Chapter Seventeen

The door was locked, naturally. It was as sealed and immobile as my window. What did he mean, “All's well that ends well”? Nothing had ended, and nothing was well. If Malice was here, ridiculous name and all, then she was probably looking for me. Milton being in the mood he was, he might hand me over to save himself the hassle of dealing with an uncooperative ward, and there was nothing I could do about it. I was trapped; reduced to pacing around my bed waiting to hear what would be done to me. Even if Malice could be sent away without incident, where did that leave me? Milton would go inside my head and change me so that I wouldn't care about the evil things he did. He would make me into a tool. I might become a sorcerer, but I would lose myself along the way.

What had stopped him before? A fluke like a weird dream sequence brought on by hypnotism? My throat still hurt. How had I done that, if it was my doing? Or was it my shadow? The Pard had spoken of it like it was a whole other person inside of me, not just a figment of my nightmares. The sorcerers had already told me I was a Cariad; that somewhere in my family tree was something other than human. Was my shadow mine , or did it come from someone or something far older? Every time they explained a fragment of the truth it was only enough to inspire more questions. They gave me a candle to look into the abyss. I was standing at the door, staring as hard as if staring could force it to open, when I felt a breeze on my neck.

“Am I interrupting anything?”

There stood Li with his back to the open, unopenable window. He wore the same strange spidersilk clothing, and had the same dark smudge on his forehead. The same long black hair, the same absurdly violet eyes and invincible princely air. I had half expected him to be different, half expected him to not be at all. He was too good to be true.

I practically leapt into a hug, and that was strangest of all. Maybe it was only my relief in seeing him, but when he embraced me it felt as if it wasn't for the first time, as if we had been apart for a while and he was welcoming me home.

“You should have known I would not abandon you,” he said.

“Bullshit. I've met you like, twice. You could still be a dream.” I wanted to say I was sorry about not believing him from the first, but he had understood. In fact, I couldn't think of anything to say. I was content to have him there.

“Abigail,” he said and pulled me tighter. He felt cool because of my fever, and he smelled of lilacs. Who runs out of the mountains smelling like fresh lilacs? Whatever he was couldn't matter, it had to be something good. I could feel his heartbeat beneath pale, flawless skin, soft enough to be defenseless, soft enough to rip and tear, for talons to shred and teeth to taste, for blood, sweet blood like red ambrosia running...

I pushed away, gasping.

Li did not seem surprised by my reaction. He wore a slight, sad smile. I could still see him torn open and mangled, though the image was fading. It had been overwhelming--the smell and the taste stronger than memory. Gone now, but how could I even think of it? Where had it come from?

“We need to move,” he said. “Malice won't be content to debate with them much longer. She will have decided that you must be here.” I appreciated the non-comment.

“How can you know?”

“It is the only motivation she could have for returning here so quickly. She has exhausted all the other possibilities.” He seemed so sure, and he stood so still; motionless as a wild animal. It only highlighted the fact that he was a stranger, and I was about to trust my life to him.

“How do you know all this?”

“Abigail,” I liked the way my name sounded coming from him, serious and tender at once. But you don’t know him! “I will tell you everything I can, but right now we have to go. There is not a breath to waste.”

I made my decision. “The Fae said you could free them.”

He nodded. “Take me there.”

I turned to the door and stopped dead. “He locked us in.”

Li snorted. “They locked you in.” He brushed past me and my arm tingled. Then he opened the door as if it had never been enchanted.

“How can you do that?”

“Wards, windows, doors, they're all only webs if you know how to see them. However strong the strands may be a web is never solid.” He made an “after you” gesture. “We really are in a hurry you know.”

The hall was thankfully empty with not a golem lurking on the landing. When we reached the white door the whole scene seemed ominously silent. My hand approached the knob which, though painted white, was as iron as the garden gates, and chilled. Li was watching calmly from the side, and the old fear burbled in my gut. “Can't you do this?” I asked him.

“I have never been through. I do not know the way. You do.” He touched my shoulder. “You can take us there if you focus.”

