AHH I'M SO EXCITED TO POST THIS CHAPTER! This took me forever to write because I wasn't sure how I wanted it to play out, and frankly because I'm scared of writing this story in general, but I'm really happy with the finished product and I think I've made a good lead in to the main point of the story. The real meat starts now!
Also, sidenote: Everything else posted for this story has been written for over two years or so. I went through and tried to edit it to make it more of my current writing style before posting it, but it was basically what I wanted to say, it was just my wording that was different. So, yeah, I couldn't do much with it, but if any of the chapters before this seem like they were written by someone else or just not up to my usual par... well, you know why.
Anyway, I hope this is as good for you guys to read as it was for me to write, and I hope you enjoy (as much as you can with a story like this, anyway). Please let me know what you think! With this story especially I'm interested to hear your theories. :) Love you all and thank you so much for sticking around! Enjoy!
4.
It soon became clear that the storm wasn't going to end anytime soon. Artemis, it seemed, had known it was coming, and had taken a huge leap of faith by leaving when he did, seemingly sure he could beat it out and make it somewhere safe. The only kind of proof that they had that he did was now Holly's communicator. The coordinates that tracking it had given here were on a small island, not too far off the coast - most likely the first and only place that he thought he could get to safely before the storm hit.
Now Holly was staring into the storm from his bedroom window, fidgeting. It would be foolish to follow him into it, she knew, but then, wasn't it more foolish to just let him take off alone? Especially if he was upset by their argument as she was. Who knew what state the genius had left in? The fact that he'd up and left without a word or his trusty bodyguard, or really even at all, was just proof that he wasn't himself and probably wasn't in his right state of mind. She hated to leave him alone for longer than she had to.
But it wasn't safe to travel in this storm, in any type of vehicle, fairy or human. In all honesty, she was lucky that she had made it to the manor without incident, but she'd been in such an emotional state she hadn't paid any mind to the weather on the way up. Now she knew better.
In the end, she stared out the window for so long that she lost track of time. It was a few hours before she saw a break in the storm - not in a relenting of the rain, but in a noticeable calming of the howling of the wind, and the absence of thunder and lightning appearing every few minutes.
As soon as these things registered, she jolted into awareness and strapped on her wings, throwing open the window and launching herself into the open. She just knew that this was the best break she was going to get, and she was growing more desperate to get to Artemis by the minute. All signs she could see pointed to something bad, and she couldn't help the sick feeling in her heart that something was wrong - something more than just his emotions running amok from her basic betrayal of his trust.
And so she flew, even with the rain still pouring down around her, with the dark clouds still covering the sky, with the knowledge that it could open up again at any minute and that honestly the danger was still imminent, regardless of the momentary visual break. She flew for hours, consulting her communicator every once in a while to make sure she was still on the right track.
It became apparent the closer to Artemis's location she got that things indeed hadn't actually calmed down. It was the opposite, actually - the closer she got to him, the worse the storm got. When she got close enough to see his location, she found herself shocked. It was a tiny island, only several miles across, maybe ten at most, and circling around the island inward revealed a small shack sat in the center, clustered around it by lots of trees. The trees, she couldn't help feeling by the look of the shack, were the only reason the old thing had survived; the shelter they helped provide from the storm must have been greatly appreciated. It was old, and more than a lean to, but not by much; maybe a few rooms at most, from the look of the outside. Frond only knew how long it had been there.
How had Artemis even found this place? The likelihood that he had just happened upon it, especially in the storm, was incredibly low. He had to have known about it beforehand. Did he own it? What about the island?
She shook the thoughts away. Artemis was sly creature by nature; she wasn't surprised that she nor his family seemed to have any idea that this place existed before. And how he had ended up here didn't really matter, so long as he was safe inside.
