Free LEMNISCATE by Jennifer Murgia Page A

resembling an overgrown driveway. I lurched forward as my car came to a stop and I closed my eyes, willing the burning hot tears to stay put as I leaned my forehead against the hard steering wheel.
    The world was still. Total silence. No birds. No rustling of leaves or branches. I opened my eyes and drank in the barren void surrounding me. Slowly getting out of the car, I stepped out onto the soft carpet of pine needles and ground mulch. Everything was brown and still. Charred stumps of trees flanked the desolate clearing as wild fern wilted with brown bending leaves scattered the ground.
    It had been months since I was last here. Garreth and I had come back the day after the fire. It still held a feeling of magic that seeped through the ruin, still held the promise of new life rising from the ashes – but all I could see around me now was devastation.
    Blackened bark curled and clung to the fragile trees that still stood, though the wooden trunks were dehydrated and petrified inside now. Practically everything here had died that night. I blinked and looked around, feeling heavy and lost, but I couldn’t will myself to turn around, get back into my car and drive away. I too felt hollow and burnt and tried to will my feet to leave this place but couldn’t. I belonged.
    I turned to face the old chapel foundation that still stood here. My legs managed their way over the cracked twigs and gnarled roots of long dead trees. I stumbled past the long fallen tree Garreth and I had once used as a bench, now blackened and splintering. My feet stopped at the bottom of crumbled rock, steps that now led to a ravaged opening to nowhere. The chapel. I remembered her beauty. The stained glass triangles of color that had glinted in the sun were now broken and pulverized into glittering sand. The arched wooden door was missing and rusted metal hinges nailed to crumbling mortar was the only welcome. I carefully stepped up and stood in the doorway, feeling the painful loss of this place. Feeling its misery.
    The red candles had all melted and bled across the floor in the fire. The altar where Garreth had revealed his true self to me had crumbled like the walls, which were no higher than my knees.
    Sadly, I looked up at the large opening in the trees that resembled a gaping mouth. The flames had not reached that far. I closed my eyes, remembering the tower that once stood here, though I had only seen it once. I had come running to this place when I died, wild and frantic to save Garreth. Giving my life for his was easy. I would still give it if he were to ask.
    And no matter how rotten things were now, I had to believe there was a solution.
    I held my hand up in front of my face and studied the lines of my special mark, hopefully for the last time, then before I could change my mind, I made it disappear.
    I was so lost in myself, I almost didn’t hear it.
    The movement. The rustling.
    That’s when I felt it.
    Eyes staring at me.
    I pivoted quickly on my heels and stared at the trees surrounding me. The coldness that swept across my arms pulled me out of my depression. I wasn’t alone and whatever was in these woods wasn’t friendly.
    My hand went numb just then and when I pulled it up to look at it, my mark had reappeared.
    Wasting no time, I hurried back to the car, slammed the door and high-tailed it out of there. I drove backwards out of the lane, hearing the scraping of branches along the sides of my car and praying I wouldn’t hit a tree on the way out.

Chapter Fifteen
     
    T hat night alone again in my room, my face fell into my hands and I pressed the heels of my palms to my eyes, pushing on them, willing them to pop out of the back of my head, so I’d have a decent excuse not to show up at school tomorrow. Facing Garreth’s new attitude was too painful. But of course my eyeballs stayed put, so instead, I drew a deep, cleansing breath into my lungs and held it. But when it was time to exhale, I couldn’t. It was stuck. Something