by Ryan La Sala
He brandished the charm. The few birds chirping went silent as something darker than the dark rose from the imploded roof of the mill, taking the shape of a lustrous beak and horns. Ursula got into a boxing stance. Kane tightened his grip on the bat, and an aura of etherea gathered around them in pulsing fractals, his powers at the ready.
Once, the Dreadmare had chased Kane and Sophia from this very mill, as though they were grave robbers. Now, Kane would make sure it knew he owned this particular grave. Dean couldn’t chase Kane away from his own past forever, not when Kane had recruited the strongest person he knew as backup.
A flash swept over Kane from the left, then another. Twin flashlights cutting through the trees as Adeline and Elliot stumbled into the clearing.
“Shit,” Adeline panted.
“Told you they’d be here,” Elliot responded, out of breath.
The Dreadmare flickered away, the mill nothing but empty walls beneath Adeline and Elliot’s garish flashlights. They pointed them right at Kane and Ursula, like they were criminals. Kane let out a frustrated groan and, not thinking, released his pent aura. It washed over the Others, unbalancing them, then soaked into the forest beyond. Everything was ruined.
“Whoa, Kane,” Elliot said, hands up so his flashlight lit the trees. “Chill. Sophia called us. Your note sent her into a panic.”
“Where is she now?”
“Your house. We told her we’d report back after we got you.”
“Got me?”
Adeline moved between them, switching off her flashlight.
“It’s not like that, Kane. She was freaking out. We had to give her something, or she was going to go out looking herself. And I’m glad she called. You both know trying to fight Dean is like, literally so dumb, right?”
Kane adjusted his grip on the bat. “So you believe me that Dean’s the Dreadmare, then?”
Adeline rolled her lips together and looked over the river, clearly not wanting to answer this question. Elliot shrugged and said, “Doesn’t matter what we believe, to be honest. You guys are our team. If your beliefs are strong enough to bring you out here in the middle of the night, we should be right there beside you.”
Kane knew this was a peace offering, but he had something to say. “So where was our team when I brought this up at the conservatory? Be honest, Elliot. You’re only here because Ursula’s in danger, right? You know you can flirt with her without also trying to get brownie points for being an awesome team captain, right?”
Adeline outright cackled at the dumbstruck expression on Elliot’s face. She pulled herself into a barely contained smirk, and for a second she and Kane connected in the dark humiliation that burned between Elliot and Ursula. Kane decided he was starting to like Adeline.
“Wait,” Ursula said. “Wait, what?”
Elliot, blushing, waved away the jab. “I prioritize safety. I’m just being cautious. You guys know this about me.”
“And you know that we don’t have the luxury of caution,” said Kane. “Not when we’re the only ones able to take action. My choices may have cost one woman her life. Maybe two. Worry about yourself all you want, but don’t stop me from trying to get Helena back.”
Ursula put a hand on Kane’s shoulder. “We don’t know what happened to Maxine, and what happened to Helena wasn’t just your fault, Kane. You have saved many, many people from their reveries, and we should have listened to you when you spoke up for her. What happened was Poesy’s fault. The blood is on her hands.”
The group considered this.
“Her very well-manicured hands,” Adeline added.
Kane had to admit she was right. Poesy had great nails.
Adeline’s eyes were laughing at Kane. “You really thought you could take on Poesy and her Dreadmare?”
“No.” Kane still wasn’t sure how he felt about Poesy. Scared, sure, but he still felt her scariness was rooted in necessity. He didn’t want to confront her; he wanted to investigate her. Learn more about what she meant when she said she would “fix”Helena’s reverie.
“I thought Dean would help us in secret. I’m sure he’s part of…”
“Part of what?”
Kane bit off his plan. He wasn’t ready to tell them about his past with Dean, which he barely understood himself. He wasn’t ready to remind them about the mysterious loom and its role in generating the reveries and attracting Poesy and nearly annihilating his life.
