Hello everyone! I am honestly going to be very surprised if any of you are still following Nyrah's story, but I am trying to continue and finish this story. I wanna finish what I started. Life has been crazy and I just needed a break for a while. I got married last year, and then discovered after coming home from our honeymoon that I was pregnant. I went through a miscarriage with that pregnancy and got pregnant the next month. I have been busy and adjusting to the new things in my life. My baby was born 11 weeks ago. She is growing so fast already and has already rolled over from her tummy to her back a few times, so no more swaddles! She also is moving from size 1 diaper to size 2. Love you all so much. Thank you for your patience and support for this story for as long as you have been, and it is alright if you have lost interest. I just want to finish it anyway.
A daydream has been pulsing through my veins while the sun crawls up into the sky. Travis snores like a car engine beneath a tall tree, but the sight of Nathan's bluest eyes in my imagination masks any annoyance I experience. Nathan brushes his fingers against my cheek, telling me he is safe and everything is going to be alright. I ache for him, impatient to place my hand over his and admit how wrong I was. But not long after the daydream descends, then it dissolves into frigid and empty air. Today needs to be the day we find him.
I nudge Constable Jai Travis with the tip of my boot, hoping he doesn't snort for a second longer than necessary. I wonder if Nathan snores as well. A ghost of a smile reaches my lips at the possibility. I never tire of wondering about him. I want to know every little detail. His ticks, habits, and joys. I desire to love him to the fullest measure, and show him how much I am dedicated to both Him and Allie. But I cannot do that if he is dead. What if Jude has done something and I'll never see my Nate again? I have already lost my family and my friend. I could not bear it if Nathan were to leave me here alone in death.
Travis rolls out of his slumber gradually. I want to snap and complain about his lack of haste, but I chew on my tongue instead. After fifteen minutes or so, we walk to the next town over. It was only about five miles. We walked most of the distance the afternoon before it was almost dark. On the last mile, we are greeted by a bustling fishing town near the coast. The waves glide and crash against the shore merely to mesmerize me. I'm certain of it. I have never seen the ocean until this moment. We stop to ask a few local fisherman if they have seen two men pass through the area. Some said they thought they recalled two men.
"Yipper! Of course! I recognize that description," one of them spoke up loudly. "One in red, and the other was a bit gruff. Both o'them were paler than a cloud. They were looking for a man and a woman near Thimble Cave."
"Thimble Cave? Where is that?" Travis wrote a few notes in a small journal.
"Up there!" A different elderly gentleman pointed to the rocky cliffs. "Ain't more than a three hour trek up into the hills. There ya should find a pool and a gentle waterfall. Look close, or ya might miss the entrance behind the trickle. No one knows about the cave except you and I. Scoured every inch as a lad." The man winks at me.
"Thank you for your time." Travis swallows, looking at me once again momentarily before we walk away from the group of men. He stares, unwavering in his serious tone, concern written between the folds of his voice. "I really think we ought to be elsewhere."
I squeeze my fingernails into my palms, confident if I remain like that, I will draw blood. I don't think he understands. "Mr. Travis-"
"Please, call me Jai."
"...Jai," the name feels like a choking hazard. Maybe it will taste better if he knows we are just friends. I will no longer allow him live in the dark. "I love Nathan with all my heart."
His brows raise, recognition coating his demeanor. A shadow bleeds into his eyes. "I see. I respect your loyalty to him, but He is a Mountie. And, no offense, but you are not. It is dangerous."
"No offense taken, but I am going anyway. Wild horses could not drive me away. You are welcome to continue to join me, but if you'd rather not, I will not blame you for staying behind." I turn around, feet sore from all the walking, but ready to climb the hills despite the flames licking my limbs, one spark at a time. And without a word, Travis follows behind me.
The fog thickens as we ascend. I bound nimbly over stone and shrub, anxious and aching to see my love once again. When we reach more flat ground, Travis halts to drink in the beauty of the ocean below. All while I assess where to go from here, he pants heavily from exertion. The fog is even thicker up here and I cannot see a thing in our forward path.
"Can we take a rest?"
"We are almost there! I can feel it. We have been walking for nearly an hour," I say.
"Yes, and we still have two more hours according to the fisherman. Please, just a minute."
