Page 43 of Backpacking through Bedlam

With that thought firmly in mind, I started walking across the barn, heading for a mound of half-rotten straw on the other side. If it wasn’t full of rats, it would be someplace to sit for a while.

I was almost there when the floor gave way beneath me with a rotten cracking sound and dumped me into the darkness.

The impact of the fall knocked me out cold. I came to in the basement of the barn with a ringing head and only the faintest traces of sunset filtering through the hole above me. I’d been unconscious for hours, and getting out of the hole was going to be a challenge, especially since it wasn’t like I’d stopped to grab a flashlight when I fled the house.

“Fuck,” I muttered, pushing to my feet. The wood around the edge of the hole was as rotten as the rest; jumping and pulling myself up wasn’t going to work. Well, if there was a basement, there had to be a door somewhere. I turned to start looking for it, and kicked a piece of wood. The clatter it made as it rolled across the floor caught my attention. I looked down.

I was in the middle of a summoning circle. One that I recognized, if only vaguely. I froze, trying to sort through the fragments of memory clouding my mind. They came with the distant taste of chocolate, for some reason, and the feeling of having escaped some terrible trap. I blinked, still trying to make them come together, until, with a snap, they all fell into place.

Of course. This was where I’d been taken when the snake cultists kidnapped me as a sacrifice to the god they were intending to summon, the god who had turned out to be my adopted Uncle Naga. Which meant . . .

I squinted through the gloom. This summoning circle had been drawn specifically to reach Naga’s dimension. He’d been able to come through several times since then, opening the doorways himself, but every time I’d contacted him, it had been with the aid of either Thomas or Laura’s mother, my Aunt Juniper. I didn’t have the magic to do it on my own.

These cultists somehow had.

I pulled a knife without even really thinking about it, reopening the wound in my arm and bleeding onto the circle. Rather than wiping the ancient lines away, it seemed to feed them. They swelled and strengthened, beginning to glow, and I cut myself again, releasing even more blood.

Blood loss is not good for humans, and I was starting to feel dizzy by the time the glow in the lines brightened to the point where I could actually see the filthy basement around me. I sank to the floor, bowing my head.

“Naga, I don’t know if you can hear me, but they summoned you this way once, and I’m hoping I can use it to reach you again,” I said. My tongue felt heavy in my mouth. “It’s Alice. I’m alone and I’m scared, and the crossroads took Thomas. Please. I have to find him. I have to bring him home. I’ll do anything you ask me to. Please, if you can hear me, please come and get me. Please, I have to find my husband so I can put my family back together. Our children need their father. Please.”

I closed my eyes, and passed out before my head hit the ground.

Eleven

“Everything wants to survive. Even dead things. We enjoy existing as much as anybody else does.”

—Mary Dunlavy

The old Parrish place, Buckley Township, Michigan, back in the present

—AND WHEN I WOKE up, I was in Empusa,” I said. “Naga had heard me calling, and sent some of his grad students to fetch me before I could die of blood loss. They put me back together, and he agreed to help me look for you. I don’t know he was lying. Maybe he wasn’t; maybe he really intended to help, in the beginning, before he realized how much money he could make by letting me search fruitlessly forever.”

“Alice . . .” Thomas sat down next to me on the bed, reaching over to take my hand in his. “You could have died.”

“Sure. The Covenant could have shot me, or I could have bled out in the barn.” I shrugged. “But I didn’t. I got lucky. Mary chucked a couple of my grenades out the front door, took out about half the Covenant team, and then screamed real big and stopped moving. When the survivors came in, they found the bodies in the living room, and the wards kept them from going any deeper into the house. And they decided, pragmatically enough, that they’d killed us all. I think it helped that the Galway did not want them here, and you know how creepy my forest can be when it gets cranky.”

“To my eternal chagrin, I am aware,” he said.

“So they set fire to the place and went back to England to tell the people in charge that the Price vaults were locked forever, and we’d probably be having this conversation in a different house if Laura hadn’t carried the kids to the Red Angel and told Cynthia what was going on. Cynthia mobilized the clientele who’d been hiding from the Covenant there with her, and they were able to put out the fire before it did much damage. This old place didn’t want to burn.”

Thomas stared at me. “So you woke up in a different dimension while the Covenant was trying to burn down the house, and Laura was running around with our children, and you kept going?”

I blinked at him. “I mean, yeah. I was already in a different dimension, and I finally had someone who was willing and able to help me start looking for you properly. I wasn’t going to turn back before I had what I was looking for.”

Thomas started to laugh, slowly leaning forward until his forehead was pressed against mine. He squeezed my fingers, hard.

“I am never, never letting you out of my sight again,” he said.

“That’s good, because I didn’t spend fifty years looking for you to get ditched.”

“I mean it. I’m not supposed to follow you around all the time—and eventually it’s going to start getting on your nerves—but clearly, when I leave, you do some of the most incredibly self-destructive things I’ve ever heard suggested.” He closed his eyes, not pulling away, and I took that moment to just look at him.

Maybe it’s because I loved him for so long before I was allowed to do it openly, or maybe I became a giant sap once I found someone who was actually willing to love me back, but I’ve always loved just looking at him, and fifty years had given my memory plenty of time to slip. I needed to fill all the little details back in, all the tiny pieces of him that I’d been losing this without even realizing it. Bit by bit, the erosion of time had been wearing him smooth in my mind, turning him into some sort of polished ideal that I could adore but couldn’t really love, not like this. Not like it was a stone in my stomach, something I’d swallowed but could never digest, something that was nonetheless a part of me forever.

He took a deep, shaking breath, opened his eyes, and pulled back enough to look at me gravely. “Promise me,” he said. “Promise me if something happens to me in New York, if things go badly, you won’t do this to yourself again.”

“How could I?” I shrugged. “It’s not like you can make another deal with the crossroads, since our lovely granddaughter went and killed them so dead they never existed in the first place.”