Page 11

The night had fully taken over. Behind me, Sike pulled himself through a narrow opening between two trees. His gear bag, intact, gave him the look of a vampire turtle.

We had survived our fall from the sky, and although I was happy to be with Sike, my mind was on our missing teammates. Bryce had flown us further into the woods instead of away, probably fearing a crash in an inhabited area. Things became wilder at night in the Leftovers, and there were only two of us in the middle of this madness.

“The scanner is sort of working,” Sike offered hopefully. His senses allowed him to miss the scraggly tree roots sticking up from the ground as we walked. He was on monster-watch duty as we moved through the woods, since his eyes were better than mine.

We had landed near one another. Amazingly, the recovered laptop and scanners in Sike’s gear bag had survived the fall. The monster hadn’t appeared again yet, but we were walking cautiously because of its presence in the forest.

”Nobody in range, still,” Sike reported from his screen. We had managed to keep some flashlights, which would prove useful in the dying light. I hoped they would work, but we would have to use them sparingly to avoid monsters. It was hard to have confidence in our usual equipment with the interference from the Leftovers.

The moon bathed the woods in a beautiful but uncanny light on the bark and leaves. Thick underbrush forced us onto a rough trail that looked like it had been carved by animals of some kind. I hoped they were more friendly, like our rodents, and not like the invisible beast that had climbed onto our plane. As we pushed forward, though, the roughness of the path fell away into something tidier—almost looking manmade. I frowned and glanced at Sike, who shrugged. The trees had moved before and reacted to our presence around the office building. Could we trust a path created by the heart of the forest? I looked behind us, but the woods hadn”t moved at all. I took that as a good sign.

Fine. We”ll keep going. We arrived at a meadow as the path ended. It was a perfect clearing for someone to build a house… or perhaps someone already had. A large rectangular impression in the grass implied that something used to exist here but hadn’t in some time. Several regular, mortal trees had fallen in the area around the perimeter of the clearing. The air was tense and slightly humid, but there were no insects flitting about. The silver lining of the Leftovers was a lack of mosquitos.

”This is probably too perfect,” I muttered to Sike. “Maybe it’s a trap.” He dropped his bag in the clearing and looked out at the woods with his scanner.

”Well, I”m not registering many creatures in the area. I wonder if the woods moving spooks them,” he said. ”It doesn”t look like there will be much activity tonight. I hope not, at least.”

I nodded numbly, noting that the sky grew darker and darker with every passing minute. We could bunk here for the night. It was better than trying to move forward in the woods, potentially ending up in an area with far more beasts to deal with. I’d managed to grab my gear bag in the madness of the crash, so we had some supplies with us. Sike helped me set up a basic area for us to rest, clearing away stubborn sharp rocks so we could sit. Sike assembled a ring of stones around an area that was sparse with grass, as the dirt made for a perfect place to build a fire. We only used the wood from the fallen mortal trees. As the flames went up, I swore the tree line inched away from the radius of its warmth. We agreed not to use branches from the immortal trees… in case that might involve unseen consequences from the sentient forest.

Never thought I”d have to worry about angering a freaking forest.I feel like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.

Memories of my first trip to the Immortal Plane rushed back to me as Sike and I huddled around the fire. I remembered the strangeness of the wilderness affecting me the most. I truly thought I had grown accustomed to weirdness as a general factor in life, but this wasn”t the same. Dorian was gone. I hated that more than anything, but there was nothing I could do about it. At least Sike was here with me and was relatively uninjured, apart from a few scrapes and bruises. I’d banged my elbow hard on a tree coming down in the fall, but that was a best-case scenario for a landing like that. I could”ve caught my leg in one of these wicked moving trees and broken it.

We”re alive, and we”re safe for the moment. I shut my eyes and tried to listen for sounds over the crackling fire. Sike fed more wood to the flames. The scent of smoke and the reality of our situation washed over me.

Sike shifted on the other side of the fire. ”Doesn”t this remind you a bit of when we were all on the run?”

