The Mark of Oldra: The Mark of Oldra, #1

Chapter 1

The crystal shards were sharp beneath her feet, and she squatted on the path to pick one up. The brown crystal looked dull as she turned it slowly in the dim light.

The figure in the fog ahead appeared more solid. Gerry walked confidently towards him across the shards, and was surprised for a moment that the crystals didn’t cut her feet.

‘Why have you followed me here?’ he asked, his voice echoed through the trees.

‘To know you,’ she said.

He stepped from the fog, clear and defined.

‘I knew you would come to join me,’ he said, his face smiling, a face she knew as well as her own. Stepping forward, he put his hands on her shoulders. His sandy hair was flecked with grey and rough stubble covered his chin, yet his face still looked the same, although maybe thinner.

She shook her head. ‘No, not join you.’

‘I am the darkness,’ he said, his face contorting. His amber eyes glowed in the darkness that was his face.

‘You shouldn’t be here,’ she said. ‘The snow doesn’t want you here. You weren’t called.’

His eyes flared in the darkness before he disappeared.

Gerry woke sitting in the middle of her bed, the sheets twisted around her legs and her heart pounding. She shivered.

She pulled the quilt up and lay back slowly. She preferred the dreams of training; although they seemed just as real when she woke tired, her limbs sore and her hands sure they had held a bow all night. But the man in the darkness scared her more than she was willing to admit, even to her mother.

She sighed and sat up again, swinging her legs out from under the warmth of the quilt and moving quickly across the cold floorboards to press herself against the window. The backyard was lost to the darkness of the night and she couldn’t see anything. The cold of the winter snow pressed through the thin windowpane. Despite starting to shiver again, there was a comfort in the cold.

Something creaked and she held her breath. Nothing followed. It was just the house shivering with the cold. She was thankful, as she didn’t want to face her mother yet. She always asked if Gerry dreamed of herbs or healing. And she would be disappointed to hear that she hadn’t. Sometimes Gerry dreamt of her hands on tanned, muscular skin. It unnerved her when she would see something else in the skin, or under it. She shook her head; those dreams were hazy. If only her dreams of the darkness were less clear.

She trembled again at the memory of the man in the shadows, and his too-familiar amber eyes.

‘Goodnight,’ she whispered to the dark world beyond the window. The snow returned no such attention. She sighed, stretched, and tiptoed quickly across the cold floor, then wrapped the quilt around her and squeezed her eyes closed, hoping no more dreams would come.

In the morning, when Gerry headed downstairs, the snow called her louder than ever before. She stopped and gripped the back of the kitchen chair. Shaking her head to dispel the clear voice only made it grow stronger, overpowering the clatter of her mother’s vigorous washing up. Gerry focused on her mother’s back, bent over the sink. She appeared frailer somehow, as though the snow’s call wore her down, even though she couldn’t hear it.

‘I can’t follow you,’ Gerry whispered, backing out of the room. She paused in the hallway and stared at the door, then shook her head again. She forced herself upstairs, away from the urge to leave the house, and then found herself standing at her bedroom window staring out.

She leaned her forehead against it, her breath fogging the glass and obscuring her view. ‘I’m needed here,’ she said, tracing her finger through the condensation and creating a snowflake pattern on the glass, small and perfectly symmetrical. ‘If only it was Dad,’ she sighed.

The snow silenced as it always did when she mentioned her father. The snow had taken him away; Gerry hoped that one day she would give him back.

She wiped the drawing from the windowpane and focused on a man standing in the yard. She stood slowly and rubbed with her sleeve to clear the glass, only to find he had disappeared. Gerry sat heavily in the window seat. She leaned her head against the icy glass and rubbed her eyes. And then she saw him step out from behind the tree at the far end of the yard. She wasn’t sure if he was really there; she couldn’t trust her own eyes that he was real. His white clothing and pale skin almost hid him against the snowy background, but his dark hair was such a contrast.