Speaking of which, she'd paid little attention to her own safety. She was so numb from the freezing rain and wind that she couldn't even feel herself shivering, although she knew she had to be. Her lips were blue, she was sure, and the tips of her ears likely were too. She was soaked to the bone. She'd bundled up in warm coats and multiple layers before leaving the Manor as she waited for the storm to calm down, but even still, over the course of the long journey, each one of them had become so waterlogged and wet that if anything they were keeping the water and the cold that had made it completely through her layers in instead of out. She needed out of these wet clothes and into something warm soon, or she'd come down with something quick.
Her wings shuddered on her back, and she heard the engine sputter and miss for a moment before firing back up. She froze for a moment, her breath catching. This was what she got for paying so little attention to the storm and her surroundings. It could have been doing that the whole time and she wouldn't have noticed. These wings were her own pair that she kept at her flat. They were old to start with, and now she'd pushed them this whole way here…
As if on cue, the engine stuttered again, and this time, there was no firing back to life. Her wings died, and she dropped like a stone, plummeting towards the ground at incredible speed.
It was a testament to her piloting skill that she managed to control them enough to turn her plummet into something more like an ungraceful glide towards the ground, but with the wind and how high she was falling from, there was no controlling the speed of her fall. She crashed into the ground and slid with enough force to leave a path, bouncing a few times before settling completely onto the ground.
By the time her body had stopped bouncing and moving, Holly was unconscious.
She came around sometime later, although how long, with how dark the sky was and the apparent absences of any clocks, was impossible to know.
She was laying on a mat in the corner of the room, low to the ground, covered with a rough wool blanket. She groaned involuntarily when she tried to move. She was injured, that was for sure, and whoever had dragged her in and tossed her here hadn't been kind enough to do anything more about the state she'd been in than toss this itchy blanket over her.
She forced herself to sit up, biting back another groan while doing so. The house looked as old and barren on the inside as she'd imagined. It might have been someone's home, once, but it had fallen into disrepair. It was clean, small and functional, but sparsely furnished and dimly lit with candles that were placed in odd places all over the room. It just had this barren look to it that screamed that someone had taken everything and ran, leaving it to whatever happened by it. Apparently, that was Artemis.
The male in question was sitting across the room from her in an old rocking chair, staring blankly at the window. He seemed to be the only one around, and so had to have been the one who brought her in, but he didn't show the slightest bit of acknowledgement to her presence. She could have been a ghost for all he seemed to notice or care.
She sat up a bit, pushing herself to the edge of the cot. "Artemis?"
No response. The human didn't flinch, didn't even seem to hear her.
She hopped up, running her hands through her hair. Everything hurt, from her achy arms and legs to the gouges she was certain she could feel on her back, but she only half-noticed, forcing herself to block out the pain in favor of reaching her friend.
Her body, however, didn't seem to agree with this idea, and she collapsed in front of him, her legs too weak to support her. She grunted in pain, struggling to get up.
For the first time, the human seemed to notice her. He glanced at her, but his eyes were vacant, unrecognizing, and he regarded her with as much interest or recognition as one views a particularly irritating rodent running around the floor while they're trying to focus on something else. He tilted his head, watching her struggle in silence, showing no hint of… well, anything at all, really.
Holly didn't like this. This wasn't her Artemis. This wasn't even her broken boy. The way he was looking at her… it was like he was someone else entirely.
She managed to get up, stumbling the last few steps to him before going down again. This time she caught herself, on his chair, falling into his legs. She found herself blinking spots from her eyes and suddenly realized that she might have been much worse off than she'd previously realized. "Artemis…" she breathed. "Help me."
He just looked at her, tilting his head and regarding her with those blue eyes she'd come to know and love, but now seemed to dark, darker than she remembered. And then they flashed, and he blinked, and his mouth twisted up into a cruel smirk that she hadn't seen in years. Her heart skipped a beat, her mouth suddenly going dry. This was Artemis. It had to be, no matter how impossible it seemed, or how odd he was acting. Surely he wouldn't…
Then he struck, and she just had a moment to realize how wrong she was before her injuries and shock and the force of the hit she'd just took knocked her out.
"There is no Artemis here," the body of her friend said darkly, and the tone was enough to send a shiver down her spine. And that was the last thing she saw or heard before everything went black.