We walk deeper into the wood. My boots squeak and crunch with every step. Dad’s boots make no noise at all. He tells me this is something I must learn. To be silent when others are not. To listen when others ignore.
Green stalks sprout from muddy ground on either side of the path. Spring is coming, and just like with every season, the wood has its own idea of how it should look. The green is neon, so bright it hurts my eyes, and the air smells cloyingly fresh, like dryer sheets.
“How much time?” he asks.
I close my eyes and concentrate. It would be easier if Dad let me wear a watch, but that was covered in lesson one. I wore my favorite Betty Boop watch in the wood that first day. The hands, which were perfectly normal-looking before passing through our threshold, spun like a pinwheel on a windy day. It made me dizzy. When we left the wood, the hands stopped spinning and wouldn’t start again. Mom took the watch to three different jewelers and none of them could figure out what was wrong with it.
“That was her favorite watch,” I overheard Mom telling Dad as I sat hidden at the top of the stairs. “You should have warned her.”
“She needs to see it for herself,” Dad said. “She needs to know.”
Now, I listen to my instincts and say, “Forty-six minutes?”
“Forty-three minutes, sixteen seconds.” He gives me a smile that is becoming all too rare. “But you’re getting closer.”
He leads me to a threshold. I know it’s ancient Egyptian, but I don’t know what it says. I’ve only just added hieroglyphics and hieratic script to my lessons.
“Thebes,” Dad answers my unasked question. “Forty-one BC.”
He takes a red Sharpie from his pocket and draws a big X over the name.
“What are you doing?”
“This one’s closed. It helps me to keep track of them.”
I remember him telling me about this on the morning of my birthday, a mug of cranberry cider warming my hands, but this is the first time I’ve actually seen it.
“It feels pretty good to knock another one out,” he says. “Don’t you think?”
“I guess.”
“Maybe someday they’ll all be crossed out, and we won’t be stuck here anymore. We could move somewhere warm. Florida maybe, or one of the Carolinas. We could live by the beach and eat fresh seafood every night. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
I smile, even though we both know it’ll never happen. “Yeah. Sounds nice, Dad.”
He puts the Sharpie in his pocket and slaps his hands together. His head tilts to the side. Listening. Always listening. “We’ve got company.”
*
The memory fades in my mind like a ghost. I walk up to a threshold, run my fingers along the X that has crossed out London, 1066. It is dark, almost brown. Nothing at all like the Sharpie Dad used.
“Sheep’s blood,” Henry says.
“How do you know?”
He shifts on the balls of his feet. “The journals. There’s a special ritual the guardian is required to observe when a threshold permanently closes. Didn’t your—”
“No,” I snap. “My dad never told me.” I shake my head at the X and murmur, “There are a lot of things he never told me.”
What made him such a pessimist? Was Grandpa like that? Were the other guardians before him? Or was Dad the exception? Maybe—No, don’t think it. But it’s too late; the thought swims through my head, burns like disappointment followed swiftly by guilt.
I don’t know for sure that using a red Sharpie instead of sheep’s blood made any difference—the thresholds are still closed after all—but I can’t help thinking that maybe Dad’s the reason all of this is happening. Maybe if he had done his job right instead of half-assed all the time, we wouldn’t be in this mess. Maybe Varo wouldn’t have found our defenses so weak.
I stare at the threshold a moment longer, then take a step back. “Come on. We don’t have much time.”
The wood changes as we go deeper. First, all the trees are bare. The trunks are black with disease, twisted and hunched. And then they’re covered in a thin sheet of ice that skitters across the path. The ice cracks wherever we step, until we walk farther and the ice has thickened—quarter of an inch, half an inch—and it no longer cracks. We slide our feet forward without picking them up to keep traction, and then we step through a curtain of snow, and the ice is covered in a fresh, powdery blanket. There is nothing but white on the path where we stand and darkness just beyond, where the trees have moved closer together, huddling for warmth. Their black branches create a cathedral over us, blocking out the sun, but that is not what makes the path ahead so dark.
A meadow of dragon’s bane shrouds the path with its white stalks and red veins and pitch-black flowers, stretching beyond the logs and into the trees. The source of the sickness.
Henry walks to the edge of the toxic meadow and drops to one knee. “This must be where they were almost…” He swallows the awful word.
“Wherever they disappeared to,” I say, “do you think they would have gone far?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know.”
Tinkling laughter echoes through the trees above us.
Henry stands. “Did you hear that?”
I nod.
Shadows pulse between the trees. They’re swift, in the corner of your eye and then gone before you turn your head. They watch us, the small flakes of sunlight that manage to break through the canopy the only thing keeping them at bay. I could almost convince myself they aren’t really there had I not already seen them and the destruction they cause firsthand.
“We should go,” I say, reaching for his hand.
“Wait.” His lips are cracked and bleeding. His breath leaves ice crystals on the top edge of his coat. “There’s something written on that tree there. Do you see it?”
I squint my eyes, but it’s too dark. “I don’t see anyth—Henry!”
He steps off the path again, and I pull out my pocketknife instinctively, not that it’ll be any help against the shadows. He stops at a tree, wiping away the fresh layer of snow dotting the ice. He blows onto the ice and wipes a circle with his sleeve.
“It looks like a code—”
A shadow circles him.
“Henry, look out!”
Henry stares at the tree a moment longer. The Sentinel dives. There’s a sharp intake of breath, and then Henry runs, stumbling back onto the path. A line of blood mars his neck.
“Nicked it on a tree branch,” he explains, pressing his hand against it,
“No, you didn’t.” The slice looks exactly the same as the one on my hand. “What you actually did was almost get yourself killed.”
“Maybe,” he says, “but I think I know where my parents are.”
My eyes widen. “Where?”
A twig snaps somewhere off the path.
“Was that you?” I ask Henry, even though I already know the answer.
“No,” he whispers.
We listen to the silence, the clouds of our breath intertwining, and then—
Footsteps crunching the snow.
“We need to leave.” I reach for Henry’s hand just as the tiny bit of sun that had been bleeding through the sky overhead blinks out.
XXXIV
“Henry!”