I didn’t need ropes and carabiners to scale rocks. (Good, because I didn’t know the first thing about that kind of gear anyway.)
Ropes and carabiners helped you not die. (Bad, in that a plummet to my death wasn’t exactly on my bucket list.)
I assured myself that this’d be different from Acari Kate’s ascent. I’d be going down—surely that was easier, right? And besides, I wouldn’t really be rock climbing anyhow. More like bouldering. Hiking, even.
Really, really steep hiking.
I headed straight to the ledge—it’d do no good to chicken out now—and tightened the straps of my bag. The thing had been thump-thumping across my back as I’d jogged along the coast, but I decided to keep it just in case I found something I needed to tuck away. And hey, maybe it’d provide padding in the event of a freak accident.
I edged closer, and the height gave me a moment’s vertigo, sending a wiggly sensation crawling up the backs of my legs. “A puzzle,” I muttered, parroting Priti’s words. While Carden had been climbing the Needle, she’d lectured. I’d tuned her out but had tuned back in when she’d likened climbing to mathematics, speaking about angles, degrees, ratios. “Just a problem to be solved.”
I squatted now, trying to decipher that puzzle and detect a possible path. It wasn’t a sheer drop here at the top. Instead, the upper ridge was graded, forming steep, mossy tiers.
I craned my neck to see. There was an outcropping roughly fifteen feet down and a few feet over. It angled away, not readily visible from above. If I could make it down there, it’d be a good vantage point from which to scan for some clue that might’ve lodged in the rocks and brush.
I sat on my butt, scootching past the spot marking Trinity’s final footprint. What lay between me and that plateau couldn’t have been called a trail, but it was horizontal enough to shimmy and slide down if I used the rocks and roots as handholds. I inched some more, tentatively scrabbling down like a crab—a lame, clumsy crab.
My boots met flat rock, and I pushed with my legs, testing the support. It was solid. It gave me a spurt of confidence. I inched to the left, over to where I thought I’d spotted the rock shelf below.
“Here goes nothing,” I muttered as I eased onto my side. I had the sensation of being almost vertical now, and it felt more secure to have so much of my body pressed against the granite. I guess somewhere in my reptilian brain I also figured that if I started to slide, maybe I’d be able to stop myself using hands and legs and belly.
It took me about thirty seconds to realize my reptilian brain was a total idiot.
Getting down to the next tier was less a thoughtful descent than it was a controlled fall. I slid, and rocks scattered loose, clacking down the side of the cliff in a shower of gravel.
“Crap.” I picked up speed and careened past the next tier without stopping. Rocks cut into my belly and punched hard along my rib cage as I bounced and slid down the face. “Ohhhh crap.”
Panic choked me as the mottled brown, gray, and green of the cliff angled steeper, rolled by faster. I grabbed for all of it. Flailing now, I swatted for rocks, dirt, the tufts of grass that poked from between the cracks.
My feet slammed into something, and the impact reverberated up my body. The plateau. Relief.
But I’d hit it too hard. Time slowed as I felt my body propelling forward, like I was about to swan dive from a platform.
Carden appeared in my mind’s eye, a vision of him diving from the Needle, all power and grace.
Power and grace. I could be that, too.
I refused to die this way. I’d see this through. I’d see him again.
I made a split-second decision. It was me or my knees.
It took a conscious effort to let go, to render myself limp as a rag doll, but I did, forcibly turning my legs to jelly beneath me. They buckled and I slammed hard onto my knees. I gripped the ledge, stopping myself before I tumbled from the outcropping.
I winced, immediately flopping back onto my butt, half cradling my bruised legs while skittering away from the ledge at the same time. Made it. And I refused to think on why, in my moment of near death, my mind had gone to Carden.
I dusted off my legs. I was here to investigate, to get my mind off the bond. I sat all the way up, and punishing wind instantly whipped the hair into my face, bringing tears to my eyes.
I squinted. Looking around, I saw how it wasn’t just a shelf I’d landed on, but there was a little niche, too. Not big enough to be called a cave, but deep enough to shelter me from the wind howling off the sea, lashing the rock face. I pressed my body into it, feeling like a creature in a seashell, and let myself take a moment to gather my wits and pick the bloody bits of grit and rock from my tattered palms.
I was busily panting and catching my breath, so I didn’t hear it at first. But as my heart slowed, I began to discern an alarming sound from above: men’s voices. Two of them.
I mouthed a curse, instantly pressing as far into my little shelter as I could. Had the killer—or killers?—returned to the scene of the crime?