Gerry lifted her hand to knock at the window, but hesitated as he slowly walked towards the wood that lay beyond the boundary. He stopped at the fence line with his back to the house. As she put her hand flat against the window, he turned slowly. His dark eyes shone, and maybe he smiled. Then he spun quickly on the spot and disappeared.

‘Dad?’ she whispered. Could he have returned? If he was back, what was he back for? And would it mean the end of her dreams of darkness?

She stood watching the spot where he’d vanished, wondering if she had lost her mind. As she stared into the yard the wind began to pick up, gently blowing at the large, naked oak.

Gerry swung around and bolted across the room, smacking her hip into the side of the desk. She pushed on despite the pain, taking the stairs two at a time and running out the back door without stopping to consider what she was doing. She raced against the wind blowing across the field, before it could cover his prints. It pulled at her hair, burnt her lungs, and stung her face as it tried to slow her down.

She slammed to a stop at the oak tree, her arms wrapped around it, the bark rough on her cheek and her fingers and toes already burning from the cold. There was something different about this place, something not quite right. It was more a feeling than a certainty, and she wondered if she had imagined the whole thing.

Yet there they were: clear, deep footprints. He was here, she thought, dropping to her knees and crawling along their path. After five very clear prints there was a larger area of flattened snow, indicating where he had been. But nothing more. No footprints in any direction.

Another movement caught her eye, but her hope that he had returned was quickly quashed as her mother raced across the yard with a coat. It was only as she put it around Gerry’s shoulders and helped her to her feet that Gerry realised just how cold and wet she was. Her mother was dangerously silent as she pulled Gerry close and walked her back towards the house.

‘I’m sorry,’ Gerry murmured through chattering teeth as her mother closed the door and glared at her.

‘Bath,’ she said, her shaking hand pointing up the stairs.

Gerry slipped through the bathroom door and slid the small bolt across. Leaning against the door, she sighed with the relief that her mother couldn’t follow her in; and that she would have a moment to think before her mother became too angry about her behaviour.

‘You stupid girl,’ her mother called through the door.

Too late.

‘For God’s sake Geraldine, you’re an adult now. Twenty-five,’ she said, spelling the word out slowly as though Gerry herself wasn’t aware of it. ‘Too old for games like this.’

‘I thought I saw someone.’

There was a longer, more dangerous silence, and Gerry cursed herself for opening her mouth.

‘Someone from your dreams?’ she asked quietly, and Gerry heard the hope in her voice.

‘I don’t know. That’s why I ran outside,’ she said. She couldn’t say that she thought it was her father.

‘Do you know how cold it is?’ her mother asked, her voice stern and hard again.

‘Yes,’ Gerry muttered.

‘It’s freezing out there. And you just run into the snow. You could have died.’

Gerry understood her anger too well, and hot, nauseous guilt washed over her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

Her mother harrumphed at the door and stomped off. Gerry was going to be making up for this mistake for days. 

She started the water running into the bath and sat on the toilet lid. The bathroom was chilly and every inch of her was wet and cold. A hot bath was exactly what she needed, but she couldn’t move. She fumbled with the buttons of her shirt, but her numb fingers wouldn’t work.

Managing to pull her soggy socks off, she shivered as the cold seeped into her bones. Staring at the filling bath, Gerry decided it would be easier just to climb in, clothes and all. She sank down to her chin, allowing her knees to poke out, and waited for the hot water to cover her.

When the shivering finally stopped, she pulled at her clothes and found it just as hard to remove wet clothes in the bath as it was to remove mostly-damp clothes with numb fingers. Hot tears of frustration fell into the water.

The bath started to cool long before she was ready. Her body ached as she forced it out of the water and wrapped it in a hard, dry towel. She padded quickly across the landing to her room, not wanting to alert her mother to the fact that she was out, only to find her sitting on the bed, her eyes red and her face tired.

‘Explain then,’ her mother whispered.

‘I’m just a bit distracted,’ Gerry said, trying not to make eye contact; instead she hunted through her drawers.

‘Oh?’ her mother said.

