Ivy Sparks
“Carl. Get Carl,” I say.
Kate steps out of the room, and comes back a few minutes later with Carl.
“Do you remember how to get to the cabin?” I ask.
“Yes. I honestly don’t think I’ll ever forget it,” I say.
“Take me there.”
“You’re not well enough to travel, Ivy.”
“I’m not well enough for anything,” I tell him.
“Why?” Carl asks me.
Out in the hallway, I can see Kate on her phone. Probably calling Nathan. I can tell by the way she’s standing. She has always stood that certain way when she talks to him.
“It’s where I last saw Ben,” I say. “It just feels right, if all of this is going to end, for it to end where it started.”
“What are you talking about Ivy?” Carl asks me.
“This baby, our baby, yours and mine and Nathan’s. It’s killing me. I’m not going to make it much past sundown. Get Nathan back, have him meet us there. If I can’t have Ben with me when I die, I want to at least be in the last place he and I were happy.”
“You’re not going to die, Ivy,” Carl says.
“Grandma!” I croak. I want to shout it, but I don’t have the strength to project much beyond the room. Still, she knew I was calling for her, and while Carl is trying to argue with me, she comes into the room.
“What is it, dear?”
“Tell him to take me to Ben’s cabin.”
Grandma looks at Carl then back at me. “Do it,” she says to him.
Carl opens his mouth as if to say something, then shuts it. He rarely argues with her, but her face tells him now is not the time.
“Kate?” I ask, looking toward the doorway.
She shakes her head. “I can’t reach him.”
“Come with us, please,” I say.
With Carl on one side of me and Kate on the other we get out to Grandma’s old lady car. It’s the biggest one at the house, and has the softest ride. Even so, the two hours it takes to get out to the cabin seem to take twenty. The baby inside of me is thrashing around, and I can feel it draining away my blood. I dry heave constantly, sure that one more spasm of my guts is going to bring my own feet and out my mouth. Kate cradles my head in her lap, stroking my hair while Grandma sits, half turned around in the front seat, and constantly works magic to give me strength and dull my pain.
Finally, Carl stops the car. He and Kate get me into his arms and he carries me across the highway. The midday sunlight is bright on my face, and I know that I will never look up at it again. It is burning my eyes, but I can’t look away. When we come under the shade of the trees, I feel an immense sadness settle over me, that the sun is now hidden from my view. It is only when we come through one small clearing and I can see sky above me that the sadness lifts for a moment. But I tell myself that in a little while, we’ll be at the cabin, and there will be a clearing there as well.
I lost the strength to hold my head up, and it lolls backwards. I see one of the trees where a strip of bark was removed, one of Ben’s markers of a place he wanted to route any other vampires coming onto the land. I wonder how the spiders in those corridors are doing. I called spiders to Carl’s house when I moved in, because I missed the sense of those fine ladies out around my home their webs being part of the greater web of protection keeping me safe.
Carl stops walking to readjust how he is holding me, so my head can rest on his shoulder. He kisses the top of my head as he does so, and his beard tickles me.
We hit sunlight again and Carl stops suddenly, so suddenly that he overbalances and almost drops me. The cabin must have taken him by surprise. I turn my head to look at the little home Ben and I were building.
But it is not there. There are a few scraps of blackened and burnt metal, but no cabin. I can see where the field stone fireplace and chimney were, though that had collapsed, and what part of it still stands is also black with soot. “It’s gone…” I say. Carl takes a few steps closer to the burnt ruins. Already, there are green plants sprouting around the metal and stone things that didn’t burn, poking up through the field of ash and bits of charcoal where a small home filled with books and herbs I’d collected had once stood. “It’s gone,” is all I can say. It is so unreal, I find that I can’t even summon tears to cry about it. I am that numbed.
“Put me down,” I tell Carl. He does, but keeps a steadying arm around my waist, standing behind me where I can lean back against him. Kate and Grandma come up to flank me.
“What happened?”
Nobody answers. For a long time we stand there in silence. I can’t take it anymore, looking at the charred space in front of me. I take a tentative step. Grandma and Kate each take a grip on my arm to steady me.
“No,” I say. “Stay here.” I feel Carl’s solid presence behind me suddenly move. A few seconds later, he is putting a stout branch in my hand. I lean on that and start to walk up the hill. I remember that when I turned one of the kitchen knives, I took off my agate pendant I’d worn for years, and I buried it up on one of the escape runs Ben had showed me. With the cabin gone and Ben nowhere to be found, I feel my tie to this land is now lost, so I want to bring that stone with me. I no longer want my life to end out here. I want to go to my circle now to breathe my last.
For each step I take up the hill, I have to rest. I look up and see that I have at least three dozen steps to take. As long as I am remaining upright, my family and my friends behind me are willing to let me do what I will.
Intent has power. I realize this when I find a little bit of strength to cover half the distance to where the stone is buried before I need to rest again, and then I make the other half. So as not to worry anybody, I take a rest before I lower myself down to the ground. There’s an irregular patch of moss on a spur of rock that breaks free from the forest floor that reminds me of a bird. I follow where its beak is looking, five hand-widths from the edge of the stone, and I use the end of my walking stick to scrape at the soil. I feel the pendant, the little impact of something beneath the surface. I set the walking stick, and use my fingers to dig away the rest of the dirt, until I find the stone with its silver mounting, tarnished nearly black now from being buried. As I bring the stone up into the light again, I feel everything about the little plot of land change. A wave of confused emotion washes up to me from Carl, Grandma, and Kate. A powerful sense of hesitation rolls down from above, of curiosity and searching, then of fear, terror, regret, all backlit by a blast of bright joy and a soft glow of relief. The weight of all those emotions drains a huge amount of what little energy I have left.
I hear footsteps coming down the slope toward me, but it takes me until I am in their shadow before I can move. I see a pair of very familiar shoes first. I roll onto my back and look up into the face of Ben Wake.
“I need you to turn me, Ben…”