Spitting out the dirt, I started to shove the moistened clay into my ears. As much as I could fit, praying that it would be enough to protect me from Ilia’s lethal voice.
Suddenly, everyone started to slow. Grunts and shouts were stalling in the air. Everyone around me was falling motionless in unnatural positions, as if someone hit pause on a movie.
Then the world started to change.
Chapter 27
Bodies were unnaturally still. A high C rang in my skull, making me dizzy. I tried to blink it away, but my vision got fuzzier and fuzzier as I did. Because reality was fading. Dissipating like fog as new images took over my vision.
I vaguely recognized PCH, old cars and bicycles zoomed by, and the feeling of awe and wonder filled my gut with every person that passed.
Completely unaware of my, and my mother’s, presence.
Wait.
I turned to look into a shop, briefly adjusting my dark red hair under my hat that so many humans wore here. A beanie. I double-checked that my ears stayed rounded, just like the humans, and trotted after my mother. I recognized the face in the reflection, but it wasn’t my own.
It was Drustan’s
This was Drustan’s memory.
He looked younger. Much younger than how I knew him. He couldn’t have been more than a late teen. Maybe twenty years old at most.
“This way,” a woman with long red hair braided back, wearing faded jeans and a tank top with beads dangling at the end of the hem, called to him.
Drustan’s mother. Queen Astrid.
I could feel Drustan’s excitement about visiting the human realm. The realm he only learned about in school, through history classes and textbooks. The realm his father wouldneverallow him to visit. But his mother was always more fun. More encouraging. More curious.
Ilia never valued curiosity. Only obedience.
Entering a quieter neighborhood, Drustan and his mother turned a corner and approached a stucco house—a house I immediately recognized even though Drustan didn’t.
Heather’s house.
It was early in the morning, and Drustan’s mother raised a finger to her lips and instructed Drustan to stay hidden. Obscured by the neighbor’s RV and overgrown shrubbery. The front door to Heather’s house opened, and Audrey, no more than fifteen years old, stepped out of it.
She held both straps of her backpack in her hands, yawning dramatically as she made it halfway down the lawn before frowning and turning to look behind her.
“Who is that?” Drustan asked with a whisper. His mother reached behind herself, grasping his hand in hers, and squeezed reassuringly.
“This is your sister,” she replied in a soft voice. Drustan’s surprise washed over his entire body, while also noting a hint of recognition. Audrey’s hair. The specks of gold freckling her eyes. His vision was so clear. He could see the finest details on Audrey yards away.
“…My sister? I thought she passed?” Drustan questioned. But he believed his mother just the same as he realized something and asked, “Does father know?”
His mother squeezed his hand as she replied, “He can never know.” Drustan frowned, feeling uneasy about keeping another secret from his father, but instinctively more loyal to his mother.
Audrey groaned, loud and annoyed, before calling toward the house, “Van! We’re going to be late!”
“Wait for me!” a feminine voice yelled from inside.Myvoice.
Chills of awareness ran down Drustan’s spine. Hairs on the back of his neck stood still. Muscles in his fingers loosened, and his shoulders dropped. Every cell in his body was focused on who was about to emerge from the house.
What was happening to him?
Stepping out of the house, was me. My wavy brown hair bounced as I trotted after Audrey. He noticed the freckles across my nose and cheeks, my paler skin that was still a shade darker than Audrey’s from being in the sun more often. My baggy grunge clothes. I wore earbuds of some kind that rested over my head, connecting to a device on my hip that, based on the sounds Drustan picked up from this distance, he assumed was human music.
“Sorry,” I murmured, pausing to adjust my Walkman. I pressed a few buttons, and it wasn’t until the music played again that Drustan realized I restarted the song I was listening to back to the beginning.