I gaze at the foggy hilltops ahead, forlorn envy rippling through my body. I plop down onto the grass, laying down to stare at the congested sky. Even the hills are closer to him than I am. Surely the hills know where he has been, each boot-print a memory pressed into the earth, and we are closer than ever. This location is not where I expected them to traverse, but I am simply grateful for the possibility they are here. Jude slips into my heart, and I wonder what he was like as a boy. I never got to experience that side of my big brother. After all we have both been through, why can we not merely embrace our existence? I ought to love and cherish the fact that I have a family member alive at all.
Or maybe I'm being silly. Maybe Sol's death is messing with my head. Or maybe I am learning something about myself because of it. Regardless of the reason, the traumatic ache of flesh torn from flesh lingers. Friend torn from friend. My eyes flutter downward against my will, and sleep descends.
I wake up by the sensation of something brushing against my cheek. I quickly discover that Jai is kneeling down beside me, hand near my face. Alarm springs like a tigger in my stomach, and instincts take over. A swing, hard and swift into his left eye leaves him stunned. And me too if I'm being honest. Did I just do that? Travis squirms and writhes across the grass, groaning like a bear. Clutching his eye, he stiffarms my offer to help him up.
"Jai, I'm so sorry!" I raise a nervous fist to my mouth in horror of what I've just done. He has been nothing but kind to me and did not deserve to be attacked like that. A flicker of a thought comes to mind. What if he arrests me for hitting him? "I was just so surprised! I didn't realize what was happening until it was too late. Please...forgive me?"
Jai winces a great deal after gently removing his hand from protecting the sensitive part of the face. The area is already quite colored and bright.
"Oh, your eye..."
Jai smirks sarcastically. "Of course it's my eye! I don't need it anyway!"
"Don't try to be cute." I stare at it for a while as his eye swells to twice it's normal size. "Does it hurt?"
"Nyrah, my dear, what makes you think that a punch at point blank range to a bare eyeball wouldn't hurt?" Travis glares at me, and I choke back laughter This is a new side of him. Who knew he could do anything other than smile all the time?
"Um..." the man might just kill me if his expression is anything to go by. "L-Let's keep going now that we've rested."
"Good idea. Exactly what I had been thinking before you catapulted me into the air." He touches around the wound, attempting to find any comfort and feel how extensive the damage might be.
"Don't exaggerate," I roll my eyes.
"I never exaggerate." His sarcastic tone is hard to interpret. Is he actually jesting? He is borderline livid, jaw grinding and fists as hard as stone. I let him lead for the remaining two hours, hoping to make it up to him somehow.
We climb in silence, the fog less thick than before and we quickly come across a beautiful pool of water with a small waterfall flowing into it like the skirt of a wedding gown.
Jai seems to have calmed visibly at the sight of the body of water. Moss spreads over large rocks clustering around the edges of the pool and leaves hang down in curtains over the water, while mist rolls up like steam from a pot of soup. He feels the temperature with his fingers. Satisfied with the crisp, cool waters, Jai whips out a handkerchief and dips it into the pool before gently pressing the cloth to the purple hue blooming over his eye. The liquid is refreshing as I scoop up some of the ripples and rinse my face.
Bursting with new energy, I take a deeper look around. The fisherman told us to look for the entrance behind the trickle, and I only assume he meant the waterfall. Carefully, I edge myself closer to the right side of the pool. I skim the area, finding nothing to indicate an opening. No signs of a cave or hideout. We almost miss it. The large crack between two large boulders and behind a mess of vines. It was past the waterfall, a little further than I imagined. We didn't bring a lantern or anything, but we almost don't need one. Deep within the belly of the cave, Travis takes the lead toward a distant glow. The echo of water dripping from the ceiling onto the stony floor surrounds us. Rats cuddle into one corner near a puddle of black, gnawing on a few apple cores. Someone has been here. Recently. Travis is armed with his gun, bracing himself for conflict as we are about to round a corner where the light is coming from. He is quick to point the barrel into the empty air of the narrow passage to the left. We have now approached a large room of some sort. A table with papers scattered over it's surface catches my eye, as well as the five lit candles near its edge. Otherwise, the room remains vacant. I rush toward the table, ignoring the fact that Jude might be close by, or worse, watching our every move.
