I made some more calls, set things up as best as I could, then returned to the Hollow. The sky was turning from violet to purple with the coming evening, the first stars starting to twinkle far above. I sat outside and listened to the wind in the branches.
Movement in the futures made me look up. A medium-to-large fox came trotting out of the woods and slowed to a walk as it approached me.
“Hi, Hermes,” I said. Hermes had taken to hanging out in the Hollow lately, catching the occasional ride in or out of the shadow realm with Luna.
The blink fox walked up to me and stood with his front paws together, head up. He sniffed at my bandaged right hand.
“Yeah, it’s hurt,” I said. “Not getting better either.”
Hermes sat back on his hind legs, curling his bushy tail around him.
“I could do it, you know,” I said. “Just leave. I’d have to abandon everyone. But I could probably make it work.” I paused. “Actually, I kind of want to.”
Hermes tilted his head.
“It’s because I’ve screwed things up so badly,” I told the blink fox. “When things go a little bit wrong, you want to fix it. When they’ve gone this wrong, you just want to quit. I don’t want to go back and pick up the pieces. I mean, I already tried once. Why would it be any different?”
Hermes looked at me.
“Okay, it might be different. Or it could be even worse.” I was silent for a moment. “I don’t feel like I’m much help. Maybe it’d be better for everyone if I did just leave.”
Hermes moved forward and nudged my hand with his nose. “You want me to stick around?” I asked with a faint smile.
Hermes blinked at me.
“You think I can do something useful? Make a difference?”
Hermes seemed to pause as if considering, then blinked twice.
“You think I’m just going to fail.”
Blink blink.
“So what are you saying?”
Hermes looked at me expectantly.
“You think I should stop feeling sorry for myself and go do something?”
Blink.
I gave a wan smile. “Direct and to the point.” I got to my feet. “I’ll get you some food.”
A few hours later, I got the response I was waiting for. I set up a meeting, left messages for Luna and Variam in safe channels that they’d see in the morning, and returned to the Hollow to sleep.
And went to Elsewhere.
I hadn’t been planning to. I knew the smart thing was to rest. I was still recovering from the past night, and time in Elsewhere isn’t as restful as normal sleep. But I couldn’t stay away.
I knew almost as soon as I entered the dream realm that someone was looking for me. A part of me perked up at the news, hoping against all reason that it was Anne. Maybe she’d found some way to reach out to me, she’d found out what had really happened and was coming to tell me that she didn’t blame me and it wasn’t my fault and . . .
It wasn’t Anne.
I sighed and let Elsewhere take the form of a vast empty city, walkways and colonnades stretching between spire-topped palaces. There was a bench waiting for me, but I didn’t sit. I stood out in the open and folded my arms.
A figure stepped out from between two columns. She was maybe nineteen, compact with short red hair, and her name was Shireen. “Hey.”
I didn’t answer. Shireen approached and sat on the bench. “I’m guessing you’re not that happy at the moment.”
“No.”
“You got out alive,” Shireen said. “Better than I did.”
Shireen had been one of Richard’s other apprentices, the third of four. Rachel had killed her, and when she had, an imprint of Shireen had lived on inside Rachel’s mind. Somehow, Shireen didn’t seem to carry a grudge. Instead, she’d been pressuring me for years to help Rachel and redeem her.
“It’s not like I didn’t give you plenty of warning,” Shireen said.
“Don’t start.”
“Well, you have kind of been asking for it. How long have I been telling you to do something about Rachel?”
“Do not even try to make this my fault.”
Shireen shrugged. “Just saying.”
“Just saying what?” I glared at Shireen, anger at the unfairness of it all boiling up. “That this happened because I didn’t work hard enough on your crazy plan of saving Rachel’s soul? Although I don’t know if I should even be calling it a ‘plan,’ since you’ve never given me the slightest clue how I’m supposed to do it. You just said ‘redeem her,’ then left me to figure out how. Not that it would have mattered if I had, since I’d still be getting screwed by the Council and Richard and everyone else. Pretty much all Rachel did was kick me while I was down. So even if I’d managed to do this completely impossible task you’ve tried to hang on me, it wouldn’t have made any difference!”
“You’d have had one extra person on your side,” Shireen said. “Couldn’t have hurt.”
I stared down at Shireen. She looked back at me with no trace of guilt, and it suddenly struck me just how young she seemed. When we met, Rachel and Shireen and I had all been teenagers. Shireen—or this version of Shireen—was a teenager still, quick and full of energy, action without hesitation. But I wasn’t.
I remembered a conversation I’d had with Luna last year. She’d told me that I was making a mistake by thinking of Rachel as Rachel; in her view, that person was gone and Deleo was all that was left. Maybe she’d been right.
“You’ve been setting me up from the beginning,” I said. “Trying to get me to turn Rachel into some sort of good person. It was always impossible, wasn’t it?”
“No. Alex, I promise, it was never that. There’s still something left in her that’s worth saving. I think that’s true. It has to be true.”
“And I’m the one who pays the price if you’re wrong.”
“Hey,” Shireen said. “You’ve had the chance for a life for yourself. I haven’t. All this time that you’ve been running around giving orders on the Council and dating your new girlfriend, I’ve been stuck in here.”
“So I’m supposed to get myself killed to make up for that?”
“You’ll get killed if you don’t,” Shireen said. “Remember the prophecy I told you all those years back? Someday, Rachel will have to make a choice. Either she stands with Richard, or she turns against him. If she turns, he loses. If she doesn’t, you die.”
“What are she and Richard doing?”
“I don’t know exactly. She can hide things from me better than she could before. I get emotions, mostly.” Shireen paused. “She’s been thinking about Anne a lot, especially the last couple of days. Resentment, envy. She’s getting to really hate her.”
“Because Anne’s yet another person who’s getting promoted over her,” I said. “Right? First it was Morden, then it was Vihaela, now Richard’s got a new girl, one who’s younger and more powerful than she is.”
Shireen nodded. “She’s been feeling like that awhile. I mean, she was the only one who stayed loyal to Richard while he was gone. Now he doesn’t seem to need her anymore.”
“Of course he doesn’t. Back then she was his Chosen. Now she’s just another follower.” I looked at Shireen. “And that isn’t enough to make her walk away?”
“No,” Shireen admitted.
“Luna gave me some advice last year,” I said. “That maybe it was time to start admitting that my redemption of Rachel just isn’t going to happen. I mean, by this point, Rachel’s done so many awful things that she probably can’t even remember most of them. Does she ever feel bad about any of it? About all the ghosts she’s left behind?”
“She buries it as deep as she can,” Shireen said. “It’s why she wears that mask. As long as she doesn’t let it catch up with her, she can keep going.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s sort of the problem, isn’t it?”