I flinch, my muscles primed to run. But there’s nowhere to go. Vorat is blocking the exit. I glance at Rafe, who looks no wiser than me. Then Vorat removes his hood. He stares at me with eyes so human, my mind scrambles to make sense of what I’m seeing.
“I will undo it,” he says, whispers echoing in the wake of each word. “I will undo all of it. And when the world is remade, she will no longer fear me. I will be as I once was andyouwill be nothing.”
She will no longer fear him?
My heart pounds as the visions he planted play through my mind.
Forward and backward.
Backward and forward.
My mother, running through the woods.
My mother, imprisoned inside Vorat’s lair.
Lily, dying on a marble bench.
Simon, trying to save her.
Simon, listening to my mother as she spoke sad, broken words.
And the monster, chasing her down.
It never made sense.
Why was I chasing her?
Why wasIthe monster?
The answer strikes with astounding clarity.
“They were all from the same perspective,” I say, staring into his face.
His eyes are as gold as the sun
With brown sugar flecks in each one.
Words from a limerick my mother wrote. About a boy she loved. A boy who loved her back. A boy who disappeared and somehow became this.
The horror of it slams through me. “Simon.”
“Iam the one who brought her back to this town.Ifound a way to slip inside her dreams. And yet, she was afraid. Unsettled by the changes I had to go through in order to survive. I thought with time, she would accept what I had become. She would adjust. She would join me here, in this world. But she only wanted you. A daughter who should have never existed.”
Pieces of the puzzle fly together at breakneck speed.
The clock.
The constellations.
The night sky.
His sister, bleeding on the bench.
Simon’s weakness and hunger.
Lily, twisting into a hound. Not because a hound killed her. But because a new Hollow Walker had just been made. Her brother consumed her. “You took your sister’s life.”
“She was already dying!” he roars, his smudged face twisting in agony. “I was so hungry.Wewere so hungry. And her soul was right there. I didn’t know—I didn’t understand what I was doing until it was too late.”
