Mom calls to check up on me at lunchtime. I promise her I’m taking care of myself, and that I’m actually feeling a little better, which is a complete lie—I feel a million times worse than when I woke up this morning. I want to ask her if Dad kept a journal, if he kept more secrets from me than I realized, but that would only make her suspicious. I’ll ask her when she gets home, as if it’s just a random thought I had while lying around sick instead of the important, potentially life-altering question it really is. Mom tells me a faculty meeting popped up at the last minute, but that she’ll be home with all the ingredients for her famous chicken soup by six thirty.
After we hang up, I make Henry a sandwich and tell him he can stay in the attic if he likes, but only until six, at which point he’ll need to hide himself in my room and dart into the closet if anyone other than me comes barging through my bedroom door.
I need to clear my head. I take a quick shower, hot water gliding over my skin, loosening the ever-present knots in my shoulders and along my spine. I’m too wired to stand still long enough to dry my hair, so I don’t even bother with it before entering the wood.
The leaves are so brilliant with the afternoon sun reflecting off them, a cathedral of red and gold diamonds stretching above my head as far as I can see, that I can do nothing but stop and stare for a moment. It is not the first time I’ve seen this sight, but it’s beautiful and tragic all at the same time. Beautiful because the leaves are crystallized fire, undulating in the breeze; tragic because they are fleeting. Beautiful because they’re here; tragic because Dad isn’t.
A branch lies across the path. I kick it away. It rolls five feet ahead of me and stops. I kick it again.
I will not turn into my dad, laughing off my job on my best days, drinking until I lose consciousness on my worst. Of course, that was only near the end, and I wonder—if he did have a journal, would I be able to go through it now and pick out the entry where everything changed? The day when my father began to drink more than he should have? The day he started to pull away from us? From the wood? It had happened so gradually, but there had to be an inciting moment.
Happy people don’t just hit the bottle for no reason.
I’m getting closer to knowing what happened to him—I can feel it deep in my guardian bones—and, for the first time, I’m not sure I want to know.
I find only one traveler in my sector: St. Petersburg, 1917. He’s well dressed in a military uniform, with gold braids that fall from his shoulders and shiny gold buttons on his coat. He has a brown beard and kind blue eyes and I fear he may be a Romanov, or tied to them somehow. I want to warn him what’s coming, but I don’t. I can’t. So I send the man back to St. Petersburg and, possibly, to his death at the hands of a revolution.
Sometimes, this job really sucks.
I don’t keep track of the time—I just walk and walk, until finally my stomach twinges and I realize the light is dimming. I head back toward my threshold, wondering if I should start keeping a journal like the guardians before me. Wondering why I never questioned Dad about it, why it never struck me as odd that we had all this archived material we could access, but we weren’t leaving anything new behind for the next generation.
Boot steps, soft as rain patter, echo off the trees. I whip my head toward the sound. My first thought is of Uncle Joe. I don’t feel any travelers, and as far as I know, guardians have never left their own sectors to enter someone else’s. But the person who appears in front of me, gliding through the trees, a long, black cloak billowing around his legs, isn’t Uncle Joe. His collar is turned up so I can’t see his face, but a cloud of birch-white hair covers his head.
My instincts tell me something is wrong, but I have a job to do, so I call out to him. “Sir?”
He stops, then slowly turns, revealing an ancient face like withered stone and pale amethyst eyes. And that’s when I realize he isn’t standing on a path.
He’s inside the wood.
We stare at each other, the old man as transfixed by me as I am by him.
My voice fails me. I clear my throat and try again. “Wh-who are you?”
He doesn’t answer. Instead, he cocks his head at me, then claps his hands together. Thick tendrils of obsidian smoke curl out from his palms. He whispers something in the language of the Old Ones, but I’m too far away to make it out. The smoke turns into a pillar, tangling itself in the branches above us, choking out the last golden rays of sunset.
The old man meets my gaze and utters one clear word.
“Tierl’asi.”
Shadows peel themselves from the bark of the trees surrounding me, amorphous blobs that turn into vaguely human shapes with bloated heads and rows of gleaming white teeth.
Sentinels.
The path buckles under my feet. The trees twist and sway, their branches bending and reaching for me. It’s just like my nightmare. The wood has turned from day to night in a matter of seconds, but this isn’t a dream. This is real.
I run.
Shadows swim past me as the path dips and bucks beneath me, so that one moment I’m slamming my foot too hard against the ground, sending shooting pains up my shins, and then the next I’m falling, down, down, down to meet the path. I grip my coin between my fingers.
Joe, I scream in my thoughts. I need you!
The wood creaks and groans around me, a starving thing hungry for blood. A branch cuts across the path. I veer out of the way just in time, so that it gets caught in the edge of my shirt, slicing away a piece of fabric instead of my skin.
I glance over my shoulder, but I can’t see anything past the wall of shadows bearing down on me. I force my eyes forward and—
Smack into a tree.
No, not a tree. A person. I stumble back, reaching for my knife.
“Win, it’s me.” Uncle Joe grabs me by the shoulders, his eyes widening as he takes in the scene behind me. “My God,” he whispers. “It’s him.”
“Who?” I try to turn back, but Joe pushes me ahead of him, screaming at me to run. He follows behind me, whispering spells in his ancient language. The smoke that had curled over the wood’s canopy shatters like a mirror, raining down on us in chips of glass. I hit the ground, covering my head, but the glass turns to black dust and covers the ground like snow.
The sunlight returns. The Sentinels scream, a piercing sound that echoes off the trees as they disappear into hollowed-out logs and dark cubbyholes. The darkness. This is what the French traveler was talking about. This was why he didn’t want to be in the shadows. They can’t cross over into the sunlight. Even now, when the sun is faded and low on the horizon, it’s enough to keep us safe. I lean my hands on my knees and take deep, shuddering breaths.
“Who the hell was that?” I wheeze.
“Varo,” Uncle Joe says. “He’s back.”
XX
“What do you mean he’s back? I thought he was banished!”
“He was.” Uncle Joe rubs his hand over his mouth, his head shaking back and forth like he can’t make sense of it. “He must have found some way to return.”
“Is he behind what’s happening in the wood?”
“I don’t know,” Joe says. “But I’m going to find out.”
“What can I do to help?”
“You can go home and wait until I have more information.”
My jaw drops. “That’s it? Go home and be a good little girl?”