Children of the Earth Read online

  A familiar look of desire flashed across his face. “Impossible,” he said.

  She reached for him, and he was there, strong and solid, holding her, kissing her, letting her heart pound and clash against his.

  12

  AS OWEN AND DAPHNE SANK into their kiss at the abandoned motocross track, Heather Anderson found herself in a cargo van jouncing along a high mountain road, the Children of the Earth stuffed in close around her. Aura drove, with Luna in the passenger seat, staring out the window and nearly vibrating with anticipation.

  From atop a spare tire, bracing herself against the van’s paneled side, Abilene led them in an old folk song. Her voice was throaty and grainy and thick, and even though Heather had never been much of a singer, she gladly joined the tangle of voices.

  She’d been with the Children of the Earth for five days, but it may as well have been five years. She’d fallen effortlessly into the routine of cocktail waitressing at the Vein each night and sinking onto a mattress beside her brothers and sisters after the bar closed, their breath mingling in a tender lullaby. Each morning Luna woke them up early: There was cooking and laundry to do, the bar had to be restocked and the dishes washed. In the afternoon they took long walks together outside, breathing in all of nature’s beauty as Luna swept her arms across the wild mountain panoramas to remind them that this was what was at stake, this was the world they would lose if their father, the God of the Earth, was defeated.

  There was so much lost time to catch up on, so much to learn. Heather drank in stories of her childhood on the commune with a dizzy thirst, sat motionless for hours as Luna taught her meditations to clean and purify her mind. She was dimly aware that she ought to have completed freshman orientation, should have been all moved into her dorm and registered for classes. But college seemed far away and irrelevant, a hazy memory from another lifetime.

  It was only in the chilly hours before dawn, with the bar’s noise and activity still buzzing in her head and her siblings crashed soundly beneath their patchwork quilts all around her, that it occurred to Heather to wonder what had happened to her. Thoughts of her parents, anxious at not hearing from her, scratched at her mind, and doubts about the Children of the Earth and her place among them made her toss and turn until she fell finally into an exhausted sleep no longer tainted with terrifying dreams. Those had stopped the moment she reached Carbon County, as soon as she found herself among the people she knew to be her true family.

  “We’re here,” Luna announced. The Children of the Earth braced themselves as the van turned sharply and came to a halt, pebbles plinking against its underside. They tumbled out of the rear doors, and the scent of pine engulfed them, its freshness a welcome relief after the gasoline-smelling closeness of the cargo hold.

  Hatchett Lake glittered before them, surrounded by mountains that cupped it like a woman’s hands gathering water to drink. The silent sunset and feathery tops of evergreen trees wavered on its glassy surface, marred only by the occasional ripple of a heron swooping in for its last meal of the day.

  “Isn’t it perfect?” Abilene said close to her ear. “The energy here is amazing.”

  Heather nodded. She had never attended a ritual before, but according to her brothers and sisters they were the culmination of all their prayers and meditation, a celebration of their power. Plus, the rituals had a way of making things happen: things like drawing her to the Vein, where she’d found her family at long last.

  She tried to stay out of the way as the Children of the Earth prepared for the ritual, bees bustling around the rusted hive of the van. Orion struggled under the weight of two enormous, skin-covered conga drums while Freya and Abilene carefully dragged their heels along the ground, casting a circle in the bed of pine needles.

  Kimo lit incense that sent rich-scented smoke spiraling along the currents of the early evening breeze, and Luna carefully polished a small, sharp dagger on the edge of her moss-colored cloak before sheathing it in a holster strapped to her thigh.

  From the depths of the van, Ciaran brought out a stack of hammered-copper bowls.

  “Now,” Luna commanded, “each of us will fill a bowl with water from the lake. Don’t let your minds wander; in order for this to work, it must be done with full intention.”

  Heather accepted her bowl wordlessly, her fingertips falling easily into the metal depressions. She trained her mind the way Luna had taught them in meditation, focusing fully on her task as she walked slowly toward the lake’s shore and knelt where its rippling edges lapped at the land.