I took a deep breath, only partially heartened, and tried to bring the garden into my mind’s eye. I saw the oak, towering in the blue, and the wilted mistletoe suspended on its trunk, disdainful of the earth. I saw the glow of the Fairie flowers, and outward swung the door. We entered the dim, humid hall with its carpet of red moss. At its end were the forbidding slabs and their binding star. Though I knew I could open it, I wondered how Li would be able to bring the Fae out. Were they kept in the garden by another “web” that he could lead them through?

“Do you want me to open it?”

“No, you have done all you need to for now.”

He touched his forehead to the open space at the center of the three triangle star. I winced, thinking how it had pricked my finger, but if it did the same to him, he appeared not to notice. For long seconds there was no effect. Then time seemed to slow to a trickle, and there was a single clarion note louder than my own mind. The star glowed forge-hot just as it had for me, but this time the flow spread across the entire gate until it was a furious, uniform white. The sound became so loud I could no longer hear it, but the vibration was ringing in my chest, down through my fingers. I couldn't have felt an earthquake if one came.

Then the gate burst, settling itself around us like a cloud of snow, a flurry of cold, pearly flakes. All of this happened during the course of a single exhalation. Li still had his head bowed, face serene, as if the gate was still supporting him.

“Try not to breathe the flakes,” he said, and despite the smoothness of his expression, I could hear weariness weighing on his words. I clapped my hand over my mouth. He straightened, and opened his eyes. I followed his gaze out over the garden. The leaves and the flowers were all falling, the branches and bushes shaking violently as if they were having fits. A wind I could not feel was bowing the trees and smashing the grass flat, and soon the boughs were twisted beyond capacity, caught up in a swelling swirl of uprooted vegetation. The air was filled by a din of thrashing limbs and crackling trunks, a whorl of color as the petals and foliage were caught up in the flow, rising into cones that circled the acres of the wizard garden.

“What's happening!?” I cried to Li, but my voice was swallowed in the rising roar of the storm. He surveyed it all calmly and took my hand in acknowledgment of my distress. We were not in danger of being caught up in this riot; these monstrous winds were less than a breeze for us. This was a storm of Fae.

As the shrubs cleared, the carnival of beauty that made up the outer ring of the garden gave way to a view of the forest beyond. At the heart of that distant, writhing mass was the great oak, the pillar that reached toward the apex of the impossible glass dome. The crystal blue of forever day above was bruising, darkening to violet in massive, undulant splotches. The ground began to shake and the oak to sway. The whirlwinds that circled the garden were converging toward its heart, growing as they did, stripping the earth until all that was left outside of their cones was clay and stone. All came together at the oak, rippling and dilating until they had stretched to even its great height and were so full of matter that the whole tremendous column was an impenetrable muddy swirl. Above, the dome cracked with a roll of thunder, and abruptly, the garden exploded in a purple haze.

When I could see again, we were standing in Milton’s backyard, ankle deep in a drift of pale flakes that had once been the gate. My heart pounded in my ears but I was otherwise unharmed. Not a leaf or a twig remained to bear witness that there had ever been such a garden. There was only the cool touch of evening and the quiet that follows cataclysm. “They're gone,” I said in wonder. “All of them.”

“As we should be.” Li swept me off my feet before I had time to protest. “It's time to take you out of here.”

“I can run!” I complained.

“Not as fast as I can,” he said, and the world blurred, everything tinged with gray and blue. Li ran, but I wasn't jounced in his arms as I should have been, and the misty ground fell away behind us at an alarming rate. The mountains loomed.

“Wait! We have to help the Pard!” I screamed. I couldn't even see the shed from this side of the house, but I wasn't about to leave her to be tortured to death. We skidded to so sharp a halt I would have flown from his arms if he hadn't clamped me firmly against his chest. Our faces were very close, and I could see emotions playing out in the violet of his eyes, the same color as the Faerie sky. The desire for haste warring against the rose of sympathy, and lastly a satisfied certainty as simple as love. “I had forgotten her,” he said, and then more softly, as an afterthought, “I am going to end up dying for you.”

