Chapter 12
The whole cafe was gone. The whole street.
I stood in the place I’d seen in my reflection, and I could see now that it was a perfectly round clearing.
Beneath my feet was a soft carpet of pine needles.
The trees rose around me on all sides, impossibly tall, reaching high into the star-strewn sky above me.
A full moon hung swollen and pockmarked in the sky, casting its eerie glow over the landscape and bleaching the color from my surroundings, so that the world looked almost as if it had been recast in the black-and-white of an old movie.
I was still in Sedgwick Cove. I knew that as surely as I knew my own name.
I could feel it, my connection to this place, even though it looked so different.
It was… younger. It wasn’t only the lack of houses or roads—there was still plenty of forest around Sedgwick Cove.
I’d spent hours wandering through it, learning the trails and how to forage for what grew in the wild that we could use in our craft.
Instead, it was a sense that there was something ancient about the trees that thrust up into the sky around me, like giants.
They were so much larger and wilder than the trees that grew in the Cove now.
I half expected some unfamiliar extinct creature to come lumbering out from between them.
Something about the heaviness of the air and the tendrils of fog snaking their way between the roots of the trees suggested that it was summer, and yet, I couldn’t feel the heat.
I couldn’t feel anything, I realized—not the breeze that rustled the pine branches above me, not the temperature of the surrounding night, not even the ground beneath my feet.
I took a cautious step forward, and found that my feet made no sound.
They didn’t even disturb the pine needles beneath them, as though I was floating just a fraction of an inch above the ground.
I reached out to the nearest tree and touched it, but my fingers couldn’t make contact, simply melting through whatever ephemeral substance this vision was made of.
I felt like a ghost. A shadow. It was an oddly comforting feeling, and it melted away some of the fear that gripped me initially when I realized I’d entered this… vision? Dream? I still wasn’t entirely clear about it, but at least I’d now convinced myself that whatever it was, it wasn’t real.
For what seemed like a long time, I waited, taking in my surroundings.
Last time this had happened, Asteria had been waiting for me.
Now, it seemed I was alone, and I expected at any moment that someone—or something—would appear.
Soon, I began to question myself. Was it foolish to just stand here?
Did I need to go somewhere or do something in order to understand why the portal had taken me to this place and this moment?
Would I screw everything up and lose my chance to learn something if I wandered away from this spot?
But just as I decided I would try to explore, a sound reached my ears that rooted me to the ground once more.
It was a shuffling, crackling sound; something large was lumbering through the forest. I fought against an impulse to run and hide somewhere.
I wasn’t really here, I reminded myself.
Like walking through Sarah Claire’s memories, this was a place I could observe, but not a place I could interact with anyone or anything.
At least, that was the theory I was working under.
I’d never hoped so fiercely that I was correct as the sound drew closer.
Just to be safe, I took two silent steps backward, allowing the shadows gathered under the pine tree behind me to swallow me up.
Now, apart from the stumbling footsteps, I could also hear another sound—a sound that sent a stab of fear right through me.
It was a guttural gasping sound, like a creature struggling to breathe.
It was the sound of desperation, and aside from the fear, I felt a mounting sense of pity and dread for whatever was about to appear.
It came from the treeline at the far side of the clearing, almost directly opposite where I stood.
It staggered as it came, weaving from side to side, crashing in the undergrowth, falling to the ground, picking itself up, only to fall again.
I wanted to help it, to reach out a hand to steady it or help it back to its feet, but I stuffed the impulse down.
I couldn’t help. Nothing I could do would make any difference.
I was a witness, I reminded myself. A witness, and that was all.
At last, the shadows of the forest disgorged the shape out into the moonlight, and I gasped as the recognition hit me like a blow.
It was him. The young man from Sarah Claire’s memories.
Well, it was… and it wasn’t.
The young man in Sarah Claire’s memories had been…
ethereal in his beauty. Flawless, like something more than human because, of course, he was.
