by Gregory Ashe
I seized on that memory of Hannah, and I felt the vibrating line of connection, and I followed it. It was like riding a lightning bolt. It sizzled with energy, beyond my own abilities, beyond Urho’s, beyond anything I could imagine. This was elemental. Yet it felt ephemeral too—out of Shay’s control, and certainly out of mine. So raw and blisteringly powerful, it threatened to buck me out into the blackness of the universe. But I held on. This was my chance. My one chance at finding Hannah and Tyler, and even though I was exhausted, even though I wanted to slide away from this emotional current and drift into unconsciousness, I held on. They were kids. They were just kids. And they didn’t deserve any of this, and so I held on for them. For another heartbeat. And another. And then again, into a place where heartbeats didn’t matter.
And then I was there. It was the inside of a cabin, although that wasn’t really the right word. It was too spacious, too expensively decorated, too modern to be called a cabin. In those ways, it reminded me of Emmett’s house, but I knew this wasn’t the same place. It had cedar-log siding, chandeliers made out of antlers, and a ceiling that rose to a steep peak. On all sides, the windows looked out onto snow-capped mountains and valleys, where the spring melt funneled into streams. In the distance, starlight spangled a high-altitude lake, making it seem like a mirror of poured silver.
I recognized this place; I had met River here in my dreams. That time, I had seen it from the outside, standing knee deep in the frigid lake. But that didn’t tell me where it was located. I knew they were hiding in the mountains, but the Bighorn range ran hundreds of miles north to south. They could be tucked into a valley I’d never find, one that wasn’t marked on any map, and I’d never be able to rescue Hannah and Tyler.
I spun, taking in the large open rooms, and then I froze. Through a squared-off archway, I saw a bulky leather sofa—and lying on the sofa, Hannah’s pale, still body. Here, on the other side, I didn’t have to walk or creep. I just thought, and I found myself next to her, kneeling, my fingers ghosting through her cheek when I tried to touch her. This was her body, her physical body. So where was her spirit?
On the far side of the room, Tyler sat like a statue. It was the only way to describe it, like seeing him in the Hunt Public House all over again, only worse: the lack of life, vitality, and essence. He registered on this side of reality the same way the sofas did, or the mantel above the fireplace, as if he had no spirit on the other side. Real candles spattered the floor with wax like bird shit. How long had they used this as a secret retreat? How long had they had this hideout, this backup in case anything went wrong at Belshazzar’s Feast? Decades, I guessed.
And Tyler still hadn’t moved. A yellowing bruise showed along his jawline, but otherwise he looked fine. He wasn’t fine, of course; whatever the Lady had done to him, smashing open his chakra like the lock on a tween’s diary, had broken him. It had left him fixed on one side of reality. Had it taken his mind? Had it taken his soul? I didn’t even really know what a soul was, but studying Tyler, with his dead gaze and the dull, leaden cast to his face, I made a guess. A soul was what made you more than a piece of furniture, and Tyler’s soul had been taken from him.
His head snapped up. The movement was predatory, terrifying; the way a fox might scent a chicken. And then something grabbed me, closing around me like a fist, a tremendous pressure that dragged me toward the straw-haired boy. His eyes were fixed past me, but that force still tugged me forward, and no matter how I twisted, I couldn’t rip myself free.
“Hannah.” I tried digging in my heels. I tried visualizing myself somewhere else—anywhere else. It didn’t work. I skidded another foot toward Tyler. The metachromatic weave of the other side skewed sharply, stretching toward Tyler like threads being stressed in loose weaving. “Hannah!”
Hannah’s image strobed in-out-in-out near the fireplace like a guttering candle. She was trying to talk to me. She was trying to shout to me. Urho, I realized. Urho was keeping her from talking to me.
