The Tide of Unmaking Page 2

  The burial plots grew up all around Eleabor as he moved deeper into the yard. They were sectioned off by hedges, trees or fences of cobbled stone. Almost a hundred yards from the caretaker’s cottage and, so far, there seemed nothing amiss.

  That’s when he heard it.

  A pattering sound, very different from the blast that had awakened him. No, this sounded like a panther charging up a forest path. Eleabor’s rychesword wobbled in his hand as he held the lantern high and called, “Who are ya? What ya be doin’?”

  No one answered. The pattering continued. The sound grew closer. A patch of young trees wavered slightly.

  “I said, who are ya—”

  A blur. A shadow moving among shadows. Something large tore up a side path to Eleabor’s right. Sword and lantern high, Eleabor gave chase. He soon realized he was outclassed. The thing, whatever it was, was pulling away with ease. Eleabor ducked out from under the eaves of the tress just in time to see a dark figure vault over the Innskell gate.

  It had only been a momentary glimpse and just a blotch of darker darkness. But given the breadth of its shoulders, Eleabor felt sure it was a Gwar.

  “Blasted hoodlum,” Eleabor muttered. Sure, the Gwar had a right to visit the dead just like everyone else, but what in Allyra was this one doing in Innskell in the wee hours? “Up to no good, I’ll wager.”

  Eleabor spun on his heels, fear replaced by fury, and trod back the way he had come. “Now to see what this joker was up to,” he grumbled.

  Even since the Accord, Eleabor still felt the Gwar should keep to their own. There’d always been some Gwar in Berinfell, even long before the war. But now the city was like some dang cross-cultural hub, Gwar and Elfkind mixing as freely as old allies.

  Not the way of things, Eleabor thought. And surely, surely, Gwar should be buried somewhere other than the Elven cemetery. Why, Innskell was the burial places of all the former Lords! To think that Gwar could pollute the soil, well, that was maddening.

  Eleabor worked himself up to a frothy lather of anger. Tombstones and monuments passed by in a blur. But some absent part of his mind still wondered about the noise that had woken him.

  Eleabor swung the lantern back and forth, searching for any sign, any inkling of damage. But once, he swung the lantern to his right when he should have swung it to his left. He saw a large crypt vault, illuminated in the lantern’s pale white light. Everything to Eleabor’s left was blotted out in inky darkness. Eleabor didn’t see the yawning pit. His next step found nothing but air. He flailed, tossed the lantern, and fell.

  His rychesword jammed into earth about halfway down, knocking Eleabor backward. He landed hard on his backside in about ten inches of icy water.

  He jolted to his feet, sputtering and growling. “Dang, hoodlums!” Eleabor shouted. “I could’a broke my neck!”

  He was almost exactly eight feet down. He looked up at a ragged rectangular patch of sky and realized into what he had fallen. An eight-foot-deep hole in the ground in a cemetery could only be one thing.

  A bit of ethereal white light glowed above. The lantern must have come to rest fairly close to the edge. Hesitantly, Eleabor looked down around his feet. He’d worked among the dead for forty years, but still had no comfort where the living did not belong.

  Whatever casket or coffin had been interred here, it must have been a grand one. But there wasn’t much left of it. Huge pieces of stained alder and maple floated in the chill water. The blasted Gwar must have taken a sledgehammer to this casket, Eleabor thought. And then, realizing that there were no skeletal remains visible in the wreckage, Eleabor had a darker thought about the Gwar’s purposes here.

  Visions of body-snatchers and black rituals skittering in his mind, Eleabor looked frantically for a way out. But graves didn’t come equipped with ladders.

  He threw his sword out and over, then jumped up at the side, feeling much like a bug trying to escape a jar. He grabbed fistfuls of wet soil and managed little more than to splatter himself dark with mud. But at last, he found a handhold. There was a deep cavity in the grave wall and a sturdy tree’s root within. Eleabor was wiry and thin, so he easily grasped the root and yanked himself upward.

