Page 51 of A Land So Wide

W hen Greer finally ascended the crest, sweating and winded by her climb, she was surprised to find Noah Finn was not there.

She dropped her pack and peered over the land below with shielded eyes. So high up, she had an excellent view of the valley, but couldn’t see any sign of him. She glanced up the mountain behind her and saw only trees.

It seemed impossible for her to have beaten him.

She cupped her hands and shouted out his name. Her voice ricocheted off rocks and the ruins of Laird, but after the echoes died, the air fell still, her call unanswered.

Greer pulled out her canteen and took several swallows of water, wondering and waiting.

So far into the foothills, the sun felt closer here, but it was a cold, pale light that fell on her.

Snow was coming. Greer could feel the storm’s approach with a dull ache in the middle of her bones.

It was a big one, and she wouldn’t be surprised if, by morning, they were buried under layers of white.

As Greer took another drink, she studied the way the road snaked back and forth, quickly rising in elevation.

Long ago, miners would have used it to haul their equipment and supplies up the mountain before returning with heavy carts of harvested ore.

Greer didn’t doubt the hike would be exhausting, but one she should be more than capable of doing on her own.

Only…

She swallowed hard.

She had no idea of what to expect when she got to the mine. She’d assumed Finn would be with her, coaching and encouraging, lending a hand if necessary. Greer couldn’t imagine taking on Elowen without him.

Greer rubbed her hands over her arms in a flurry of adrenaline as apprehension and doubt set her skin to gooseflesh.

What was she doing?

What was she thinking?

The strangers had been right. This was a mad endeavor. One that would undoubtedly get her killed.

Greer looked over the valley again, searching for Finn. She paced across the ledge. She could wait, burning up precious hours of daylight, and they could go up together, the way it was supposed to happen. Or—

“Starling,” the voice came down from the mountainside, ringing and resonant.

Greer whipped around, but the only thing moving was a bank of clouds rolling in. The snow was closer than she’d thought.

“What are you waiting for, Starling?” Elowen called out with a surprising lightness. “Come find me. Come find your love.”

Greer’s jaw tensed so hard that her molars ground together. She knew Elowen wanted to bait her into doing something stupid and rash.

“I know you hear me,” Elowen went on. “You hear everything, don’t you, little half-wit? Why don’t you answer?” Her laughter sounded like the trickle of a brook, lilting and musical. “Answer me, Starling. Go on.”

Resolutely, Greer sat atop her pack. She sipped at the canteen again, staring forward as if taking in the view.

“Answer me!” Annoyance rumbled in Elowen’s voice. Its reverberations vibrated through Greer’s body, making her clavicles feel as though they would shake apart.

“I will when I have something to say!” Greer snapped and when she spoke, her words sliced through the very land around her, shaking trees and rocks in equal measure.

Elowen fell silent, retreating, and Greer watched with fascination as little pebbles skittered down the slope beside her, jarred from their stasis by the residual echo of her voice. Even as her head throbbed, she felt a strange wave of pleasure in having created something so tangible.

Absentmindedly, she rubbed at her chest, feeling where Elowen’s words had sunk in. Though they’d hurt Greer, they didn’t seem to have affected anything else. Another stone, the size of her thumbnail, rolled downhill, leaving behind a squiggling wake.

Finn had said Ailie knew her daughter would be strong, stronger than even a mortal turned Bright-Eyed, but Greer hadn’t believed it.

She couldn’t change her appearance, transforming into whatever suited her fancy.

She couldn’t leap into the air, knowing wings would catch and hold her.

She was not strong, not in the way Finn and Elowen were.

She reached out and traced the rock’s path.

But her voice had done that.

Elowen’s had not.

Greer remembered the moment she’d screamed Elowen out of the sky, the rolling thud as she’d smashed into the earth. She remembered the way the trees swayed and the river shifted.

She’d done that.

Perhaps that was the only weapon she needed.

The clouds were well and truly settled in, low enough that Greer felt she could reach out and touch them. The storm would soon be upon her.