I struggled against Tyler, but he was strong. So much stronger than I was. Stronger, I guessed, even than Urho—because Tyler would have to be stronger, he would have to be strong enough to rip Urho across planes of existence. I wasn’t going to win a fight with Tyler. His soul was gone or locked away, and whatever part of him I might have been able to reason with, whatever fragment of him I might have been able to use my power on, had been snipped out as clearly as if someone had gotten busy with pinking shears. I couldn’t win against that kind of power; he had been built this way, stronger than any psychic because he only had to do one thing and he had to do it well. I’d never be able to beat him.
But I might be able to beat Urho. Just for a second. And a second, I hoped, would be long enough.
I reached out, feeling for Urho, and there he was: deadly, silent, an invisible smoke suffocating the room. I pressed against him. My heels skidded another inch as Tyler pulled, dragging me toward himself. I didn’t know what would happen when he got me, but I didn’t think I wanted to know. The boy I had fed cold chicken strips, the boy I had covered with a thin blanket while he slept on the couch, that boy wasn’t here anymore. There was just this thing that the Lady had made, and if this thing got me, I thought it would rip me into pieces.
Hannah appeared, fractionally longer this time, and she opened her mouth, calling something to me. Then she vanished, and Urho’s presence slammed between us. I wrestled with him. I was exhausted; I was injured; I was still new to all of this psychic stuff. Urho was ancient, and he was powerful, and he knew exactly what he was doing. I could feel his shape begin to coalesce, still invisible, and I remembered the dreams, all those dreams going back to when I had first encountered Urho: nothing more than an impression of wild, gnashing teeth that had torn the back of my neck, the dreams when he chased me through trackless woods. That same ferocious hunger was here, now, taking form as Urho concentrated and manifested.
Another tug from Tyler sent me stumbling, and I barely caught myself. His little face was set in a horrible grimace: his lips peeled back to bare baby teeth with the front teeth missing. Milk teeth. That was one way of calling them. An old way. It just popped into my head, milk teeth. Seeing those teeth meant for an adorable, gap-toothed grin, instead framed by that hateful face with peeled-back lips, was terrible in its dissonance. I set myself against the force of his tugging and turned my attention back to Urho.
My eyes flicked up, hoping to see Hannah, but to my surprise the Lady stood in the doorway. I hadn’t seen her like this, with my second sight, since that day at Belshazzar’s Feast when she had locked me in the basement. I had stared at her then, looked on her with my second sight, and I had seen something that carried me to the cliffs of madness.
Her physical form was nothing to be frightened of: she was prim, old-fashioned, her narrow face and her mountain of pinned hair like something out of a Victorian sketchbook. She even wore clothes to match—a long, full skirt and a frilly blouse. Only her eyes gave her away, eyes that glowed like brick dust. Or like the orange of a plastic pumpkin at Halloween.
Outside, she looked old-fashioned and dowdy and severe. Inside, though, was the nightmare. Inside her was a shriveled thing, a naked, desiccated abomination, as though someone had unwrapped a mummy that had lain under sand and hot desert winds for centuries. It huddled inside her physical body, withered and shrunken, the blackened nipples on its sagging breasts falling over curled knees. It hissed at me, and its eyes flashed the same Halloween orange, and I knew I was seeing the real Babria, Lady Buckhardt, the one who had lived all those centuries.
She was hungry. The thought hit me like a sledgehammer, and it raised a question that flickered in my mind like a coin spinning on its edge, there and gone and there again.
But I didn’t have time for questions. I had to do this now.
Urho manifested beside her, a distortion in the air that was most visible at the edges, like light warped through glass. He might have been a hound, but he was the size of
a goddamn pony, and I could feel the roil of heat and hate and madness.
Now, I told myself. Now. While he was distracted. While all his focus was on manifesting so that he could rip me to shreds himself.
I threw the last of my strength at the smokescreen Urho had raised, and it wavered and blew apart. Then Hannah was there, staring at me, her mouth open as though I’d caught her in mid-scream.
Tyler grunted, a little boy grunt, and my feet flew out from under me. I felt myself hauled through the air, dragged toward him.
