The box was still where I had left it, the lid upside down on the floor. I gathered up the slithery gold ribbon and stuffed it inside the box, hiding those polished black button eyes. Then I snatched up the lid from the floor and slammed it into place on the box, resisting the urge to wipe my fingers on the edge of my T-shirt.
The thought of carrying the box all the way downstairs in my bare hands made my flesh crawl, so I grabbed a shirt from the hamper and wrapped it around the box. I made my way downstairs, quick, silent, and furious. Easing open the back door, I stepped out onto the patio.
The air held a slight predawn chill, and I inhaled deeply. The silver wind chimes shivered in the cool breeze, murmuring musically behind me. I had no idea if what I had in mind would work or not, but I suspected I could make it work. I had done it before, after all. And apparently the barriers between me and the bank were thinning.
Looking up at the still-dark sky, I spent a moment counting the stars, counting the spaces between the stars, counting my breaths as I focused all my concentration to a single sharp point. I felt the edges of myself thin, the boundaries between here and there soften into smoke. The familiar vise tightened around my lungs; the buzz of dark silence began burrowing into my inner ear. But I had no intention of going to the bank. I wasn’t even trying to reach the dream-side of the bank. No, I simply wanted to send a message to a place where I knew it would reach Zo wherever he was. And with a mental shout, I sent the words winging away into the void.
Are you watching, Zo?
Then I snapped back to myself, gasping in a harsh breath, feeling my ears pop as sound returned full force.
I set down my bundle and dragged Dad’s charcoal grill to the center of the patio, wincing as the stuck wheels scraped against the concrete. I hinged back the lid and dumped Zo’s gift out of my shirt and onto the grill. Padding around the corner of the house, I quickly gathered up my supplies and returned with a half-full bottle of lighter fluid in one hand and a box of matches in the other.
Setting the matches down, I drenched the box with lighter fluid, the acrid stench making my eyes water. The yellow brocade soaked up the fluid until the fabric looked nearly black in the shell of the grill. When the bottle was empty, I turned the garden hose on, waiting until the water began dribbling out of the nozzle before I picked up the box of matches.
I touched the first match head to the rough striking strip on the side of the box and paused. I knew that crossing Zo could prove dangerous to both me and Dante. But Zo had to learn that I could be just as dangerous.
I struck the match.
Zo’s box flared up in an instant inferno, the flames devouring the fabric. The brocade retreated in huge swaths, shrinking, melting, leaving behind only blackness streaked with red. The golden threads flared into brief life as each knot blazed like a small supernova.
I took a step back from the crackling heat and watched the smoke begin to spiral up into the air. The gray smoke was almost invisible against the gray sky, and yet the trailing wisps seemed to form patterns that I could almost recognize. A message I could almost read—a prayer, a wish, a warning.
I don’t know how long I stood there, watching the shifting patterns in the sky, but when I finally drew in a deep breath, I could taste the scratch of smoke in my mouth and feel the sting of tears in my eyes. Zo’s box had collapsed into ash, taking all my hot anger with it. Exhausted, I swiped a trembling hand across my forehead.
Dawn began stretching awake, long fingers of light reaching to push aside the stars. My thoughts returned to my childhood doll, now gone for good in her own small funeral pyre.
Good-bye, Little Abby, I thought with a pang. Thank you for being my warrior . . . and my friend. I’m sorry you got caught up in this mess.
Stooping, I picked up the garden hose and directed the stream of water into the bottom of the grill, soaking the remains of the box until it was a soggy black-and-gray lump. Then I turned off the water and closed the lid to the grill. I would clean the rest of it later.
“Abby?” My dad’s voice came from the doorway behind me. “Everything okay?”
I turned around and dropped the hose at my feet. “Yeah, everything’s fine.” I glanced at the closed lid, hoping I had told the truth.
