Page 8 of Skalterra By Nightmare (The Skalterra Duology #1)

The shop was busy for a Wednesday, which wasn’t to say that it was bustling by any means. Rather, it was just busy enough to annoy me that Liam Glass was late for work.

Gams had abandoned her workshop to help me in the store and was recommending Mom’s books to what appeared to be a Bachelorette Party passing through town on their way to the real festivities in a bigger city. They giggled and blushed as they poured through pages, giving me time to stare at the two new scars the night’s events had added to my hand.

The throat wound had luckily sealed itself shut during my second bout in Skalterra, but the blast Tiernan had subjected me to had left me sore and bruised.

My ribs and arms had taken the brunt of the explosion when I’d unknowingly detonated Tiernan’s Skal bomb. My forearms were painted in yellow bruises that looked weeks old, and my ribs were a mottled green and purple that had made pulling on my clothes that morning more painful than I cared to admit.

Luckily, the morning was cooler than usual, so Gams didn’t question the Keel Watch Harbor hoodie I wore to hide the injuries.

Worse than the physical remnants of Tiernan’s explosion, however, was the gentle panic broiling inside me. Skalterra was real, and not only was something evil trying to break through from there to here, but somehow I was the person to keep that from happening.

We were screwed.

Unless, of course, my sacrifice last night had been worth it and the Grimguard was already dead. He’d nearly been on top of me when the explosive had detonated. I hadn’t survived it. It wouldn’t be a surprise if the Grimguard hadn’t either.

The young women shopping in their matchin.

“Laurel’s Bride Tribe”

t-shirts carried two complete sets of Mom’s books to the register, along with three Keel Watch Harbor hoodies, and enough wine to last the week.

I stared at their haul for a moment, blinking slowly, before one of them cleared her throat and pushed the items closer to me from across the counter.

“Oh!”

I shook my head.

“Right. Sorry.”

I hurried to ring up their things, and the bell over the door chimed. Liam shuffled into the shop with his head down and his blue Von Leer hood up. I wanted to be angry at his tardiness, but something about his hunched shoulders and the bags under his eyes softened my edge.

Gams abandoned the shelves she was restocking to pull him into a hug that crushed his bag of bagels between them, but it was hard to feel jealous at the familiarity of their embrace when Liam looked so terrible.

The bachelorette party paid and went on their way, and I strained to listen to Gams and Liam’s hushed conversation as I rang up the ceramic chickens the next customer had picked out. Gams patted Liam’s shoulder, took a squashed bagel, and retreated to her workshop.

“Back for more chickens, Stanley?”

she called as she crossed to the workshop door.

“As long as you keep making them, Miss Ethel.”

The customer, a bespectacled man with a weak chin and a stiff button-up, raised a hand to her, took his chickens, and left.

Liam pulled his hood back as he came to meet me at the counter. He pulled another misshapen bagel from the bag and tried to smile.

“I promise it’s not scooped.”

I took the bagel even though it was nearing lunch time.

“Did something happen?”

I hadn’t planned on asking it, but the words tumbled forth. Maybe I was looking for an excuse to think about anything other than my fight with the Grimguard, Tiernan blowing me up, or the fact that our entire reality really was teetering on the edge of collapse. Or maybe I was actually concerned about Liam, despite his stupid smile and perfect hair.

He sighed and ruffled said perfect hair, somehow making it look stupider and perfecter.

“My cousin Riley,”

he said.

“He was supposed to come back from grad school yesterday, but no one’s heard from him in two days. He hasn’t called, and he’s not responding to texts.”

“Oh.”

I remembered Teddy’s pallid, worried face at the tavern the evening before. Riley would be his son.

“Your uncle didn’t have to make us bagels.”

“He needs to keep busy.”

Liam shrugged and took up his spot behind the ice-cream just in time for a young family to rush in. A small boy led the way to the ice-cream station and pressed his face against the glass to survey the flavors.

“And you need to keep fed.”

I looked up to see Liam still watching me from over the heads of the family.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

I demanded.

“You won’t pass out if you have enough food,”

he reminded me.

“Eat that bagel. I don’t want to have to catch you anymore.”

My face bloomed with embarrassed warmth, and I considered not eating the bagel out of principle. However, it was still warm in my hands, despite its squished form, and I’d never been able to resist a pairing of bacon and guacamole. I unwrapped the bagel sandwich with stinging pride as well as gratitude.

Gams made an effort to pop out of her workshop more often, checking in with Liam each time she did. Anyone else might have felt suffocated by her fussing, but Liam smiled every time she came by, even accepting the little blue chicken that she brought to him a while after lunch.

She handed a second blue chicken to me, beaming. This particular chicken had careful white lines cross-hatched across the blue body, and while it wasn’t a very intricate pattern, the tiny details and careful lines must’ve taken Gams forever.

“Does this one go on the shelf too?”

I asked, looking at the shelf of ceramic chickens for sale by the door.

“This one is for you!”

She goggled at me with eyes magnified behind her work glasses.

“For getting into Von Leer!”

“I didn’t get in yet,”

I murmured, though I closed my fingers around the chicken all the same.

