My mouth full of her bitter blood, Ithought sidewaysas best I could, and felt myself shiver out of one existence and into another. Just before I was entirely gone, I reached out and grabbed Colin by the ankle, hauling him with me.
It seemed to work, and for a moment, I was looking at the bare boards and cobwebs of the Other House. But a pain in my shoulder made me gasp and set my vision to shimmering, so that I was seeing first the sorcerer’s black House, then the Other House, back and forth, flash-flash-flash, until I thought my eyes would melt.
Then the pain stopped, and I sank to the floor in the silent, dusty hallway, and Cornelius was wrapping himself about my ankles as if trying to tie a knot around me with his own furry body.
15
I spat onto the dusty floor, a repellent glob of saliva and spicy, sorcerous blood that left my mouth as numb as if I’d been sucking on cloves. When I put my hand to my shoulder, it came away wet with my own blood. Clarissa’s nails had been sharp.
I tried to slow my breathing and clear my thoughts. I was kneeling, I discovered, but on dirty floorboards now. I looked to the side and saw that Colin was sprawled beside me. Only the faint up-and-down movement of his spine showed that he was alive and breathing. One of my hands still gripped his ankle like a manacle, so tightly that I could see his skin reddening around it. Cornelius was at my other side, quite composed.
“You did it,” he purred. “I wasn’t sure if you’d be able to.”
“I almost couldn’t,” I said. I patted myself down, less to check for injury than for the reassurance that I still existed, that I hadn’t left a leg or an arm somewhere between the two Houses. I felt watery and weak, fuzzy about the edges, as if the journey had stripped me of something essential.
As I calmed myself and steadied my breathing, however, I started to feel solid again. I was still here—me, Foss, the one unchanging, unchangeable thing in all this magic mess.
“She was going to harvest me,” I said. “Something stopped her.”
“You bit her.”
“No, before that. She tried, and couldn’t.”
“Well, whatever it was,” mewed Cornelius practically, “We made it.”
There was none of that black stuff to be seen. We stood in a drafty hallway (which was a relief, honestly, after the stifling warmth of the House), laced with very impressive cobwebs and smelling of a fair amount of damp—and thick vines everywhere, twisting and dark.
I let my eyes travel slowly from one unfamiliar corner to another. It was lavishly coated with dust, like an old woman puffing on her face powder with a too-heavy hand. Every surface was furred and blurred with layers of it. Clearly, no one had come here for a long time—the dust was undisturbed except for a few of Cornelius’s paw prints.
“This is what the House really looks like?” I asked.
“No,” said Cornelius.
“But you said ...”
“It really looks like this, and it really looks like the other thing,” said Cornelius, twitching his tail. “They’re both real, at the same time.”
“And one is on top of the other?”
“No,” he said, exasperated. “Itoldyou. They’re both in the same place, at the same time.”
I suppose I had to accept that both places could exist at once in exactly the same space, but I did wonder what I had been sleeping on for the past month in this Other House. A nest of hay and field mice, perhaps? It made my head hurt to think about it.
“Don’t think about it too hard,” warned Cornelius. “It might be listening.”
“Can the magic-workers follow us?” I asked. “They have magic. If I can get here, surely they can get here too.”
“I don’t think so,” said Cornelius. “Probably because there’s no magic in it at all. It’s theabsenceof their magic, if you see what I mean. There’s nothing they can draw on in here to do their castings, so it’s beneath their notice, so to speak.”
So, there was one place safe from their spiderweb of spells. I found I could breathe easier, stand straight. That constant, nagging presence of the heartsickness was not quite entirely gone, but it was certainly lessened. I took in a deep breath of air, then immediately regretted it when the dust set me to coughing and spluttering.
When my vision cleared, I could still see the dust swirling about me. I thought of hiding in here indefinitely, escaping the spell that way, but from what I could see, there was no way to survive.
Nothing lived besides the twisting vines, and there was no water source that I could see. Unless Cornelius could somehow be persuaded to bring me supplies every day for the rest of my natural-born life, which wouldn’t be much fun for either of us.
I pressed my fingers to Colin’s wrist. His pulse was still there—faint, thready, but even. “We have to get out of here. We have to leave. Clarissa is going to kill us both.”
“We’re leaving for good, then?” asked Cornelius.
