Page 14 of Moonstriker (The Summertide Chronicles #4)

Chapter 14

Aubrey

The whole damned mountain.

I sat there, staring at him, my chest heaving, but it didn’t feel like I was really breathing.

I wasn’t . . . anything, was I?

No, I wasn’t there in the car, looking at Kit, demanding answers. I wasn’t breathing, I wasn’t thinking, I wasn’t living this life.

This had to be a dream.

Any moment now I would wake up to find that I was sick with the same pneumonia that had taken Mother, a fever of a hundred and five, and this whole situation was a sweaty fever dream.

I wasn’t Oberon Gloombringer’s son. Mother had never once mentioned him to me in my entire life. This whole thing was a fevered fantasy where I got to be the special child of my whole nation, thus proving my worth to everyone who’d ever doubted me, including—and maybe especially—myself.

I wasn’t the bastard child of a family of no particular distinction. I was the heir to one of the four families. I was someone .

It was all nonsense, and I didn’t know why I’d ever believed it was real.

“Look, I know it sounds crazy,” Kit said, sighing and shaking his head, like he could read my mind. “Believe me, it’s not something I’d have ever thought up on my own. A mountain as a stone? It’s ridiculous.”

“But you did come up with it,” I pointed out. “No one calls Mount Slate a stone. No one has ever suggested to me that it’s possible to bond a whole darn mountain. But here you are, saying exactly that. That I’m supposed to bond Mount Slate.”

“Nikka knows,” he said, hand going to his throat. “She told me.”

“She knows about the mountain? Or she knows, what, my future?”

He groaned at the question. “It’s complicated.”

Oh no. I was not putting up with that crap. He was going to give me answers, and right now. “Then uncomplicate it.”

“She knows the future. Sort of. Some of it. And she told it to me, so we made plans on how to fix things. How to get people where and when they needed to be. How to stop Huxley Dawnchaser from ruining everything, and how to get everyone here. To get you here.”

To get me here.

His entire goal had been . . . to get me here.

The road went rough beneath the car tires, and I turned to look at him. “We’ve never even met. How did you know I would come?”

He blinked at me, cocking his head, his stone twinkling between his fingers. “If you’re alive, you always come. Every time. Nikka says...she says you’re very loyal.”

Was I?

For Mother, sure, I’d always been loyal. Grandmother had died before I’d figured myself out that much—I’d only been about twelve when she’d passed away. But was I loyal as a rule? I certainly hadn’t been loyal to Oberon Gloombringer.

I’d hardly even been sad when I’d heard about his death on the news.

But when Aunt Titania had asked me to come, I hadn’t hesitated a moment.

The car gave a hard jolt, and I turned to look out the front windshield. Had the road been this rough on the way in? I hadn’t remembered it. Maybe Kit had taken a different route than Titania’s driver.

But the road looked perfect and smooth.

So why was . . . everything . . . vibrating?

I lifted one hand from my lap to find it shaking, so I lifted the other as well. Like leaves about to fall from their tree.

“Shit,” Kit said. “Are you about to have another—Fuck!”

I turned to look at him, and suddenly he was entirely focused on driving in a way he hadn’t been before.

“Wh-what?—”

“It’s not just you,” he said through clenched teeth. “It’s the fucking ground.” His knuckles were going white where they were gripped tight around the steering wheel, and for some reason his eyes were trained not on the road, but to the side of it. “Come on, come on,” he muttered, and I could feel the car accelerating even through the increasing vibrations.

“Y-you should s-stop. Th-this is d-dangerous,” I managed to shove out past the shaking in my core. It didn’t feel quite the same as the other times. The shaking wasn’t immediately out of control, and the world wasn’t going dark. The noise started again, but this time more like it was in the movie theater, starting low, then increasing in tone and volume.

He shook his head and pressed down hard on the accelerator. “Nope. No slowing down. We need to be on the other side.”

“O-other side of wh-what?”

He was still staring at the side of the road when suddenly he hissed, “four,” and slammed on the brakes.

Mile marker four. What the hell did that have to do with anything?

I turned around in my seat to look at the tiny sign, like the back of it would give more information.

As I watched, behind us, the middle of the road went dark.

No.

Not dark.

It was a crack. A split in the ground, and as the rumbling increased, the crack did too, growing and growing, heading off vaguely in the direction of town, and widening until I wasn’t sure I could leap across it, even at my best.

The car skidded to a stop, and I turned to look at Kit. Unless there was another road, we were now cut off from town. Why had that been the plan?

The shaking went uneven, increasing in one side of my body, and Kit reared back, but he wasn’t looking at me, he was looking at the road. I turned to see...rocks. Everywhere. Had part of the mountain collapsed in front of us?

I could barely breathe, not just because of the tremors, but because, because...a crack in the road behind us big enough to swallow the car, and rocks scattered across the pavement ahead. There was a box of maybe a hundred feet in which we could have stopped without ending up in one or under the other, and Kit had managed to pull right into the middle of it.

Mile marker four.

I collapsed against the seat, gasping for air and staring at the rockfall ahead of us, and it took me a moment to realize that the trembling had stopped. I hadn’t even blacked out this time, but given the fact that we’d almost died , it felt like a very small favor.