I spun, twirling streamers of gold across the silver ocean of mist, and thrust through the black-snake coil, diving toward the voice of my father and towing the Pharaohn with me. To the reflection of normal eyes that the Grey fed me, I knew I looked a tiny figure, turning like one lost in the fog, fighting a ragged shadow of white smoke and ethereal flesh still just recognizable as Wygan. Up and sideways, into the black center of a blazing ring within a ring, each burning too hot for flesh to stand with the shattered sliver of temporacline glittering at the center. I could see the edges of rooms superimposed on rooms, trees, fires: Dru Cristoffer’s apple orchard maze, my father’s office splashed with his blood and brains, the Hardy Tree, the puzzle balls falling outward/ inward . . . into the fiery circles of the oubliette and ethereal labyrinth doors as they blazed. The puzzle balls and their unfolding magic gates to the hidden parts of the Grey were finally burning and we would go with them in a moment.
I could have stayed there and held Wygan to be immolated together into nothingness, but I yanked myself into searing air, my body protesting, bleeding, gasping for breath. And the Pharaohn rushed from the cold blackness beneath our pyre, struggling for shape where there were only fiery recollections and ghosts. For a moment, his memory of himself coalesced, drawn from the ash and flame: the ancient snake god writhed before me, gaping its fangs and striking. I let it come, taking the bite in my back, the fangs sinking in. I held the monstrous thing against me, forcing him to the gleaming surface of the temporacline, as I hooked my fingers into the slowing, knotted energy of his ethereal form and pulled the core of him apart. It burned and struggled, his fangs biting deeper, tearing at me as it loosened. First memory falling away, then shape, and then the scorching tangle of energy, magic, knowledge, self . . . so many jackstraws in my hands. I sank, exhausted, toward the dark center as the fires of the labyrinth doors burned out. I struggled away from the grid, back through the mist and chaos of the Grey toward the surface of the normal world, scattering the dimming threads of the Pharaohn and the falling ash of his children into the fog.
The world seemed to gasp and quiver, dozens of voices crying into the grid at once, lost and terrified. The voices of the asetem, the grid told me, those too weak and old to continue without him, falling into oblivion with their father-god. The half-mad unconscious of the grid raged at me in mindless despair; I had destroyed a god. . . .
This time there was no emotional chill to insulate me from the horror and pain of what I’d done. I stumbled back into the normal, bereft and bleeding, trying to get to Quinton and get out of the room before things got worse. Pandemonium still reigned in the concrete basement I fell back into; the rift had not healed with the destruction of Wygan. I could feel the furious Grey hungering, trying to devour me as it searched for another Guardian, for anything that would hold it in shape, stop it from raveling out into the wide world.
My vision was still dazzled by the ghost-stuff of the Grey and the raw burning of the grid within. With it storming around me, I couldn’t find my way. I crashed into someone and grabbed onto him. He was shaking, slim, too tall to be Quinton and too insubstantial to be Goodall or Carlos.
“Will,” I breathed. “Can you see the door?”
“Oh, yes.” He wasn’t shaking with fear: It was excitement. “It’s beautiful.”
I turned to look back the way I had come, back toward the center of the circle that was now only ash and flickering fire, back where the single glassy temporacline shard had sparkled, where time had stopped under Edward’s ruined shell.
Yes, there stood a door, much like the one I’d seen the first time I’d gone into the Grey, back what seemed long ago. Made of cloud and light, it beckoned and pulled us toward it. The door. The mouth of the starving Grey, seeking something, someone, to guide and protect it.
“No, Will. You shouldn’t go there. That’s a dangerous place.”
“It’s lovely. It wants me to come.” He planted a soft, absent kiss on my temple and pushed me aside, moving crabwise and crippled through the doorway. The raging power of the unbound Grey unwound his physical form, leaving a fleeting Will-shaped skein of bright blue and gold that sparkled away into the light and fog of the world between the worlds.
The clouds of Grey and magical fire drew in as a new Guardian began to take shape beyond the door: the long, elegant form of a Beast spun of spiderwebs and ghostlight into animate runes and twining Celtic knots, flickering silver like reflections on glass and strands of platinum hair. The door whispered closed and the storm ceased.
Footsteps pounded across the floor as I stood, staring at the misty portal that faded toward the colors of the grid through the retreating silver fog of the Grey.
“Harper, Harper!”
Even through the ringing in my ears and the diminishing mutterings of the treacherous grid, I heard Quinton and started, once more, to turn.
And something ripped into my back and through my gut, driving me onto the floor.
Warm wetness spread under me, bringing new pain with it, covering me, and making the world darker at the edges.
“Little girl. Let me take this. . . .”
“Dad . . .” But he was gone and I felt sorrow, compassion, despair, and joy flood in as the inhuman remoteness that had tortured and sustained me disintegrated, leaving me. If ever I woke, I would not be the same, I would not hold and move the power of the grid again. The humming of it died and the bright lines slid away from me, growing further distant as darkness closed in. Even the Grey turned thin and cold, mocking me with voices I almost remembered, until it sparkled, dying. . . .
EPILOGUE
He had run. He had not waited. Carol had tried to stop him, but he fought and made it to the elevator before she caught up to him again. He dragged her in with him and rushed through the best explanation he could make. “Harper knows where Goodall and Wygan are—where they have Kammerling—but I think she’s going to try and stop them herself. I think—I think—”
“That she’s going to do something kind of stupid,” Carol suggested.
“Foolish. Honorable. . . . OK, yeah, stupid!”
Harper had been growing stranger and more upset since she got back from London. He knew she wasn’t always saying everything she thought—that was how they were together—but this was a distant fear and despair that pulled her away from him. He wanted her to tell him, but what she had said was horrible and incomplete. He tried to help. He comforted and supported and looked for information or ways to help her silence the voices that had plagued her until she beat her head against the floor.
That had upset him. It wasn’t like her to hurt herself. But she had and she seemed to be heading for worse pain.
He hadn’t meant her when he’d said someone wouldn’t walk out of the situation alive. He’d been sure Kammerling was already toast, but no one else seemed to believe that. But it sounded like she hadn’t expected to walk away from the broadcast tower at all. Not for Novak or her dead dad—neither of those made sense—but for something she couldn’t express. She’d said the Grey was swallowing her and he wasn’t sure how that could be true, but maybe it was and he couldn’t let it happen.
Carol had driven them to Queen Anne, to the broadcast towers, where they saw nothing that indicated anything amiss. They drove back and forth across the crown of the hill, checking each one. . . . Maybe he should have gone to the Danzigers’, but time felt too short.
Finally, he pointed at the place they’d found Wygan the last time: the tower in the middle of the hill, alone on the edge of a park, across from the condemned gymnasium. He got out of her car and stared at the place. Something wasn’t right . . . a thread of light out of place, a reflection maybe. He turned until he was facing the old gym building. One of the chained doors wasn’t quite tight in its frame. But there shouldn’t have been anything in there at all.