Dad tightened the belt of his bathrobe and stepped out on the porch in his slippers. “Good. I heard someone banging around out here. I didn’t think it would be you.” He wrapped me in a hug and rubbed his hands over my arms. “You feel a little chilled. How long have you been out here?”
“Not long,” I said, feeling myself relax into the protection of his arms.
“What are you doing, anyway? Is something the matter?”
“No, everything’s okay. I just had some old stuff I needed to get rid of.”
“And you had to do it in the middle of the night?” Dad asked.
“I guess I didn’t think about the time.”
“You couldn’t just throw the stuff away? You had to fire up the grill?”
“Oh, um, it’s just . . . I didn’t want anyone to see me,” I stammered. “You know. Because it was private.”
“Oh, I see how it is. Keeping secrets from your old man. I get it.” Dad ruffled my hair. “What was it? Old love letters? Incriminating photographs?” He wiggled his eyebrows like Groucho Marx and I laughed. Dad always managed to make things better; I loved that about him. Grinning, I kissed his cheek, leaving behind a black smudge from my nose.
“I must look a mess,” I said. I rubbed at my eyes, feeling the hours of missed sleep starting to catch up to me. My hand came away streaked with soot.
“Ah, you’ll always be pretty as a princess to me, sweetie.” Dad kissed the top of my head. “But you might want to get cleaned up before Hannah comes down. If she sees you like this, she’ll never let you live it down.” He released me and stepped over to the grill. He slapped the lid with the flat of his hand. “Tell you what—you go on upstairs and I’ll make breakfast this morning before I go to work. What are you in the mood for? Grilled pancakes? Flambéed French toast? Cereal shish kebabs?”
I laughed again. In the middle of the night, Zo’s threats and warnings had been scary, but now, with dawn on the horizon, his efforts seemed a little sad and small. Was that really the best he could do?
“See you in a bit, Dad,” I said before heading back to my bedroom. I had every intention of hitting the shower and washing away the soot from my hands and the shadows from my mind, but once I closed the door behind me, I fell into bed and pulled the covers back over me.
I was asleep before the summer sun spilled over my windowsill.
Chapter
11
Darkness had fallen on the bank. Instead of the omnipresent flat gray light, the bank was cloaked with a thick black veil that stretched across the horizon and curved overhead like a closed eyelid.
I hadn’t expected to be here. When I had tried before, nothing had happened, and yet, this time, when I wasn’t thinking about it, I made it here. Would I ever learn the rules of the bank? Then again, did I really want to?
I looked around, wondering if I had made it to where Dante was, but everything looked the same. No, not quite. The bank was vast, but something was different this time. There were feelings in the void that drifted around me like unmoored ghosts.
Anger, grumbling like an awakening volcano. It tasted like red.
Hostility, cracking like knuckles. A flash of pain.
Hate.
Of all the times I had been to the bank—real or dreamed—this was the worst. This was bad.
I risked speaking. “Dante?”
The horizon line rippled. I rubbed at my eyes, sure it was a mirage. Nothing ever changed on the bank; that was the whole point. But that wasn’t true anymore, was it? I looked up involuntarily. The black sky seemed even lower, even closer. I swallowed. What other impossible things were going to change in this impossible place?
As I watched, the ripple bubbled up into a fat blister, a wavering sunrise
of light pushing against the oppressive night. But it was unlike any sunrise I’d ever seen before. Instead of stretching a gentle pink across a pale blue sky, this light boiled and churned, straining to break free from the bank’s flat two-dimensionality. My heart dropped in my chest, beating fast and hard in the veins at my temples, my wrists, my knees. I didn’t want to be anywhere nearby when that white hellfire light cracked through the black.
Distances were deceiving on the bank, so it was hard to tell exactly how far away the blister of light was. From where I stood, though, it looked to have swollen to the size of a small car.
The growing light demanded my attention and I watched the blister, now the size of a small building, fill with electric fire. The edges boiled and sizzled. The flickering light in the middle seemed to paint patterns, swirling into intricate pathways that looked almost familiar. Mesmerized, I let my focus soften, my eyes captured by the hypnotic rhythms.