  Frigid water cascaded over her fingers, but she forced herself not to flinch or even shiver. Luna had given her instructions, and she was determined to fulfill them to the letter. That was her purpose now, her reason for being: to learn from Luna and to do as she said.

  “Now place your bowls before you and stand in the circle.” Luna’s voice was smooth, hypnotic. Heather found a spot facing the lake, where she could see the last golden wisps of sunset reflected in its ripples.

  “In our last ritual, we called on the Gods of Air to bring our Earth Sister Heather to Carbon County.” Luna gave Heather a smile that spread like warm tea through her chest. “This ritual is for our Earth Brother Owen. He may be right here in Carbon County, but powerful forces are keeping him from us. Tonight, we turn to the west, where the Gods of Water reside. We humbly ask the Gods of Water to freeze the air, bringing us an early winter. When the snow falls, Owen will return to our hearth. He’ll come home.”

  As Heather nodded along with the rest of the Children of the Earth, the sound of a car engine rumbled down the road. She tensed, wondering what kind of stranger would come to a deserted mountain lake at sunset—a lone fisherman, maybe, or a couple packing a romantic picnic? The ritual had to be that night, the evening of the perfect quarter moon. If they ruined it, what would Luna do?

  “Oh, crap,” Kimo muttered as the car swung into view. It was a boxy four-door sedan, white with a thick blue stripe down the side. “It’s the cops. We better run.”

  He shivered under his black hoodie, making the anarchy tattoo on his neck contract and expand. A scrawny former gutter punk who’d been arrested for everything from dumpster diving to possession, he was no stranger to run-ins with the law.

  “It’s okay.” Luna glided to Kimo and put a comforting hand on his shoulder, instantly relaxing him. “We’re not getting busted. Tonight, the sheriff is our guest.”

  The car door opened, and the sheriff emerged, his doughy head peeking out from the driver’s-side door. He wore civilian clothes, a plaid button-down shirt and new-looking chinos that stretched over his sagging belly, and he carried a bouquet of drugstore carnations. Freya and Abilene exchanged knowing glances, laughter dancing in their eyes. It was obvious that the sheriff was dressed for a date.

  “So glad you could join us.” Luna glided to greet him. His eyes lit up, drinking her in, and he held out the flowers almost shyly. A smile frolicked across her face. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

  “We?” The sheriff glanced past her and saw her assembled brothers and sisters. The softness in his face hardened, and he dropped the flowers on the hood of his car.

  “I thought . . .” he began uncertainly.

  “Shhhh.” Luna placed a finger on his lips. “This will be even better than what you thought. Come with me.”

  She took his hand and led him to the lake’s shore. His eyes shifted suspiciously over the Children of the Earth silently appraising him from the circle drawn in pine needles, copper bowls of lake water at their feet. Heather wondered how they must look to him, with their earth-toned clothes and long, messy hair, their backs straight and tall as Luna had said they must always be when summoning the elemental gods, in order to keep all seven chakras open and aligned.

  Luna and the sheriff reached the center of the circle. “Sit,” Luna commanded softly. But the sheriff shook his head.

 
; “Listen, lady, I don’t know about all of this. I—”

  Luna wrapped him in an emerald stare, her eyes glowing brighter until they flared neon green. Heather could almost see the power rising through her spine and shooting from her eyes, the indigo glow of Luna’s mind entering the sheriff’s and stopping his thoughts in their tracks.

  “Sit,” Luna said again.

  The sheriff’s eyes glazed over, and his mouth clapped shut. He crossed his legs and dropped clumsily to the ground, staring up at Luna like a trusting child.

  Luna knelt in front of him, the edges of her cloak brushing the earth. The sunset’s persimmon glare glanced off her brow, illuminating flecks of glitter leftover from her go-go dancing makeup the night before.

  “Tonight, we make magic,” she crooned, her nose inches from his. “Tonight, your dearest wish in the world comes true.”

  The sheriff’s head bobbed like a marionette’s, making Luna laugh an icy laugh. She kissed him lightly on the cheek and twirled around, eyes shining.

  “Now the ritual begins!” she cried. “Join hands so we can activate the power of the circle. Hurry—the moon is rising.”

