53. Closed In
CLOSED IN
Ifollow Rafe through the blizzard. He carries the jerry cans and I shoulder the backpack as the wind howls and the snow lashes sideways. It stings my face. My cheeks go numb, but my dread only sharpens, persisting even when we reach the maze and the tall hedges offer relief.
A strange hush settles around us. I switch on my flashlight and shine it on the diagram I took from the gardening shed.
We move forward, the makeshift weapons clipped to my backpack tapping together with each step.
The snow is shallower in here except at the intersections, where drifts have accumulated and the occasional gust whistles through gaps in the hedges.
Using the diagram, we navigate into the heart of the maze, where the walls loom tall and dark around a clearing and the storm fades to a low, distant moan.
My flashlight catches swirling flakes as it sweeps across a stone bench covered in snow and a fountain capped in white, the broken sundial in the center almost completely swallowed.
I drop my backpack and pull out my phone to check on Jude and the others.
They are getting closer to the rift. Once Jude is inside the Overlay, he will send word and I will open a rift right here.
Rafe and I will step through with our backpack and the jerry cans.
We will douse the maze in gasoline from the inside out, then head to the Water Garden where I will lure Vorat away.
“There’s something undeniably poetic about a sickle,” Rafe says. Only he doesn’t unclip the sickle. He unclips the pruning saw. He snaps it open and runs his thumb along its jagged blade. “But this feels more honest.”
I round on him. “Can you please not be so blasé right now?”
He lifts his eyebrows.
“You’re always acting like nothing matters. Is it real or for show?”
Rafe turns the saw in his gloved hand. “When you’ve been around as long as I have, you start to appreciate the truth of Ecclesiastes. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”
“Ironically, you can’t.”
“Oh, but Selah. I can.”
His words take a second to land, and when they do, I’m certain I misheard him. When I search his face, however, I find nothing but candor.
“I assumed I would cease to exist along with Seraphina,” he says, his frozen breath curling in the dark. “My life tethered to hers and all. Turns out, it was my immortality.”
His immortality.
I blink, taking in the implications.
“But how did you—” I stop abruptly. I don’t need to finish. I remember what I saw all too well. The claw marks on his chest.
“I came very close to meeting my end.”
“And you’re willing to go back?”
Rafe plants the saw’s tip in the snow beside his boot, snowflakes clinging to his dark lashes as he gives me a careless shrug.
I narrow my eyes at him. “Why?”
“Perhaps I want things to matter again,” he says, looking at me with such intensity the hedges seem to press closer.
He snaps the saw shut. “How good are you with a blade?”
“I can’t say I’ve had much experience.”
He unclips the machete and sets it in my palm.
With his hands guiding my hips and his eyes never leaving mine, he gives me an impromptu lesson.
I’m not sure what’s more unsettling—the precision of his instruction or the intimacy of it.
In one fluid movement, he steps behind me and coaxes my arm upward.
With my back pressed against his chest, he says softly in my ear, “Whatever you do, don’t hesitate. ”
My breath catches.
I, myself, feel caught.
Heat trembles in my abdomen.
Inside my pocket, my phone vibrates.
With a rush of urgency, I step away from Rafe to read the message.
In position. Vorat in line of vision. Prisoners, too.
Adrenaline floods into place.
Jude has gone inside the Overlay.
This is our signal to begin phase two.
I can feel the mark on my arm—the tingle has become a burn, an itch begging to be scratched, one I have resisted all day.
Now, I push up my coat sleeve and stare at the glittering pattern of dots.
The last time I tried opening a rift, I almost died.
But that was with a plant. This has become a part of my body, one that has grown increasingly insistent.
I gather up my backpack.
Rafe picks up the jerry cans.
And I press my finger against my wrist.
The air tears open immediately, obediently.
Like opening a rift was nothing at all. Rafe steps through first. I follow him into the dark and twisted world, where the hedges crawl and writhe and the snow turns to shadow and the fountain is a swirling void and the rift isn’t just a rift, but a bright red beacon shooting up into the black maw overhead.
“I guess we don’t have to lure him,” Rafe says.
As if on cue, the ghastly bay of hounds sounds in the distance and another alert vibrates my phone.
