The Nothing: A Book of the Between (18 page)

Traveling with a child provided complications. Lyssa woke crying for her daddy. Once he’d managed to soothe her, she was hungry, she was thirsty, she needed to pee. What did he know about any of this? One thing at a time, he managed to get her squared away. This meant another good-bye.

“We can’t take the elephant with us, Lyssa.”

“She has to come!” A sheen of tears in her eyes gave him warning and tightened his stomach in a knot.

“Look, child. We are going that way. Ella is not going to fit between those trees.”

“Then we don’t go that way.”

“We have to go that way. It’s the only way to go.”

“I don’t want to.” She stomped a little foot, face crumpling.

The elephant stroked her hair with its trunk, for all the world like a caressing hand, and the child turned and wrapped her arms around a front leg, clinging and sobbing.

Weston felt like a monster. Maybe Lyssa was right. There was no guarantee that this path led to Surmise. Nothing but the feeling in his gut that they needed to go that way, and that they were running out of time. Years of wilderness living, of guiding hunters on expeditions in search of dangerous trophies, had taught him to trust his gut.

“Ella has to go home to her family,” he said, after a long minute filled with tears and sniffles. “She very nicely gave us a ride, and she loves you, but she doesn’t want to go to Surmise. Do you?” he said to the elephant, trying to look up into its eye.

The elephant, he swore, gave him a condescending look. Bob flew down onto Lyssa’s shoulder and buried his beak in her hair.

Weston threw his hands up and found himself lecturing both elephant and bird. “Look—you both know I’m right. She’s not safe here. Things could shift at any minute. If you want to try to blaze a path through those trees, Ella, you just feel free. Or maybe you know another way to get to Surmise. Maybe you could help a little.”

The elephant snorted, ruffled the little girl’s hair, and then gave her a push toward the path with her trunk.

“Hey!” Lyssa said. “Cut it out.”

This time, the elephant gave her a gentle swat on the bottom.

“Ow!” Lyssa covered her bottom with her hands, scooting along the path without realizing what she was doing. The raven
kronk
ed twice and fluttered up into a tree, then flew to another farther along and
kronk
ed again. The uneasiness that had been growing in Weston’s breast burst into full-fledged knowing.

Too late. The ground began to tremble beneath his feet. He grabbed Lyssa, abandoning gentleness, and started running. She kicked and screamed and fought him, her flailing fists surprisingly effective. The shaking of the path beneath him increased, and he ran for it, flinging her up over his shoulder to leave one arm free for balance.

All along, he’d felt the threat building, just hadn’t understood what it was. Still didn’t for sure, just had an undeniable driving belief that if he didn’t run fast enough, they were going to be cut off from Surmise.

The path beneath him felt like Silly Putty, his feet sinking into what looked like solid ground and sticking, slowing him down, holding him back. He heard the elephant behind him trumpeting, the child screaming, “Ella, no!” But he didn’t stop, even when the level path ahead of him curved up into a hill.

He scrambled up it, using his one free hand to grab hold of branches and roots to help pull himself upward.

Lyssa had stopped fighting him and he shifted her again so she rested on one hip with her arms around his neck, squeezing so tight he could hardly breathe. His heart felt like it was going to burst, every breath burning in and out of his lungs. There was a stitch in his side, and his legs were cramping. He was too old for this. Probably going to have a heart attack or something, but then, miracle of miracles, he’d reached the top of the hill and there was a clear path downward, not too steep, and at the bottom he saw an opening in the trees, and a broad, paved road, and a glimpse of a castle.

There was also a dream door, open, and through it a darkness he could never have imagined. This was Lyssa’s Nothing. He knew it. And they had to get past it in order to reach safety. Down the hill he ran, as if all the hounds of hell were on his heels. He felt the sun go out, the sudden silence as the noise of every insect, every bird, every breath of wind was suddenly cut off.

A few more steps, he told himself. Just a few more.

And then his ankle turned as he stepped in a depression. Momentum and Lyssa’s unbalanced weight pulled him forward and he was unable to catch himself. He was falling toward the open door and it was sucking him in. As he tumbled forward, he got his hands on the child and flung her away from him and toward solid ground.

He felt the shift as he passed through the dream door, but where he should have struck the earth with a jolt to knees and shoulders and hands, there was only emptiness. His eyes flew open to a darkness so vast, it made midnight on one of his beloved mountains seem bright.

So many near misses, and death had caught up to him now.

His brain softened, grew foggy around the edges as even sensation faded away. The last word that stayed with him was a name.

Lyssa.

And then that, too, was gone and there was nothing.

THE UNRAVELING of the worlds tore at Isobel’s heart and teased the edges of her fragile sanity. She was not quite a Dreamshifter but should have been. Jehenna had stolen that birthright from her, along with every hope or chance for a normal life. She had just enough awareness of the unseen worlds to feel the wrongness without any ability to define the problem or engage in a solution. In Wakeworld, she had been broken and twisted, in and out of mental hospitals. She’d lost track of the number of times she had tried to stop the constant fracturing of time and place by shedding her own blood.

Surmise was the only place she was whole, and now Surmise itself was under threat. If it unraveled, then there was nothing left for her but madness or death. As for Landon, who was more to her than her own life could ever be, he was tied to Surmise in an even deeper way. He’d been born in a Dreamworld, one that Jehenna had woven into the fabric of Surmise.

He was older than he appeared, as was Isobel. Long hours in the Dreamworlds slowed their aging, and the recent demands on Surmise had required much more time out of their refuge. Isobel could feel her bones growing more fragile. Each morning, the lines in her face were deeper and there was more gray in her hair. She tracked the same process in Landon, yet the loss of eternal youth seemed a small thing in comparison to all that was wrong in the Between.

