SEVEN

The next morning, bright and early, Lark drove to the rest stop with Dex riding shotgun and Ivy in the back seat. The drive was quiet but Lark didn’t mind the quiet. All the best ideas sprang from the quiet – at least he thought so. Max, on the other hand, couldn’t write or draw a single thing unless she had music blaring or a movie on in the background. He smiled at the thought – he didn’t know how she did it but if it kept him in graphic novels, he’d buy her a lifetime supply of music.

As for the quiet in the car today, he knew Dex’s thoughts centred on Cali and his unborn son back at the camp. They weren’t even an hour away by car but he was sure the distance felt like days to the expectant father. Lark had no idea how Dex would manage when Max decided they needed to venture further away to find more chades. Ivy’s silence, on the other hand, was pretty much par for the course, despite their amicable parting the day before.

Over the past few weeks, he had watched as Ivy had warmed perceptibly to a couple of members of the household, including Max, Dex, and surprisingly, Axel. He had seen her engage in a handful of conversations which didn’t revolve around her duties as a ranger – practically a miracle. Unfortunately, her opinion of him hadn’t changed much and she was typically stoic and non-verbal in his presence; her face an emotionless mask – which he despised.

In those precious few times he had caught her face full of animation, he thought she was the most incredibly beautiful woman he had ever seen. He really hoped she was able to get over whatever her hang-up with him was. However, after his initial poor behaviour during their meeting the day before, he was sure Ivy’s already less than stellar impression of him had only gotten worse. It was his own fault. He had gone down prepared to do battle. He should have known he couldn’t pull off hard-arse-Lark and all he’d succeeded at was looking like a moron. He really hoped Max hadn’t been wrong to pair them up for such an important task.

Speaking of Max, she had been in one of her more mystical moods as she had hugged him goodbye that morning, he recalled;

“Lark.”

“Hmm …?” he halted with his hand on the door handle of the car and turned back to his liege. Darn – her eyes are doing that swirly thing, he thought. His coat of arms writhed, responding directly to the power his sworn liege was projecting.

“Names are powerful things. Not only do they make up our identity, but they give us purpose and they keep us grounded. The chade … his name is Knox. He’s forgotten it, along with his humanity. Remind him of one and he may remember the other,” she intoned.

“Ookaay,” he responded slowly, unsure what one could say to that but curious to know if Max’s intuition would prove correct.

He shivered as he thought about it now. Max’s ‘feelings’ were proving correct at an alarming rate and they had no doubt she wasn’t just empathic and in tune with the world around her, but was precognitive. It didn’t surprise him as much as it did the others; the woman was a goddess, she was bound to have astounding gifts. But he could admit that it alarmed him a little. Especially when she went around talking about squirrel armies filled with reformed chades.

And I’m the one doing the recruiting? He shook his head, realising they had already arrived at their destination, so he turned off the ignition and grabbed his scythe before opening the car door.

As if by silent agreement, the other two also stepped out of the car and stood wordlessly looking at the tree line that edged the open parkland of the reserve. Given it was kind of in the middle of nowhere and off a main highway, he would have expected it to be ugly but it was surprisingly clean and well-kept. A couple of tables with attached bench seats dotted the open area and a simple swing set sat looking rather lonely to his right. Those swings had been the motivation for them stopping here in the first place all those months ago and when he thought about it, had been the catalyst for Dex being cured and the possible shift of society’s beliefs. If Max hadn’t have wanted to play on the swings, they never would have been attacked by the chades. The hate Darius had had festering bone-deep for the chades would never have been exorcised and they would never have given Max the opportunity to reveal her ‘pet’ chade to them – Dex.

Life sure was a weird tangle of connections, he thought.

“What if it – he,” he quickly corrected himself, “isn’t here anymore?” he asked, presently.

“He’s here,” Dex assured him, his dark eyes focused on the dense trees to their left.

“Definitely here,” Ivy confirmed, looking in the same direction as Dex.

“You can feel him?” Dex asked Ivy, clearly curious.

She nodded her head, sending her long pony tail swinging madly, before shaking her head and sending the same hair swishing from side to side. Both Lark and Dex waited for the female ranger to clear up that mixed answer but Lark figured he really should have known better; even a warmed-up Ivy wasn’t the talkative sort.

“Well, which is it?” Dex asked, “You can either feel him or you can’t.”

Ivy sighed, “I can’t feel him. But the earth can and I can feel the earth,” she explained.

Lark found that very interesting. As paladins – for even though Ivy was a ranger by occupation, she was still a paladin by birth – they were connected to their domains but not on the same intimate level as the wardens. They couldn’t manifest, manipulate, or control their elements but they could feel them and communicate with them to a certain degree. What Ivy had just said, inferred her connection with the earth was unusually strong for a paladin.

“Huh,” Dex stroked his chin in thought, “When you and your team were hunting the chades that were amassing near the Lodge a couple of months ago, you knew I was up in that tree, didn’t you?” Dex asked.

Ivy shrugged like it was no big deal, never taking her eyes from the shadowy tree line in the distance, “I felt a vibration under my feet but when I looked up, I couldn’t see anything. I knew something was there though.”

“The others couldn’t sense anything, including the two wardens who were with you,” Dex pointed out.

Ivy finally turned her dark eyes toward Dex, “The wardens were Silas and Jasper – they’re brothers and only about forty years old, practically babies. Plus, they’re water wardens and there was no water nearby for them to communicate with. They were really only there as bait – to draw out the chades so we could deal with them.”

She thought forty was a baby? What must she think of me then? Lark wondered. He was only thirty-one.

“The other guys in my team aren’t as in tune with their elements as I am and Nik wasn’t there. I assure you, if he had been you probably wouldn’t be standing here with a head on your shoulders right now. He would have sensed you far more clearly than me,” she asserted.

“He always was good,” Dex acknowledged.

“Still is,” Ivy confirmed, a mysterious tiny smile playing at her lips.

And just what the hell did that mean? Lark turned his face to hide his immediate scowl. Was Ivy insinuating she and her Commander were more than friends? The flare of anger and jealousy took him by surprise. Sure, he was attracted to the woman but feelings of possessiveness were something new. Swallowing down his somewhat irrational feelings, he gestured toward the trees, “Shall we …”