“Just a little more,” the Dreamer crooned, invisible fingers stroking the inside of a Son’s skull.
Fighting to keep the god out meant you reflexively battled any breach in your mental borders, even a Dreamer’s soft, skilled touch.It meant that the amount of force necessary to dig through a Son’s head and find innocence was extreme.
And very painful.
“He’s coding,” someone said.There were other callused, ungentle hands on him now, invisible force humming through his bones, shocking his heart, forcing the dumb meat to squeeze its cargo of blood.The scar on his chest, pink and shiny, flushed a deep angry red.So did the other imperfectly healed wounds from the last forty-eight hours.“Look at that.Is that a?—”
“Sarnaki,” the Dreamer hissed, his head tipping back.“And others.All of them.Sent, not summoned.”
“Is he clear?”
Theliraishuddered, his hair rising and eyes widening.His hands darted for his face but both Youngers of his trios intervened, grabbing his arms.The Dreamer clawed at empty air, his throat swelling with a terrible, rising cry.
There were things in a Son’s head noliraiwould deal comfortably with.
The young man stiffened.Invisible force swelled and crackled in the room.One of the dreamstones on the table popped, shards flying, and a wall of Sons closed before the vulnerable, bow-archedlirai.His feet, in glittering red high-top sneakers, drummed the tile floor, and his trios grabbed whatever they could reach of him—Fathers, Elders, and Youngers all seeking to bleed off the excess force, to comfort and restrain.
The Dreamer’s cries were white birds above a golden shore, ringing like crystal bells.Erik’s spine curved, crackling as a convulsion hit, and he began to scream as well, a low, guttural cry rising behind the Dreamer’s, both repeating over and over in strange, disjointed tandem.
“Liv!Liv!Liiiiiiiiiiiv!”
Value of Normal
This place boreas much resemblance to the other stone houses as the Louvre did to a roadside tourist trap.The lights were bright, the sconces expensive, the carpets plush, the hardwood drenched with beeswax and polish, and it was full of quiet activity, grim-faced men hurrying back and forth on booted, whisper-quiet feet.Even the empty halls they carried her through—as if she couldn’t walk on her own—somehow managed to give an impression of being full, though you could have heard a pin drop in the hush while she babbled on and on.
When she was finally carried through a sitting room, into a bedroom, and deposited on a solid wooden chair with high carved finials as well as an entirely inadequate horsehair cushion, she was beginning to think Erik had, after all, made a mistake.And it only got worse when the questioning started.
“It wasn’t him,” Liv insisted, knowing she sounded like the poster girl for Stockholm syndrome and not caring a single bit.“Hesavedme.If it was him, he would have given me to the monsters.Christ knew he had…” She rubbed the heel of her hand against her forehead, scrubbing hard as if the pressure would give her the right words to make them see.“He had enough chances,” she finished, lamely.“They all did, I suppose.”
This suite was much larger than the ones at the old place, and the curtained, rumpled bed was draped with wine-red velvet.The sitting room looked very Louis Quatorze, a walk-in closet the size of a small apartment was stuffed to the brim, and there weretwobathrooms, one with the door half-open showing the edge of a clawfoot tub that looked older than Liv and her mother combined.The windows were the same as the other stone houses, though, mullioned to within an inch of their lives, and she couldseethe shimmer over them clear as day.
Protection.Magic.
Had the other place been crawling with that gleam too, and she just hadn’t noticed it?Her skin shrank from harsh still air, the light stung her eyes, and even though everything was different here, the man questioning her looked a little like Ignatius.
It was around the eyes, mostly, and the way he moved, upright and efficient, no motion wasted and his signet giving a bright, bloody gleam every once in a while.He paced before the empty fireplace—bare, scraped clean, and big enough for Liv to crawl into—until the woman glanced at him.Then he stopped dead, even though she didn’t say a word.
She was tall, with a mass of long dark hair flowing in soft glossy ripples down her back.She’d obviously been shaken awake in a hurry, because her eyelids were sleepy as a tired child’s and that amazing hair was mussed.She was wrapped in an honest-to-God blue and gold patterned kimono over silk pajamas—and not the cheap kind, either.Both kimono and pajamas looked handmade, and her light-brown skin had the kind of sheen you only got with incredibly expensive skincareandgood genetics.Heroneiroswas heavy, its sharply geometric setting almost barbaric, but it probably didn’t scratch her soft skin either.
It was enough to make Liv, rumpled and dirty and monster-chased, want to scream.If there hadn’t already been so much to yell about, that was.
“Nevertheless.”The greying man stood to attention, his hands now clasped behind his back like Ignatius—was Liv actuallymissingthe old man?And cocky, self-assured Jake, too?
She wasn’t exactly sad about making them fetch her books and other listed items, or about trying to escape.But she hoped like hell they were okay.
“What Albert’s trying to say is that we’re not ruling anything out.”The woman—Sara—settled in the chair across from Liv’s.It was warm enough in here to melt the snow in Liv’s hair and any residual chill out of her bones as well; Sara’s bare feet had some great pedicure action going on.Her toenail polish matched the couth pink on her fingernails, and both were buffed to a high gloss.“They believe in being very careful when it comes tolirai.”
Yeah, I noticed.“Look.”Liv gripped the arms of her own highly carved, not very comfortable chair.If the table wasn’t rosewood she’d eat her nonexistent hat, and the chairs looked like antiques as well, with their wine-red horsehair cushions.If they were going to keep her in here, maybe she could use the furniture for firewood.Send up smoke signals.Something,anything.“They kidnapped me, all right?I’m really mad about that.But there are the goddamn monsters, okay?There was the squid thing coming through the window and the spiders in the hall, and they all got beat upreallybad getting us out of there.Then the car blew up, and then theothercar blew up, and it was just Erik and me.He took me to the place Ignatius said, but it was closed up?—”
Sara glanced at the older man, who stirred.“Rochester, my lady.”
“Shuttered for twelve years.”Sara looked at the door to the sitting room.There was an overstuffed fainting couch in there, embroidered withpineapples, of all things.“Or is it thirteen?”
“Thirty-seven, my lady.”It should have been funny, but the way Albert said the last two words was deadly serious and utterly respectful.Liv had hung out with a few Renaissance Faire types in college, but they’d always sounded faintly self-conscious sayingmy lordthis, my ladythat.
This guy definitely didn’t.
“Time gets strange in here,” Sara murmured, and shook her head.“But if this Ignatius was working from old information, it could make some sense.”