Gerry tried to smile for her, but the idea of explaining the snow made her feel off balance.

‘Is it a boy?’

Gerry stared into the drawer and, shivering again, she pulled the towel tighter around herself. How could she say that she thought she saw her father in the backyard, but then he was gone again? And then Gerry realised that her mother was staring at the photo of him beside the bed.

‘You know, your father and I were sixteen when we first got together.’

‘I’ve heard this before.’ And she had, so many times. But it was as though Gerry was only looking at the photo of him clearly for the first time. The strong jaw, the amber eyes she shared with him, the sandy hair, and the mischievous grin. She stopped and focused on him and then looked towards the window. The man she had seen had had dark eyes and dark hair, although the rest of him had been almost as white as the snow he had stood in. He wasn’t her father.

‘So, at your age you should be settled with children of your own. You should find a nice young man. Surely there is someone out there.’

Gerry refocused on her mother and the conversation. She usually pulled this out when Gerry did something she wasn’t happy with. Running into the snow half-dressed easily fell into that category. She tried not to sigh as she focused on her mother, knowing just where this conversation was going.

‘You know you have a real skill with the rifle, and I’m sure you would learn to use any other weapon just as well. There is more for you out there.’

‘Just because I can shoot straight doesn’t make it a career choice.’

‘It’s more than that. It’s like you don’t need to think about it. Natural skill, Bob Wicker calls it.’

Gerry shrugged. She knew her mother needed her whether she admitted it or not.

‘I think it’s time you moved out and started a family of your own.’

Gerry stared at her with wide eyes. That was a new twist to the conversation. ‘But I have a family.’

‘A nice man, like...’ Her mother stopped and looked at her hands in her lap.

‘Yeah, exactly. There might be nice men out there, but not any interested in me.’

‘Of course, there are,’ her mother said, looking up sharply and pulling her shoulders back.

‘No there aren’t. I scare them,’ Gerry said simply.

Her mother raised her eyebrows and Gerry tried to maintain eye contact.

‘They all think I’m strange and good with a gun. Not a great combo.’

Her mother looked at the faded photo beside the bed with a sigh.

Gerry moved to the window and leaned her forehead against the glass. The yard looked just as it always did; a blanket of white covered everything and there was no sign of anyone having been there at all.

‘Did you think it was Dad?’ her mother asked softly.

Gerry nodded, but continued to search the snow.

‘He wanted to hear her,’ her mother said.

‘Hear who?’ Gerry asked, turning from the window to watch her mother closely.

‘The snow.’ She nodded slowly. ‘He would watch you, as a little one, crawl out to the edge of the porch when it snowed. At the age of two you sat down and began to talk to her. When he asked what you were doing, you told him the snow talked.’

‘I wonder what she said,’ Gerry asked.

‘I know she still talks to you,’ her mother whispered.

‘How?’

‘I dream of her, like you dream of another world. But she never called to me.’

Gerry shook her head, trying to understand the pull herself so that she could explain it to her mother. ‘What did he say?’ Gerry asked, sitting beside her on the bed.

Her mother reached out and pushed a damp strand of hair back behind Gerry’s ear. ‘From that day on, he sat with you on the porch. When I asked why, he would just say, We are listening to the snow. And then one day, when you were about four, I came out and you were sitting on your own, and we never saw him again.’

Gerry couldn’t remember that. She had only heard the story of his disappearance and not that she had witnessed it. ‘I’m sorry, Mum. I didn’t mean to scare you.’ Gerry saw the tear escape despite her effort to quickly wipe it away.

‘I just don’t want you to disappear.’

‘I won’t,’ Gerry said, pulling her mother close. ‘I’m not Dad.’

‘He never dreamed.’ She ran her finger down Gerry’s cheek. ‘He wasn’t like us.’

As Gerry squeezed her eyes closed, she saw his face, dark and contorted, and she sat back quickly.

‘You dream when you’re awake, don’t you?’

‘Sometimes.’ Gerry shrugged and headed back to the dresser to find clothes.

