to terms with this. I promise.”
“Wouldn’t blame you if you ran away.”
“Running wouldn’t help,” she said with a lopsided grin. “This brave new world is inside me. No escape.”
“Good point.”
“I’ll be back,” Fallon said. “And as much as I thank you for guiding me through this craziness, I hope you realize your job is far from over, mister.”
Logan beamed. “Then I’ll see you at school tomorrow?”
“For starters.”
She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, contact too brief for the delicious tingling sensation to completely unhinge her knees, then climbed into the pickup truck and drove home to what had passed for normalcy.
A glance in the rearview mirror showed Logan standing on the sidewalk, giving her a slow overhead wave in parting. She entertained the spark of an idea that something good might come out of the night’s tragedy. A glimmer of hope.
What had Ambrose said?
Life without hope is nothing.
Chapter 28
Ambrose grew weary of the protracted discussion. Logan had departed with the unbound girl, and Liana had left to check on Thalia and the sleeping Chelsea Conrad. Unfortunately, Barrett and he had to endure Chief Grainger’s repeated questions, to the point that Ambrose had a clear sense how the man would interrogate a particularly recalcitrant suspect. It seemed as if Grainger would never be completely satisfied with any of their answers. Ambrose’s calm assurances were insufficient, but he was unwilling to offer the man guarantees of success, no matter the lateness of the hour or the circular nature of the man’s arguments.