“What is it?” I was barely aware of my words, barely heard them in my own ears. I wasn’t really expecting an answer, but a voice sounded low in my ear anyway.
Change . . .
But it wasn’t Dante’s strong and comforting voice that reached me through the veil of my dream. It was Zo’s voice: sly, confident, and unmistakable.
Are you watching, Abby?
The blister blossomed into a dome the size of a sun, blinding white like a hole cut into the black of the bank.
“What’s happening? Are you doing this?”
I’m so glad to see you again, Zo said, his voice filling first one ear, then the other. I was worried that we’d lose touch, what with you being where you are, and me being—well, wherever I want to be. His low-throated laugh sounded like an earthquake.
“Stop it!” I ordered the voice, pressing my hands to my ears.
Oh, but I’m just getting started.
“What have you done?”
Silly question, my sweet. It’s what I am doing that you should be worried about.
“I’m not scared of you,” I bluffed.
My ears rang with sudden, dreadful silence.
I lowered my hands, surprised to find traces of tears on my cheeks.
And then the blister on the horizon burst open in an explosion of boiling light.
The shifting, swirling fire shot upward like a fountain. At the apex of the column, the light began to bend, curving into a mushroom cloud as white and empty as the blackness it penetrated. Wherever the two touched, the edge glittered with golden stars.
I expected a rush of sound—the sonic boom after a bomb—but there was nothing except my ragged exhale and low moan.
And then the landscape of the bank buckled as waves
rippled just below the surface. Lumps became hills became mounds became mountains. The earthquake raced toward me, silent, destructive, deadly.
Instinct screamed at me to turn and run, to move, but it was too late.
Cracks fractured around my feet, thin lines that widened as they raced outward to meet each other in a tightly woven spiderweb. When the lines collided, the web broke open and chunks of land fell into a deep chasm as black as the sky above me.
The aftershocks continued to crash into each other, creating larger ripples, which created even larger cracks. And as each crack broke open, more and more of the bank fell away into darkness.
The bank was disintegrating before my eyes.
But thankfully, not from beneath my feet. The patch of land where I stood remained intact, a small island of safety. My screaming instinct quieted; there was no point in running if there was no place to run to. I wrapped my arms around my chest, frozen with fear and confusion. Was I still just dreaming, or was this actually happening?
Eventually the ripples lessened, stilled, smoothed out into oblivion, and I was left standing on a scrap of stability. The chasm around me felt as wide and as deep as the Grand Canyon. I didn’t dare look down, afraid that whirling vertigo would pull me down with it. I still felt the tattered remains of the dream state wrapped around me, a gentle fog that softened the edges of the harsh black-and-white world. I almost took a breath.
And then the mushroom cloud of light imploded, folding in on itself to form a single point on the jagged horizon. Surrounded by thick blackness, the spot looked like an eye frosted with milk-white blindness, an eye fixed directly on me.
I began to shake.
The light changed again, but this time, instead of blossoming upward, it descended into a waterfall of flame, bleeding down into the blackness of the chasm that stretched between me and the shattered horizon line.
It happened so fast. One moment the light was there—in the distance—and then it was here, rushing past my feet in a churning, frothing river of silver and white, the sharp peaks of the waves glittering like broken glass.
The wild river parted around my small island, dividing and rejoining in the blink of an eye.
It wasn’t just a river, though. It was the river.
As before when I had gazed into the endlessly changing, endlessly flowing river of time, I could see images flashing past.
A girl, standing on her toes, her hand on the frame of an open wooden door. Her head swinging right, then left, looking, searching.
The river shifted and I peered over her shoulder, catching a glimpse of the darkness of an underground prison. I blinked, and she was washed away from sight. I wondered who she was looking for, or who she was running from.
