It’s kind of a strange ask, she’d told them over the phone.But I can try.
Standing in his personal space, Beckett had gone breathless with anticipation. Colton peered at her down the bridge of his nose. He waited.
“Ask me what else,” she finally said.
“There’s no need to build suspense,” said Colton. “Just say it.”
She huffed out a breath that sounded likefine. “It’s not Vivienne’sreflectionthat Adya saw in the mirror. It was her.”
Lane’s eyes met Colton’s. He knew what she was thinking. The last time Adya had seen someone in a mirror, he’d turned out to be dead. If Vivienne Farrow was in the astral plane, it meant she’d slipped between the skies. The moment Colton had the thought, the dark recoiled. It quivered at his feet, like some wretched proletariat.
“Colton,” said Lane, drawing his gaze. “You don’t have to go in after her.”
He thought of Liam sinking out of reach beneath him. Of the cold, interminable press of water, the painstaking plod of time in the bottomless dark. He turned his face toward the sky, one eye pinched shut against the bald yellow sun. Finally, he sighed.
“Don’t I?”
A weighted pause followed. He could feel Lane studying his profile. He held still and let her do it, ignoring the parts of him that spun and squirmed inside. He felt the most human this way, pinned beneath her scrutiny. He supposed it was because she refused to see him as anything but.
Finally, she said, “I can go with you.”
“No.” He dropped his gaze to hers. “Out of the question.”
“But—
“I need you out here,” he said. “So I can find my way back to you when it’s done.”
She’d expected to drown. To sink, choking down lungfuls of water.
Instead, Vivienne stood in a room with no end and no beginning, no light and no dark. There was, she realized, no anything, other than an absence of color and a hard, osseous floor. And there she stood, both looking at herself and outside herself, like some strange omnipresence had taken hold.
Like she was wide-awake inside a dream.
A few feet away from her stood another Vivienne. This one was four years old, dressed in a powder pink nightie, her feet stuffed into slippers. Looking at the little version of herself gave Vivienne the peculiar sense of having been cleaved neatly in two.
“Now you’ve done it,” said the tiny Vivienne, sounding furious. Inside her mouth were two rows of teeth, razor sharp. “You’ve ruined everything. We’ll never be together again.”
Vivienne stared down at her, disoriented.
The little girl stomped her foot. “I hope you’re happy.”
“She will be” came that voice like a wagon wheel. “Once you’re gone. And so will I. You’ve caused more than enough trouble.”
Vivienne spun out, searching the nothingness. Slowly, coalescing from the void, there came a boy. Broad shouldered, pale eyed, a dimple in his chin. Thomas. Vivienne fell back, alarmed.
“It’s not possible,” she gasped, and then gasped again, clutching her hand to her throat. Her voice had been smooth and clear. A honey-sweet alto. The voice she might have had, if she’d never screamed herself raw in a ravine. In front of her, the Not-Thomas smiled.
And it wasn’t Thomas, she saw that now. He seemed to break apart and pull together, parts of him going funny at the edges whenever she looked too closely. He had seven fingers on his right hand, and then she blinked and there were only three. His smile seemed to consist of two rows of teeth, but when she looked directly at his mouth, the rows became innumerable.
“Don’t think so hard,” said Not-Thomas. “The human brain cannot comprehend what I am, and so it replaces me with that which it finds most pleasing.”
“What are you?” she asked.
“Those who trickle down into my pool call me the Charybdis,” he said, “but that is not my name.”
“You’re the—” She faltered, startled by both his shifting familiarity and the ease of speaking. “You’re what lives beneath the house?”
“I lived here well before it was a house at all,” said the Not-Thomas. “Before they came and put down their foundation, they tread paths for their cattle. Before the farms, there were trees. Before the trees, there was me. I have been here since the dawn of time, sleeping happily in the mud. And I have been waiting for you, Vivienne Farrow, since the day you were born.”