I opened my eyes to see him with a lopsided smile on the other side of the fire. He must have been referring to when we originally went on the run from the big bad Bureau, before everything got sorted out with the new board. I nodded, giving him a humoring smile even if my heart wasn”t fully in it. He was right. This was like the time we’d spent hiding out in caves and an old ski resort, trying to do everything we could just to survive. An anxious twitch on his face betrayed his nostalgia. He”s worried. Sike wasn”t as skilled in fighting as the other vampires, but he could hold his own. I wanted him to know that.

”We”ve grown a lot since then,” I told him with a nod. ”We”re going to be okay. We”ve been through worse. You’ve seen so much in your life already.” My statement floated up with the smoke and seemed to ease the heavy air around us.

“Thanks for saying that.” Sike offered a small smile. “Sometimes I forget. I’m not like Dorian.”

“Nobody wants you to be,” I promised with a grin. “You’re Sike. Besides, I’m not letting Dorian near any human technology, but you? I’d be okay with it.” We chuckled. Sike gazed around the clearing and up at the trees, which looked particularly menacing with the shadows from the fire. The dancing flames cast odd shapes on their velvety trunks.

”Do you want first or second watch?” Sike asked. What a gentleman.

”First,” I said. It was better for me to do it in the earlier hours, since the creatures got progressively worse through the night and I couldn’t sense them like he could. Sike accepted this without complaint and rolled out his bedroll on the other side of the firepit. He stilled for a moment as he rested on the ground.

”You”re right. We”ll be okay,” he whispered. I hadn’t been alone with Sike much, but I was glad that we had ended up together, since Sike was calm and collected in his own way. He fell asleep quickly, and I settled in for the watch, leaning against my gear bag on the edge of our fire circle to better hear the night sounds of the forest. When the insects chirped here, it was a croaking one second and a buzz the next. I gnashed my teeth together to fight off the unsettling sensation of it. Just like the Immortal Plane, I would get used to the Leftovers.

The first half hour passed without anything happening. Not so much as a bird settling in for the night. I grabbed one of our scanners and messed around with the controls, checking the screen. I wasn”t as good with the scanner as Cam or Sike, but I knew how to take a basic reading. Nothing registered on the screen for me, but I refused to let myself be lulled into a false sense of security. Whatever physics-defying properties this landscape had, I would never drop my guard.

Behind me, Sike muttered in his sleep, a strained mumble of words. I glanced back at him, concerned that he might be having a nightmare. Instead, I found him awake and sitting up on his bedroll. He was completely silent, with his lips pressed firmly together. Another murmur hit my ear. It wasn’t him talking at all.

An icy sensation of unsettledness spread through me as easily as the fire ate up the wood.

There were voices, and they weren”t coming from either of us. I turned toward the forest and leaned forward, trying to still my heavy-beating heart from the rush of adrenaline so I could hear properly. The scanner remained blank for presences.

”They’re getting closer,” Sike whispered. I cast him an urgent look, but he was already straining to listen. We quieted as the voices continued.

”Funny—” someone said, but it was cut off. I find it to be quite the opposite, actually. The whispers danced in and out of comprehensible words, but it sounded like more than one person speaking. Could it be Dorian?

”The voices might not be real,” Sike said cautiously as he spotted my blank scanner. ”I sense a few creatures around… but they”re not big at all. They feel kind of weak. Let me check with my scanner.” He pulled out his more sophisticated scanner, the one meant to detect barrier fluctuations. I slowly inched toward him, trying not to make noise so I could still listen to the voices. The sound had all the rhythm of a hushed conversation, but I still couldn”t pick out the words. It was like trying to listen to someone talk over a bad cell phone connection.

Sike frowned at his screen and showed me what looked like a graph with various lines on it, rising and falling. The waves had spiked suddenly a few seconds ago. He pointed to the thin green lines displayed, which were peaking toward the top of the screen. ”The barrier is having a fluctuation. It”s getting thinner when the line climbs like this.” The wave continued to spike randomly, but it had clearly had long stretches of being high. I looked back out to the forest, as if it could offer up some answers. What did that mean—if the barrier was thin, were we hearing someone from the Immortal Plane on the other side?

