Through the Archway

Chapter Twenty-Five -- Part Three

Rebekah tried to step through, but it was like she had walked into a solid barrier. A shock in her hand spread along her body and Rebekah looked down to see the engagement ring glowing a bright red. She tried again to yank the ring off, to no avail.

"I can't get through!" Rebekah shouted. James and Evelyn put their heads together, speaking in hushed tones. Rebekah spotted a length of blonde hair trailing through the blades of grass. "Is that Taylor?" she asked, and again smacked into the barrier in her desperation to see Taylor. She imagined Thomas watching her try to get through, laughing, sneering...

Evelyn didn't answer, but stepped aside, her face grim. "James," she said, "Go get Mark, please. Rebekah, just wait."

James did as he was instructed and walked up to Rebekah. For a moment it seemed her was going to walk through her, until the clearing vanished, replaced again by the white snow drifting against a black sky. She tried and failed to make it come back. Taylor needed her, she was hurt, she wasn't moving.

"No!" Rebekah screamed, slamming her fist against the wall. It was all she could do not to slide to the floor, sobbing. Rebekah knew she needed to wait. Evelyn would have a plan. After what seemed like hours, the clearing reappeared, and Mark was now with them, looking down at Taylor like she was some foreign object.

Mark knelt over Taylor, his face pinched and worried, and put a shaking hand to her face and brushed the hair out of her eyes. Rebekah had never felt more trapped in her life, not when her father had banned her from mountain climbing, not even when Thomas had proposed.

"When did you find her?" Rebekah demanded of Evelyn, who had stayed quiet.

"We didn't," she said. "She just sort of... stumbled through and passed out when I was trying to locate her energy. I did my best to heal her, but she was muttering incoherently and she was nearly blue. I... I have no idea where she's been."

Evelyn looked at Rebekah desperately, and Rebekah fully realized for the first time that Evelyn was a little girl, and even she made mistakes.

"Is she going to be alright?" Mark asked in a thick voice.

Evelyn nodded. "I think so," she said. "We should get her something warmer to wear." She looked down at Taylor, who was wearing a breezy, white nightdress. Mark took off his coat and wrapped it around Taylor's shoulders without a second thought.

James and Evelyn had stood a fair distance away this whole time, watching them both. Rebekah raised her eyebrows at both of them and they scurried forward nervously, as though afraid they were going to catch a disease.

"Where was she?" Mark asked Evelyn, and Evelyn frowned.

"I don't know," she said timidly. "Somewhere in the mountains, maybe... she had signs of hypothermia. It's possible that if someone took her, they let her go — wanted her to be found at this moment."

Mark raised an eyebrow at James. "So Oceanus, then?" he asked pointedly.

Evelyn studied Taylor. "Maybe," she said, though she did not sound convinced. "But there are other places that she could have been, Mark; other places beyond the mountains that we've never even been to — she most likely wouldn't have been in Oceanus long, if at all."

Taylor groaned from where she lay in Mark's arms. Her eyes fluttered open, and Rebekah let out a sob of relief. "Tay?" she asked, leaning as far forward as she could without hitting the barrier again.