  Oddly, he found another similar handhold just above and to the right. It was exactly where he needed it to be. In fact, there were equally spaced divots for his feet as well. It may as well have been a ladder. Eleabor clambered out in no time.

  He did his best to wipe himself off, then retrieved his sword and took up the lantern once more. He held the light over the open grave and looked down. The casket shredded like that, well, Eleabor had never seen the sort.

  In fact, the more Eleabor thought about it, he couldn’t imagine a Gwar sneaking into the cemetery, digging up a grave just to pulverize a casket. If that was it, he thought, where was the body? And if the body was the Gwar’s object, why smash up the coffin?

  The lantern’s white glow only revealed more disturbing details.

  Eleabor had dug a lot of graves. He’d also had the unenviable task of moving dozens of graves from parts of the cemetery where sinkholes had opened up. In so doing he’d learned a great deal about the work. Older graves, for instance, were much, much harder to disinter. Any grave ten years or older, the dirt would settle and pack. It would mesh with the soil all around it. Digging it would be no easier than putting a shovel through untouched earth.

  But Eleabor noticed that this grave still held its rough, rectangular shape. Couldn’t be more that five, six years old. Seven tops, Eleabor was sure. And where’s all the dirt anyway?

  The dirt from the grave hadn’t been piled up beside the ditch. Even a reckless laborer would leave some kind of bank. There should have been a ring of soil or mounds or something. Eleabor wandered about the gaping black hole, but there was no rise of any sort.

  It had rained overnight: a cold, pelting downpour. That would wash a fair amount of soil away. But not all of it.

  Eleabor frowned and felt as if the chill rain had begun anew. Only it hadn’t. He shivered and started the walk back to his cottage. I’ll have to report this, of course. It wasn’t his fault. Thousands of graves spread all over Innskell. He couldn’t be expected to watch them all, at the same time, by himself. And yet, he was the caretaker.

  Maybe the Elders would see fit to assign a night detail of soldiers to make hourly sweeps. “That’s what we need,” Eleabor muttered as he passed a tall mausoleum. “Maybe then an Elf could get a good night’s—”

  Eleabor stopped as if smacked by an invisible hand. The ghostly lantern’s light fell upon more destruction. Chunks and jagged shards of stone littered the ground all around the mausoleum’s eastern wall. At first, Eleabor thought the wall itself or maybe some stone monument upon it had crumbled. But looming closer, Eleabor saw that the wall of the grave building was unscathed. Well, there was a fairly large crack in the wall. But nothing seemed to have broken off.

  Eleabor picked up a piece of the broken rock. Turning it this way and that, he was pretty sure it was high-grade marble. He turned around and looked back the way he had walked. Not fifteen paces back was the dug up grave. Come to think of it, Eleabor had seen the frame for the grave cap. If the family had a fair amount of gold but didn’t want a big mausoleum, they often had a grave cap of good stone crafted. The cap itself was usually six arm length’s long and three wide. It was a full eight inches thick too.

  Eleabor shook his head. Those blasted things were heavy. It usually took a team of four Elves to cap a grave. Eleabor looked down at the broken stone. The light fell upon a few engraved letters. A letter “e” and something cut off. Maybe a “t.” Good engraving, fancy, deep lettering. Eleabor turned more and more of the stone. It was so obliterated that he couldn’t find a single whole word. The closest thing he found was a chunk of marble with “mande” on it. Maybe this means something in one of the old languages? Eleabor didn’t know.

  He looked back at the open grave. It was as if someone had lifted off the grave cap and tossed i
t against the mausoleum’s wall. But no single Gwar had such might.

  Eleabor swallowed. He began to wonder if what he’d seen had been a Gwar after all. It might have been some creature, some backwoods creature no one had ever seen before. Something strong enough to break old Eleabor in half like a toothpick.

  Eleabor turned to walk away and put his foot into a pile of fresh mud. He looked down. There was fresh, muddy soil all over the side of the mausoleum, except for a rectangular outline the size of a grave cap. Clumps of soil lay scattered all over the sod as well.