I curled in more tightly. If I was discovered, I’d be dead meat. Literally.
I tucked my legs, grimacing through the pain as I bent them. I quickly reeled my bag in, too, and clutched it close to my side, grateful that I hadn’t stowed it at the top or anything stupid like that.
My sweaty undershirt clung to me, and I became instantly chilled leaning against the damp, hard rock. But I hunched closer, turning my back to the voices, praying that, if they happened to walk to the edge and look down, the gray of my Acari uniform would act as camouflage.
I huddled and stared at the rock wall, and that was when I saw it. Simple carvings. Old runes, like graffiti.
The sight made me smile despite myself. Viking carvings could be found all over the islands in the North Sea. It was amazing—the graffiti was thousands of years old and yet it was as unremarkable as the stuff you’d find in the bathroom stall at Applebee’s. Magnus red-legs was here, that sort of thing.
I used my thumbnail to scrape away the fine layer of moss, peering at the letters.
I imagined it was Icelandic, or Old Norse maybe. I could stare till I went blind and it still wouldn’t make any sense. But it cheered me just a little. It was such a peculiar reminder of my humanity.
I wriggled heat into my fingers and toes, forcing my mind back into the moment. The men were still there, closer now.
Angling my head as far as I dared, I tuned my ear, trying to make sense of their conversation in the keening wind. Their words echoed down the bluffs, bouncing into my shallow crevice. German, I realized. They were speaking German. I didn’t recognize the voices, but I could tell that one speaker was more deferential than the other.
The wind shifted, bringing me a phrase. Hat er unter Kontrolle? “Is he in control?”
Ja, Meister. I didn’t need to rely on my years of study to recognize “Yes, Master” when I heard it.
The explosive cries of a flock of seabirds bursting into flight shattered the moment. I shifted, waiting for the flapping to subside, considering what I’d heard.
Is he in control? He who? A vampire? Tracer? Trainee? He could’ve referred to any number of people on this island.
There was more gruff murmuring, a pause in the wind, and then: Sie werden unvorsichtig.
“They grow reckless.”
Again, who?
Reckless. The word harkened back to my chat with Carden. There were so many different ways to be reckless. There was reckless brave. Murderous recklessness. Or my favorite kind of reckless, disobedience. Then another wrinkle occurred to me: There was also the recklessness of pure instinct that was the Draug.
I hung on for more, but the voices dissipated and never returned. Even so, I dared not budge. I needed to make certain the men were far from here.
As I waited, I did several dozen careful scans of the cliff side, but found nothing. There were no clues. No murder weapon waiting for discovery, flashing “look at me!” in the twilight.
Bored of that, I stared at the runes for a while, discerning others carved along the moss-covered stone. But they quickly lost their power to comfort me. Soon, I was just cold.
I decided to give it fifteen more minutes, an arbitrary amount of time more to wait, and bided it by staring out at the sea. When thoughts of Carden and my need for him grew too piqued, I distracted myself by pulling a sheet of paper and pencil from my bag to take a rubbing of the runes. A little reminder of my humanity, of how tiny and meaningless we were. That time marched on, but the rest of us had expiration dates.
I thought about who might’ve left the graffiti so long ago. What would I carve, if given the chance? Drew + Vampires 4ever? I smirked at the thought. How fleeting our human dramas became when viewed through the telescope of centuries.
Finally, the sky turned the color of metal, and the air took on a bite too sharp to ignore.
I scrabbled my way back up the hill. Since I was able to leverage my body and control where I put my hands and feet, I found it much easier to go up than down. Carden had been right: Using the strength of my legs was the key. I scanned the rocks as I went, but saw no more evidence beyond that scuff left by Trinity’s heel.
On the walk back, the pencil rubbing was an odd weight in my bag. Other people had been here thousands of years ago. And who knew, maybe others would walk this same bluff a thousand years hence. I tried to feel a sense of connection to my fellow man through the ages, but instead all I could think was how those Vikings were long dead, and someday I would be, too.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Mei-Ling and I picked up Emma as we headed out the door. The week had limped along. I’d risked my neck to find clues, and all I’d found was a bunch of old Viking graffiti. Worse, I remained torn about Carden, feeling desperate to see him again but also hoping desperately that I wouldn’t.
Emma sensed something was up with me. “Are you okay?” She’d asked it slowly, her words heavy with meaning. But then she flicked a glance at Mei. We needed to be discreet in front of this girl we didn’t really know.
Between me having a new roommate and Emma joined at the hip with Yasuo, I wondered if we’d ever talk openly again. “Yeah, I’m okay, I guess.”