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Obidias took a puff from the cigar. “You have to offer him something he can’t refuse.”
“What exactly would that be?” Aunt Prue asked, as though she might have whatever it was tucked in her pocketbook. Like the Gatekeeper would be interested in three linty breath mints, some nondairy creamer, and a wad of folded-up Kleenex.
“It’s always different. You’ll have to figure it out when you get there,” Obidias said. “He has… eclectic taste.” He didn’t say any more on the subject.
An offering. Eclectic taste. Whatever the hell that meant.
“Okay. So I have to find the black stones and get across the Great River,” I said. “Figure out what the Gatekeeper guy wants and give it to him to get inside the library. Then find The Caster Chronicles and destroy my page.” I paused, because the question I was about to ask was the most important detail, and I wanted to get it straight. “If I do all that and don’t get caught, I’ll get back home—my real home? How do I do that? What happens after I destroy the page?”
Obidias looked at Aunt Prue and back to me. “I’m not sure. It’s never happened, as far as I know.” He shook his head. “It’s a chance, nothing more. And not even a good one…”
“Nothin’s certain, Ethan Wate, ’cept for that you had a shot at a life a your own, and the Keepers stole it from you.”
I stood up before they could finish talking.
Lena was waiting, in my room or hers, by the crooked cross stuck in the grass at my gravesite or somewhere else. But she was waiting—that’s what mattered.
If I had a chance in hell to get back home, I’d take it.
I’m trying, L. Don’t give up on me.
“I need to get going, Mr. Trueblood. I have a river to cross.”
Aunt Prue opened her pocketbo
ok and pulled out a faded map, covered with shapes that didn’t represent any continent, country, or state I’d ever seen. This was more than a doodle on the back of an old church program. I knew what Aunt Prue’s maps were like, and I knew how important they had been to me before—the last time I found my way to the seam, for Lena’s Seventeenth Moon.
“I’ve been workin’ on it since I got here, jus’ a little bit here and there. Obidias told me you’d be needin’ it.” She shrugged. “Reckoned it was the least I could do.”
I leaned down and hugged her. “Thanks, Aunt Prue. And don’t be worried.”
“I’m not,” she lied. But she didn’t need to be.
I was worried enough for both of us.
CHAPTER 12
Still Here
After we got back to our side of the Otherworld—Harlon Jameses and all—I didn’t go home. I left Aunt Prue at her house and walked the streets—more like the rows—of His Garden of Perpetual Peace.
Peace wasn’t exactly what I was feeling.
I stopped in front of Wate’s Landing. It looked every bit the same as when I left, and I knew my mom was inside. I wanted to talk to her. But there were other things I had to do first.
I sat down on the front steps, closing my eyes.
“Carry me home.”
What was it?
To remember. And be remembered.
Ducite me domum.
Ut meminissem.
Ut in memoria tenear.
