Chapter 2

Her Battle

The first thing Marcus notices is the heat.

How can she be so hot?

“Marcus?” Thomas whispers.

Marcus looks at his younger brother. Beads of sweat are forming on his forehead and cheeks. His black hair is already wet. Marcus perspiration slides along the side of his own face.

“Give me a minute. I must find where Mom is.”

Darkness conceals everything. How can he find her? When he wants to connect with Tessteel, it just happens.

How do you make it happen?

Not for the first time, the brothers wish their father was home. Marcus closes his eyes, and the silence is deafening.

I do not know what I am doing, Marcus thinks in anger.

A voice drifts to them from a vast distance.

“You can do this,” Abigale’s voice says.

Marcus and Abigale have talked many times in the last five years. Abigale figured out, they could speak to one another when she was at the Protector’s Camp, where their dad stayed when he came for their mother.

“I do not know?” Now that they are here, he is having doubts.

“Yes, you can. Dad taught me. How do you think I located you so far away? I’ll talk you through it. Reach out, feel her skin, breathe deeply, smell her scent. Listen closely, hear her voice. Let it wrap around you.”

Marcus does what she tells him, and the silence breaks as their mother’s scream rushes past. The brothers fly in the direction it came from. What they find stops them cold. Holding their mother by the throat is their mother dressed in black. They rush forward even though they do not hold the knowledge to help.

“Boys, no!” Jacklyn screams.

As soon as her mouth opens the dark Jacklyn busts into a mist and tries to enter her. She swiftly shuts it. The vapor turns back into their mother. When Marcus gets closer to the mother thing, he fills something in his chest expand. He drops to the ground on all fours from the pain. Forced upright, Marcus’ chest convulses and light bursts from him. It hits the dark creature in the back.

It lets go of their mother and charges at them.

When the creature is almost on top of them, a white light comes from Thomas, surrounding them both. The false mom hits the light, and the thing sails backward. Where it lands is where it dies.

As the boys feel pulled back to their bodies, they hear their sister.

“Told you, you could do it.”

“Was it us? It did not seem that way. It felt unnatural.” Marcus voices to his siblings as the sensation of the cool wooden floor under him returns.

Marcus opens his eyes. He looks at his brother, who is wide-eyed and looks as baffled as he is. The mystics have arrived, and a slight cooling windstorm is swirling around their mother. After a few minutes, they see her shiver. The mystics stop the wind and leave the room. Snow lays along Jacklyn’s side and puts his massive head on her midsection, helping to warm her quicker.

“What happened?” William asks the brothers.

“She was fighting herself,” Thomas answers.

“No, it was not her. It…” Marcus pauses, not sure how to describe it. “…was dark. It changed from a solid to a mist.”

The brothers were told about the Darkness and how she changed forms from its normal vapor state to a female. They are seeing it for the first time.

William touches her forehead with the hand unchanged by the Fire Dragons years ago. The arm is dark red, making it look burned. His typically neatly trimmed chestnut hair lays disheveled tonight. Unlike most Midlanders, William’s body has developed a hardness to it. When he first met Brandon, the word soft came to the Protector’s mind. The softness is now gone. In service to Jacklyn, he unearthed something in himself he had not known was there, strength. Not even his round, gentle face takes away this newfound part of him.

“Your mother has been an amazing queen. We tend to forget she is always fighting two battles. She is keeping the Darkness in two prisons. She feeds the barrier we see every day, and she has to maintain the door within herself.” William does not remove his watery blue eyes from Jacklyn, waiting for a sign she is returning to them. In that moment, he forgets he is talking to her sons.

“I do not know how much longer she can hold on.” His voice cracks slightly, and Marcus senses something from William he has felt surface now and then. The Queen’s Advisor has things within him; he fights to hold deep and hidden away.

How can we … are we to let her go? William thinks to himself, but the brothers hear it loud and clear.

“No!” Thomas yells and runs from the room.

William looks up. “Oh, Marcus, I am sorry.”

 “We cannot,” Marcus says, taking her hand. At his touch, his mother stirs. “Let us get her to her bed. She needs her rest. I am uncertain she would have won if we had not arrived in time.”