He had only appeared to her as a human because he needed her to trust him—not only trust him, but worship him.
This young man appeared to be the true human form—the flawed creature left behind when all the glamours and spells had been removed.
He was still handsome, with a chiseled jawline, a muscular build, and a startling pair of green-blue eyes.
But he was also much more mundane than the version of him Sarah Claire had seen—dirty, with matted hair and unshaven sunken cheeks that spoke of hunger, and a twisted expression that spoke of despair.
Those startling eyes were clouded with it, an almost unspeakable pain, and it was that pain—not his looks—that stole the breath from my lungs now.
He staggered and fell to his knees as he reached the clearing, looking up into the sky and unleashing a howl of agony that punched right through my chest, took hold of my heart, and squeezed it tightly.
I wanted to cry, to rush forward and say anything—do anything—that might make that sound stop.
But I stood rooted to the spot, immobilized by the pain of another living creature.
The sound shattered against the clear sky, breaking off into ever fainter echoes of that same pain as the stars stared down, enduring and unmoved.
The answering silence was almost as devastating as the cry itself, a cold reminder that the world was full of such pain, and did not bend to it.
I watched, helpless, as he tore at his hair, beat his fists against his chest, dug his fingers into the earth as though the pain lay buried there, and he could pull it up by the roots, excise it from the earth, and therefore from himself.
But all he achieved was dirtying himself, so that the tears that coursed down his face cut tracks in the dirt and grime now stuck to him.
He looked down at his hands and suddenly froze, like he’d been clubbed over the head by a thought.
Then he seized a jagged piece of stone from the ground and, first pulling away clumps of grass and moss so that the ground lay smooth and exposed, began to draw in the dirt with the tip of the stone.
Still panting and sobbing, he gouged a large Circle into the earth, muttering as he did so.
I couldn’t make out the words, and my curiosity overrode my sense of self-preservation.
Without deciding consciously to do so, I began to move closer, until I was standing no more than a few yards away from the man.
I was close enough that, when he lifted the rock into the air over his head and began to chant, I could hear that he was speaking a language I did not recognize.
But though the individual words escaped me, something universal in the magic he was performing, and the emotion coursing through him as he did so, sparked meaning in me, and somehow I knew what I was witnessing.
This was a Summoning. Of what, I was not sure, but a Summoning no doubt.
A creeping sense of anticipation skittered up my spine on icy legs.
At first, this man before me had been the thing I’d worried about encountering.
Now, I was more scared of whatever it was he was calling to this place, hoping against hope that the call, as desperate as it was, would go unanswered.
But even as I wished it, the man’s voice rose to a keening wail, and he drove the sharp end of the rock right into the soft flesh of his palm, twisting it and dragging it downward, so that a rivulet of blood began to roll down his sinewy forearm as the gash opened wide.
I started forward automatically, like I might be able to do something to stem this blood that flowed hundreds and hundreds of years before I was born, but stopped myself after only a couple of steps.
There was nothing I could do. I had to focus on observing, on committing every aspect to memory.
I didn’t know yet why this memory was important, and I didn’t want to get distracted and miss the detail that might mean everything.
The blood trailed down to the man’s elbow, and then began to drip to the ground, hitting the dirt with a sizzling, popping noise—like water hitting a hot pan, and sending steam up into the air.
The man’s eyes widened at the sight of it, but he made no effort to stem the flow, letting the blood continue to plop and hiss as, with his other hand, he began to draw shapes within the boundary of the Circle.
Then he cast the rock aside, and began to smear the blood onto his fingertips, tracing over the shapes he’d just created until each one shone with blood.
The shining became a glowing. The glowing became an almost blinding light.
A rumbling sound began, and the earth beneath us began to tremble, like the young man had summoned an earthquake. Though I could feel the shaking, it did not unbalance me; like so much of my surroundings, I could take them in, but they didn’t seem able to physically affect me.