  Heather glanced up and saw a pale quarter moon floating like a slice of lemon in the sky. Kimo’s bony fingers slipped into her right hand while Aura’s warm, padded palm grasped her left.

  “We feel the energy of the earth beneath us,” Luna chanted, “feel it rise through the soles of our feet into our legs, through our bodies and into our arms. Our veins drink it in, and our heart chakras fill, and we join our power with the energy of the earth until it’s too great for our bodies to contain. Now we pass this energy through the circle, sanctifying this space and our bond.”

  A jolt pulsed like an electric shock through Heather’s arms. She stifled a yelp and forced herself to hang on to Kimo’s and Aura’s hands, even as aftershocks sparked through their fingers. The energy ballooned inside of her, making her feel like she was about to burst, and then the jolt flowed through her arms and out her fingers. Next to her, Kimo and Aura winced. Their eyes narrowed with pain, but they held on, and a moment later Heather saw it ripple back around the circle, ebbing and flowing through the group’s clasped hands and settling evenly into their bodies.

  Her eyeballs felt hot. She looked around the circle and saw that all of their eyes were glowing, illuminating the darkened grove next to the lake in phosphorescent green.

  “The circle is complete!” Luna cried. “Now we’ll use sacred rhythm to awaken the Water Gods.”

  From opposite sides of the circle, Orion and Silas approached the giant drums that flanked the sheriff like sentries. Orion’s drum was slender and tall, like him, while Silas’s was nearly as wide as his bouncer’s shoulders. They positioned the drums between their knees as the sheriff sat slack-jawed and slump-backed in the center of the circle, legs loosely crossed and beefy elbows resting on his knees.

  The drummers’ palms hit the skins with slow, deliberate precision, beating a solemn rhythm that echoed across the lake and bounced off the rock faces of the mountains. Heather felt the beat in her feet and her chest, let it stir the molten light glowing in her eyes and vibrate her bones. As the music coursed through her and the drumbeats grew louder, faster, stronger, Heather felt the rhythm pick her up and carry her around the circle, found herself moving instinctively among the Children of the Earth in a dance that took control of her body and left her brain smothered in dust. She was barely aware of her arms rising to the moon and her feet pounding the dirt, was lost in the web of life and sound connecting her to each of her Earth Siblings.

  “A-ya-a-ya-ay!” Abilene’s voice soared above them.

  “O-ya-o-ya-oh!” The drummers’ baritones echoed in her gut, propelling the blood ever faster through her veins.

  The moon glowed green, and the Children of the Earth raised their faces as one to greet it. Seafoam-colored light vibrated around it, and Heather realized she was seeing the moon’s gravitational pull, the waves of power that dictated tides and controlled oceans. She could feel the presence of the Water Gods among them, their seaweed fingers grasping at her hair, their voices sluicing and babbling in her ears. Sweat, or something more than sweat, coated her body, making her skin slick so that she swam rather than danced through the air, her body bubbly and bouyant.

  Luna began a guttural chant, her voice carrying over the lake.

  “Gods of Water, hear our cries:

  Freeze the water in the skies.

  Free the wind, release the snow

  So homeward will our brother blow.”

  The Children of the Earth joined their voices to the chant, lacing it into the drumbeats until it echoed like thunder through the mountains. Heather felt her throat open and heard her voice join in, a voice that was deeper and stronger and more powerful than her own. The moon’s green glow was blinding, waves of light and energy pulsing and pounding around it to the rhythm of their voices, the power of their chant.

  A crash on the lake’s shore jerked Heather’s eyes away from the throbbing moon and the faces whirling beside her. A wave spread its white-tipped fingers over the shore before diving headfirst to consume itself in a foam-spewing gulp. Before it could fully recede, another wave rose, turning the lake’s once-placid surface into a roiling, serpentine sea.

  “They hear us!” Ecstasy trilled in Luna’s voice.

  Still dancing to the frantic, hypnotic drumbeats, she turned to face the sheriff, her hips churning inches from his face. She lifted his chin until he was staring up at her, his mouth open in awe at the wild-haired, wild-eyed creature laughing before him.