“We’ve been over this,”

she sang.

“With a phone interview, you’re as good as in.”

The chicken’s glazed paint was smooth under my fingers, and I held it tighter, as if its cool touch might erase the scars Galahad had left on my palm.

“Wren?”

Gams stared at me from behind her giant spectacles, and concern doused her usual fire.

“What?”

I loosened my grip on the tiny statue and tried to blink away thoughts of Galahad. I avoided her gaze, worried if she looked too closely at me, she might see the midnight forest of Skalterra rushing past behind my eyes.

“You’ve been distracted today.”

She raised a hand to my forehead, but I ducked away and smiled.

“I’m okay. Promise,”

I insisted softly. Gams was a wild spirit, but she and Mom had both become quick to worry over me in the last few weeks.

The bell over the door jingled, and the young woman who’d sat with Liam at Siobhan’s Tavern the night before walked in. Her curly hair glowed strawberry in the light that streamed through the back wall windows, and she forced a smile through her grim demeanor.

“Hot off the presses.”

Her smile faltered as she held up a stack of papers.

“Mr. Lane let me use the library printer for free, since it’s for a good cause.”

Gams took the top paper, somehow managing to work a chicken into the woman’s hands as she did so. She nodded approvingly and passed me the paper over the counter.

“It’s a good picture of him. Thank you, Sabrina,”

she said.

“Wren, put that on the bulletin board.”

A black and white face stared back at me from the paper, grinning the same stupid grin that Liam liked to flash. His hair might’ve been darker than Liam’s, but it was hard to tell without color, and he wore an identical Von Leer hoodie. It looked like a picture that might’ve been snapped between classes or on a school weekend while out with friends.

I’d been sad for Liam before seeing a picture of Riley, but putting a face to the name brought a new, more profound sadness. I didn’t want this young man to be missing, not when he looked so friendly and so much like Liam.

Not that I cared for Liam, but he had brought me a bagel, and that counted for something.

I pinned Riley’s poster to the bulletin behind the register, trying to put it to the side so that I wouldn’t block customers’ view of it as I rang them up.

“Mom’s letting me use the car to drive these up the coast. I was going to post them as far north as Dunningham,”

Sabrina said. Liam shot Gams a pleading look.

She nodded.

“Absolutely. I’ve got things handled here.”

She waved me out from behind the register.

“Wren, go with them. They’ll appreciate the help.”

I faltered, hunkering down in my safe haven behind the counter.

“But what about the shop?”

Gams laughed and side-stepped around me to take up my post at the register. Jonquil jumped onto the counter to greet her with a chirp.

“What do you think I do the rest of the year when neither of you are here to help? I’m perfectly adept at running my own store. Besides, you’ve been staring at the far wall all day without blinking. You need a break. Get a move on. The highway is going to get crowded soon.”

The air outside was uncomfortably warm, but I pretended it didn’t bother me. If Liam worried about my tendency to take sudden and aggressive naps, he’d panic if he saw the bruises on my arms.

Sabrina introduced herself properly as we walked to her mom’s tavern. Like Liam, she’d grown up in the town. Unlike Liam, she attended the community college in the next town over.

“Von Leer is the most popular school in the area,”

she admitted with a shrug.

“but I’m not nearly pretentious enough to go there. Even if they did admit me, I’d die living on a campus full of people just like Liam.”

Liam rolled his eyes at her ribbing, but smiled.

“That’s great news for Wren,”

he said.

“She uses words like ‘amalgamation’ in casual conversation. She’s perfectly pretentious enough for us.”

He took the stack of posters as we approached a black sedan, and Sabrina climbed into the driver’s seat. Liam paused with his hand on the passenger door.

“Are you okay?”

he asked under his breath.

“I’m fine. Why?”

“Yesterday you would’ve thrown me in the harbor for calling you pretentious. Today you seem… I don’t know. Off.”

“Maybe because you don’t know me?”

I raised an eyebrow at him.

His cheeks tinged pink, and he opened the passenger door.

“Would you like the front seat?”

Liam asked. I stopped myself from scowling at him, remembering that we were only climbing into a car together in search of his missing cousin.

“I’m fine,”

I repeated, taking the backseat, and then forced out, “Thanks.”

The inside of the car was sweltering. I risked pushing my sleeves up, trusting that Liam wouldn’t look back and see my bruises. They’d faded slightly since morning, but were still dark and mottled enough that I was sure he would worry.

The coastline blurred past outside as we headed north on the two lane highway that wound through trees and along the lips of cliffs. I relaxed against the window while Sabrina and Liam talked in the front seat about small things that didn’t matter. I figured she was trying to distract him. However, the way Keel Watch Harbor was, she was probably close with Riley too.

I tried to focus on what they were saying. I wanted to think about anything that wasn’t Galahad and Grimguards, but the trees that passed outside the car reminded me too much of the forest from my dreams.

My fingers inched to the back of my head, but my undercut served as a reminder to not pull hair there. Heat rose in my face, thinking about how Liam had thought my classmates had shaved my hair in retribution for narcing about the physics test.

