Aerenden The Child Returns Read online

“Meg,” Nick called to her from across the room. He kept his voice low. “We need to get your father out of here. You have to help me carry him.”

  She tried to obey him, but her feet refused to budge. She dug her fingernails into her palms, gritting her teeth with the sharp pain, but she still could not believe any of this was real.

  “You can’t,” her father’s voice croaked. “You have to leave me here. You have to protect Meg.”

  “James—”

  “Now,” her father insisted. His head rose and Meaghan saw a flash of authority return to his eyes. Nick nodded and she stared at him in horror.

  “I won’t leave him here,” she said.

  “We have to. You’re in danger. Once you’re safe, I’ll return—”

  “I won’t go,” she insisted. “I refuse to leave him in the house with whoever did this.”

  “We don’t have—”

  “No!” she yelled, and then slapped her hand over her mouth, too late to muffle the noise. The footsteps upstairs quickened.

  “Meg,” her father spoke again and her eyes filled with tears. His voice was no more than a whisper. “Trust Nick. He’ll keep you safe.”

  She nodded, and then shook as her father gathered his last breath. The footsteps reached the top of the stairs. Her father shuddered into stillness, but she had no time to mourn before Nick grabbed her hand and yanked her out the front door.

  Cold air bit her face. Black clouds gathered overhead, shadowing the day in darkness. A gust of wind whipped leaves across the yard, building small funnel clouds, but she ignored them. She focused on the back of Nick’s head, then on her car when she realized they would need it to escape. They had nearly reached the driveway before she remembered she did not have her keys. She skidded to a stop. Turning back toward the house, she caught her breath when she saw their pursuers exiting the front door.

  There were three of them, each taller than the last. Dark brown cloaks covered them from head to foot and they all carried heavy wood clubs stained with blood. They moved with an unnatural speed and disjointed grace, as if they floated instead of touching the ground. A putrid, rotting scent emanated from them in waves. It rolled Meaghan’s stomach, pitching her breakfast mid-way up her throat before she controlled the reaction. Nick grabbed her arm and pulled her toward her parents’ SUV.

  “The keys,” she gasped, daring a glance behind her. The creatures grew closer. “We don’t—”

  “I have them. James gave them to me. Get in the car.”

  She heard a beep as Nick deactivated the alarm. She ran to the passenger side. Yanking open the door, she slid into the seat while he turned the key.

  Releasing the parking brake, Nick threw the transmission into reverse, and then stomped on the gas pedal. The SUV squealed down the driveway seconds before their pursuers reached them. At the road, Nick yanked the wheel, spinning the car onto the blacktop so it pointed toward the highway, then shifted into drive, and gunned the engine once more.

  A thud echoed through the vehicle as one of the creatures jumped onto the roof, gripping the edges of the car with long, skeletal fingers that gave the illusion of skin suctioned to bone. Meaghan screamed and tore her eyes from the creature.

  “Hold on to something,” Nick told her. “I’m going to try to shake him.”

  She grabbed the door handle with both hands and Nick accelerated again, swerving left and then right before taking a sharp corner at full speed. The creature still held. It inched across the car, moving down the windshield so Meaghan saw his face. The monster staring back at her appeared worse than any of the horrors she had seen in her nightmares. His eyes shone crimson red, pools of blood sunken into ashen skin. His mouth appeared to be no more than a black hole filled with fibrous webbing. A mass of disfigured scar tissue filled the space where his nose should have been. He lifted his fists, then brought them back down, pounding on the window in an attempt to break it.

  “Put your seatbelt on,” Nick commanded. Heeding his warning, she clicked her belt into place and he slammed on the brakes. The monster flew from the SUV, landing on a car parked in the street. A burglar alarm blared an incessant, alternating pitch that drew neighbors into their yards.

  Nick’s maneuver halted one pursuer, but the other two had not given up. From the side mirror, Meaghan could see them gaining speed. Nick jammed his foot onto the gas pedal again and headed north, as fast as the roads would allow.

