test or answering a riddle. This wasn’t the Thorn Land. I wasn’t playing a game of wits with Tremaine. I was amusement for an ancient evil, and I existed or perished at his whim.
That, I decided, feeling some of the old stubbornness left over from my living self creep into my thoughts, was going to change starting this moment, this second. I was nobody’s mere amusement, and it was time the Yellow King saw that for himself.
“Dean,” I said. He was sitting listening to the aethervox. It was the first baseball game of the season, and the Red Sox were losing, though not as badly as usual.
“Yeah, darlin’?” he said, looking up.
“I’m going,” I said.
His brows drew together. “Going where?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll start with outside and take it from there.”
He was up, and it was impossible to walk away all over again. Concern flooded his face, a flash flood that swept away all reason, and I knew in that moment it was now or never. This was a wonderful life. A beautiful life. A perfect life.
And none of it was real. Not Dean. Not even how I felt as I looked at him.
“Don’t,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I told him, and then bolted for the door.
I expected another run around Nylarthotep’s maze, but instead I ran into blinding bright light.
I stopped short, the energy to run shocked out of me. I realized after a moment that I wasn’t in a pure white void, but standing on an arctic ledge, snow stretching out behind me and glaciers rising to meet a shining pale sky.
In the distance, a white city pierced the clouds, carved out of the ice, the entrances to tunnels little more than black periods on a page at this distance.
Across the plain, a line of figures in white moved to and fro from the city. I made out the squamous, glimmering backs of shoggoths, huge gelatinous creatures that were a holdover from the days of the Great Old Ones, and the tall, many-jointed limbs of some kind of life-form I didn’t recognize, another creation of the Old Ones.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
I whirled around, recognizing the voice before I took in the robe, the lank black hair and the skin whiter than the glacier behind us.
Crow was the only dark spot on this landscape, which was fitting. He was in darkness always, trapped in the world created by humans’ dreams. If dreams ceased, so did he.
“Where are we?” I said. The last time I’d seen Crow, he was where he’d been since the beginning of his existence, in a small glass bulb at the center of all the Lands, a space outside the laws of physics or time.
“We are at a place out of space, out of time and distance,” Crow said. “This was once your world, Aoife. It’s the only safe place where we can speak.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “One minute I was … well … trapped in another sort of dream, and now I’m here?”
Had I woken up? Or was this something worse, some other layer of Nylarthotep’s game?
“You’re not dreaming,” Crow said. “What he’s done to you is a perversion of a dream, using your own happiness and desire to forge prison bars.”
“I got that much,” I said. “But I left. I passed his test.”
Crow sighed. “No, Aoife,” he said. “You didn’t.”
I felt the void again, and I was plummeting through it, guts-first. It was the same sinking feeling I’d gotten when I’d realized Tremaine had tricked me, and again when I’d realized that the cost of setting right what I’d wrought would be freeing the Old Ones.
“He tricked me,” I said matter-of-factly.
“More like sidelined you,” Crow said. He reached for me and drew me into his robe, which was a welcome relief from the cold.
“He trapped you here to study you, to exploit your weakness. When you return he will present you with the only choice you can make: allow him his freedom from the Deadlands in exchange for your life, Dean’s life and the lives of everyone else in the Lands. He’ll try to scare you—”
“He
“I don’t disagree,” Crow said. “But he cannot be allowed to leave that unholy playground he’s created. You cannot accept his bargain, because if you do, the Old Ones’ coming will be the least of your worries. Nylarthotep is more than a creature of evil. He is a force of nature. He is the end of all things.”
“The one who waits,” I murmured.
“Who waits for the end of the world,” Crow said, “and for his chance to dance on the ashes.”
I looked back at the city. I still felt nauseated, but unlike the last time Crow and I had met, I didn’t scream and cry and try to wrap myself in denial as thick as his robes. I just sighed. “What do you need me to do?”
“The Old Ones trapped Nylarthotep the first time with the same power that turns the Gates,” Crow said. “The same power that flows in your veins. They created the opposite of a Gate, a lock so strong not even the first evil could break it.”
He pressed an aged piece of paper into my hands. “It’s called an Elder Sign—a representation of the Old Ones themselves, or at least their light half. The good they can bring to a world, the flip side of the devastation. The same minds that built this city here, this first place where living things crawled from the mud to begin what would become humans and Fae and even me, they created the Elder Sign. But the Old Ones have lost their way, and the knowledge has faded. Not even I can locate it.”
“What’s this?” I asked. I didn’t open the paper. I felt beaten-down and hopeless. I should have known that an impossible bargain with Nylarthotep was still too good to be true. That it wasn’t a bargain at all but a setup to permanently rid himself of the one person who could harm him, a person who would only be released when she was compliant and desperate, ready to free him instead.
“It’s the only clue to the Elder Sign I’ve been able to locate,” Crow said. “It was written down in the twelve hundreds by an Arabic scholar. He went mad, but he was the last to directly communicate with the Old Ones.”
“Probably why he went mad, then,” I said. Crow allowed himself a small smile.
“Likely. Good luck, Aoife.”
“Because I’ve had so much of that so far,” I muttered.
“Listen,” Crow said. “There’s nothing wrong with wanting to bring back your dead friend. There’s nothing wrong with loving someone so much that you would cross oceans and distances and over from life itself to look into his eyes again. You did what you had to do for Dean.”
He took my face in his hands. They were warm, surprisingly so, and they stilled the horrible emptiness inside me, filled me with something that wasn’t hope, but wasn’t the sucking hopelessness of a moment ago, either. I felt myself stop shaking for the first time.
“Now do what you have to do for the legacy in your blood. For the world, and for everyone in it,” Crow whispered.
I shut my eyes, feeling a tear freeze on my face, and when I opened them I was back in the awful hallway, lying on my side with tears still wetting my cheeks.
Nylarthotep sat a few feet away, watching me intently. “So how did you enjoy my test?” he asked, that pure white-bone smile slicing from under his cowl.
“I’ve had better days,” I said, pulling myself to my feet.
“Don’t be snippy,” he said. “And don’t pretend you wouldn’t give it all up for even ten more seconds with that Dean boy.”
Here it was. I’d ask for Dean back. He’d threaten me. And I’d … what?
Dutifully, I said, “I did what you asked. Let Dean and me go.”
Nylarthotep laughed, and he kept laughing. “My, you humans are simple creatures. Every time I think evolution might have finally made a jump, you do something that convinces me all over again just how wide-eyed