  Eleabor had seen enough. The lantern shaking as he scurried away, Eleabor wondered what could have created the destruction he’d witnessed. And he wondered what “mande” meant.

  He stopped cold. In fact, standing in the center of an erupting volcano wouldn’t have warmed the chill that came over him. He spun on his feet, looked from grave to grave.

  “Aww, no,” he whispered. “Not that grave. No, no, can’t be.”

  But the more he thought about the location of the obliterated burial plot, the more he became certain he knew just who had been buried there.

  Rubbing his temples, Eleabor wondered if maybe he could find another job.

  2: Premonitions

  MRS. SIMONSON STARED AT THE LA skyline spreading out behind her office picture window and gasped. The view from the top of the skyscraper was spectacular, vast…and empty.

  No picturesque view, no posh office, no seven-figure, high-profile job could dull the ache she felt as keenly as a stab wound. More than a month had bled away since her only daughter Kat disappeared. A month full of murderous days, grinding through the jarring moments following the abduction. The waking nightmare, she called it. She rubbed her temples, elbows on her desk.

  She wasn’t sleeping well. Wasn’t eating well. And therefore wasn’t working well. Everyone at the office told her she needed a break. She agreed, but their beach house in Newport was the last place she wanted to go. Too many memories of Kat there. So she did what she’d always done and plunged into her work. But whatever creative energies she’d once called upon to distract her from life, they weren’t working their magic now. Bidden or unbidden, the memories—and the questions—would not relent.

  The North Hollywood Police Department eventually turned the case over to the FBI. International trafficking, they’d said. Most likely a cartel. Darkened SUVs, military grade weaponry, the broken stone wall surrounding the property, and the disappearance of the household’s Mexican house keeper. Most likely a ransom game for the Simonson’s daughter.

  Only one problem: there’d been no demands.

  “We’re so sorry,” the lead detective had said to Mrs. Simonson.

  And with every frantic phone call she made to the FBI in the weeks that followed, she got the same reply: “We’re doing all we can with the leads we have.” But there were no more leads, and that meant the authorities weren’t doing anything really.

  There was the magical paper note, as she called it during the first few days of the aftermath. But it wasn’t exactly something the FBI would believe, much less spend time and money investigating.

  Still, seeing Kat’s own curly-cue handwriting on the golden paper, then watching in amazement as it vanished right before her eyes, gave Mrs. Simonson some initial assurance that Kat would be fine. It was a clue, wasn’t it? But where could it lead? And how could she follow…if the note was gone?

  Before long, she wondered if the magical paper note had been real at all. By the second week, she was sure it was an aberration, and by the third, the family psychiatrist had explained it as a coping mechanism.

  Speaking of coping mechanisms, she thought. The temple rubbing wasn’t helping the throbbing headache…or any other aches for that matter. She turned away from the window and found the photograph of her husband staring back at her from across the desk.

  He claimed he hadn’t seen her for more than a few minutes a night. Maybe just a brief encounter in the kitchen at the coffee machine, or sometimes barely waking up to mumble something to her as she walked in the door at some absurd hour.

  Even the company CFO, Woody Gregg, noticed the long hours she was pulling. He appeared in her office doorway and gestured for her to follow. She entered the hall and followed him to an alcove near his office.

  “Kathryn, I can’t imagine what you’re going through,” Woody said. “And I know it’s not my place to talk, but I’m not so sure On Your Mark needs you as much as your husband needs you. This is business, and business does matter. But, we aren’t exactly struggling here. Look around.” Woody gestured to the audaciously stylish office floor that made up LA’s top advertising firm. “Go home, Kate.”

  There was almost no traffic on the 101 at 2am on a Tuesday. A good thing, too. Kate knew she was swerving. Her vision blurred from tears and mascara. She could scarcely imagine the black streaks running down her cheeks. Not even her best waterproof makeup could withstand this sort of flooding. But what could she do? Retreat…and tears…well, that was just how she dealt with heartache.

