Obidias pulled the hood off his hand, and the snakes hissed and struck one another. “Do you know who did this to me? A ‘bunch of Keepers’ who caught me trying to steal my page from the Chronicles.”
“Lord have mercy,” Aunt Prue said, fanning herself with her handkerchief.
For a second, I didn’t know if I believed him. But I recognized the emotion playing out on his face, because I was feeling it myself.
Fear.
“Keepers did that to you?”
He nodded. “Angelus and Adriel. On one of their more generous days.” I wondered if Adriel was the big one who had shown up in the archive with Angelus and the albino woman. They were the three strangest-looking people I’d seen in the Caster world. At least until today.
I looked at Obidias and his snakes.
“Like I said, what can they do to me now? I’m already dead.” I tried to smile, even though it wasn’t funny. It was the opposite of funny.
Obidias held out his hand, the snakes jerking and stretching as they tried to reach me. “There are things worse than death, Ethan. Things that are darker than the Dark Casters. I should know. If you are caught, the Keepers will never let you leave the library at the Far Keep. You will be their scribe and their slave, forced to rewrite the futures of innocent Casters… and Mortal Waywards who are Bound to them.”
“Waywards are supposed to be pretty rare. How many can there be to write about?” I had never met another one, and I’d met Vexes and Incubuses and more kinds of Casters than I ever wanted to.
Obidias leaned forward in his chair, cloaking his cruelly deformed hand once again. “Perhaps they aren’t as rare as you think. Maybe they just don’t live long enough for the Casters to find them.” There was an undeniable truth in his words that I couldn’t explain. I guess there was some part of me that knew a lie would have sounded different. Another part knew I’d always been in danger, one way or another—with or without Lena.
Whether I was meant to jump off a water tower or not.
Either way, the fear in his voice should’ve been proof enough.
“Okay. So I won’t get caught.”
Aunt Prue’s face was filled with concern. “Maybe this isn’t the best idea. We should go on back ta my house and think on it. Talk ta your mamma about it. She’s waitin’ on us, I reckon.” I squeezed her hand. “Don’t worry, Aunt Prue. I know a way in. There’s a Temporis Porta in an old tunnel beneath Wate’s Landing. I can get in and out before the Keepers ever realize I was there.” If I could walk through walls in the Mortal realm, I was pretty sure I could step through the Temporis Porta, too.
Obidias broke the end off a thick cigar. His hand was shaking as he lit the match and held it up. He took a few puffs, until it glowed a steady orange. “You can’t enter the library at the Far Keep through the Mortal realm. You have to enter through the seam.” He delivered the news as calmly as if he was giving me directions to the local Stop & Steal, to pick up some milk.
“You mean the Great Barrier?” It seemed like a strange place for a door to the Far Keep’s inner sanctum. “I can handle it. I did it once, and I can do it again.”
“What you’ve done is nothing compared to what you’re about to do. The Great Barrier is just one place you can get to from the seam,” Obidias explained. “You can cross into other worlds from there that will make the Barrier feel like home.”
“Just tell me how to get there.” We were wasting time, and every second we sat around talking was another second away from Lena.
“You have to cross the Great River. It runs through the Great Barrier, all the way to the seam. It forms the border between the realms.”
“Like the River Styx?”
He ignored me. “And you can’t cross unless you have the river eyes—two smooth black stones.”
“Are you kidding?”
He shook his head. “Not at all. They’re very rare and hard to come by.”
“River eyes. Got it. I can find a couple rocks.”
“If you get across the river, and that’s a big if, you’ll still have to make it past the Gatekeeper before you can get into the library.”
“How do I do that?”
Obidias took a puff from the cigar. “You have to offer him something he can’t refuse.”
“What exactly would that be?” Aunt Prue asked, as though she might have whatever it was tucked in her pocketbook. Like the Gatekeeper would be interested in three linty breath mints, some nondairy creamer, and a wad of folded-up Kleenex.
“It’s always different. You’ll have to figure it out when you get there,” Obidias said. “He has… eclectic taste.” He didn’t say any more on the subject.
An offering. Eclectic taste. Whatever the hell that meant.
“Okay. So I have to find the black stones and get across the Great River,” I said. “Figure out what the Gatekeeper guy wants and give it to him to get inside the library. Then find The Caster Chronicles and destroy my page.” I paused, because the question I was about to ask was the most important detail, and I wanted to get it straight. “If I do all that and don’t get caught, I’ll get back home—my real home? How do I do that? What happens after I destroy the page?” Obidias looked at Aunt Prue and back to me. “I’m not sure. It’s never happened, as far as I know.” He shook his head. “It’s a chance, nothing more. And not even a good one…”
“Nothin’s certain, Ethan Wate, ’cept for that you had a shot at a life a your own, and the Keepers stole it from you.” I stood up before they could finish talking.
Lena was waiting, in my room or hers, by the crooked cross stuck in the grass at my gravesite or somewhere else.
But she was waiting—that’s what mattered.
If I had a chance in hell to get back home, I’d take it.
I’m trying, ll. Don’t give up on me.
“I need to get going, Mr. Trueblood. I have a river to cross.”
Aunt Prue opened her pocketbook and pulled out a faded map, covered with shapes that didn’t represent any continent, country, or state I’d ever seen. This was more than a doodle on the back of an old church program. I knew what Aunt Prue’s maps were like, and I knew how important they had been to me before—the last time I found my way to the seam, for Lena’s Seventeenth Moon.
“I’ve been workin’ on it since I got here, jus’ a little bit here and there. Obidias told me you’d be needin’ it.” She shrugged. “Reckoned it was the least I could do.”
I leaned down and hugged her. “Thanks, Aunt Prue. And don’t be worried.”
“I’m not,” she lied. But she didn’t need to be.
I was worried enough for both of us.
CHAPTER 12
Still Here
After we got back to our side of the Otherworld—Harlon Jameses and all—I didn’t go home. I left Aunt Prue at her house and walked the streets—more like the rows—of His Garden of Perpetual Peace.
Peace wasn’t exactly what I was feeling.
I stopped in front of Wate’s Landing. It looked every bit the same as when I left, and I knew my mom was inside. I wanted to talk to her. But there were other things I had to do first.
I sat down on the front steps, closing my eyes.
“Carry me home.”
What was it?
To remember. And be remembered.
Ducite me domum.
Ut meminissem.
Ut in memoria tenear.
I remember Lena.
Not the water tower.
What came before.
I remember Ravenwood.
Let Ravenwood remember me.
Let Ravenwood—