The thing-that-was-not-Rowan stared at me from behind the door. The house was suddenly still in the way a loaded, waiting, spring trap is still. I didn’t dare blink. Didn’t dare turn my eyes away from the familiar-unfamiliar face still staring at me from the darkness of the bathroom. His face sagged. It was something I would have read as disappointment, hopelessness, if I didn’t know better. If there wasn’t still that strange twitching in the skin around his—its—eyes. It was only when the first, tiny shard of glass peeked out from under its eyelids, puckering the skin at the corners, that I realised it wasn’t twitching but filling, like a coin purse.
An inky stream of splintered glass tumbled from under its eyeballs, catching in the thin skin of its eyelids. Its mouth pulled into a perfect dark ‘oh’, too round to feel natural in any way, and shook the walls with a piercing scream. In a scatter of glinting shards, not-Rowan lunged at me. I forgot the use of the axe in terror and threw myself away from the imposter. I slipped on the top step, fumbled on my own feet and tumbled down the stairs, down into the dark below where the voice was waiting for me.
CHAPTER 43
I felt every stair on the way down.
Each blow felt like a stick hurled against my body by a furious assailant. The final impact with the floor knocked the air out of my chest. I wheezed and splayed out my arms, the axe still clutched in my unbandaged hand. Miraculously, I hadn’t gouged myself with it. After a moment of shock, I tenderly, slowly, patted my limbs with the other hand, checking for bones piercing skin and bends where there shouldn’t be bends. My shins were bruised, but unbroken. My arms, the same.
Well, you definitely have her on the hunt now.
Tentatively, I raised myself off the cold, hard floor. Pain, immediate and sharp, announced itself from my side. I yelped. Then from the darkness came—
“This is not your home.”
It was the voice. No, a different one. On the other side of the living room. Close, but not close enough to know exactly where it was coming from. I froze where I was, gritting my teeth through the pain in my ribs. I searched the darkness for a figure.
The voice spoke again in the shadows.
“This is not your home.”
A figure emerged from the black. All I could make out was their outline against the grey-gloom of the kitchen beyond. Bipedal, long-limbed and slender. They were still, perfectly still.
They spoke again, voice a hissing whisper.
“You can bring all the papers and the coins and the genealogical charts and the swords and the crockery and the shields. You can pray to your gods and chant your spells and shake your charms and cite your laws and repeat your mantras and state your ‘facts.’ It means nothing.”
A set of eyes lit up in the figure’s head. I only knew they were eyes because of where they sat on their face. Otherwise, they were unrecognisable as eyes; they were round, flickering pinpricks of light.
The figure hadn’t moved, but the voice spoke beside my ear.
“This is not your house.”
My heart pounded insistently in my chest. Each beat implored me: Get out get out get out! Forget the knots. Forget the breach. Just get out!
The figure burst into life, arms raised high and wide, impossibly long, bending in all the wrong places. It charged toward me.
I scrabbled back on the floor, flinging myself toward the front door, away from the footsteps thundering toward me, louder and heavier with each step. Shapes flew in the dark. My arms moved painfully, sluggishly slow in the adrenaline fog, as I swung the axe in front of my face.
In my flailing I managed to hit something.
There was a screech.
I was on my feet, twirling out of the way, bouncing off the fireplace, pain a shout in my hip. I hunched against the wall and braced the axe in my arms. The living room was still again. Where had it gone? I searched the darkness, looking for movement, hoping for none.
Silence.
Moonlight softly lit the house around me. It was still bare. Bare as I’d found it. Bare as I’d left it. No sofa, no armchair, no dining table for dinner parties with friends. Just a single sheepskin rug. I realised how with everything that had happened I hadn’t had time to get furniture yet. No soft things to buffer my fragile self from the hard stone walls built up around me. The place looked abandoned. Like no one lived here. Lonely and empty and cold.
And no assailant.
I lowered the axe a little.
This had to be another trick. The fight had only just begun. I had to push on.
“Come on.” I glanced around the room, pushing as much of my bravery into my voice as possible. “Where are you?”
An explosion of wood to my right. The front door burst open. The figure rushed me from the outside. A monstrous boar. A minotaur. A fury. Limbs and claws and those bright, watery eyes.
