stellaR (Editing)

Chapter XIV

Chapter- XIV

    

I’m not upset that you lied to me. I’m upset that, from now on, I can’t believe you.   -Friedrich Nietzsche

 

     Everyone’s face drained of color, and I glanced around, wishing someone was able to think rationally at that second. Because I knew that I, for one, wasn’t.

     Slowly, I forced my gaze to lock onto Sol’s, willing him to look up.

     “You said you got an ‘odd phone call’?” I asked him once he did.

     He nodded, somewhat sheepishly.

     “Explain.” Chaud ordered, his gaze dark.

     “It was some chick…” He began. I narrowed my eyes, I hated that word.

     “It was some girl,” Sol amended, having noticed my look, “on the other end, acting all big and bad, telling us she had something we wanted. I told her I didn’t know what she was talking about; she muttered something like ‘you will’ and told us to go check out the beach.”

     “So… you listened to the crazy person on the other end of the phone and… went to visit the beach in the freezing cold of nearly November?” Aria asked incredulously, and I had to agree with her there. It was a pretty ridiculous thing to do, especially considering the fact that they had been instructed to go there by someone who, for all they knew, could have been certifiably insane.

     Marée and Sol exchanged a glance, before shrugging.

     “Okay, so it wasn’t our brightest moment…” Sol admitted self-consciously.

     I blew out a long controlled breath, mulling everything over. Whoever had placed the severed hand there, and then called Sol and Marée, had obviously given it some forethought. They could be waiting to ambush us. Then again, they hadn’t actually left a ‘when and where’ on their body tag. Maybe that meant we would be seeing them… regardless of the when and where.

     Pushing down my nerves, I looked back at the rest of the Five.

     “Well? Anyone got any brilliant ideas on how to handle this?”

     Everyone looked away from me, and for a moment a bright flash of anger hit me. This was the Five- the element-wielding, high-powered groupthat everyone treasured so dearly? They couldn’t even think of an approach to a simple confrontation: meet the person responsible for giving us back the key- and possibly becoming an ally- or not meet them.

     I looked out, down the rocky cliffs and off into the ocean. Maybe if I stared hard enough and long enough at the waves the answer would appear, much as driftwood did.

     I stood up from where I had been crouched down beside the hand with the engraving, paced along the edge of the cliff. Although it was rocky and probably unsafe, I didn’t think to step back from the cliff at all. What was it Chaud had said to me not so long ago?

     “…you can’t fall to the ground without your own permission…”

 

     And right now, I wasn’t planning on giving the ground my permission. This, I tried explaining to myself, is why I walked out precariously far along the rocks and the cliffs. I stood stock still, taking in the scene before me.

     The sandy, pebbly beach shore was spread before me, a thin strip bordering the ocean’s uneven edge. The beach here was a common ground for anyone who lived nearby. It was placed perfectly between a small town and two cities, so there was always someone on it in the summer. The beach strip was a direct route to the closest roads and restaurants and hardly anyone actually walked out on the cliff that I was now standing on. The only way to the top of the cliffs was from the road that Chaud and I had driven to get here earlier.