  Allan, her husband, was different. He always had been. He turned to his faith whenever things got tough. He even claimed her leap to stardom was because of God. Now, faced with the most difficult trial of their lives, Allan was going to church. “There’s strength in community,” he’d suggested, pointing to his small group invitation. “I don’t know, I just feel God helping me there. Through people.”

  “I have plenty of people around me at work,” Kate argued.

  “You know it’s not the same.”

  “Why? Because we have to all read the Bible and sing Kum Ba Ya in order to get God to help us?”

  Allan had been visibly disappointed…again. And while Kate was dying on the inside—knowing her husband was right—she wouldn’t give in.

  Hands on the steering wheel, Kate imagined how frustrated Allan must be. She blinked back more tears. For several years, Kat had acted toward her the very same way she was now treating her husband: not really listening, retreating, even pushing away. It seemed adoption was even stronger than blood. Of all the things to teach her, and now she’s gone.

  Kate smeared more black makeup across her left cheek with the back of her hand, trying her best to stay within the yellow lines. She hadn’t looked at the speedometer for a few miles. That’s when the blue and red lights flashed in her rearview mirror.

  “For crying out loud,” Kate muttered, then snickered at the irony of her statement—the first time she’d smiled in a while. She eased the SUV to the shoulder, leaned over to pop open the glove box, and fumbled for her registration, then slipped her driver’s license out of her pocket book. She could hear the police car door slam shut behind her, then saw the glow of the flashlight try and punch through her tinted windows. How was she going to try and explain her way out of this one? I’m sorry, Officer, but my daughter has been abducted by a drug cartel. Maybe you saw it in the news? Anyways, I’m real sorry, and I won’t ever speed again.

  Yeah, right.

  And can I have a lollipop too? Maybe play with your radar gun?

  What was the point anymore? She didn’t care. She didn’t care about anything. She didn’t even feel like trying.

  Three raps on the window with a knuckle. Kate smashed down the button on her armrest as colored lights played over her face, blaring from the rearview mirror. When the glass was low enough, she squinted up into the blinding light, unable to make out if it was a man or woman. So she went with the generic in her usual get the first word in approach.

  “Good evening, Officer. No, I don’t know why you pulled me over, and I don’t know how fast I was going. But my destination is home, and I’m coming from work. Here’s my license and registration.”

  The Officer didn’t take her credentials. Kate waited.

  This is strange. Some sort of interrogation maybe?

  “OK, yeah. The tears are from being upset. No, I’m not drunk or high. I’m crying. Grown women do that from time to time. Like you ha
ven’t—”

  “Mom, I’m okay.”

  Kate froze. The voice behind that flashlight. “Kat?”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “KAT! Dear God!” Kate reached out, trying to push the flashlight out of the way. But the figure—her daughter—stepped back. “KAT?! Is it really you?”

  “I’m fine, Mom. Don’t worry. But it’s hard to get through…from this distance.”

  Kate threw the door open, tried to leap from her seat, but was held back by her seat belt. She looked down, fumbling with the button. “KAT! WAIT!” The seatbelt came free. Kate swung out of the driver’s seat, her feet hitting the asphalt.

  Her daughter was ten steps away now, flashlight still aimed at a blinding angle. Kate raised her hand. “KAT! COME BACK!”

  The violent blast of an air horn sounded to the left. Kate didn’t even have time to blink as a roaring eighteen wheeler barreled into her daughter.

  And just like that, Kat was gone.

  But so was the police car behind her.

  Kate stood in the middle of the far right lane, hands grasping the hair on her head. “What—what—” She spun around, bewildered. What just happened here?

  Another pair of headlights approached her from the left. The car slowed then swerved, horn blaring. Kate stumbled back toward her vehicle. “Oh, God. What’s going on here? What am I doing?”

  She slide into the driver’s seat again and closed the door. “I’m delirious,” she said aloud, then slumped her head onto the steering wheel. “I’m losing my mind.”

  Then she thought of Allan. She could see his face: the soft smile, the peaceful eyes, the confidence.