bidding, master?”
He knit his brows and took his arm away, exhaled, and ran his hand across his forehead. She saw how tired he was. He’d just flown halfway across the world, for God’s sake. But she hadn’t asked him to. She hadn’t asked for any of this.
He reached out a hand toward her, then lowered it. The flashlight beam glinted off the piercing in his eyebrow. No, not the beam. There was light around him, as if he were glowing from the inside. His eyes were almost luminescent.
“I feel like you’re supposed to be here. And
He walked on. She walked behind him, staring at the back of his head, at his shoulders. She could almost see tendrils connecting her to him. She didn’t feel like she was supposed to be in the castle, but she did feel like she was supposed to be with him. Was that his doing? Was he leading her down there to do something to her?
At the bottom of the next landing, a white strip gleamed. Luminous paint. There was a sign in German. EINTRITT VERBOTEN. She knew
The sorrow came back. A silver trickle of strange sounds, like wind chimes, breathed against her ear.
Twinkling like starlight.
And she knew it meant “Mama.”
“Hello?” she called out.
“Delaney?” Alex said.
“Shh,” she ordered. She listened hard.
“Where are you?” she whispered.
Silence. And . . . weeping, and then a kind of gasping, like strangling. And another voice, higher-pitched:
She ran forward, past Alex, who tried to reach out a hand to her. Then she stood at the beginning of a double row of cubes, or boxes, that stretched far into the darkness. The sounds were all around her now, coming from the boxes. Whispers, cries for help. Help that never came.
She ran to the closest one and stood facing it. There were bars across the front, and what appeared to be shattered glass in a semicircle on the floor. The moan again:
She felt emotions: Loneliness, misery. Shock. They hadn’t expected this to happen to them. Something else was supposed to have happened. Someone else was supposed to be waiting for them. Whatever had been in here had been abandoned, dumped into cells.
“It’s evil. So evil,” she said.
Then her knees buckled. She felt her eyes roll back in her head. Light blossomed in front of her, reaching to the ceiling in ribbons of color, like the aurora borealis Alex had conjured on the ocean. Shadows appeared, then snapped into sharp silhouettes. Misshapen figures rode huge black horses whose hooves sparked as they galloped six inches above the ground. Tiny, gibbering
The deepest fear she had ever felt shot through her soul.
Then everything vanished.
Wordlessly, Alex picked her up and carried her out of the room. Up all the flights of stairs, to the main floor of the castle; and there she felt the rage again.
He set her down on a rock and bent down in front of her. He took both her hands in his. They were cold.
“Are you all right now?” he asked her.
She blinked at him. “What was in there?” she asked him. “And what were the things with the horses?”
“Horses?” He looked bewildered. “What did you see?”
She told him. Then, still not sure it was the right thing to do, she told him about the rage.
“It told you to kill me?” he repeated, the blood draining from his face. “That I was a liar?”
She nodded.
He made a face and muttered in German. Then he said, “I guess it’s haunted.” His shoulders rounded, and he patted her hand as he got up and plopped down beside her. He gestured to the castle. “I don’t think the answer is there.” He clicked his teeth and scratched his chin. “I thought you would find it.”
She was quiet a moment. Then she said, “You glowed. When I looked at you, I saw light.”
“I’m Mr. Electric,” he said. He opened his arms. Blue crackles shot from his fingertips. “We can go back to your home. I can make your refrigerator work.”
She heard the disappointment in his voice. “But Alex, something
“You can’t go back in there,” he said.
“I think I have to,” she replied, feeling sick to her stomach at the thought.
“But not tonight.” He sighed. “I have a car. We can go to the village.”
It was a Mercedes; why was she surprised? They didn’t even go back for their stuff. They drove into the deserted village. Some shops were still filled with goods; they got toothbrushes and food and changes of clothes. Sheets in packages. They broke into an inn and commandeered two rooms. She wasn’t sure which would make her feel better, to sleep in the same room or apart. She wasn’t sure of anything. She remembered how great it had felt to find that carton of batteries. It felt like that had happened to someone else. Not here, anyway.
“What did you want out of life, before I came for you?” he asked her, as they shared a bottle of wine—she really wasn’t much of a drinker—and ate some canned baba ghanoush. They were sitting on his bed. He was wearing a pair of black drawstring pajama bottoms and a gray T-shirt. She had on an oversized T-shirt and leggings. Not very glamorous, but in a way, that was better.
“Batteries,” she said. “Endless quantities of them.”
He smiled crookedly. “I’m older than you. I was laying plans for my adult life. We were really rich.”
“Did you, um, have a girlfriend?”
“I always had a girlfriend.” He waggled his eyebrows and sipped from their bottle. “I was going to follow in my father’s footsteps, be rich, then save the rain forest.”
“I think you added that last part to make yourself sound more noble.” She thought about the voice in the castle telling her that he was a liar. Maybe it had lied.
He handed her the bottle, and she cradled it in her lap. “I wanted my mom not to die. And I wanted to meet my father.” Her voice dropped. “And I wanted to be safe.”
“I think you need your own bottle of wine,” he drawled. “Because you got nothing on the list.”
“Are you saying I’m not safe with you?” she asked. She meant to tease him, but her voice shook.
He blew the air out of his cheeks. She wanted to take it back, but she decided to let it hang there, and see how he responded.
“I think,” he said, “that we should go to sleep.”
But she was too afraid to sleep. She went to her own room and lay down, but she felt too vulnerable that way. She paced, wondering if Alex was awake.
From her window, she could see the castle, and she made a face at it, like a little kid. She never wanted to