  Meaghan kept her eyes glued to the mirror, watching the creatures fade into specks of brown until Nick turned onto the highway. He seemed relieved, but she could not shake her fear.

  “They’re gone for now,” Nick assured her after she had checked the mirror for the fifth time in the same number of seconds. “They’re powerful, but they’re not very bright.”

  “They’re not very…” she echoed, her voice trailing off when she realized the underlying meaning of his words. She shook her head. “You can’t possibly know anything about those things. They aren’t real. They can’t be. None of this is real.”

  Nick set his jaw, and for a brief second his eyes met hers before he turned them back to the road. “It’s real, Meg. I wish it wasn’t, but it is. The creatures are Mardróch. Now get some sleep. You’ve been up all night and we have a long drive ahead of us. We can talk when we get there.”

  Sleep was the furthest thing from her mind. She wanted to scream, to run. She wanted to shake Nick and break him out of whatever spell held him firm and emotionless beside her. She wanted to wake, but the pain she had felt when she saw her mother on the stairs, heard her father take his last breath, still ripped through her and she knew this nightmare would never be over.

  Only Nick could decipher what had happened, but his white knuckles on the steering wheel and hard gaze on the highway told her there would be no conversation. He remained focused on escape.

  Meaghan opted to do the same. Closing her eyes, she let tears ease her into a dreamless abyss.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  SCREAMS ECHOED across the cold air, startling Meaghan awake and shredding the small amount of peace she had found. Yanking open her eyes, she gasped when blood filled her vision, then eased from her sight in thick, crimson rivulets to reveal the dark wood of her living room floor and the white risers of the staircase, stained pink with her mother’s blood.

  Logic told her she should be in the car with Nick, escaping to an unknown destination, but her mother’s body lay before her, twisted and tortured, bent and bruised in death. Footsteps pounded the floor above her, but she ignored them, dismissing the peril to focus on her mother’s pale face and the red hair splayed across her shoulders. Meaghan reached out a hand to brush the strands aside, to feel the softness of them between her fingers, but a stirring of her mother’s body froze her.

  It had not been much, only the slightest inflation of her mother’s chest, and Meaghan would have credited it to imagination except it came again, this time accompanied by rattling breath. Meaghan stepped back, and then froze once more when her mother’s eyes opened, fixing Meaghan with a heavy stare.

  “Meg,” her mother’s voice rasped. Red spittle escaped from her mouth, spraying the front of Meaghan’s sweater. “Meg,” her mother repeated as she lifted her hand, her fingers coated in dark, dried blood.

  Meaghan swallowed hard. Her heart raced, but her hand drifted forward on instinct, seeking her mother’s comfort.

  “Trust him, Meg,” her mother’s lips moved, though her father’s voice escaped them. “Trust Nick.”

  Meaghan’s fingers closed around her mother’s. They felt hard, unyielding, like plastic.

  “You’re in danger, Meg. Danger…There are things…I have to tell you….”

  Meaghan fought to hold on to her mother’s words, but they faded, lost to the drone of an unseen engine, the sound of rocks crunching somewhere beneath her. Then all sound, including her mother’s voice, succumbed to silence. She squeezed her eyes shut, opening them again to search for her mother’s face.

  She f
ound a black dashboard. Her eyes coasted along the smooth plastic to the car door at her side and the handle grasped beneath her white knuckles. She released her grip, turning her head when Nick coughed beside her. He watched her, his eyes rimmed red, and she knew he was real and what she had just seen had been a dream. Or rather, a nightmare.

  Her mother was dead, and any secrets she had held had died with her.

  The thought stabbed through Meaghan’s heart and her eyes drifted from Nick’s face, seeking solace in whatever lay beyond the windshield.

  Dark clouds had overtaken the sky, fulfilling their earlier promise with an onslaught of rain and snow. Beyond the haze, she could make out the outline of tall trees and lowlying brush that formed the edge of a thick forest.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “Five,” Nick said, his voice as hollow as her mother’s had been in her dream.