He’s coming.
Rafe hands me a jerry can and together, we douse the hedges. We retrace our steps, racing through the labyrinth until we are out in the open and I find myself wishing for the storm. Anything but this terrifying, disorienting abyss.
The howling grows louder.
Rafe takes my hand and pulls me toward a copse of trees.
We ditch the jerry cans and sink low to the ground.
My breath feels too loud.
So does my heart.
My arm burns like it’s attached to the fiery beacon rising from the center of the maze.
We wait for him to step into view.
To see the beacon.
To enter the maze with his hounds so we can set them all on fire. But he doesn’t appear and his hounds have gone silent.
A twig snaps behind us.
Rafe and I turn in tandem. We peer into the shadow when a beast lunges out of the dark.
It knocks Rafe to the ground, snarling and snapping, its blackened fangs dripping with saliva.
Its claws tear through Rafe’s coat and shirt.
I grab the hilt of the machete and in one fluid motion, swing at the creature.
The blade connects and with a keening shriek, the hound retreats.
Rafe scrambles to his feet.
Glowing, ember eyes blink at us from the dark.
Too many of them.
We run out into the open.
Low growls emit from the shadows, pressing us back toward the maze.
I fumble inside my backpack for a lighter and an explosive when out from the fog steps the Hollow Walker—unnaturally tall and thin, more shadow than flesh, his long coat stirring behind him like smoke in water.
His face is shadowed by his hood and the ruby necklace pulses around his neck, throbbing with Jude’s life.
I light the rag stuffed inside the bottle and hurl it at him.
With a flick of his head, he changes the trajectory. The incendiary flies in the opposite direction and explodes in the distance.
My heart judders as his hounds step out into the open.
We are closed in, the gasoline-soaked bushes writhing at our backs.
I try another explosive, but it is as useless as the other.
With no other choice, we run into the labyrinth.
We turn up and down the rows, pausing to listen as the hounds bay, not from inside the maze, but from outside the maze. We are surrounded. Trapped. Forced into the center, where the fountain swirls with shadow. I know what’s down there. I remember all too well those slimy tentacles from the deep.
I back away.
Our only escape is the rift before us with the beacon shooting upward.
But I can’t use it.
I won’t abandon the others.
I hold the machete tight, expecting Rafe to desert me. To step through the rift, to save himself. Instead, with his shirt torn and his scars exposed, he snaps open the pruning saw and stands with me.
Vorat slides into view. With a lazy swish of his hand, the beacon dissolves. The rift disappears. And it’s just us—me and Rafe, and this monster that moves like vapor.
How do you fight shadow?
With more shadow.
I grab the onyx from my pocket, but Vorat throws out his arm and I am hurled off my feet.
I land hard against the stone bench, my breath gone, stars dancing in the periphery of my vision.
Rafe is beside me on the ground without the pruning saw.
But what does a pruning saw matter? What can any of our weapons do?
Rafe helps me to my feet.
Vorat curls a sinewy finger around the chain at his throat.
Fury swells inside me. I want to attack. Lop off his head and snatch the ruby from his neck. As if it’s an actual possibility, I pick up the fallen machete. My grip tightens around the hilt.
He tilts his head, and I catch a glimpse of the face beneath his hood.
Just like Lily’s drawing. I watch in horror as his mouth tears open into a crude slit.
He speaks, his voice like nothing I have ever heard—unnervingly refined with whispers following each word, like the souls of those he has consumed.
“Come with me and I will let the others go.”
I scoff at the lie.
He’s not going to let them go.
But if I can distract him long enough, it won’t matter.
His prisoners will be gone.
“What is it you want?” I ask.
“Where do I begin?” He moves to the other side of the fountain, his form stretching and unraveling like vapor pulled by wind—darkness flowing across space, then gathering back into shape. “You destroyed a curse that birthed an entire world, a curse woven into its very foundation.”
I draw back. Why is Vorat talking about the curse?
“I have spent years searching for a way to undo what it has done. On Halloween night, you and the boy made it possible at last. His life, I have.” He fondles the ruby. “But your blood, I still need.”
“For what?”
“To reclaim what the curse stole from me.”