Sike was clearly thinking something similar. ”It could be the Immortal Plane.”

”So, the voices aren”t technically here with us,” I pointed out. ”Do you think that could mean the barrier would get thin enough to act like a portal? If it can carry voices, it might be able to carry bodies.”

”Maybe,” Sike muttered, and stared out at the trees as if searching for something. ”The auras feel… lukewarm, if that makes sense. They don’t feel fully here, so maybe that lends more support to our Immortal Plane theory.”

I wouldn”t know what an aura felt like at all, but I trusted him.

Sike curled his lips with worry. ”They”re getting closer.”

I heard the voices again, but they sounded as if two people were speaking much closer to us. The unsettled sensation inside me melted into excitement. This could be an interesting development. I leaned forward and tried to focus on the sounds as Sike did the same. If he said the auras were faded, we didn”t have a physical threat to worry about. Dealing with voices all night was far from ideal, but I could work with it.

“It’s not supposed to be like this,” a soft voice whispered. My interest spiked.

Mostly, I had hoped the voices were Dorian. I longed to hear his voice. He had bravely gone after Cam, but we were separatedbecause of that… and he’d used his necklace, which meant he would be exhausted. They might run into beasts along the way, or worse, the creature who’d hunted us in the airplane. I hoped he and Cam had landed somewhere relatively safe in the Leftovers… as safe as someone could get in a place like this.

Sike fell back on his bedroll to listen. So much for sleep. I paid close attention to the voices. They sounded young, really young. I couldn”t tell what species of creature we were dealing with, although I ruled out wildling, since they had throatier voices on the whole.

”We can”t,” one said. It was higher than the other. Was this one younger, perhaps, or a girl?

”Joining them may be best,” the other replied. Two people, definitely, I decided. They might mean joining us. Sike frowned at that, but the conversation was more than casual. It was an argument.

”It”s dangerous.” The first one again. They sounded less confident than their companion.

The second added in a drier tone, ”We risk danger by not joining.” I barely heard the phrase as the voice suddenly faded to a much weaker volume.

The voices lapsed into a silence for a minute. I imagined several different faces, trying to connect the disembodied voices to something I could envision, and yet, nothing fit them. I heaved a sigh as the conversation turned from joining us to food.

”He will need—”

My heart hammered against my chest. He? I sat up straighter.They could be talking about anyone. Dorian, maybe. Or us?

”I want to go home,” said the first. The voice wavered, and the image of a lost child appeared in my mind. My heart tugged with compassion. They didn”t sound like they wanted to hurt anyone; they sounded truly scared.I wished I could help them, but I didn’t know how.

”Home is too dangerous.” The second was unafraid to speak bluntly. ”We need to hide. It”s almost time.”

Fearful anticipation pricked at me as I struggled to catch everything that was said. The scanner was beginning to fail, showing the lines fading as the screen went dark from some kind of interference from the Leftovers. Their voices grew softer, like ghostly murmurs in the night just brushing by my ear.

“Hello?” I whispered cautiously. We had no idea if these guys were dangerous.

”We need to go to the new one. He will be frightened,” the higher voice said worriedly. He or she was almost gone from my hearing now. ”Can we trust him?” So, they were wondering who they could trust, too. They likely posed little threat if they were worried about others hurting them. Combined with their age, they must have been lost kids looking for a way to survive.

Sike tried again, “We’re here.”

”He was brought here—he must be okay,” the second one answered evenly. They hadn’t heard us. ”Perhaps we can trust him. Joseph—” The voice faded completely, cutting off the sentence before we could hear anything else… but I had heard enough. My pulse staggered with surprise at the sound of a very human name. I looked at Sike, and our eyes said everything.

Joseph. The name on the letter we’d found in the Black Rock office.

Maybe our missing survivor was alive. If it was him, it sounded like he had company.