"Look at this," I breathe in erratically, pointing to the pictures of me and my family when I was three years old. My mother's smile reflects my own as I hugged her tight around the neck in the photo. I pick up another picture of me with Nathan. With Elizabeth. With Lucas...my focus shifts to a folder. I flip through hospital records of my birth and the birth of my siblings. Including Jude's records. His mother's name was Clove, it seems. A nobody from Tenesee. There is record of Jeremiah Wesley changing his surname to Sutton and reports on the house fire and its point of origin. The name of the martial arts studio our father started and a genealogy of some kind. I search for more clues, connecting the constellations in my head. He researched everything. From our ancestors to the apartment Sol and I used to live in together. He looked up everything. Travis glances at the documents, but remains more bothered by the lack of people in this eerily lit room.
The hardest thing to see is not the fact that Jude knows everything about me, but that his plans lie scribbled down with illustrations...in a storybook.
"Elizabeth Thornton, giddy with mustered courage asks Nathan to dance..." I read aloud, recalling the first change to the story of When Calls the Heart. Flipping over a few pages to an entry about Lucas bringing Elizabeth some flowers, and I swallow hard. Daring to find out the worse, I keep searching until I see the name "Sol". There is an entry binding her loyalty to Jude Wesley. She shot Nathan and set fire to my home...because of my half brother.
"Nyrah, I don't see Constable Grant, Avery, or Jude Wesley, but they must be nearby. We need to leave and come up with a better plan than this." Jai urges me toward the exit.
"Just a moment. I thought that Jude Wesley was just in this to get out of the contract or get revenge for my causing the fire that killed our father...but what if it is more than that?"
"You really aren't going to be sensible are you?"
I ignore his statement and continue, "Why was he so insistant that I provide his heir? Why not Sol? And how is she connected to all of this? How did she posses authorial blood? He was willing to risk breaking the code of Authors to receive his successor, but why?"
"Nyrah..."
"What if it is not because our father died in the fire, but because Jeremiah left to start a new family? Look in the records. Jude's mother committed suicide and Jude was shortly after placed in foster care. He resents that he is an author in the first place and he will try anything to get out of it." I don't even hear the movement of footsteps behind us, and scour the table for anything related to Jude's past.
"Do you not see it?" I jolt in surprise, clasping almost fearful eyes onto my brother. "Sol is a distant cousin of ours, you know. We have many cousins out there."
I open my mouth to speak, but no words come out. Before me is a different man. I do see it now. The weariness. The anger and sorrow. It is subtle because he hides it well. I take a moment and clear away the sticky words from my throat and try to empathize with him. "I was also an orphan, Jude."
"Yes, but our father chose you. And you didn't even have the decency to appreciate him. You killed him. You had a gift." His eyes flash lethally.
Jai still has a hand on the holster of his gun, waiting with bated breath for Wesley to try something, but nothing happens.
"Our father did not love me at all actually," I say as a matter of fact, "He made that quite clear daily. You have all the pretty pictures on your desk, but beneath the surface, all of us were crumbling apart."
Jude slips out a pen from an hidden pocket, silver and flawless. "That is irrelevant." Jude flips open a journal as he paces across the room, the tip of silver touching his lips.
"Where are Nathan and Bill?"
"Did you know..." He continues as if I had never asked the question, "That there is one thing an author is incapable of doing?"
I scour my brain for the answer from what I read in the book, but I cannot recall and I shake my head. I search the room for any sign that Nathan might have been here.
"I take notice that you don't recall from the book you carry with you. I want that back by the way." Jude continues, "Authors are not capable of changing the past."
"So?" I ask.
Jude chuckles and I feel a shiver of terror reverberate through my bones.
"Enough of the talking! You're under arrest." Jai's jaw clenches as tight as a bear trap.
Jude quietly scribbles onto the notepad, seemingly unalarmed in the slightest, and I pause, uncertain what to do. I should stop him, but he is already writing "I think not. I do believe that, in fact, that you are under arrest." He snaps the notebook shut as Mr. Travis and I lunge for him. "Both of you."
And the next thing I know, I wake up in a damp cage.