Though after a second, he followed her anyway. He climbed into the passenger seat, and Pod scampered over her shoulder to the back, and now all that was left was doing this thing. “Okay, you ready? Here we go. Turning the engine on,” she said, as she reached for the key that still somehow sat in the ignition.
And of course got a snort of near derision from Seth. “But there’s no engine to turn on. I don’t see why you need to do that. It should just go—” he started to say. But he got no further than that. The car cut him off the moment she turned the key. And not with an ordinary engine sound, either. Oh no, this was something else. This was a ground-shaking roar, of the sort you might hear coming out of an enormous dinosaur.
Seth actually jumped, and squeezed her leg.
She was so stunned she couldn’t even react to the squeeze.
And it wasn’t just the engine noise that stunned her. It was a great kaleidoscope of about five thousand wild things happening, all at once. The entire dashboard lit up in colors no dashboard would ever have been allowed to display. Purples and neon greens and bright blues washed over their faces, as brilliant as a goddamn disco.
With the soundtrack to match.
The ancient tape deck actually fired up, alongside the rest of the car. It made that weird reversing sound she remembered from her mom’s old stereo, then suddenly the entire interior was full of incredibly loud music.Recognizablemusic. “Take on Me,” she thought it was, as those weird horns piped the central tune. And sure enough, a second later, Morten Harket was singing the words.
Hell,Sethwas singing them.
“I’ll be coming for your love, okay,” he belted out—and so exuberantly, so full of astonished laughter, that it was infectious. She found herself laughing and singing too, as she pressed her foot down on the gas.
And then they were in the sky.
Her, and Seth, and their newly adopted raccoon son.
In their flying eighties disco of a car.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
She kind of believed that Seth was messing with her when he pointed out a place to land. Because as far as she could see, there wasn’t any building in sight. Just a great, grassy hill, like a giant’s knee, surrounded at its base by trees. Though she listened anyway, and began to urge the car down. She pressed on the brakes, and the thing started drifting toward the crest of the hill.
But that didn’t get the response from Seth she expected.
“No god, not in the middle,” he gasped, and grabbed the wheel to steer her toward the trees. And it was only once they were safely on the ground, nestled between two oak trees, that he sighed with relief, and tried to explain. “Sorry, I should have been clearer. The house isn’t actually here.”
“Well, then, why are we landing? And what did you panic for?”
“Because I meant that you just can’t see it.”
“So you’re saying it’s invisible.”
He made anot reallyface as she turned off the engine. “Kind of. It’s more like it exists somewhere else, but it can be accessed from our world. So that’s what we all call it: the House That Isn’t Here. Supernatural creatures and beings use it as a kind of meeting place. Sometimes they might live here for a time. A few have offices here, storage rooms, that kind of thing,” he said, at which point Cassie thought two things:you really should have told me about the interdimensional building before I plunged us into total spooky darkness, andoh mygodare we going in there to steal from Cthulhu?
“So the stuff we’re going to getbelongsto someone?”
“It does. But don’t worry. We can write an IOU.”
“That sounds dubious in the extreme,” she said.
And Pod seemed to agree from the back seat.No go, no go, she heard him say. Seth had to hiss at him to shush—and he did. But only after she reached back and held his little hand. And after he’d called Seth anugly beefhead.
Which made her have to smother a giggle, as Seth sighed heavily and tried to continue. “I promise it’s not. An offer like that from a witch is worth a lot.”
“Yeah, I can imagine it is if they’re gonna ask me to make them a death ray.”
“They’re not gonna ask that. It’s up to you to decide what you give in return.”
“That seems like a weird system. I could give them a fart in a jar.”
“Are you going to, though?” He glanced at her through the darkness. She knew he did, because his eyes gleamed just a lit tle more than usual. They looked like mirrors catching light that wasn’t actually there; like glass at the bottom of a deep lake.Beautiful, she thought, and promptly forgot what she was supposed to be saying.
She had to fumble her way back to it, through a sudden wave of that syrupy feeling. But she got there, she got there. She felt the answer to what he’d asked, sure as anything:no, what I give in return will instinctively be commensurate.
