Found

The currents eddied around me, tugging petulantly at my awareness as I pushed past them. I held fast to the single draw, the scent that I’d been following for days. Step, tap, step, tap. My cane moved rhythmically, in the dance they’d taught me from the first. Foot forward, cane reaching ahead to the opposite side. They’d never understood why I didn’t try to use my skillset to compensate for not seeing. I’d never understood why they thought I needed to.

Vaguely, I noted again how my locket was warming gently against my chest, just below my collar bones. The slightly tingling heat had been bothering me for hours, coming and going, but steadily increasing in urgency. It felt like a summons. I’d learned to ignore that call years ago.

I was in the dark again. They were coming. The bad people were coming. I wedged my tiny body between a pile of shoes and a wobbly stack of boxes. Terror, confusion. Footsteps in the hall. My sibling screamed.

The fear exploded from my body. I was falling. Falling.

Tap. I drifted out of the nightmare into the constant reality of the sound I carried with me. Tap, tap. Left, right. I’d never told them how it soothed me. They would have mocked the need. I would have believed them. They were always right, in the end.

The current was pulling me sideways now, around a corner. I could sense it breaking against its source, somewhere up ahead. I was close. I was close and then I could hide, if only briefly, before they found me again and gave me another hunt. And another. And another.

The first day they knew what I could do, they gave me chocolate. They gloated over their treasure, their resource, their weapon with its own built-in tracking mechanism. Over me. I was five, I think. It’s hard to remember.

The memories swirl up and around me, fading, pulsing. My locket is almost burning. I wouldn’t let them take it. When they snatched at my little fist, nearly prying it out of my hand, I screamed, and they stepped back from the wave of energy that started building around me. After that, they told me it was my talisman. It was always their idea. Once they gave me a new chain to hang it around my neck, I never took it off again. No one ever tried to make me.

Tap, tap. The sound crisply echoed off the buildings to either side of me. I could feel their shape, their distance. I could feel the deserted street ahead of me. I used to hate being alone. That was before being around people always meant pain.

My sibling crouched in front of me, their hand wrapped around mine. “It’s magic,” they said, seriously. “Mama told me we are magical, and this locket …” their voice broke off as a crash came from below.

Their hands were dragging me into the closet. “Shhhhh, you need to hide. I’ll keep you safe, I promise,” the door shut. I was alone. The walls were cold where my arm brushed against them.

Why doesn’t the world let children keep their promises?

I shifted the locket on its chain. The warmth was starting to hurt. It had never behaved like this before.

My steps were soft, almost silent as I turned the corner. I was no longer alone. Someone stood ahead of me. My prey. My mark. I stopped, staring into the quiet that had always been my visual reality, listening to the sounds and the magic that filled the world around me. In front of me, the current crashed into the person I had hunted across miles and cities, and came surging back to me. I began gathering it into myself, drawing the flow deep into what they now assumed was my endless abyss.

“Fay?” the voice was tired, old but young, breaking on the edges.

My hold on the currents crumbled momentarily. My name. No one used that name. But then I shook my head, rage suddenly pulsing past my temples, racing into my fingertips. How dare they! How dare this mark use my most private agony against me! Hot bright flooded my visual field.

“You are not Fay,” they told me, gripping my tiny face in too tight hands. “You are the Fell. You are the Fell. Say it.”

“I am the Fell,” my baby soprano piped.

I didn’t realize I was screaming the words until the sound broke through my memory, freezing me for just a second.

“It’s me, Fay,” my mark said, and they were crying. “They told me you were dead.”

“We are the only ones you have. Your family. We’re your family.” They scolded me, almost gently. That was worse than the pain. I was letting down the only people I had left. My sibling was dead. They were too weak, and the magic had killed them trying to keep me from the people to whom I belonged. I never stopped crying for them in the night. I learned to cry silently too soon.

Tears were running down my face. The locket was searing into my skin. A haze clung to my thoughts, slowing reality. They could not be. Dead. Mark using leverage. They knew they were going to die.

Sluggishly, I sucked in the magic that was spilling out, slopping over in messy abandon into the world around me. I began forming the last driving blow that would end this torture for good. It would end it. No one would try this again. Dead. They were dead. They needed to be dead.

The song came softly. So softly that someone who hadn’t been listening to everything since birth might not have noticed it.

My sibling sat with me under the prickly pine branches, glee radiating off their body. “We’re going to make a spell,” they said, voice vibrating with excitement. “Real, actual magic!”

My small, piqued face scrunched in skepticism. “Isn’t magic bad now?” I asked. “After the Change, we’re not supposed to…”

“I’ll tell you all about it!” My sibling was full of the infinite knowledge only seven year olds can possess. “But we’re going to hide, and the spell will mean no one can ever find us. Only we’ll always know where the other one is. It will be awesome!”

I wasn’t sure I understood, but I nodded solemnly. My sibling took my hand, a warm, heart-shaped lump biting gently into my palm where they held it between us, and they sang.

The song shattered against my eardrums in the street. I dropped the magic. Everything was spinning. The locket was thrumming to the melody, echoing, growing stronger. Something was breaking inside my chest.

Impact slammed my head sideways and my mind into the cold dark. I was falling. Falling. Would they catch me this time?