She taps the deck, then flips the top card over. When she makes a humming sort of sound, it seems to connect to some kind of tuning fork in me. I don’t like it.
Her eyes shift to something far brighter than mere indigo. “It’s something in the stars,” she tells me, as if she’s looking at those stars herself. From inside this little room with covered windows. “A doorway. A window, maybe. And it’s closing, fast. But it’s not closed yet.”
“I don’t remember there being any windows in that temple,” I mutter. Not that I investigated it closely, but we all saw it hovering around in midair, practicallysingingwith all its bad energy.
Even remembering it makes my stomach clench.
Winter shifts on the couch beside me. She’s sitting with her legs crossed, frowning down at the cards in her hands as she shuffles and then flips over another. “You have a target on your back,” she tells me. “You know that. It just got bigger.”
“I have a number of extremely cool tattoos on my back,” I contradict her. “Not a single target among them, thank you.” She lifts her head and blinks at me. “When don’t I have a target on my back, Winter? People are either going to come for me or they won’t. I’m not going to lose sleep about it.”
“I might,” Winter retorts. “I have.”
We hear the back door creak open, and then the telltale signs of Briar moving around in the kitchen. The sound of the cereal cabinet opening and shutting. The sound of cutlery in a ceramic bowl. The refrigerator door. But neither one of us calls out. Or makes any move to go into the kitchen.
We sit there in silence, watching each other, until the back door creaks shut.
It’s quiet again. I can hear Briar’s footsteps outside, and it sounds like she’s muttering to herself as she heads back in the direction of her cottage. Possibly she’s muttering about the cold out there. Or maybe she likes to move about with a mantra on her lips. Hard to say.
Winter makes a sound when I look back at her. “I don’t want to scare her.”
“Yeah.”
When we get quiet once more, I wonder if we’re both imagining what that would be like. To be ignorant of all the things going on in this valley, all the time. To be able to carve out some kind of life in these strange days that feels relatively normal.
I daydream about it a little. I think Winter does too.
We’re still sitting there when Ariel and Ty return. I notice that Ariel is now capable of simply appearing inside Winter’s house, meaning he has that full-access invitation. More interesting in this moment isthat he did that puff-of-smoke thing he doeswithTy, who looks both disgusted and faintly outraged to have been transported in this manner.
Savi is nowhere to be seen.
“The lake looks the same but feels wrong,” Ariel tells us. Ty only glares. “The sorceress has retired to her lair to see if she can find the right spells to determine what’s wrong.”
“She’s freaking out,” Ty grunts.
“We’ll run patrols,” Ariel says, exchanging a look with Ty, indicating they’ve come to some kind of agreement between them on that. “But until the sorceress can ascertain what has happened, we can otherwise only wait.”
Ty shakes his head. “It’s not right up there,” he says. He and Ariel exchange another look. “Something’s up, and it’s not good.”
I think of that early-morningshakingI felt and hold back a shiver.
There’s nothing else to be done, so Ty and I go back to the den. I think we might forget about our troubles in one of our preferred fashions, but instead he’s called away immediately to consult on matters that I know he’ll tell me about later. Yet protocol demands I pretend I don’t know what’s happening while it’s actually happening.
Maybe this is as close as I get to my fantasy about what Briar’s life must be like. All that blissful ignorance—but if it is, I hate it.
I lie in Ty’s bed and stare at the carved rock ceiling. I remind myself that you can’t change everything in one day. Not even on the solstice.
In the morning, what’s wrong about Crater Lake is clear, and we don’t need Savi’s spells to figure it out.
It’s flooding. And fast.
The water from the lake is draining, pouring out, and rolling downhill.
And pretty much everything is downhill from Crater Lake.
This time, the tense meeting of the valley’s three powers takes place at Ariel’s mixed martial arts school in downtown Medford.
We take the bike again. Ty navigates his way through piles of debris and shuffling zombies—both actual zombies and the crowds of drug addicts who haunt what’s left of the city center. The same vacant eyesand imperviousness to the condition of their bodies, the weather, the danger they’re in at any given moment, and everything else.
