3 Gone with the Wind (2/2)

Arah laughed. It was the last bout of genuine laughter I would hear for a long time.

”She wasn't the only one,” I continued. ”Lots of kids have been missing in Starlight City over the years… Many of them about our age…”

There was another bout of awkward silence. No one knew how to respond to what I just said. Eventually, though, Arah would be the one to speak her mind first as she really hated uncomfortable silences.

”We're talking about Luca… Isn't he a black belt in several martial arts like you, Dean?” No one could just abduct him,” Arah reasoned.

Find authorized novels in Webnovel，faster updates, better experience，Please click visiting.

She had a point. For as long as I could remember, my dad had been training me and Luca in all kinds of fighting styles. He never explained why but I remembered him revealing once how he wanted us to have the skills to defend ourselves from anything.

”Anything,” dad repeated, placing a lot of emphasis on that last word like it held some hidden meaning.

Even after dad's passing, Luca and I kept up our training. We couldn't let go of it as daily training was the most time dad spent with us. Nostalgia aside, there was also a bit of rivalry between me and Luca. This meant a lot of one-on-one sparring sessions that resulted in plenty of bruises—mostly, for me. Even before our adventure in the Fayne began, I could never beat him in a straight-up fight.

”Yeah… Luca's probably just getting some quality time with a girl from his class,” I joked, half-heartedly. It was all I could do to keep from panicking.

In response to my attempt at levity, both Ty and Arah gave me tired smiles.

We continued our search, and it wasn't until the sun was peeking through the eastern horizon when we finally stopped and admitted defeat.

The next few days went by in a blur.

After my failure to find Luca, mom finally called the police. Detectives arrived at our two-story townhouse in the suburbs and questioned both my mom and me about him, his habits, places he liked to go, and known associates. I hated how they hinted that Luca might be involved with some undesirable groups, and I insisted he was a good kid. He wouldn't hang with a bad crowd. This interrogation lasted the entire morning. Afterward, the detectives left and the search for Luca began.

As he was a rising star in our community—everyone being such big basketball fans—volunteers from both the school and the neighborhood turned up to help search the nearby forests and hills surrounding Starlight City for him. Even my classmates came out to support me and my brother. It was honestly very touching.

Three days after Luca vanished, Ty, Arah, and I, along with some neighborhood volunteers, made our way into Elfwood Forest, the deep forest reserve located south of the city and just a few miles outside the suburbs where my family lived. We trekked through dense foliage and wooden pines searching for Luca and found ourselves about five miles deep into the forest, arriving at one of Starlight City's most renowned landmarks, the Elfwood Circle Stones.

Like the Stonehenge in England, the Elfwood Circle Stones was a henge, a circular ring of standing stones roughly thirty feet in height each surrounded by a circular ditch about twenty feet away from the stones. Slabs of rock joined some stones together, forming a kind of uneven, flat arch roofs.

While the rest of the search party moved on after a quick glance at the site, I remained behind out of a sense of nostalgia. Luca and I spent many summers with dad exploring this place. As he was one of the top researchers on circle stones, the local authorities never minded whenever we visited. Today, however, something about the ring of stones caught my attention. I couldn't quite understand why but there was this feeling in my gut that Luca had been here.

I walked over to the carpet of grass at the center of the circle and glanced around me. while there was nothing to see except for the tree line, I noticed something odd. There was a strange vacuum of silence where I stood that seemed to banish away the sounds one usually hears in the forest. No noise from the birds or forest critters. Not even the fluttering of the wind in the trees.

Unnerved and frustrated, I screamed Luca's name to the sky. Then the strangest thing happened. I heard him answer.

”Dean!”

I wasn't entirely sure if it was a whisper or a shout but I heard Luca's voice in the wind like he was somewhere very far away.

I blinked. ”Luca…? Where are you?”

There was no response this time. Just dead silence. It was as if the wind had gone and it had taken Luca with him.

”Luca! I'm here, Luca!” I yelled frantically.

Alarmed by my yelling, members of the search party returned to the circle stones. They found me kneeling on the grass with tears streaming down my face while I screamed for my younger brother to come back.

Yup, I had been bawling like a baby. But could you blame me? This was an emotionally taxing moment, and I might have felt like I was going crazy. After all, I did just hear Luca's voice in the wind. This was not a very sane thought to have, which is why I never mentioned it to anyone and chalked up the whole episode to a temporary nervous breakdown.

It was worse for my mom. After what happened in Elfwood Forest, I went home and found her in a catatonic state. She was sitting on the living room couch with her long, unwashed red hair draped over her face like a curtain. She'd been swaying from side to side while whispering nonsensical gibberish to the empty room. For how long, I didn't know. All I knew was not even the sound of my voice or the shaking of her shoulders could snap her out of it.

I called my aunt Lena—mom's younger sister—and told her what was wrong with my mother.

Aunt Lena arrived at our house fifteen minutes later in a haggard state embodied by the mess of short red hair which she usually kept waxed and styled. After she found my mom in the living room, she used the house telephone to call for an ambulance. Right after this, she strode over to me and gave me a hug like she used to do when I was a kid. She held me there in her arms for the full five minutes it took emergency medical services to arrive.

Now, I was already fifteen and certainly not the sappy, overly emotional teenager I became for that brief period in Elfwood Forest, but it was honestly nice to have an adult hold you together like that. At least for those five minutes, I felt like the world wasn't ending around me.

I let aunt Lena do the talking. I simply allowed the paramedics to lead me into the ambulance so I could sit next to mom while they tended to her. She didn't even twitch or make a sound after they'd stuck a needle into her hand for her IV drip.

That night was certainly a contender for the second-worst night ever. It was right up there with the night Luca went missing and the night they told us about dad's accident. Yeah, I'd been through the wringer these past few years. You'd think fate would let you catch a break once in a while, you know? Balance out good karma with the bad—but no. Fate was indifferent like that.

Hold on, what kind of terrible night did I have that trumped the list above for the title of the worst night ever, you ask? Well, that would be two month after mom got carted away in the ambulance. It was the night I learned the truth about my family and our curse. It was the moment I learned that Luca's disappearance was all my fault.