“Sorry.” The last thing I wanted was to torture the man.
“It’s possible this killer was worried you would start throwing magic right away. Maybe he wants to get you on his side so you’ll open a door for him to go through.”
“Then why have my mother send me right back through?”
“It’s about building trust. As long as he has Wesley, he knows you’ll be back.”
I snapped a crab leg and yanked out the meat a little more viciously than I would under normal circumstances. “In the scenario you’re painting, Wesley is still alive.”
“Killing Wesley doesn’t get him what he wants.”
“What if he doesn’t want me?”
“He created a trap specifically for you. What we need to figure out iswhyhe wants you.”
I dipped my crab in melted butter. Galen had thought ahead and gotten a big tub of it. He knew exactly how to coddle me. I nodded as I ate some more crab meat. It was delicious, but I couldn’t find the same joy I normally did when inhaling it.
“The obvious answer is that he wants my magic,” I said after opening the container of shrimp. “He either wants to steal it so he can escape, or he wants to motivate me to use it to save Wesley.”
“Sounds probable.”
I ate some more. “The thing is,” I said after more than a full minute of silence, “how does he think I’m going to help given what I know about his killing tendencies?”
“Maybe he killed Clive as a gift to you. He knew that Clive was your enemy. I’m sure Clive told him everything before being killed. That little weasel would do anything to save himself.”
Clive had been gone for months. That would be years on the other side. “Clive didn’t look exactly the same,” I said. “He did look older, by at least several years.”
“You said that plane is a hellscape. It could have been hard living.”
“Maybe, but I was over there about an hour. My mother said that door opened only once a day. If I’d stayed, more time would have passed. She said weeks. How long was I gone?”
“Twelve of the longest hours of my life,” he replied.
“Twelve hours.” I was bad at math. “So two hours is a day.”
Galen laughed at my struggles. “One day on the other side would be almost 300 hours on our side or twelve days.”
“Clive would have been there several years.”
“And we don’t really know how time works on that side, whether it slows or quickens at the far end of the clock, but that’s fine. Three years on a hellscape could age a man fast.”
“Right.” I ate more crab. “If that door opens once a day at the same time, why doesn’t our killer use it to cross over?”
“How do you know he hasn’t?”
“Just a feeling.”
“Then maybe he doesn’t use it because he can’t.”
“Which would mean that only witches can? Clive would have used it to get back if he could.”
“Maybe the door was created for you specifically.”
“Who made it?”
“Your mother?”
“But how did she get there?” I had so many questions and not nearly enough answers.
