Heart of Stone
Lauren Esker
The turn off the highway was easy to miss, a gravel road marked only by a wooden sign, half buried in brush, reading Monument Hot Springs. Tess overshot it on the first try, even after carefully studying the guidebook in their hotel in Whitehorse that morning. They were beyond the range of cell service here; her phone had stopped giving her directions forty kilometers back.
She stopped on a wide place in the road—there weren't many proper turnouts here—and got out of the car. The gravel underfoot would do in a pinch, but there was a rocky outcropping along the road that was much better for what she needed.
David woke with a jerk as she parked. "What ..." he mumbled. He looked weak and pale, strands of brown hair straggling on his sweat-damp forehead. He was visibly getting worse now by the day. "Are we there?"
"I just need to check directions." She leaned over to press her cheek lightly against his hot, feverish one. "Go back to sleep."
She walked swiftly to the outcrop, a short nondescript woman with a cap of dark curls and a man's shirt rolled up at the sleeves. She laid both hands against the rock and let herself sink into it.
It was harder than usual to sense the pulse of the land beneath her. She'd been afraid of that. This land itself was hostile to her; the rock did not want her here. She pushed harder, forcing herself through the barriers holding her back—and regretting it even as she did so, knowing she wasn't being a proper guest, but she simply didn't have a choice.
These were young rocks, as rocks went: basalt and quartz and granite, thrust up in geologically recent times from the furnace at the heart of the earth. There had been volcanic eruptions here in the not-too-distant past, only a millennium or two. She could still sense the traces of the resulting ash layer, buried in the thin, silty soil under the spruce trees around them.
And she could sense the hot springs, to the south and west. The land was even more inimical to her there. She let go with a shiver that went deep down into her bones.
There would be a price for what she was trying to do, a bitter and brutal one.
But there was always a cost for everything.
When she went back to the car, David was sitting up, studying the map at the back of the Yukon guidebook with glazed eyes that he kept blinking as if he found it hard to focus. Although it was a warm day and the air was close inside the car, he was huddled in his leather jacket. Tess tried to keep from staring at the black traceries visible on the surface of his skin above the collar, creeping up his neck, reaching around to the base of his skull.
"We missed it," she said, forcing her voice steady. "Back around the last turn, I think. Somewhere in there."
"Yeah, it's back—back ..." His words faltered; he seemed to forget what he'd been saying. Tess started the car and turned off the AC. She rolled down her window instead.
"Tess?" When she turned his way, David's soft brown eyes, glassy with pain and fever, searched her face. "You doing okay?"
He was worried about her, in spite of it all. She threw the car in gear with more force than was necessary. "I'm fine. Drink some water."
He didn't argue, just reached—with his left hand—for the bottle tucked into the drink holder. His hand shook and water slopped onto the seat between them, onto his leg and the gloved right hand curled and immobile in his lap. "Fuck," David muttered.
"It was the road; these potholes—"
"Don't," David said harshly. He mopped at his leg with his sleeve.
Tess looked away, studying the scrubby willows and spruce along the road. She spotted the sign this time, looking just like the one in the guidebook. As she turned carefully onto the narrow, rutted road, she noticed that the neat lettering was burned into the wood of the sign, seared in black as if handwritten in flame.
She shivered.
"I'm sorry," David said quietly. "I'm just—"
"Don't. You have nothing to apologize for."
"I've been a jerk lately. I know it."
She put a hand on his leg. He curled his fingers over it.
"How are you feeling?" she asked. "Do you need more morphine?"
He shook his head. "I'd rather save what I have."
They didn't have that much left. She had a feeling he didn't mean for the pain, and bit down hard on her bottom lip until the stinging in her eyes went away.
"This is going to work," she said, in a firm voice that left no room for doubts.
David gave her the lopsided smile that was the first thing she'd fallen for, back when she was determined with all her heart and soul not to fall at all, and reached into the mess of loose coins and gum wrappers in the car's change tray to retrieve a quarter. "Want to bet?"
Tess bit her lip again, tasting blood. "I don't want to bet on that," she said. "Let's bet on ... whether the road bends left or right after that turn up there. I say right."