  The chant died around them and the drums quieted to a whisper as Luna locked the sheriff’s eyes in hers and parted her lips to speak.

  “The Water Gods demand a sacrifice.” She squatted so that her eyes were level with the sheriff’s and placed both hands on his shoulders. “But you must go willingly.” The indigo halo returned, a glowing bubble that grew to encompass both of them. “This world hasn’t been kind to you. The one beyond is better. Would you like to go there?”

  An indigo glaze shadowed the sheriff’s eyes. Heather saw his Adam’s apple bob in his throat.

  “Do you want to look into your wife’s eyes again, to touch her hair?” The sheriff leaned into Luna’s words. “Do you want to hear her laughter and hold her close all night, every night, forever?”

  The sheriff opened his mouth, and Heather felt her breath stop. The Children of the Earth were frozen around her, their entire future—their reason for being together, their reason for being—hanging on the sheriff’s answer.

  “My son . . .” The sheriff spoke in a cracked husk of a voice. “Charlie.”

  Luna nodded. She took his hands in hers. “I’ll take care of him,” she promised. “Charlie will be safe. All you have to do is let go.”

  Tears glistened in the sheriff’s eyes. His lips trembled, and his skin seemed translucent in the greenish moonlight. He looked lost and tiny next to the towering pine trees.

  “Are you ready to let go?” Luna whispered.

  He nodded.

  “Yes.”

  Luna cupped his cheeks, raising his face to the moonlight. For a moment, the sheriff’s eyes blazed with the full force of a million lives, with every precious moment from birth through childhood, from adolescence to first true love to fatherhood to middle age. A smile stretched his lips, and his face filled with happiness so pure it stuck like an ice pick in Heather’s heart.

  Then his eyes closed, and his body went limp. Luna caught him beneath the shoulders and laid him gently to rest as the drumbeats pattered into silence. She tilted her ear to his mouth and listened for breath. Then she drew the dagger from her thigh holster and raised it to the moon, an icicle cutting the sky.

  She knelt at the sheriff’s side and slid the dagger across his fingertip, releasing a trickle of blood. In one fluid moveme
nt she dipped her finger in the scarlet pool and used it to paint a teardrop on his forehead.

  The Children of the Earth joined hands as she rose to her feet and looked out over the lake. Heather felt sick and shaken by what she’d just seen, the power that had bloomed like fire in her chest now a small, lost ship rocking nauseatingly in her stomach.

  “Gods of Water.” Luna addressed the lake, the moon, the pale and trembling circle of her siblings. “Your sacrifice is complete. We have taken from your oceans and rivers, and now we humbly offer you blood in return. Do with it what you will. All we ask is that you consider our plea: Grant us an early winter so that our brother returns home to us.”

  Ashy clouds began to gather over the lake, plump with moisture and sinking low in the sky, as a chill wind ripped through the pines. The Children of the Earth shivered in their light jackets. The sweat from their ritual dance cooled to a clammy glaze, and Heather watched goose bumps rise on her arms.

  “It’s cold.” She pulled on the sleeves of her sweater, stretching them over her suddenly freezing palms. “Like, really cold.”

  “Do you know what that means?” Kimo turned to her, his skeletal grin stretched wide.

  The frigid air rushed to her head, making her feel dizzy and sick. A man lay dead just a few feet away, a man who had passed away at Luna’s command, a man whose death she’d helped orchestrate.

  “It means it worked!” A great cheer dashed through the circle as he threw his scrawny arms around her, squeezing and lifting and spinning until her feet were off the ground and the lake and trees were a blur. The rest of her brothers and sisters pressed in, hugging and squealing and yelping until the lakeside was a blur of limbs, grappling and tackling, a cacophony of excited chatter even as the temperature dipped lower and the clouds hung dark and pregnant over the lake.

  Their energy infected her, pushing away the doubt until it was just a tiny nagging voice in the back of her head, and she finally let her mouth fall into a smile, joining her husky laugh with theirs and hugging her family the way they deserved to be hugged, with all the love she had to give.