  She nodded, too numbed by her own pain to acknowledge his. “Where are we?”

  “North of the house by several hundred miles,” he answered. His voice grew stronger and steel returned to it. “We need to go. We have some distance left to go tonight and we need to walk it.”

  Her focus came back to him. She frowned. “I don’t see how we can. It’s snowing. I doubt our sweaters will be warm enough.”

  “It won’t be easy,” he admitted. “But once we start moving, we should be okay.” Taking her hand in his, he offered a thin smile, though it did not hold any encouragement. “I’m sorry. I wish we were better prepared.”

  “How do we prepare for something like this?” she asked, dropping his hand. “It’s not like we could have known,” she hesitated, not wanting to say the words that would acknowledge her parents’ deaths. “That we would be out here,” she finally finished.

  Nick pressed his lips together, and then averted his gaze. In guilt, she realized, though she did not understand why. They had found out about the intruders at the same time. They had both seen the carnage and together, they had failed to rescue her father.

  The realization stung her heart once again, burning hot tears in her eyes. The tears coursed down her cheeks, splashing onto her hands before she saw Nick’s blurry image move closer. She fisted her hands on the back of his sweater, burying her head in his neck as sobs came fast, racking her body. Her grief overwhelmed her until she had exhausted her energy for it and her body stilled. Nick pressed his lips to the top of her head before he let her go.

  “I’m so sorry,” he whispered. Sorrow hung in his voice and she felt her throat constrict with her own grief. She swallowed to erase the sudden feeling she might choke to death.

  “You knew they were there,” she whispered, forcing her gaze to his face. His eyes widened slightly and she continued to press him. “You knew, didn’t you? When we were in your apartment, when I—”

  “Not the way you mean.” He placed his hand on the door handle and turned from her. “We need to go.”

  She grabbed his arm to keep him from leaving. “What happened, Nick? What aren’t you telling me? You feel guilty. I can tell.”

  “Nothing.” He yanked his arm from her fingers, facing her long enough for her to see the anger now stiffening his face. “Stop, all right? I’m too exhausted to keep you out right now, so stop reading me.”

  “Reading you?” She shook her head, confused. “I don’t even know what that means. What on earth are you talking about?”

  “Forget it. Let’s go.”

  Without waiting for her objection, he opened the car door and stepped outside. She followed his lead, moving around the vehicle to the driver’s side.

  “What are you talking about?” she asked again, frustration creeping into her voice when he did not answer. “You can’t keep avoiding my questions.”

  “I can and I will. At least until it’s safe.” He opened the back door of the SUV and pulled out the backpack. When he turned to her again, she felt a cold that had nothing to do with the weather. Despite her talent for understanding small emotional cues, she found his face indistinguishable. His posture appeared impassive, his eyes vacant. His anger had dissolved in an instant.

  “What—?” she started to ask what had happened, but did not know how to finish the question. It made no sense.

  “I blocked you,” he said before turning from her to gather branches from the ground. “Help me hide the car. By now, the police will have found your parents and assumed you’ve been kidnapped. Their theories on me won’t be great, so I’d rather not give them an easy path to hunt us down.”

  She stood rooted to her spot. “What do you mean ‘blocked’ me?”

  He stacked the branches over the car, creating a nest. “Are you going to help?”

  Her hands shook, so she dug them into her pockets to warm them. “Not until you answer me.”

  “There’s no time.”

  “You promised me you’d answer my questions when we got here. I’m not taking another step until you do.”

  “You can’t be serious,” he said, then sighed when she moved to a tree stump and sat down. “We’ll freeze to death if we stay here.”

  “I’ll run the car.”

  “If you do, you’ll draw attention. We have to worry about the Mardróch finding us.”

  “You said we lost them.”

  He threw another branch on top of the car, and then turned to frown at her. “There’s nothing wrong with being cautious, but even if they’re gone, we still have the police to worry about.”

  “I don’t have to worry about the police. You do,” she pointed out, crossing her arms over her chest when he continued to collect branches without looking at her. “And why do you? Why would they assume you had something to do with this?”

