Children of the Bloodlands by S. M. Beiko

Author:S. M. Beiko
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2018-09-24T16:00:00+00:00

Come to Roost

It was still dark when Eli came to, rising to the surface of wakefulness like ballast. No bolting upright, no feeling of falling eternally. No voices screaming at him, invading his senses. Comfort was a strange and foreign sensation. He found himself welcoming it.

He woke, blinked. Enough rest. He needed to find out what was happening. Crossing great distances and speaking with Roan in dreams was one thing, but there were too many holes, and too much had happened since he had let the plane crash. Since he had let everyone in that grove down.

Eli pulled himself carefully and painfully into the linen service uniform someone had left out for him, neatly folded on the rolling cart that also held the monitors from which he now unplugged himself. A few months ago, he would have been insulted at wearing another Family’s colours. But being rendered barely able to do up his own buttons realigned his priorities. Especially the kind he didn’t know if he felt anymore.

But the stone had saved him. Eli never guessed that he would one day be glad for the Moonstone and the space it took up in his heart, in his mind. Or that he’d managed to hold on to it, and himself, this long. He brushed his fingers over it and it felt warm, like it had been touched by fire.

Maybe it had.

His mind flickered back to the dream, where he swore he was back in that miserable worm pit in the Bloodlands, Roan Harken chained arm-to-arm alongside him. But while it was a memory, something that had already happened, it had felt like the present. Felt too real to discount. He could’ve been looking into a mirror — her mismatched eyes holding the terror he recognized too well. Of knowing that the fate she’d blindly chosen was no longer one over which she had any control.

But something else was growing there. He could feel it. Something dark. Where was she that she was trapped in dreams or moving sideways through time and memory? Were the stones communicating, and was she calling for help?

“You’re awake sooner than they predicted.”

It took Eli much too long to turn, to take in Barton at the doorway. His mind was also playing catch-up at a devastating snail’s pace, barely able to read his thoughts before seeing him. So this is what it must feel like to be human . . .

“I’m not one to keep people waiting.” Eli tucked the shirt into the pants, yet even touching his own skin seemed to hurt. “I spent most of my time in that tree asleep, anyway.”

The Owl Council must have come to check on him and gone, once Eli was found to be stable. However weak and vulnerable he’d been, keeping up a defense around his deeper thoughts was automatic, probably aided by the stone. If they’d tried to look into his mind, they wouldn’t have found much. Which was just as well — Eli was still trying to decide whether to tell them all the things the Moonstone had shown him.

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