Instead, I leaned my head against my hand and gave in to the urge to pull at my eyelashes. I’d stop after just a couple. I would force myself to stop. In the meantime, it helped. When my thoughts raced faster than I could keep up with, the act of plucking hair from follicle always helped.

I’d pulled my first eyelash back when I was only nine-years-old, but it didn’t get bad enough for Mom to notice until I was fourteen. That was when I’d raised my hand to play with my eyelashes and found none left on my right eye. So, I moved to the back of my head.

The first doctor Mom took me to said I was depressed, that the hair pulling was a form of self-harm. She’d been so smug in her assessment, so self-assured, that I didn’t know how to speak up and say otherwise. I wasn’t depressed. I knew I wasn’t. I was an anxious mess, and had been since a small age, but I was an otherwise happy kid.

Luckily, Mom didn’t think much of the first doctor’s assessment either. The second doctor wasn’t much better in my opinion, but Mom liked what he had to say a lot more.

“It’s because she’s gifted,”

he had explained through a neatly-trimmed white beard. He probably should’ve retired a long time ago.

“I see this all the time in smart kids.”

Mom liked that. Gifted. Her kid wasn’t defective after all. No, it was the opposite. Her kid was smarter, better, more advanced than the other children! And somehow that translated to a compulsion to remove the hair from my face and head one strand at a time.

That doctor’s solutions weren’t great—fidget toys to busy my hands, gloves to render my fingers useless at pulling out hair.

But gloves are easy to remove, and fidget toys don’t get the nervous energy out quite as well. Besides, no one wants to be the kid with the fidget block in class. It’s an easy way to get labeled different.

“Smart”

felt like a lazy diagnosis to me, but Mom was satisfied, so that was all the help I was going to get.

And here I was, four years later, pulling out eyelashes to deal with the weight of keeping reality from collapsing while helping Liam look for his lost cousin.

Partway through the drive, Liam rolled his window down. He stuck a hand out to play with the current of salty sea air, and when he asked if it was too much wind on me, I lied and said no. Maybe feeling the air rush between his fingers did the same thing for him that pulling my hair out did for me. Maybe he needed the distraction.

It was hard not to notice him checking his phone every minute. I knew he was waiting for Riley to text him, or for his Uncle Teddy to call with good news. He was still flashing Sabrina that stupid smile as they talked, and there had to still be some semblance of hope behind it.

Riley had only been missing forty-eight hours after all.

The first town we stopped in had a community board at a marina similar to the one I’d seen in Keel Watch Harbor. I felt like an intruder as I followed Sabrina and Liam out of the sedan. They clung to Riley’s posters as they assessed the board to determine best placement.

“There.”

Liam pressed the flyer against the board at eye level and drove a push pin into the paper just above Riley’s picture.

“One down.”

Sabrina leaned in towards the poster and lifted onto her tiptoes to give the corner a swift kiss.

“For luck,”

she asserted. She rubbed her thumb over the red lipstick mark she’d left on the paper.

“Sorry about that.”

Liam clapped her on the shoulder and forced a laugh.

“He’ll think it’s funny.”

They made to move towards the line of shops that overlooked the marina, more posters in hand, but my phone buzzing in my pocket held me back. I pulled it out, and my heart soared at the sight of the caller ID.

Liam looked back at me expectantly, but I shook my head at him.

“I’ll catch up,”

I promised, fumbling my phone in excitement as I rushed to answer.

“Mom! Mom, are you there?”

“Wren!”

Mom cheered on the other line. I had missed her voice, and the sound of my name reverberating through my phone speaker was enough to dispel every thought of Skalterra.

“Your Gams told me the news! My baby’s going to be a Von Leer Viking!”

The heat that rushed to my face made the hoodie a bit too warm for comfort.

“No, I only have a phone interview and not for another two weeks.”

“If they’re making you wait that long, they’ve already made their decision. You’re in. Otherwise, why waste everyone’s time?”

I pulled my phone away to glance at the clock.

“Wait, where are you?”

I asked, doing quick timezone math in my head.

“Lisbon! Oh, Wren, you’d love it! Maybe next summer we can come here together. Call it a late graduation gift!”

“Lisbon? It’s got to be past midnight in Portugal.”

I scanned the street for Liam and Sabrina, but they had already disappeared into one of the shops.

“Book reading went late.”

I could hear the shrug in her voice.

“Plus, there’s no event scheduled for tomorrow, so I get to sleep in. Is Gams there? I wanted to talk to her, but she never answers her own phone.”

“No, I’m out with Liam Glass and Siobhan’s daughter. I guess no one has heard from Teddy’s son in a few days, so we’re posting missing flyers in the neighboring towns.”

Silence buzzed on the other end of the call for a moment before Mom broke it.

“Teddy’s son is missing?”

she asked, her tone suddenly tight and careful. “Riley?”

“Yeah, but he’s probably okay, right? It’s only been two days.”

“And you’re putting up posters?”

She said it in a way that implied the answer better be no, even though she knew it wasn’t.

“The librarian printed them. Gams gave Liam and me the rest of the afternoon off to help Sabrina post them and—”

“Take them down. Wren, do not let those posters stay up long enough for anyone to see them.”