  “Because,” he started, then hesitated and faced her. “Because I didn’t exist until a year ago. The police are bound to realize that when they start investigating.”

  Meaghan dropped her arms. “That’s not possible.”

  “It is when I’m not from here. To them, I don’t exist.”

  “Of course you do,” she protested. “If you changed your name, there’s a record. If you didn’t and you left another life, there’s still a record somewhere. A birth certificate, a school record, something. You exist, Nick.”

  “Not here,” he said, returning to his task. “Please help. I don’t want to be doing this all night.”

  She gave in and helped him stack branches along the base of the SUV though the effort seemed pointless. A strong gust of wind would reveal the car in seconds.

  Wandering away from him, she returned a few minutes later with heavy tree limbs to stack on top, and picked up the conversation where they had left off. “Unless you were born in the Antarctic to polar bears, you have a birth certificate.”

  “I don’t,” he replied. “And neither do you.”

  “Of course I do. I’ve seen it.”

  He stopped his task to look at her. “So have I. Vivian and James did a good job on the counterfeit. It would fool an expert, but it’s still fake. So is their marriage certificate. It’s all fake, Meg, and the police will figure that out once they realize Vivian and James had no real history either.”

  The thought tightened Meaghan’s throat again, but she shook her head to chase it away. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “It’s not. None of us are from here.” Nick turned to stack the last of the branches, and then faced her again. “I told you it was too much to explain right now. We have to go.”

  “Not a chance. Not until I know more, anyway. You sound insane.”

  Nick shook his head. “Come on, Meg. You know better than that.”

  When Meaghan met his plea with silence, weariness drew lines over his face, then seemed to emanate from him, turning the air heavy. She felt stifled by the sensation, but ignored it and shoved her hands into her pockets.

  “How do I know you’re not crazy?” she demanded. “I’m not sure I’m still sane after,” she swallowed the rest of her words. Tears burned her eyes, but remember
ing Nick’s guilt from earlier, she backed away from him when he reached for her.

  Then her thoughts turned more sinister. She scanned the forest for an escape as her tears dissolved and panic set her muscles in preparation for flight.

  “Do the Mardróch even exist?” she asked. “How do I know you didn’t slip me something to make me hallucinate and then kill my parents? How do I know I’m not next?”

  Nick’s eyes widened and pain rolled from him in waves. She felt it as raw as she had his weariness. It drowned her, robbing the air from her lungs and returned tears to her eyes. Sorrow washed over her next, then guilt again. This time the emotion came through clear enough for her to understand it. He had not killed her parents. He felt responsible for failing to stop their deaths, just as she did.

  The regret that came last was hers alone. But before she could apologize, he turned his back on her.

  “We have a lot of traveling to do before we can rest tonight. You can come with me or you can stay. I don’t care which, but know this, Meaghan.” He glanced over his shoulder. His eyes and face were devoid of emotion, the wall he had erected earlier to keep her out fixed back in place. “If I had intended to kill you, I would have done so long before now.”

  He picked up the backpack and walked into the forest.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  HER FINGERS hurt. Meaghan held them up in the moonlight to examine the red creeping up her skin, and then blew on them in one last attempt to warm them. Shoving her hands back into her pockets, she tried to focus on something else to take her mind off the pain. Her lungs did not help in the effort. She felt like she inhaled steel wool with each breath of cold air. Neither did her feet. They felt like sledgehammers. Too much snow had fallen over the past few hours, burying the path in front of them in white powder so that each step forced snow into her sneakers and soaked her socks and jeans. Before the storm had dissipated, sleet had mixed with the snowfall, coating the trees in tentacles of ice. If she had been at home, warm in front of the fireplace, she would have appreciated the winter storm for its pristine beauty. Out here, subjected to its hostile side, she loathed it. Even the stars resembled tiny icicles hanging in the sky. If they grew too heavy and fell like daggers around her, she would not be surprised. It would be a fitting end to this night.