But then he saw their asking faces in the moonlight, and he saw they were the only things holding the darkness of the mill at bay. He realized that, as messy as their entrance had been, they had shown up for him after all. They each had arrived in their own way, choosing to chase the flame of his half-imagined hunches over the comfort of their own beds and the safety of their own dreaming.
Kane could almost feel his lost friendships, then, like shadows beneath the new friendships trying to form. So why was he protecting Dean, who vanished when Kane needed him the most?
“Do you remember,” Kane began, breathing deep, “how you said I was obsessed with finding the true source of the reveries? Well I did, in Maxine Osman’s reverie. It was that crown. It’s called the loom. It’s some kind of weapon that is leaking etherea like radiation, causing the reveries to mutate out of people. Poesy said that if we find it, we can stop the reveries. She thought maybe one of you had stolen it. That’s why I helped her.”
“No one stole your crown,” Ursula said. “That thing was awful. It nearly killed us.”
“And what about Dean?” Adeline asked in a clipped tone, pushing her question in front of Kane’s accusations. Once again he was sure she knew more than she let on.
“I think he’s here for the loom, too. I think he wants to use it, somehow.”
“And where does that leave you?” Adeline asked. “If you found that kind of power again, what would you do?”
Kane clenched his hands. “Knowing what I know now? Destroy it.”
Adeline lifted her chin, peering at him through the lens of this new fact. “Give me the whistle,” she said, her face unreadable.
Kane sagged. Maybe telling them the truth had cost him his chance tonight. Maybe he’d chosen wrong.
“Making a deal with Dean was a bad plan,” Adeline said as she took the whistle. “But it was the right idea. If what you say about Poesy is true, I’m guessing she needs our help in finding the loom, which means we’ve got leverage. And she clearly values your life. Let’s see if she’s open to negotiations.”
And she blew the whistle.
Kane’s mind stumbled. Bubbles of anxiety fizzed in his throat, filling him with the bright sting of excitement. Elliot and Ursula looked just as shocked.
The whistle’s silence cut through the birds’ chirping as though it’d cut through the birds themselves. Then a rushing, whispering discord blew through the mill and the moonlight ahead bruised, dimpled, and peeled apart. A pair of double doors towered before them, finished in a lusterless black, and starkly flat against the drifting river beyond. Kane braced himself for the Dreadmare to fly through but minute after minute passed in glassy stillness.
“It’s a door,” Elliot said.
“Yes, Elliot, we can all see the door,” said Adeline.
“Do we knock?” Ursula asked.
“I think we already rang the bell,” Elliot said.
“The whistle opened up some sort of passage into Helena’s reverie,” Kane said. “Maybe this leads to wherever Poesy came from?”
Adeline marched forward, grasped a massive handle, and pulled the heavy door open a few inches. Mellow light spilled out.
“No one’s here,” she whispered. “Kane, what do you want to do?”
Kane felt absurd relief. He considered the door and all that might be behind it. Something told him fate had dealt them a very rare chance to enter Poesy’s realm when she wasn’t home
.
Or it was a trap. Either way, they had to enter to find out. Otherwise, manicured or not, all their hands were covered in the crime of doing nothing to bring Helena home.
“Let’s go,” Kane said.
• Twenty-Six •
TRICK OR TREAT
Kane wasn’t sure what he expected, but it wasn’t this.
They entered a room full of height and golden glow, with curving walls made from glass display cases. Turning around, Kane wasn’t surprised to find that the room was actually circular. The double doors they’d just walked through stood alone and without any discernible wall to lead through. Just a door frame made of the same obsidian as the whistle, gilded with gold filigree. It stood upright like a lone domino upon a circular stage at the room’s center. It almost reached the chandelier.
Elliot propped the door open with Kane’s bat.
“I think we’re okay,” he whispered. “But no one touch anything. This place could be rigged.”
They each picked a different area to explore. Kane sought out the squat coffee table and the tea set. There were a few cups ready for use, but Poesy’s specific cup was absent. He moved on to the cases. They were backed by mirrors so that at first each case appeared to hold nothing but far-flung infinity. Then he looked closer.
