Chapter 27
Love Conquers All
Theringslidesontomy finger.
The world ends.
Not dramatically. Not with fire or sound or any of the things you might expect. Just a sudden absolute wrongness, a sensation like stepping off a kerb you didn’t know was there, and then the bedroom is gone and there is nothing where it used to be except a sensation of darkness.
I keep my eyes closed.
This is the most important thing. Fiend said it, and I heard him and I am keeping my eyes closed. Whatever is here, whatever the Shadow Realm is made of, I am not going to look at it. I am going to stand in it blind and trust the thing in my chest that has been pointing towards Hex since the night he first appeared in my bedroom.
The cold arrives next. Not Hex’s cold, not that particular winter clarity I’ve spent weeks learning to find reassuring. This is something older and deeper, the cold of a place that has never been warm and doesn’t understand the concept. It goes straight through my skin as if I’m not there at all and settles somewhere in my chest and stays.
The ground under my feet is wrong. Not unstable exactly, but uncertain. The gravity is slightly off, pulling from an angle thatisn’t quite down, as if the Shadow Realm has strong opinions about which direction things should fall and those opinions don’t entirely align with mine. I plant my feet carefully and breathe.
In. Out.
I follow my heart.
That is not a metaphor. Or rather it is, but it’s also a literal navigational fact, because there is a direction in my chest that is not north or south or any compass point with a name, and it is pulling me forward with the gentle insistence of something that knows exactly where it’s going even if I don’t. The bond. Stretched thin, flagging, but still there. Still holding.
I follow it.
The air around me is thick with something that isn’t quite mist and isn’t quite smoke. I can feel it moving against my skin when I walk, the particular sensation of passing through something that doesn’t want to be passed through. It smells of nothing. The complete and total absence of smell, which is somehow worse than any smell there could have been.
Then the whispering starts.
Not words, at first. Just sound. The suggestion of voices at the very edge of audibility, layered over each other in frequencies that don’t quite resolve into anything I can interpret. But they know I’m there. I can feel that. The whispering has a quality of attention to it, a turning towards, the way a room changes when everyone in it looks at the same thing at once.
I keep walking. Eyes closed. Following the thread.
The whispers get louder.
Words, now. Or things shaped like words, pressing against the edge of meaning without quite breaking through.Turn back. Turn back. Turn back. Not threatening exactly. More like a recording of a warning, played on a loop by something that doesn’t understand what warnings are for, only that they are supposed to stop things from continuing.
I continue.
The ground dips unexpectedly and I stumble, catching myself, arms out in the dark, and for one terrible instant, the instinct to open my eyes and see what I’m about to fall into is overwhelming. I breathe through it. I think about Hex running out of time.
I keep going.
The voices multiply. NotTurn backanymore. Something more personal now, as if the realm has taken a closer look at me and decided to be specific.He doesn’t need you. You’re just a human. You don’t belong here. You can’t save him. You’re too small. Too ordinary. Too late.
None of it is wrong, exactly. I am just a human. I am quite ordinary. I might be too late.
None of it is enough to stop me.
Something touches my arm.
I make a sound. I will not pretend otherwise. I make a sound and I stop walking, and every instinct I have fires simultaneously, the overwhelming primal certainty that there is something right next to me that I cannot see and I need to see it right now.
I do not open my eyes.
I stand very still in the cold dark with whatever it is at my arm and I think about Felix asleep on my sofa. I think about Fiend perched on the desk chair with that look underneath the theatrics, that desperate pleading look that he was far too proud to voice. I think about Night sayingyou’re stronger than you know.
Then I think about Hex in the kitchen at four in the morning sayingI’m not ready to leave.
