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22
First, there was nothing but searing pain as the heat of the spell burned over me; but though I felt like my flesh must surely be charred away, a quick, incredulous examination revealed that I was completely unharmed. Xiomara’s elixir of rue had worked—the crossing into the circle had been painful, but the ferocity of the magic had left no mark on me that I could see.
The next thing I noticed, even as I blinked the tears of pain from my eyes, was the strange, muffled silence. A second ago, everything had been chaos—my friends shouting, Bernadette screaming, the magic sparking and exploding everywhere, like it would take the very lighthouse down to rubble, but now: nothing. If I concentrated, I thought I could hear the continued sounds of the confrontation, as though from deep underwater.
Finally, I was able to look around me. My first, fleeting impression was that I had been trapped in some kind of monstrous snow globe. Ash fell gently around me, and smoke swirled in strange, unnatural patterns. The floor beneath my feet was cracked and hot. I could see almost nothing outside of the boundary of the circle, but for shifting shadows and flashes of dull light. It was as though a curtain had come down between me and the rest of the room.
“Mom.”
She was there, still tied to the ladder, which was smoldering like hot coals behind her. I stumbled forward, almost knocking into her, and pressed my hands to her face, swallowing a sob.
“Mom?”
She groaned and lifted her face, squinting out of bleary, bloodshot eyes. “Wren?”
“Yes, it’s me,” I replied, in a cracked voice.
“You weren’t supposed to come. I didn’t want you to come,” she murmured, frowning at me for all the world like she would have liked nothing better than to ground me, if she could just keep her eyes open.
I actually laughed, one wild sob of laughter that bubbled up out of me. “Well, it’s too late for that. I’m here, and everything’s going to be fine.” The lie slipped out easily, an automatic impulse born of the desire to wipe the worry from her face. My mom was still trying to talk, despite the way her words slurred together.
“It’s Bernadette—”
“I know.”
“I don’t know how… there’s a mirror… Sarah Claire…”
“I know all that, Mom. It’s okay. I’m gonna untie you, okay? Just try to hold still.”
It was an almost ludicrous request, because she could barely stay conscious, let alone move; but she stopped trying to speak, and let me work at the knots that bound her to the ladder.
At last the scraps of fabric and rope fell away, and my mom sagged against me, unable to bear her own weight. I staggered and fell against the ladder, which made an ominous cracking noise, and hurried to shift my mom’s arm more securely around my neck. I looked down at the candle, now little more than a pool of wax cradling a tiny, flickering flame. I was nearly out of time.
With shaking fingers, I uncorked the bottle of the rue elixir and put it to my mom’s chapped lips. “You have to drink this.”
She obeyed me like a small child, tilting her head back while I tipped all the remaining liquid into her mouth. She swallowed it, spluttering a little, and I tossed the little bottle aside. I had no idea if the rue would still work for me—maybe it could only protect me once from that kind of magic—but I felt confident that my mom, at least, might make it back through the barrier okay. I began edging her toward it, step by shuffling step, staggering under her weight as she sagged against me. But we’d only made it a few steps when it began.
The air filled with that familiar sound, the sound of soil shifting and insect parts buzzing and sawing. The strange scent of rotting and soil and the tang of hot metal filled my nostrils, even as panic swelled in my chest. He was coming.
I heaved more quickly, dragging my mom’s feet against the floor with a grunt of desperate effort. Around our feet, insects were forcing their way up through the floorboards by the dozens—millipedes and spiders and ants and worms—all scuttling and curling into a seething mass. I kicked them violently out of my path, with a strangled cry of horror. They were trying to flee the circle, blindly crawling over each other to reach the edge, only to ignite like tiny firecrackers as they made contact with it. I watched a millipede crumble to ash in a frozen moment of horrified fascination; but then my mom groaned again, and I snapped out of it, dragging her a few more inches. We were almost there. A few more steps… we were almost there…
And then the sound shifted, warping on the air into a voice. A voice I dreaded because I knew it like I knew my own name.
“There’s my Little Bird.”
Terror boiled like lava under my skin. I knew what I would see if I turned around, knew exactly—and yet every impulse, every primitive instinct for self-preservation, was screaming at me to flee like the insects. Even if I went up like dry kindling, it would be better—kinder—than what awaited me in the call of that voice. I also knew that he wouldn’t simply let me leave. I would have to face him, my childhood nightmare made manifest.
What choice did I have? What choice had Ieverhad? I turned.
The Gray Man loomed before me, faceless and menacing. He was tall—even taller than I remembered, with strangely long arms and too-large hands. His body curved with an almost serpent-like smoothness, and in the gray smoky nothingness that made him up, there was a writhing, a pulsing, as though a million smaller things seethed beneath his surface, desperate to break away from the whole. And around it all, Darkness itself roiled like a thundercloud held captive.
Perhaps it sounds absolutely crazy to say it, but something in me breathed a sigh of relief. All these years, I had convinced myself that the Gray Man was a figment of my imagination. There was something comforting, even as I stared down a waking nightmare, that I hadn’t invented it all, dredged it up from a child’s overactive imagination. My imaginary friend wasn’t imaginary at all, though he was most definitely not a friend.
His head tilted to one side, curious. And then, though he had no discernible features, he smiled—the shape of his face contorting monstrously to suggest the expression even without the presence of a mouth. I swayed where I stood, wanting to vomit, to run, to strike out with magic I didn’t even think I possessed. But I didn’t—or couldn’t. I just stood there, my mother’s weight pinning me in place on shaking legs.
“I know you,” I told him finally, feeling a fleeting flash of pride that my voice was not shaking, even if the rest of me was.
“Indeed, you do, Little Bird. You remember me, then?” the Gray Man asked. The words dropped into my head like intrusive thoughts, and I wanted to claw them out of my brain. They didn’t belong there.
