Gabe wouldn’t put it past the elf to do just that, to make a point.
He rummaged around in his room, got his homework from the family room, packed up his bag, and went to find his sister.
Sophia sat on the floor next to her bed, her bag next to her feet and one of her storage boxes from the closet next to her elbow. She’d tossed all the sweaters that had been in the box onto the bed.
She had a notebook on her lap, one of those leather-bound blank-diary-type books for people who like to journal, except this one looked old.
“What’s that?” he asked.
She slammed it shut and tucked it into her bag. “You can’t tell Mr. Frank I have his notebook.”
She’d stolen a book from Mr. Frank? “Did you take that?” He pushed his way into her room and loomed over her like a babysitter. “Seriously, Sophia! What were you thinking!”
Gabe grabbed it from her bag.
It really was old. The paper inside had dried out and he had to extra careful not to rip anything. “It’s blank,” he said.
“No, it’s not.” She grabbed it from his hand.
“Sophia….” Was the notebook magical? He looked over his shoulder at the door. “Does this have anything to do with the kelpie?” Was the book bad?
She thinned her lips. “It’s how I knew we were supposed to bring Ranger’s bridle home and give it to Mr. Frank.”
When Mr. Frank came home this morning, Sophia said she’d handed the bridle to him and told him to take it to someone named Ellie.
Mr. Frank disappeared for a bit after that. Then Wrenn came by.
“I don’t like all these magic things we don’t understand,” he said.
She nodded yes as if she, too, felt overwhelmed. “I was really scared of Ranger,” she whispered. “And those vampires.”
Gabe dropped down to the floor and hugged his sister. He didn’t think she’d seen the bodyguard behead his boss, but she had seen the bullets impact his vampire body.
It hadn’t been anything at all like gunfire on television. The vampire had popped and snapped and sprayed more than just blood.
“If that notebook is magical,” he said. “Mr. Lennart will know.”
She shook her head. “The elves think it’s useless and no longer magical.”
Still, Gabe thought. What if there was magic that got by the elves? He didn’t want to think about that. Because that meant there might be a way for those vampires to get back into Alfheim.
And the last thing he wanted to think about was vampires.
Epilogue
Between The Land of the Living and The Land of the Dead…
He’d been digging so long he’d forgotten who he was supposed to be. No name, no past, no intrinsic understanding of why he slammed the tip of the broken pike into the schist again and again and again.
He only had his work, and Anthea.
She was a lovely vampire, one with bouncy blonde curls, a satisfying plumpness to her hips, and a chatty disposition that filled in his gaps with details about a place called Las Vegas. It was hot and dry but oh so full of life!
He hated deserts. Of all the voids he carried around, those empty spaces that should have been full of memories and wants and desires, he was able to label one: Deserts were good only for invading.
Every so often a little air would leak from that bubble of emptiness called “disdain for deserts” and he’d get a sun-bleached image, or the memory of blowing sand scouring his skin. But then that would stop, and another bubble would fart out the smell of sweet clover, or another would wheeze cliffs and the cold, cold wind over icy seas.
The frightening thing weaving these moments together was not their breadth and variety. It was their synchronicity. Deep down inside him, deep in the blood in his veins, he knew that all of these geographically far-flung memories had happened at the same time.
The same year. The same month. The same exact moment.
Such things were not possible.
Yet he dug with Anthea out of a gray place with gray wailing and grayer dust. A place of twilight and vampires.
Such places were also not possible.
Hell was not possible, though he was sure the place from which they sought to escape was not Hell. Just somewhere adjacent. So perhaps he did have an understanding of why he chipped and clanged and stabbed with a pike he knew was a lot more than the dead piece of gray metal.
Magic, it whispered. Or not. Perhaps the whispering came from the blood—bloods—pumped by his (vicious) heart.
Vicious, it whispered.
He stopped for a moment, pike in his inordinately large hand, his shoulder sore under the bleak, dead armor he wore. Why did his shoulder hurt? Why would he think of his armor as dead?
Magic.
Anthea looked up at him with her preternatural violet eyes. He was almost twice her height. Not quite, more or less a yard or a meter or… He did not remember his measurements. There were many, and most were not synchronous.
She was Anthea of Las Vegas, that place of dry and hot, but the black dress she wore was something wholly different.
It flickered out around her, blackness more black than the absence of light, yet all the illumination in their pit came from the dress’s shimmering obsidian sheen and its crow-feather-like refracted rainbows.
It was the absorption of all colors at the same time it reflected back darkness.
And it had a mind of its own. It made him uneasy even though he should have made her—and it—quake in their boots.
She smiled and stretched up onto her
