“Sincenow. What is the dirt for?”
That smarmy smile of his is back as he relaxes into his chair. “It’s a conduit. It runs between worlds, through this world, all over the place, actually. You can go anywhere you want in the dirt, Ryet. And you don’t even have to move.” He taps his head. “It’s all up here.” He pauses again, eyes practically twinkling. “Of course, there is…a catch.”
I open my mouth to reply, but he’s gone. Like he was never sitting in that chair in the first place. Or… maybe… like hewashere and he just ran out of time.
Was he not an illusion? Was that really him? Is being stuck in the purple like being in the dirt? Only he’s unable to come out of it?
I get up and start pacing the room, my boots thudding on the wide-plank hardwood floors.
If so, this whole purple thing doesn’t sound like much of a punishment. He can come and go places as… what? A ghost? Not a ghost. Ghosts are dead people. He’s not dead, he’s just stuck. So he comes and goes as a… well, I don’t have a word for that. A kind of energy, maybe.
Of course, being pure energy has its limitations. Maybe he can’t hang around for long because he runs out of energy. Maybe it costs him a lot to come visit me like this, so being corporeal is a need. So he can affect the real world.
It makes sense, in a vampire way, I guess.
I blow out a long breath as I walk into the bedroom to check on Syrsee. She looks the same. Sweaty, pale, and unconscious. I sit down next to her on the bed, bite my palm, and then trickle the blood past her lips. After about a minute of this, she swallows. And I wait—like I do every single time—to see if this is the limit. To see if we’ve crossed some kind of threshold. To see if this is enough to wake her up.
It’s not.
So my next decision isn’t really a choice, it’s a foregone conclusion.
I get up, take off my clothes, then go down to the tunnel that leads to the root cellar. The whole passage has been torn up at this point. It’s nothing but dark, rich, loose earth. And not only does it feel soothing under my bare feet, it smells pretty fucking good too.
Not really sure how this whole dirt road thing works, I figure I must be on the right track if all my instincts are telling me to just lie down in the hole and cover myself up. So that’s what I do. And as soon as I’ve got a good layer of it over me, I feel better. Like I’ve been carrying a weight and I just put it down.
I’m not completely covered and my face isn’t covered at all, but I begin to wonder what would happen if I was truly immersed in the earth. And for long periods of time, the way Paul does it.
It’s not something I’m going to try now. How would I breathe? Do I need to breathe? I have so many questions and the only way to get answers is to initiate this conduit through the purple that vision-Paul was talking about.
I don’t know how one might do that, but I am pretty familiar with dreamwalking. And the moment I think this, I close my eyes and there it is. The lavender mist, floating all around me. Only I’m not lying down in a hole, I’m standing in the middle ofthat forest. The winter one where I saw Paul sitting on the fallen tree trunk while holding that baby.
And then there he is, minus the baby—naked and covered in dirt, just like me.
He just stares at me for a long moment. It’s unsettling because normally this stare would be accompanied by the smarmy smile, and this time he’s not smiling.
“What’s wrong? Why are you looking at me like that?”
He lets out a breath, and with it comes a small smile. But the tone of his voice is different. It’s not that fake congeniality, but low, and deep, and serious. “I just… I can’t believe it worked. Do you have any idea how long I’ve been trying to make this happen?”
“Hundreds of years?”
“Yes. Hundreds of years. It was Syrsee who made it happen. Well”—he sighs—“it was all of us. Me, Josep, the Darkness. And reluctantly, I have to give Lucia credit as well. She was the origin witch for Syrsee’s bloodline, after all. Of course, I’ve used the blood of every single Black witch I’ve ever tasted since landing in America for that purpose as well. But without Lucia, we wouldn’t have been able to create a new strain.”
“New strain ofwhat?” He’s calm and sounding very rational. But I’m not. And this question comes out with a lot of anger and pent-up frustration.
“Of…” He pauses, like he’s struggling to find the right word. “Of…sustenance, Ryet.”
“Sustenance? What a gross word, Paul. She’s not food.”
Paul doesn’t even argue with me. Just kinda shrugs his shoulders. Then redirects the conversation away from Syrsee with another question. “What do you think of them?”
“Them? Could you be any less specific?”
“The wings, Ryet. What do you think of the wings?”
I look over my shoulder and find that they are complete and all the bones have been covered with a thin grayish-purple membrane. I raise one shoulder and the corresponding wing flutters a little. I can suddenly feel all the new muscles along my back that control this movement. Then I redirect my attention back to Paul. “What are they for?”
He tilts his head at me, like he doesn’t understand the question. “What?”