‘Our family has always had visions.’

‘And again, we are back at the reason I can’t find a nice man.’ But despite the jovial tone, she couldn’t raise her eyes to face her mother again.

‘Do you want to talk about them?’

‘I don’t see anything that makes sense. Maybe the man I thought I saw was just that, a strange vision.’

‘Can’t you tell me anything?’ her mother asked, standing slowly.

Gerry shrugged again. ‘They are stronger in the winter, and dragons don’t really exist.’

Her mother nodded slowly and opened the door. Gerry heard the sigh as the door clicked shut. She had never asked what dreams her mother had. Her mother gave the idea that there was something more out there for Gerry, but she only ever smiled and brushed the hair from her face when Gerry asked. And she had stopped asking years ago.

The note Gerry found by the kettle the next morning simply said Shops xxx. The little crosses along the bottom told Gerry that her mother was no longer angry, and she smiled as she headed outside to do her chores. Yet as she crunched through the snow towards the chicken coop, she wasn’t sure if she was relieved or disappointed in the silence, and found herself looking around for signs of something—anything—in the snow.

From inside the chicken house, she heard a vehicle pull up outside the house, and she called out when she heard the door shut. But there was no response, and she stood still and listened for a moment. She tucked the single egg into her gloved palm and headed out.

It took Gerry a moment to realise that the car parked before the house was not theirs, and although the blue lights on its roof weren’t flashing, it was as though her whole world had suddenly changed colour.

She sat on the porch beside the large man in his crisp, green police uniform and stared at the broken egg on the driveway. His soft, deep voice washed over her, and she nodded occasionally to keep his words flowing. She couldn’t focus on what he said. Accident and I’m sorry stood out, but she couldn’t pick up on any other words surrounding those.

A gentle hand rested on her shoulder as a shadow covered the trees beyond the back fence. She thought she saw a man in the distance. Taller and thinner than the man in the yard the day before. But it was just an idea of him, and when she blinked, he was gone.

‘Is there anything you need?’ the man beside her asked. ‘Anyone we can call?’

She shook her head and stood slowly to watch him climb back into the patrol car and drive away. She moved from room to room, but it all seemed empty now, not her own; as though she was walking through someone else’s home. Her mother’s glasses were folded on the book by her chair. She sat there every night to read, but Gerry couldn’t remember how she sat, or even how she held the book.

Even her own room seemed foreign as she stood in the doorway. Too stark and too neat. She walked slowly back downstairs, but standing in the kitchen doorway she could only focus on the note by the kettle. The small crosses winked at her from the page. Not a page—an envelope. She stepped forward to turn it over.

The print on the reverse was Gerry’s name and she ripped it open, longing for a distraction from the overwhelming silence.

The letter was from Bob Wicker, offering her a position as an instructor at the local gun club. They had been asking her for years to take on a role there, and she had always shrugged it off. This time they had formalised it. Gerry dropped the letter and headed outside.

She pulled at her coat and scarf, trying to cool herself as hot panic covered her body and closed her throat. Struggling to breath, she stepped off the porch and into the cooling snow. A calmness settled on her as the soft flakes started to fall. The chill as they melted into her clothing was refreshing, and it refocused her foggy thinking.

The gentle, feathery flutter of snow became heavier, blocking her view of the house despite her being only a step away from it. And then she heard her name. It vibrated through the storm around her, louder than the snow had ever called before. The swirling air was strangely warmer and more secure than if she were wrapped in her mother’s arms.

The tears froze on her cheeks and she brushed them away. She held the strange ice drops in her hand, and in each one she saw her mother reflected. She shivered despite the cushion of warmth and then she looked more closely at her hands. They were blotchy and blue and as the snow slowed around her, she realised just how cold it was. Each snowflake slowed its journey as the storm surrounded her, swirling in slow motion, no longer falling into her outstretched hands or onto her already-soaked clothing.