Refugees had begun to trickle in about a week before, with whispered stories of Dreamworlds gone dark, of the Between turned upside down. They came in every size, shape, and age imaginable, anything that had ever been dreamed by one person or many over the course of time. Surmise drew them with the promise that it was something more, a place not subject to the devastation falling elsewhere. So far, this had proven to be true.

Refuge, Landon made it clear, would be granted to all, but there had to be rules. Some of the wanderers did not play well with others. Saving the worlds was one thing; allowing their denizens to eat, maim, crush, or destroy those from other worlds would not be allowed. While he worried about martial law and housing refugees in a way that was least likely to result in bloodshed and disaster, Isobel was left to her own devices.

In an official capacity, she had taken it on herself to oversee food and clothing, to make sure the sick and wounded received medical care. Mostly, that meant putting good and efficient people in place to manage these things. Overseeing them was little more than a formality.

On the day everything changed, she had gone to sit in the garden by the fountain, letting her fingers dabble in the pool, listening to the endless murmur of the falling water and letting it soothe her into a state half awake, half dreaming. This was Landon’s world and was of her own creation. Dreamed into being by a lonely teenage girl with the latent power of a Dreamshifter, bound into the web that made up Surmise by Jehenna’s machinations. Aside from Landon’s arms, this was Isobel’s favorite place, and she often took refuge here to think or dream. No peace today, though, not with the ongoing lines of disharmony from the Dreamworlds.

So much danger and darkness. Vivian was out there somewhere, trying to save the worlds, while Isobel sat and did nothing. This gnawed at her, along with the constant knowledge that she had not been a good mother, whether it was her own fault or not. The daughter of a crazy woman, in and out of the hospital, always playing with sharp objects—it couldn’t have been easy. And now Vivian was the Dreamshifter, faced with the task of sorting out this mess.

Isobel’s unease on this day had reached a barely tolerable intensity, even here by the fountain. She needed to know what was happening. There was a way. It was dangerous, and she hadn’t allowed herself to pursue it since she’d found herself safe in Surmise. But it was her only access to magic. Closing her eyes, she let herself drift in the old way, her mind running along the fracture lines. That’s where the danger lay, side by side with possibility.

A darkness wound through everything. A bitter scent underlay the perfume of roses. A slight disharmony marred the sound of falling water. She could very nearly feel it swirling beneath her feet like a river made of emptiness rather than water.

The danger was closer than they’d thought.

She must tell Landon. When she opened her eyes, it was to the horror of knowing that what she felt was real. A wall of blackness approached from the far side of the garden, rolling toward her.

Her feet refused to move. She stood staring at what was coming, making no move to save herself. Helpless, as she had always been, and nobody there to protect her. It came to her that she need not always be a damsel in distress. She had no power, no magic to close doors or move among the worlds, but she had feet and a voice.

She was running before she knew she’d made a choice. Past the fountain, along the path through the rosebushes, through the weaving she could faintly feel that bound that Dreamworld into Surmise. There she stopped and turned. If the boundary didn’t hold, there was no point in running, and she wanted to stare her death in the face before it took her.

Green grass beneath her feet. Six inches in front of her toes, nothing. If she reached her hand out, she would touch it, but her whole being shuddered away from the thought. Turning her back, she walked, with dignity and purpose, away from the nightmare and into the crowded streets surrounding the castle. The sight of her running and frightened would only invoke panic.

She knew she needed to find Landon and tell him, but first she would assess the damage. There were other worlds woven into Surmise. What of those? So, she kept herself to a sedate walk, as if out for exercise, past the castle, out into the field.

A moment, she hesitated. If the field was part of a Dreamworld, just as the garden had been, it could be wiped out at any time. One foot on the grass, she felt for tremors and that sense of wrongness, for the whisper of a crossed dream barrier on her skin. It all seemed solid enough, integral to Surmise, and she proceeded across it.

About halfway across the field, when she judged herself far enough away from onlookers, she lifted her skirts and ran. On the far side, there was a main thoroughfare into Surmise that had been stable for longer than most of the paths of the Between. Five Dreamworld doors opened onto it, just outside the borders of Surmise. Fear pumping adrenaline and driving her forward, she half flew across the grass. And stopped with a cold understanding that for once, the actual danger was greater than her fear.

At the edge of the meadow, where there should have been a wide thoroughfare, there was only a wide, black emptiness. Her mind reeled away from it, from all the resonances of the darkness that had sucked at her soul during the years she had been insane. So many times she had tried to kill herself before it came for her at last, and now here it was, caught up with her. Not a mirage or a hallucination but real.

And hungry.

It wanted more. Sucking at the walls of Surmise, waiting.

It called to the darkness walled up within her, offering a complete and final end to every heartache, every worry, every broken dream or unfulfilled desire. Give them up, lay them down.

Unbecome.

Landon. Vivian. Duty to Surmise.

She ran over the litany in her head, but all of her loves seemed paler now, leached of color and warmth by what waited. Slowly, she took another step, so focused on the dark that she startled and leaped aside when a voice spoke from nearly underfoot.

“The Nothing wants you.”

Isobel looked down into the face of a child, tear-stained and grubby but calm. Wide blue-green eyes, a tangle of chestnut curls. A big black raven perched on her shoulder, and the look he gave Isobel was both inquisition and warning.

“What are you doing here?” Isobel asked. “Where are your parents?”

“The Nothing took everybody,” the child said. “Even Ella.”