She had no more time to wait.

She had no more time to waste.

Finn would have to find her on his own.

Greer stood and slung the pack over her shoulder.

“I’m coming, Elowen,” she said, not with a scream, not with a shout. Just a whisper she had no doubt the Bright-Eyed heard every syllable of. “I’m coming for you.”

Instead of following the miners’ road up the mountain, Greer kept to the forest running alongside it. Though Elowen obviously knew she was on her way, the road felt too open, too exposed for travel.

Snow had begun to fall. The flakes were thick and heavy, quickly dusting a layer of powder over everything and reducing the world to a palette of grays and whites.

The woods were littered with strange piles of debris: large swaths of metal railing curved into impossible shapes, wheels and cogs and levers and so many things she couldn’t identify, all torn apart, useless and rusting.

Iron, Greer realized, passing a giant spool of cable that was nearly as tall as she was.

This was iron machinery from the mines. When the Bright-Eyeds had taken the caverns, they must have ripped apart anything left behind, casting it down the mountain, exiling the cursed metal as far from them as they could.

The forest had begun to reclaim the space, covering the detritus in creeping vines and determined saplings.

Greer thought about taking something with her, but even the smallest pieces weighed too much, and grasping the metal for only seconds was enough to make her own palms break into itchy discomfort.

She shuddered to think how the creatures had stomached removing so many pieces themselves, and wondered why they simply hadn’t chosen a different spot to roost.

Greer wondered if she might somehow lure Elowen here and use her voice to impale her upon a ragged piece of railroad track.

She smiled—picturing how Elowen’s limbs would flail like those of a pinned insect—then stopped short, wanting to cast the horrible idea from herself.

Since she drank Finn’s blood, her mind no longer felt entirely her own, too easily prone to thoughts of dark desires and violence.

Greer closed her eyes and tried to wipe it clear of everything but Ellis.

She imagined how good their reunion would be, how she’d feel like herself again, secure and whole, because the other half of her heart would be back.

She drew a deep, centering breath, then opened her eyes and gasped.

There, just up the embankment, as if summoned by her thoughts, was Ellis.

He was holding his side and walking with a strange sort of hitch, favoring his right leg as he hop-walked down the road.

Greer wanted to race to him, wanted to crash into him and throw her arms around his neck.

She wanted to pull him to her and cover him with a hundred kisses.

A thousand. She never wanted to stop kissing him.

But she held herself in check, remaining hidden in the shadows of the trees, certain this was a trap.

The wind shifted, hurling snowflakes into his eyes, and he tucked his arms tightly around his frame.

Even from so far away, Greer could see his shivers. “Stupid coatless boy.”

She glanced up the road from where he’d come, waiting to see a flash of eye-shine as Elowen stalked after him.

But Ellis staggered through the snowstorm all on his own.

His labored breathing filled her ears. There was something terribly wrong about it, a heavy wetness that shouldn’t have been there.

He stumbled again, pitching forward to land hard on his knees, and Greer couldn’t take it any longer. She burst after him, already slipping free of Finn’s coat.

“Ellis!”

He looked up, squinting into the trees, frozen with fear.

For a long moment, he stared at her, motionless and without response.

Then she was beside him, putting the coat around his shoulders, cupping his face as she pressed her forehead to his.

He blinked slowly, once, twice, as if wresting himself out of a dream, a trance, a nightmare. He gasped. “Greer?”

She laughed, throwing her arms around him.

It took him a moment to return her embrace. “What are you doing here? What are you—how are you—”

“We need to get you out of this cold,” she said, and ran her hands over his arms, trying to generate warmth. Tears of happiness welled in her eyes as she felt the tangible, solid heft of him.

“Are you really here?” he asked, his voice hushed with wonder.

“I really am,” she promised. “There’s more shelter in the trees. Let’s get off the road.”

“You’ve been here before,” he accused, protesting her lead. “You were, but it wasn’t you. They made me… She made me see all kinds of things that weren’t here.”

“Ellis, I promise you, it’s me. I’m real and I’m here and I’m getting you off this mountain.”

