But I didn’t.
I walked as if somebody else was in charge of my own body, my limbs numb, but my senses worked. I saw the darkness, and the light coming from somewhere on the otherside. I heard the footsteps and the whispers of the others as they reluctantly followed.
The corridor wasn’t long at all. It turned to the right a few feet in, and then I found myself in the strangest place yet.
A room that wasn’t a room. The ceiling was higher than it should be, then lower, then higher again depending on where I looked. The floor was made of different things—stone here, water there, grass in a patch near the back.
A metal hook sprouted from the soil in the center like it thought itself a tree.
And against that hook, on the floor, barely visible in the dim light that seeped in from our side was a boy.
Curiouser and curiouser.
Thin. Pale. Deep hollows on his cheeks. Long hair matted and dark, falling across a faceI knewbut didn’t.
His chin was square and his jaw sharp, and he looked tall, even sitting against that hook like that. He was breathing, definitely alive, and he had a name. I’d seen it written on the pages in that room.
“Silas.”
The word could have slipped out of my lips or someone else’s—it didn’t really matter. We were all thinking it. We all knew the boy, even if we didn’t.
But the boy wasn’t alone.
A blink, and it was like the view before me changed, when it didn’t. I just hadn’t noticed that, on the boy’s lap, curled like it belonged there, was a cat.
Fluffy, unnaturally still, with numbers flickering over its fur like each strand was alive.
The cat opened one eye.
Looked at all nine of us standing in the doorway with our mouths open.
“Oh.”
The cat spoke.
The catgrinned.
“You arrived early.”
15
Nobody moved—how could we?
We were frozen in the doorway of a room beyond a wall that just disappeared into thin air, staring at a boy who was barely breathing, and a cat that had just spoken.
“Did that…did that cat just…” Russ couldn’t finish his question.
The cat did.
“Talk? Yes. Quite well, in fact. Better than most of you, I’d wager,” it said, raising its head a little as its grin stretched wider than any mouth should stretch on any face, human or otherwise.
Something in my mind stabbed and screamed and burned.
“Time’s Teeth,” Mimi whispered, and she grabbed my arm so hard her nails bit through my sleeve—she had been right behind me.
“Time’s Teeth, indeed. Terribly rude of Him, too, if you ask me. Which you didn’t, but I’m telling you regardless because that’s what I do.”
A talking cat-a talking cat-a talking cat…yet I wasn’t all that surprised, to be honest.
