The Sea of Always by Jodi Lynn Anderson

Author:Jodi Lynn Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aladdin
Published: 2022-04-05T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

The witch is drifting farther and farther inland. We follow far enough behind to be out of earshot—at least, that’s what we hope. And still the Griever keeps going, deeper and farther across the fields.

I look at my hourglass again. A red seventeen now spins inside the glass.

Where could he be headed? I want to whisper. But I don’t dare risk the noise.

Finally, a little before midnight by my reckoning, the Griever begins to behave strangely, looking around like he is making sure he’s not being followed, and then he slips into the dark gap between two large boulders. We follow, as stealthily as we can, though it feels like we could become trapped in such a place. We squeeze through the gap, and find ourselves in a kind of swamp, thick and hidden beyond the boulders and surrounded by impenetrable marsh.

It’s a gloomy place, in the shadow of rocky overhangs where the bats now settle in. They hang themselves upside down, clinging to the undersides of the arching boulders, rustling like the skin of a dog when it shakes itself off. The Griever waves a hand at them. And—as with the chameleons—they exhale dark tufts of emptiness, as if changing light to emptiness inside their lungs.

The Griever gathers armfuls of these breaths, then waddles mournfully to a rock where he sits and pulls a spinning wheel, exactly like the first one we saw, out of his sleeve. As Hypocriffa did, he spins yarn out of the fibers, muttering to himself words we don’t quite hear. Then, leaning back, exhausted, he hangs the finished ball of yarn from a branch at the swamp’s edge, as if leaving it for someone to retrieve.

He lies down in the muck and goes, suddenly, to sleep. At least, I think it’s sleep. His skeletal face remains blank, his empty eye sockets wide, white, and open. Tears stream out of them, but he remains still. And beside him, we see the container that surely must hold his heart, a faded trinket box that looks as if it could be made out of bone.

All around, the bats flutter and move restlessly, wide awake, as they probably will be till morning.

Germ looks at me meaningfully, points at the sky, and then makes a sleeping motion with her head tilted into her hands. She is suggesting we wait till the sun rises and the bats sleep, but I shake my head. That means waiting several hours we can’t afford to lose. And by then, the Griever will be waking up.

I lift my flashlight, turn it on, ruminating. Little One, in bluebird form, looks up at me expectantly.

I think back to the story I told to Germ the day we met, about a bat that swallowed mosquitoes and burped out stars. The story came to me because, at the time, we had bats in our attic. My mom didn’t even notice the noise, but I’d hear them leaving at night and returning just around dawn, when the sun was beginning to rise.

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