“Tyler, no,” Hannah screamed, and I felt her push—a push as strong as Tyler’s pull, a push that hit me at an angle. She wasn’t trying to play tug of war with Tyler; she just punted me as hard as she could, and I felt myself shear through the line of force Tyler was exerting, and then I was tumbling into darkness as the other side dissolved around me.
I had one last glimpse of Hannah tiny and frightened and alone before night swept the other side out of my vision: her little face fixed with resolve, her little mouth working, and the noise coming to me like the worst cell call in the history of the world.
One word. And so much static I wasn’t sure what I was hearing.
Chapee.
And then darkness caught up the last granules of the other side, and I was back in that wild spread of forest, my feet pounding the packed earth as I ran. The beast wasn’t there, not yet, but he was coming. So I ran. Then the dream dissolved, and the last thing I heard was hot breath at my heels, and then everything was gone, and I slept.
BIRDS WOKE ME. I was snug in bed at home, in my attic room in Sara’s house, and the birds were singing. Every inch of me ached, so I stayed where I was, my eyes closed, and listened. Birds. That was good. The storm had moved on, finally. No snow. And the birds were coming back. Maybe it really was spring—in Wyoming, even in April, it was hard to tell.
If it had only been the birds, I might have gone back to sleep. But the birds didn’t sound particularly happy. It wasn’t singing, I realized. Not really. More like squawking. I shifted under the covers, and my body howled at me. It was worse than any post-workout I could ever remember. And the sheets felt rough. Itchy. And my head was pounding. And the inside of my mouth was shit. And—
And bacon.
My eyelids wanted to stick together, and it took some real determination to get them open, but there was bacon on the line. Even with my head pounding, even with those damn birds squawking like a fox was wringing their necks, even with my whole body, head to toe, feeling like somebody had played me like a xylophone, there was bacon. Sara cooked the best damn bacon in the world. So I got my eyes open. I would have cut off my lids if I had to.
No attic ceiling. No Sara.
Emmett sat cross-legged, facing me, and his dark eyes met mine. Then, very deliberately, he tapped his phone. It let off the loudest squawking bird noise I’d ever heard.
“I thought you’d like a soothing wake-up.”
“What is wrong with you?”
He jabbed at his phone again. This time, it sounded like a chicken being murdered. “Nothing like the sounds of nature to ease that transition back to wakefulness.”
“Back to wakefulness? You sound like a bad infomercial.” I rolled onto my back and rubbed at my eyes. Everything hurt. My fingertips hurt. I groaned.
A bird being savagely ripped to pieces shrieked at me.
“Stop it, or you lose the phone.”
The next one was a hawk. Some kind of hawk. Some kind of hawk ready to swoop down and catch up a mouse or a vole or a rabbit.
“Fine.” I was up, on my knees, before he could do more than squirm a few inches on his ass, and I grabbed his wrist and, pop, the phone fell into my other hand. “And if you’ve got one of those motherfucking bird call whistles or if you know how to gobble like a turkey or you think it’d be cute to try to imitate a sparrow, give it one shot, one, and I’ll hit you in the throat so hard you’ll be on a trach for the next year.”
Tucking the phone under my arm, I flopped back onto the bed.
But that bacon.
I crossed an arm over my stomach. I could feel it—the traitorous little shit—getting ready to make some noise. I hadn’t eaten in days. Had I?
The bed rocked as Emmett got off it, and then, from the other side of the room, waxed paper crinkled. The bacon smell was suddenly about ten times stronger.
I crossed my other arm over my stomach. Don’t do it. Don’t fucking do it. Because you’ll just be giving him what he wants.
“Vie?” More crinkling. And then, the bastard talked through a mouthful of—what? Biscuits and gravy? A bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwich? “Thought you might be hungry.”