Then we were rushing back the way we had come, to the house and around it. I gasped and pointed at the sight of a golem, but we passed by the construct without its notice.

“How?” I asked as we neared the shed. The distance was only half of what it should have been.

“I took us Sideways.” He set me down before the makeshift door. “It is a trick the Fae taught me in a place called Mori.” The lens lifted as he spoke. The world grew solid and real again.

“Sideways?”

Li did not answer. There was a latch and a heavy lock over the shed’s only door. He took it in his hand, and from within came the lachrymose keening of the Pard. It was a song of sorrows, a long and pleading cry. I heard the high bell tone again, like singing crystal, and the sigil painted over the shed sizzled and steamed, evaporated into nothing in a matter of seconds. The sound that was purer than pure snapped off suddenly, and Li staggered back with the heavy lock in his hand crumbling to dust. He looked exhausted.

“Are you all right?” Even as I asked he recovered visibly, steeling himself.

“It's done,” he said. “That is what matters.”

The door creaked open and I flinched back, realizing all at once the kind of risk this entailed. But Li wouldn't have agreed to it if he thought it put us in danger, would he?

A woman stepped free of the black inside, and that blackness clung to her like a shroud. She looked like the survivor of a concentration camp, all but the vestiges of beauty erased by a cadaverous frame and paper thin skin. Dark hair hung in twisted knots down her back, and if it were not for her eyes she could have been mistaken for a human. Her eyes were the roiling, demoniac green of the Pard. They belonged to no other. She regarded us, one then the other, with a grimace and too sharp teeth. Her glower settled on me.

“I'm still going to eat you,” she said, “another day.” In a blink she was streaking across the ranch, feline again, leaving me speechless.

“Now,” Li said, “we really must be leaving.” He took me Sideways again, where distances stretched and bent like coiled springs. It was only a matter of moments before we reached the first cover of the trees and could stop to look back. I had to look because something terrible was happening at the house. The sounds were muffled as if heard through yards of spun wool, and the colors muted, but I still felt it when a roar erupted from Milton’s home. It flamed; spouted like a roman candle from one corner of the roof.

“What’s going on?” I asked, and even my own voice sounded diluted in this creepy other realm, like I was speaking through water.

“They felt the gardens break, all three of them, and Malice deduced their lies. She cannot help herself in her rage, and now she fights them both.” He stopped me before I took a whole step forward. He looked amused. “We really cannot save everyone,” he said, “them, least of all. It’s better that they destroy each other.”

He was absolutely right, but I felt bad for Timothy. Had he put me in my room, knowing Li would come? Had he been as much a slave as Milton intended to make me? I found it hard to label him evil, despite what he was party to. Light came from the house; red lightning carving the ground in random spurts. I heard a voice, a giant’s voice echoing within the bowel of the mountains.

It was Milton who spoke, though the words were numbing hammers without meaning, falling like blows. The roar came again, so powerful it rattled my skull, but Milton's casting was cut short. The roof of the house bulged like the entrance to a trap door spider’s lair. The air shifted and snapped, as with a thunderclap all the enchantments of Milton's many years and many schemes were broken.

Out of the wreckage of his home rose a beastly shadow, a creature of fantasy and daydream, of novels and television scripts, known to every person of every age in the world. Known, but not known like this. Two wings unfurled like inky banners to contain the evening, seeming to stretch from edge to edge of the ranch. A neck, serpentine and slender and almost delicate, lifted to survey the region. It was surmounted by a head that was wolf and raptor and shark all at once, every terrible predator known to man. Even from where we stood, its eyes shone like sanguine suns, caressing the valley with their devil’s light. Cariad, they had called me, descended from a god. But there were good gods and bad, weren't there? A memory blossomed of Milton in the hospital. Just before he hypnotized me, what had he said? “Calm, calm, calm little dragon...”

First came the Wyrm, and then the Serpent that became the mother of dragons. Mother to daughter it would have gone, down all the years and all the lives, blood to blood to blood.

“Li,” I said, panicking, “Li, is that my…”

“Yes,” he said. “Now run!”

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