Esme cursed as she hit potholes on the winding rural road that was so narrow. She was driving through the mountains along a rural route that would have taken her hundreds of miles off course if she was truly heading to mystic falls like she'd told her sister. It was the only way out of town these days, with the main road still impassable. The highway department was not in any hurry to repair it.
She had lied to Erin, though. She was not traveling out of town to visit her new department head. She was concealing her car so she could sneak into therianthia for a few days.
She did not notice noa oscar's car ahead and breathed a sigh of relief. She immediately pulled over to the side of the road and stopped behind him.
Noa was her patron in this instance, the dean of folkloristics for the college of koala, the one who had given her the job and presented her with that ridiculously fat, extravagant check. She'd been impressed when he'd approached her; she'd immediately recognized him, one of the most illustrious names in the study of folkloristics.
Noa was walking along the side of the car, rubbing his thinning gray hair. He was a tall, thin fellow with a nervousness about him. He was dressed like a man from another century; he even had a bow tie.
"Esme! Happy you could make it!".
He'd brought his assistant george along, so that george could drive her car. George, an assistant professor who looked more like a young crewcut weightlifter than like a scholar, smiled good-naturedly as she came up to them.
"Good to see you two, thanks for keeping an eye out for my car for me whilst I'm away," she said to noa. "I don't want to have to tell anyone I am traveling over before I go, not even family. They'd give me a heart attack."
"Yes, I will," noa agreed. "And you're sure that you can come back and forth safely?" The four horizontal lines on his forehead creased with worry, and he twisted his hands. "I don't like to do this. I hope we're not endangering you by doing something too risky. It's just that the importance of the research would be so incredible…"
"Like I said, my family's been doing it for centuries. Done it scores of times. Haven't killed me yet. Not even a cold."
She handed him the keys to her car. The idea was that noa and george would drive her car and park it well out of sight in a safe place for her. Then george would come back every day in his own vehicle and wait for her at 2 p.m., just in case she had to leave early. He'd sit there for two hours. She wanted to stay on the other side for three days, but it was smart to have a backup.
"I'd like to call you there," noa complained.
"Cell phones aren't working at all in elk vale, much less across dimensions," she pointed out.
"True."
"I do miss my cell phone. What's it like out there in the parts of the country that aren't flattened?" she asked wistfully. "I'd kill for an internet connection."
"I hear you," george nodded sympathetically, slapping the pocket of his button-down shirt. "My cell phone and internet connection died about half an hour ago, and I'm already withdrawing. I don't know how six months will be. Don't worry, your town will be rebuilt one day, and you'll be able to come back to the 21st century."
"I don't know," she said with a heavy sigh. "To rebuild our infrastructure, they'd need to be able to move in heavy equipment, which they can't do on these little narrow country roads. The gap on the main road is so wide that they'd have to build a bridge over it, and we're one little tiny town in the middle of nowhere. We're not a priority."
"Maybe once you've published this paper, people will see how special elk vale is, and you'll become a priority," noa said encouragingly.
She managed a smile. "Here's hoping."
Then she gave them a jaunty wave. "Well, I'd love to stand around jawing all day, but I've got werewolves to observe."
She turned and began trudging through the woods.
If she was caught, she would lose everything. Her family's farm, their means of living, the slender promise of a future. But if she could do this, she could save her sister and maybe, just maybe, save the world. The tension was a tight knot in her stomach as she pressed deeper into the black forest, each snapping of leaves sending her leaping at the sound of an approaching menace. A fleeting shadow, too large and swift for a deer, darted at the edge of her vision. A wolf? Or just her imagination?"
She ran through her checklist in her mind. Soup cans and granola bars – she didn't know what they'd be eating there, and, though she'd shoved a hunk of money in her pocket, she didn't imagine that they took the same money there. A camera, which would be okay; some of the werewolves who'd crossed over into their world had cameras. Her notebook and a few spare clothes. That was all; she didn't want to take too much with her, in case she took something inadvertently along that didn't exist where she was headed.
Her plan was to walk into the closest town and observe as much as possible without calling too much attention to herself – hopefully. She'd also taken along binoculars so that she could look at them from afar, if necessary.
She was well aware of how much at a disadvantage she was. The only thing they knew about their world was what she and her sister had picked up when they'd snuck over as children, and what the humans had gleaned from the werewolves who'd wandered into their world by mistake after the shard opened.
She knew that their world appeared to have grown on an parallel trajectory with her own, and their lifestyle there appeared, at least superficially, to be virtually identical with that of humans on her own side of the shard – save that their machines, their cars, TVs, cell phones and airplanes were powered by some sort of magical energy. She knew werewolves were male, that they shared the world with humans peacefully. They must be capable of pairing up with human women, because otherwise their kind would have died out.
She didn't know anything else than that, so she could only pray that she didn't get caught over there.
She reached the location she was looking for relatively easily. It was one of a number of locations that were everywhere, which only she and her sister could see.
There was a blue location in the air that was ten feet wide and twenty feet long, and there was rippling in the air surrounding it like the heat shimmer around an enormous fire.
When she and her sister were small children, they'd walked along one of those places and found the other world. They'd seen people transform into wolves. They'd gazed up at the sky and seen two moons, one big and one small. They'd run home and told their family what they'd seen.
Their grandmother and mother had gone white as ghosts. They had also gone through something similar when they were children. So had their great-grandmother. She had warned her daughter that if she told anyone, they would think that she was a witch.
Esme and Erin's mother had more modern concerns. They feared that if someone discovered their family gift, they'd be kidnapped and sent to some government lab and experimented on. Esme and Erin were sworn in, and they'd always respected that secret, but things had changed now.
After the earthquake had passed, and the dust had settled, there it was, that massive shard, and everybody could see it. Werewolves and people had walked through it, driven through it, even biked through…without knowing that they'd never be able to return.
There were soldiers now the full length of the shard – all the portion that they could see, anyway.
But the odd spots where the fabric of reality between the two words was thin, spots that only Esme's family could see.no soldiers manned them.
Of course, most of the spots were congregated on Esme's family property, but she couldn't travel through there–she had to keep up the ruse that she was leaving town. This spot would do nicely.
Way off in the distance, through the blue, Esme could swear she heard voices. People on the other side. Crud. She'd have to pray that no one saw her walking through.
She took a breath, and walked into the bright blue.
She felt the tingling, that recognition. Her surroundings rippled, like underwater, and then disappeared. She looked around. The woods were just as much the same. She was standing beside the tree that was the identical blue oak tree that she had stood beside in her own reality. There was the same ghostly twin set of pines that she had just gazed at. Beyond, sweeping across the horizon, were the sierra nevada mountains, spiky, white tipped and blinding the horizon.
This was in line with the prevailing theory that the two worlds had evolved down almost identical paths. The same mountains, trees, landmarks, the same physical features…apart, of course, from the two moons hanging in the sky above.