“I’m trying to sleep.” But really, I was squeezing my stomach so hard that I felt my ribcage ratchet up a few inches. As usual, Emmett was being annoying. He’d been annoying about the bird calls. He’d been annoying about waking me up. He’d been annoying about how much I slept. And I was not—I absolutely was not—going to give him the satisfaction of—
More crinkling. Another loud, wet bite. A moan. The little fuck was probably patting his stomach.
My own stomach gurgled.
I lay perfectly still.
Emmett swallowed. It was an intentionally, annoying, assholeishly loud swallow that they probably heard in the Middle East. Then, his words clear of food, “I heard that.”
I sat up and pitched the phone at his head.
Laughing, he caught it and resumed his seat on the dresser. Next to him were two sandwiches still in their yellow paper. He tapped one meaningfully. And then he gestured to a brown sack.
“I mean, only if you’re—”
“Quit being such an asshat,” I grumbled. I felt like I teleported across the room—all those aches and pains vanished as I scrambled to the dresser—and when I peeled back the paper, I saw a burger. A big, fat, quadruple-stacker burger. With bacon.
Emmett was grinning, and it went through his dark eyes like lightning.
“A burger?” I tore off a mouthful and, through my chewing, said, “They didn’t have any breakfast food?”
He nodded at the paper sack again. “They did. At six o’clock. And they still did at ten-thirty. But they stop serving breakfast at eleven, so I had to get burgers at two. And at five.”
“Five?”
He tilted his phone at me, and the clock flashed across the face: 5:27. So I’d slept—what? Sixteen hours? And he’d gone to pick up food for me four times. Would Austin have gone four times? Or would he have gone once and then just waited for me to wake up, which was the sane and rational decision? I chewed faster and shoved that question out of my head. What did it matter what Austin did—or what he would have done?
My arm was elbow-deep in the paper bag before I realized Emmett was laughing.
“They’re cold.”
I fumbled around. “Not all of them.”
“You already ate two burgers.”
“I need to keep up my strength.”
“Two big burgers.”
“You didn’t get any fries?”
“Actually, I did.”
“Where are they?”
He cuffed me lightly on the side of the head.
“Ouch. Thank you. For all of this. But where are the fries?”
“You’re like a garbage disposal, you know that?”
“Uh huh. Yeah. Sure. Fries?”
“I gave them to everybody else. Along with another sack of hamburgers. And the apple pies.”
“Apple pies?”
He laughed again, cuffed me again—so light it was really more of a caress, and I’d never realized how bright his eyes could be when they were so dark. And the scars—he’d probably never believe me, probably never understand it himself, but they made him perfect. They gave this balance to how unbearably pretty he was. They were the dark to all the light. Then I thought of the Lady, and her eyes like brick dust, and I wiped the back of my mouth because the
hamburger grease tasted rancid now.
“Hungry,” I said.
He laughed again. His fingers kept finding my hair and running away like they’d been burned, and a part of me wanted to ask why, after we’d fucked—we’d fucked really, really well—now he was acting like it was a first date. But my mind snapped to those burnt-orange eyes. And the hunger.
“No,” I said, wiping my mouth again. “She’s hungry.”
He nodded slowly. “You dreamed about them?”
“I found them.”
“Where?”
“Some place called Chapee. I don’t know; something like that. I heard the word. I’m not sure how it’s spelled.”
Emmett was already on his phone, tapping out a text, nodding and only half-listening to me.
“She’s hungry, Em.”
“Yeah, I got you the burgers.”
I ripped off another chunk of quadruple-patty and grabbed Emmett’s arm, shook him. “Em, I’m talking about the Lady. That’s part of what’s driving her. That’s part of what this is about. I’ve seen her, the real her, and she’s starving. She’s withering away. No matter how much she eats, she gets older and thinner and shrunken. That’s part of this. That’s a big part of this.”
He jerked free and rubbed his arm. “What are you talking about? Hungry? She’s shriveled? She’s two hundred years old. No wonder she’s shriveled.”