Curios. Artifacts. Charms. Small, strange objects that each emanated the same reality-bending aura of the reveries. They whispered to Kane of their mysterious magnitude, their stolen vastness. Some lay in pieces, crushed but then meticulously arranged, like an exotic pinned butterfly made beautiful in its unmaking.
Poesy didn’t fix reveries. She collected them. Kane craned his neck, following the cases all the way up to the ceiling. There must have been thousands in this room alone. How many lay in pieces? How many people were locked away in false realms?
What little hope Kane had for Poesy finally crumbled, and it left him dizzy and drifting. He stumbled back, catching on the corner of a wide desk. The Others glared at him, but no alarms sounded. Nothing changed. They went back to inspecting the charms, Kane’s same grim conclusion hanging over each of them in the silence.
Kane turned to the desk. It was covered in papers and books and odd, sharp instruments. He picked up a scroll full of diagrams and cryptic print. Buried beneath it was a book with a bright red cover. Chills prickled across Kane’s neck. He knew that red.
Kane slid the journal forward and ran his hands across the supple leather. The elastic band slid off smoothly, his eyes filled with his own penmanship. Except not quite; all the words were backward.
Kane made sure no one was watching as he took out the journal Poesy had given him from his backpack. The two books were identical. Experimentally, he flipped them both open to the back-most page and scribbled across one. On the other, like a bruise rising to the skin’s surface, the scribble reappeared in reverse.
Deceit slid through Kane’s heart, oil-thin and burning, amplifying the humiliation he already felt. He’d dutifully recorded every lousy detail of his recovery (even his dreams!) into that journal with no intention of giving it back, but Poesy had been reading along the entire time.
He was sure this is how Poesy had sent her invitation for tea. On this hunch, he put his pen between the pages of one journal, then opened the other. The pen rolled from the spine, a bit warm from its journey.
Kane’s anger gave way to wonder. He did the trick several more times, captivated by the magic. He could feel himself getting carried away, so before anyone noticed he grabbed both journals and shoved them into his backpack.
Then he saw the egg.
On a cleared corner of the desk, nestled within a satin cushion, was a bejeweled egg no bigger than an acorn. Its surface was crammed with exquisite gems of every color. There was no mistaking it: he had found Helena’s reverie.
“It’s here!” Kane called, and the others hurried over.
“You sure?” asked Elliot.
“I’m sure.”
Several other charms were scattered around it, but Helena’s felt different. From it drifted a rumbling, desperate energy, as though it verged on hatching.
“Good. No negotiations needed, then. Someone grab it,” Elliot said.
“How about you grab it, Elliot?”
No one wanted to touch the thing. Then the lights flickered, and everyone looked up. A far-off creaking sent shivers down Kane’s spine.
“Well, that’s ominous,” Elliot whispered.
The lights flickered again. The door vibrated in its frame.
It was Ursula who finally moved. She snatched up a small velvet pouch from the desk and swept the charms—Helena’s and all—into it. Then they were following Elliot to the door, which was still propped open by the bat. The night beyond was a sliver of navy beckoning them from the room’s golden warmth, promising safety, but right before Elliot slipped through Adeline wrenched him back. There was a crack and the door slammed shut, slicing the bat in half.
“Shit,” said Elliot.
Ursula pushed open the door. It showed clearly to the other side of the room. The mill was gone. She closed it again and opened it again. Nothing. On the third try she paused.
“It’s…cold?” she said.
Kane grabbed the handle. It was frigid.
The light of the room waned, and a jitter ran up Kane’s arm. Adeline pointed to the bottom of the doors. “Snow,” she whispered, and sure enough a dusting of flakes seeped beneath the door on an icy draft.
“Hide!” hissed Elliot, but already they were stumbling over one another to stuff themselves behind the settee. A second later the door groaned open, and freezing air gushed into the room, kissing the nape of Kane’s neck. Kane watched from beneath the settee, stifling his frantic breaths as a flurry of snow revealed first the legs of a dog, then the dip of a silver chain, and finally human legs in thigh-high boots.
