A Nameless Dark

Chapter 12

The sunset burned its way across the Colorado sky and I shook my head in frustration as another day met its end. Lara and I sat perched on a warped wooden picnic table, the only seating available in the small, roadside park where Thaddeus and Lin had left us to wait. We both did our best to ignore Samuel's cursing as he paced back and forth, kicking at scrub brush and scanning the empty stretches of highway in either direction with angry eyes.

Three days had trudged by since our flight from Pittsburg, and with every day that passed, I lost a small piece of hope that we would ever see Aaron again. This latest delay seemed like an even more colossal waste of time than our previous stops had been. Thaddeus and Lin had gone to visit a particular horse ranch, with the apparent intention of speaking to one of the horses. It was just the latest in a long list of nonsensical errands that had led us across the central United States in a meandering course that brought us gradually closer to the Rocky Mountains.

It was mid-afternoon when they'd dropped us off in the middle of nowhere with a meager supply of snacks and bottled water, and drove west, disappearing into the distance along with the long, straight line of asphalt we'd been traveling. A far off smudge of mountains on the horizon provided the only break in the flat expanse of dried up grassland that rambled off in all directions. The park itself rested on a mound of grassy earth raised to match the level of the road. Other than the dilapidated picnic table, there was a thin gravel parking space, and a short wooden post with a bronze plaque mounted at an angle on top. Etched on the plaque was a list of seven names, financial donors who'd contributed money to the building of the minuscule park. Perhaps if they'd been more generous, we'd have had a decent place to sit, or a bit of shade against the relentless late-afternoon sun during our long wait.

Now, with the light fading out and the temperature dropping, I shivered in the cooling air, unable to escape the chilling thoughts that had crawled through my head all afternoon.

My Uncle Aaron's face flashed through my mind often, rough and unyielding, stern against the dangers we faced. Whether out of stubbornness or courage, Aaron could always be counted on to stand his ground no matter what the cost, just as he had done in that alley in Pittsburg. I wondered what he was faced with at that moment. Was he in pain? Did the Morrighan have him now? Was he even still alive? I wished selfishly that he was here with us to take charge of our situation with a surly word of wisdom or scrap of rugged common sense. His absence was like a lead weight in my chest, belaboring my breathing and dragging me closer to the ground. With our mother and father both gone and our grandmother basically a stranger, Aaron was the last parental figure left in my life. And now he'd been taken from me too.

It was not fair. I hadn't asked for any of this. My siblings and I had been born into a family with a great destiny, and then lied to and manipulated into living in fear instead of being driven by purpose. And now that the house of cards we'd lived in all our lives had collapsed, where was our father? Where was the man who taught us to run away and hide instead of facing down the demons in our path? He was gone.

How convenient.

We'd been left to clean up the scattered pieces of our family, paying the price for Jacob Acheson's failure. Our lives were in turmoil, with Samuel and Aaron both struggling to fill my father's shoes, and now Aaron may have paid an even greater price to keep us all safe. And yet, despite the anger and bitterness I felt toward my father, I couldn't shake the soul-crushing certainty that all of this was my fault. Dad had at least been able to keep our family safe all these years. He'd been gone less than a year and already I'd managed to kill a local kid and break the wall of protection around our family. I had shattered the decades of careful concealment my father and uncle had crafted for us, and brought our enemies crashing down upon our heads. My father had his failings, but he couldn't be blamed for our current situation. Whatever Aaron faced right now, the burden of guilt was on me.