She couldn’t remember where she dropped her coat or where she taken off her scarf. Hadn’t she been hot? She struggled to breathe again. She couldn’t remember where the house was, which direction she had come from, or how far. And then the snow stopped completely, each snowflake floating in space. A dark shadow closed around her for just a moment and a distant scream made her shiver. And then the snow drifted to the ground, and she focused on the snow-covered world around her. An unfamiliar and foreign world. She turned slowly on the spot as the bile rose in her throat.

The house was gone.

Chapter 2

The intense cold burned Gerry’s skin and she shivered uncontrollably. With her jeans already drenched and her shirt soaked through, she found herself in more pain than she thought existed. Her breath caught on the lump in her throat as she turned back and forth, searching for the house. Then her legs gave way, along with any hope she had, and she sat heavily into the deep snow.

She dragged in one burning, icy lungful of air after another. Her eyes watered from the cold. It wasn’t just that the house was gone; she was somewhere different. A whole different world. She was surrounded by a forest of dark, dormant and unfamiliar trees covering unfamiliar hills. The world appeared to have lost its colour.

Gerry rubbed at her nose, but her hands were numb. Only moments before she had been overwhelmed and hot, and now she longed for her coat and scarf. She couldn’t make sense of any of it. There was the faint smell of wet wood, so similar to the smell of the woods around her house that it only disorientated her further.

She pushed up on wobbly legs and hugged her body, slapping at herself with numb hands. The wind worked against her efforts and caused the branches above to clatter loudly, unsettling her further and threatening to knock her back into the snow. She looked up, but found herself looking into the face of a man, and yet not a man, and she stopped breathing.

The only colour he added to the surroundings was the deep brown of his eyes. In a strange way he was handsome, although as frozen as the snow he stood in. An iceman with dark, shaggy hair, highly placed pointed ears, sharp cheek bones and a small, pointed nose. Studying his face, she wondered if he was the man from the yard.

Gerry opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. He nodded once, but his eyebrows drew together as he studied her face in return.

‘Why are you so determined to run into the snow without clothes?’ His deep voice matched his large frame and his warm eyes studied her closely. ‘You are not what I thought you would be.’

‘Oh,’ Gerry croaked through chattering teeth.

He sighed as he slipped off his coat and pulled it around her shoulders, holding it only long enough for her to slip her arms into the sleeves. Despite Gerry’s dampness it was warm and soft and smelt of smoke and an unfamiliar scent that could have been his.

The man motioned for her to follow and strode ahead. She glanced behind her again; the house had not reappeared. When she looked back the man was far ahead of her, but in this strange environment she didn’t have anywhere else to go but with him. Pushing through the snow, her arms still wrapped around her body, Gerry wondered if this was where he had disappeared to. Sure now, as she watched him walk away, that he was the man from the yard. She pulled her hands into her sleeves to warm them.

‘Wait,’ she called out, as his lead increased, desperate not to be left alone. ‘Wait!’

When he stopped, Gerry looked back again to where they had come from. Nothing. Just trees and snow, snow and trees.

‘We need to keep moving,’ he called out, and was on his way again.

‘I can’t,’ Gerry said. ‘I’m so cold,’ she added in a whisper, slipping to her knees again.

He ran easily towards her and slipping an arm around her waist had her back on her feet. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, moving the arm to her shoulders.

It was much warmer when he touched her, but she was unsure if it was the big man or her close proximity to him. As he pulled her through the snow, she found a strange security in his hold.

‘It could have been closer,’ he muttered, shaking his head.

No matter how he directed her through the snow, it was hard work. And then, Gerry’s feet slid out from beneath her and the cold instantly surrounded her again, taking the air from her lungs.

When he lifted her out of the snow by her upper arm with one hand, he sighed again, and her face burned with embarrassment. She didn’t have long to try to redeem herself before he swiftly lifted her over his shoulder.

Gerry fought the urge to cry. Her eyes stung and his hard shoulder dug into the softness of her stomach. She jiggled and jostled in this position as he ran through the snow, making it even harder to breathe. But at least she was warmer against his icy skin.

She couldn’t focus on the world around her. She