The door closed, shutting out the blizzard and trapping them inside.
Elliot’s eyes glowed gold as he worked up his invisibility magic, but Kane knew he couldn’t hide them all for long.
“I know I say this every time, Ms. Daisy, but that is the last time we visit Saas-Fee,” said Poesy as she unlatched the silver chain. “Next time I decide where we walk.”
Ms. Daisy growled. Kane felt a hand squeezing his calf. Adeline’s. Kane had been right. Ms. Daisy had been on a walk with Poesy this whole time, which meant the dog and the Dreadmare were not one and the same.
“Stop that. You love the loop around Belgrade.”
For the next few minutes they listened to Poesy walk about the room, shuffle things here and there. Tinkering with something. Then, quite calm, Poesy called out, “Would any of you like tea?”
No one moved.
“It’s no trouble, really,” she said. “I’m making some for myself—to warm up—and it’d be rude not to at least offer. I know Mr. Montgomery is inclined to decline, but I’m fairly positive Mr. Levi should like a cup. Ms. Bishop, Ms. Abernathy, one lump or several?”
Elliot stood first, dragging Kane up with him. Adeline followed and, after a stiff nudge, Ursula stumbled up, too. Poesy, dressed in a fur-fringed house coat, watched with bright eyes across the room. In her hands was a tea tray, the teapot already steaming. Ms. Daisy trotted up to them with a bone clamped in her jaw and placed it cordially at Ursula’s feet.
Kane tried to sound tough. “We didn’t come for tea.”
Poesy gave a patronizing smile. “Yes, Mr. Montgomery, I know. You came for Ms. Helena Quigley’s charm, and I see you’ve got it. You’d think I’d have this place alarmed but, alas, with no discernible entrance I don’t get too many unsolicited guests, never mind haphazard trick-or-treaters like yourselves. If you’d given me a little more notice I’m sure I could have summoned a charcuterie board.”
“We’re not staying,” spat Adeline. For the second time she nudged Ursula, now
because Ursula was patting Ms. Daisy on the head.
“Yeah,” Ursula stammered. “We’re leaving.”
Poesy lifted one eyebrow. “How?”
Confidently, Adeline brandished the whistle.
“Hmm,” Poesy watched the charm without concern. “Whistles are for beckoning. You appear to be in need of a key.”
Kane opened his mouth, then closed it. His eyes flickered to Poesy’s bracelet, where he remembered there was a small, white key. This was a very bad plan indeed.
“You come and go as you please,” said Elliot. “You’ll let us go.”
“Will I? I am not so sure.”
Elliot elbowed Kane. “Threaten her!”
“Oh, right.” Kane stretched out a hand, producing a cloud of vaporous light. Instantaneously, the cases of charms began to whisper as they sipped the ambient magic.
The whites of Poesy’s eyes glistened as she scanned the heights of the room. “That would not be a wise move, Mr. Montgomery.”
“Then let us leave,” Kane demanded.
“Come now, child. There is no need for savagery.”
Adeline gawked. “Savagery? How about what you did to Helena Quigley? How’s that for savagery?”
Poesy’s eyes lowered, brimming with menace. “Don’t,” she seethed. “Do not call my ethics into question, Other. What I do and how I do it is founded in necessity.”
“Necessity?” Adeline spat. “Was crushing an old lady’s dreams a necessity? You might as well have murdered her.”
“Murdered? Ha!” Poesy let out a throaty guffaw. “And I suppose she was safer under your dubious protection? It didn’t look that way, when Mr. Montgomery invoked my intervention. But he did, and I rid reality of the fantasy you four poisoned, and now Ms. Helena Quigley is safe. She would thank me if she were awake to my mercy. You should thank me, too.”
Adeline gripped the settee. “You’re evil. All these charms are evil.”
Poesy gave an amused smile. “And what do you think that makes you? You haven’t a clue where your powers come from, do you? And to think, here you’ve invaded my sanctuary to denounce the very mechanism I used to create you? I have no taste for irony. Such insolence from my own children will not be suffered.”