I blink, confused. “Stole from you? What could it have possibly stolen from you?”
“Everything!” His rage ripples through the clearing.
I flinch, my muscles primed to run. But there’s nowhere to go. Vorat is blocking the exit. I glance at Rafe, who looks no wiser than me. Then Vorat removes his hood. He stares at me with eyes so human, my mind scrambles to make sense of what I’m seeing.
“I will undo it,” he says, whispers echoing in the wake of each word. “I will undo all of it. And when the world is remade, she will no longer fear me. I will be as I once was and you will be nothing.”
She will no longer fear him?
My heart pounds as the visions he planted play through my mind.
Forward and backward.
Backward and forward.
My mother, running through the woods.
My mother, imprisoned inside Vorat’s lair.
Lily, dying on a marble bench.
Simon, trying to save her.
Simon, listening to my mother as she spoke sad, broken words.
And the monster, chasing her down.
It never made sense.
Why was I chasing her?
Why was I the monster?
The answer strikes with astounding clarity.
“They were all from the same perspective,” I say, staring into his face.
His eyes are as gold as the sun
With brown sugar flecks in each one.
Words from a limerick my mother wrote. About a boy she loved. A boy who loved her back. A boy who disappeared and somehow became this.
The horror of it slams through me. “Simon.”
“I am the one who brought her back to this town. I found a way to slip inside her dreams. And yet, she was afraid. Unsettled by the changes I had to go through in order to survive. I thought with time, she would accept what I had become. She would adjust. She would join me here, in this world. But she only wanted you. A daughter who should have never existed.”
Pieces of the puzzle fly together at breakneck speed.
The clock.
The constellations.
The night sky.
His sister, bleeding on the bench.
Simon’s weakness and hunger.
Lily, twisting into a hound. Not because a hound killed her. But because a new Hollow Walker had just been made. Her brother consumed her. “You took your sister’s life.”
“She was already dying!” he roars, his smudged face twisting in agony. “I was so hungry. We were so hungry. And her soul was right there. I didn’t know—I didn’t understand what I was doing until it was too late.”
My horror expands.
“But after?” I take a step back. “You understood exactly what you’d done after, but you kept doing it.”
Consuming souls.
Stealing life to sustain his own.
Not to survive.
But to accumulate power.
To feed his addiction.
I take another step away, sliding my hand inside my pocket where it curls around the lighter. Beside me, I can feel Rafe’s tension, and I see that he has something in his hand, too.
The onyx.
It fell when I was knocked off my feet.
It fell and he picked it up.
“So what is your plan, Simon?” I ask him.
The ruby around his neck continues to pulse.
Jude’s life.
My blood.
Together, we broke the curse that separated them.
I think of his sister’s soul—no longer her own, but his.
A temporal conduit.
A wormhole.
I think about the pond.
The prisoners.
The clock in the center.
One that stopped the moment the curse was triggered, the moment he was torn away from Clara.
Who is now in a tomb.
“I will wake myself up from this nightmare. I have all the pieces I need to get back what was taken. To go back, only this time, there will be no curse to separate us.”
“And what are those pieces—lives? Souls? How many more people are you going to kill to get what you want, and how can you possibly think she could ever love you again when this is what you’re willing to do?”
“She can’t love me when I am like this. But I will not be this for much longer.”
“No, you won’t.” I pull the lighter from my pocket.
I give it a flick and a small flame flares in the dark.
I hold it centimeters from the writhing, gasoline-soaked hedges.
I don’t actually want to set them on fire.
I just need to make him believe that I will.
I need to give Rafe an opening to use the onyx.
And it’s working.
I have Simon’s full, unwavering attention.
I can see the fear in his eyes.
Shadow bursts from the stone.
Only it doesn’t fly at Vorat.
It flies at me.
It knocks the lighter from my hand.
It falls to the ground, its flame extinguished as the shadow wraps around my wrists.
Cold bites into my flesh.
“What?” I try to escape, but the shadow tightens like a vice. “No!”
My stomach drops as I gape at Rafe.
His eyes are pinned on Vorat.
“I did what you required,” he says, gritting the words through clenched teeth. “I upheld my end of the bargain. She is alive. She is yours. Now release me.”