Another image rose to the surface: A man cresting a hill in the distance. A tall man, but lost in a shadowy fog. I recognized him, but I didn’t know how or from where. He opened his mouth, and the river poured into him, drowning out his words, dripping from his eyes in tears that fell like stars.
The river tore the image to pieces, fragmenting only to reassemble into a scene that stopped my heart in my chest. Dante stood on the burned wreckage of the Dungeon, his boots coated with a fine layer of gray ash, the same color as his eyes. The light from the setting sun rested on his shoulders like a coat. Seeing him was like a balm to my fevered mind. His eyes met mine, and I could have sworn that in that moment, he saw me—really saw me—even through the ripples of the river and the cocoon of my dream.
Almost immediately Dante was pulled apart by a whirlpool of time and I cried out with the loss.
Zo’s voice slithered back into my ear. Do you like what you see?
The river boiled around my feet, the silver stream filled with jumbled images. A collection of flashes of me appeared, each one layered on top of the next like a giant, personalized flipbook: walking to school with Hannah, watching movies with Jason, laughing at a joke with Valerie, listening to Leo’s story of the Midnight Kiss, dancing at the Dungeon with Dante, studying with Natalie. My life frothed around my feet as wildly as the swirling river did. I felt dizzy, disoriented. Which one was the real me?
Time was running free and loose, unchained from its moorings, carving a new path through old land.
I took a deep breath, hoping this was still just a dream. But then why couldn’t I wake up?
This was Zo’s doing. He’d admitted as much. But what could he have done that would have completely redirected the river?
As soon as I thought the question, though, I knew I didn’t want to know the answer. Only something catastrophic could result in this kind of devastation, this kind of wholesale change. He’d threatened to kill da Vinci—had he succeeded? Or had he struck closer to home? Was I here because he was somehow targeting me?
I had had enough. I was sure that, even in a dream, the key to getting home was to go through the river. Surely the shock of the transition would be enough to wake me up. At least, I hoped that would be all it would do.
As much as I didn’t want to leave the safety of my small island, I also didn’t want to stay here another moment.
“I’m leaving, Zo,” I called out into the void. “You can’t keep me here any longer.”
I swallowed my fear and stepped off into the river.
A
nd I started awake, my body sheathed in sweat and my heart snapping like a flag in the wind. My mouth felt lined with cotton and I swallowed, hoping to clear it out enough to cough. I folded my legs against my chest, wrapping my arms around my knees and burrowing my face into the deeper darkness of my own body. I braced myself for the inevitable wave of black-and-white flashes that accompanied the changes to the river. I expected the pain would match the severity of what I had seen firsthand; I wasn’t disappointed.
Hot needles pierced the soles of my feet, injecting liquid fire into my veins. Lava bubbled up my curved legs, pooling in my stomach. Steam cooked my heart. Sweat beaded on my forehead and dripped into my hair, mingling with the tears that dribbled from my eyes. I tightened my grip on my limbs, biting down on the agony until my scream softened to a whimper. I prayed that the darkness sweeping toward me was unconsciousness.
Dante’s locket around my neck burned like the cold fire from a distant star.
I’d never felt so alone in my life.
Zo’s voice pierced through the tattered remains of my dream, his words lingering in the still air of my room. But sweet Abby, I am with you . . . always.
***
Some distant time later, I woke again. This time to the smell of bacon. My mind slowly shook off the rust of unconsciousness, piecing together fragmented memories into some kind of cohesive whole. That’s right. Dad was making breakfast. I could do with a hot meal to help banish the cold stone that seemed to be lodged in my chest.
I crawled out of bed, straightening my back first and then stretching each individual limb. Residual heat seemed to crackle along my bones—one last needle-shot of pain before sloughing off into a flash of numbness. I shook out my hands, flexing my fingers.
I swung back my curtains, disoriented to see the sun so high in the sky. The darkness of the bank and the following hours of oblivion had thrown off my timing.