He released a rush of air that sounded like a sob. “It’s really you?”

Greer nodded and pressed a quick kiss to his forehead. “Come on.”

She hoisted him to his feet. He leaned heavily against her, and slowly, gently, Greer led him into the woods.

Returning by way of the road left them too exposed, too vulnerable.

They’d take cover in the trees, resting for a moment while she sorted Ellis and his injuries out, then they’d try to reach Laird by nightfall.

“Where’s Elowen?” she asked, once they’d found shelter under the boughs of a thick fir. “Why isn’t she coming after you?”

Ellis sighed, sounding impossibly exhausted. “She’s gone.”

“Gone?” she echoed and peered toward the road with disbelief.

He nodded. “I took care of her. I…I…” His sentence dissolved into a wretched cough that sounded as though his body was tearing apart.

“Ellis!” Greer exclaimed, drawing him to her. “Get this on all the way, fasten it up,” she chastised, helping him into Finn’s coat. She rubbed her hands along his body, trying to stir some sort of heat into his limbs. He felt cold, so cold, a block of ice, his body immobile and so…

Greer stopped her ministrations.

…bloodless.

“Ellis…” she began cautiously, unable to hold the concern from her tone. “Did she bite you?”

He frowned. “Bite me?”

“Did she”—she licked her lips, now noticing all the things about him that looked so terribly wrong—“did she feed on you?”

Ellis winced. “I don’t think so. I don’t…”

But he pawed at his side again, and Greer gently lifted the sweater. Horror stole her breath away.

The left side of his body was mottled with bruises, punctured with bites.

She could read the violence across his skin as easily as lines on a map.

There were so many different sets of teeth marks, some wide half-crescents, showing the impression of every tooth, some nothing but the pointed stab of incisors.

Greer shuddered as she imagined these mouths roaming over Ellis, drawing out his blood, painting their lips red with it.

Her hands balled into fists, and if Elowen had been beside her now, Greer could have cheerfully ripped her teeth out.

“It didn’t hurt,” Ellis said, an attempt to reassure her, but his voice was too high and breathless. He let out a laugh. “Much.”

Greer looked up just in time to see Ellis draw back his mouth into a smile, revealing his own teeth. They were long and needle-sharp, like those of a northern pike, like a set of daggers, like—

Ellis lunged at Greer, knocking her over as he tried to sink those teeth into the crook of her neck.

“Ellis, stop! Ellis, get off me!”

Her legs thrashed as she tried to dislodge him, but he was so much bigger, so much stronger.

His hands wrapped around her wrists, holding them down as he pressed his face to her throat, snapping and trying to find purchase.

When Greer felt the points of those wicked teeth graze her skin, she did the only thing she could think of and screamed.

The sound roared from her, flinging Ellis across the clearing. He struck a piece of machinery hidden in a thicket of thorns. There was the horrible sound of something wet squelching violently open, then a gurgle of blood and breath, mixing together in ways they were absolutely never meant to.

Too scared to move, Greer pulled her knees to her chest, burying her head in her arms. She didn’t want to see what she’d done. She covered her ears, jamming her fingers painfully inside, but nothing she did could mask those sounds.

A howl of despair ripped from her, setting the ground around her to tremble and startling a roosting flock of nuthatches. They took to the sky with shrieks of dismay that seemed to echo everything screaming in Greer’s soul.

She’d come so far, endured so much, to have it end like this.

Ellis, turned.

Ellis, killed.

By her.

By the one who loved him most. By the one who had done everything she could to save him.

The irony was too cruel to bear.

So she let out the pain, shaking the world apart, wanting to hurt it as much as it had hurt her.

She screamed past the ache and the fury, tearing into her grief with bared teeth and balled fists.

She screamed until she could no longer draw breath, until the sound of her voice choked everything inside her and black stars filled her vision.

Her head listed heavily, weighted with too much pressure, too much angst.

Just before she passed out, succumbing to the welcomed promise of oblivion, Greer opened her mouth and screamed again.