World Weaver (The Devany Miller Series Book 4) (20 page)

“Beyond is the last room that is locked to me. The first room the Witch King took. It houses the dreams of the living and the fantastical nightmares of the dead.” She crawled through the doorway, leaving us behind. Krosh and I exchanged glances.

“It doesn’t feel right.”

He shook his head. “Whatever it is, it’s bad.”

We held hands and followed the spider. Stark white greeted us. Floors, ceilings, walls, all gleamed bright white. There wasn’t any dust in this room, nothing to mar the unrelenting colorless room. Across from us, there was the thin, black outline of a door. It didn’t have a keyhole or a handle, or anything else to distinguish it from the rest of the wall but that thin, black outline.

“How do we get in?” I asked, my voice echoing unpleasantly in the bare room.

The Spider Queen shifted her bulk. “You must die.”

“No. Nope. I didn’t come here to sacrifice my life for you and your stupid eyeball. There has to be another way. A window. Hell, let’s break through the wall. Get in that way.” My instinct was to move away from that door and I did, taking a couple steps backward before I could stop myself.

“It is impossible. The magic of this place prevents it.”

‘I won’t do it,’ was on my lips again, but then I remembered Masette and the passion burning in her eyes, the devoted fervor. “You didn’t let her sacrifice herself for you, did you?”

“Just so. I’ve grown fond of my champion, strange as that is. I do not wish her to die for me. But she may still have to give her life for the good of this world. Otherwise, I fear the magic will break it.”

“I will do it,” Kroshtuka said, and I turned to him, already negating his words in my mind.

“No. I won’t let you die for me.”

“I would be dying for my world, not for you.” His eyes crinkled at the corners. “Though it would be for you, too.”

“Seriously, Krosh. No. You have people relying on you.” Liam. “You could care for them much better than I could. And anyway, maybe, when you think about it, this world, my world, the Slip, it would all be safer without me around.” It sounded melodramatic and maudlin and I waved my hands in the air. “Why death?”

“It is the door that cannot be passed by the living,” the Spider Queen said, as if that answered my question.

I should have brought Ty, but he had his soul now. Did that mean he was alive? Really alive? To Krosh, I asked, “Would you make it a priority to rescue Bethany? Make sure she and Liam get to stay together? Get my dad on board and all of that?”

“Of course. But I think it should be me that goes. You could hold my soul for me in safe keeping until I return.”

“It is your soul that must go through the door,” the Queen said. “The body stays behind to die.”

“How the hell does a soul carry a solid object?” I asked, picturing a very irritated me trying to pick up a ball with ephemeral hands.

“My eye is not in this place. Beyond this door lies the answers to where it is hidden.”

I counted to fifty, because the Spider Queen was pissing me off. “So, it’s not even in here, but I have to die to go in here? What’s on the other side?”

“Memories.”

Great. Just great. “The Witch King took your eye a long freaking time ago. What if it’s not even where he left it?”

“Then you will have perished for naught.”

Was it wise to kick a giant spider in the foot? Probably not. I wanted to anyway. “And what happens when I get back here?”

“Most find their bodies in decay when they return.”

I stared at the door. Where exactly was the positive in this? Oh yeah. “Most folks aren’t Originators.” I hadn’t died when Amara stripped my soul from my body. I’d become a sociopathic nightmare, but I hadn’t passed on, my soul hadn’t had any awareness. I didn’t have any memories of my time as a soul, anyway. “How would we know it was working? I mean, if I separate my soul from my body, how will my soul know what to do?”

“Your awareness will go with it. Your body will collapse.”

I didn’t think my body would die. In fact, I was pretty confident it wouldn’t. However, I didn’t want Krosh anywhere nearby, in case I was wrong and returned through the door a crazed, Originator soul wanting a body. I didn’t want to hurt him. He would have to wait below with the Spider Queen until I returned.

I hoped I returned. My fingers tightened around Krosh’s. “So I don’t have to do anything but go through this door? And then what?”

“You will witness the events that led the monster to attack me and steal my children. And then you will help me set things to rights.”

Great.

I stiffened my spine. “Wish me luck.”

I was going to need it.

***

The room was quiet and a lot larger without Krosh and the giant spider. I wondered if it was too late to call Krosh back and almost said his name before I bit down on the word. I didn’t want to put him in danger. I had to remember that.

The room was chilly, the better to preserve a body, I supposed. Goosebumps rose on my skin as I shuffled toward my doom, Kroshtuka’s promise not to come upstairs no matter how long it took still ringing in my ears. He’d also promised to care for my kids as if they were his own, a promise I had every faith he’d keep.

The door called to me, not powerful, but compelling, like the drop off a fifty-story building. It was the morbid fascination of leaning over the edge, a little voice whispering, ‘An inch more and you’ll fall. A bit more and you’ll fall and fall until you hit the pavement, until your body collapses on itself, all systems a catastrophic failure.’ Not a death wish, just a ‘what if’ moment that teased the edges of death.

All I had to do was step up to the edge. And then step off the side.

I had to take the fall.

My fingers turning to ice and, as I reached for the door, my skin paled and turned waxy.

Inch by inch or all the way? If I jumped through, did it show a lack of trying, of caring for who I was leaving behind? Did that even matter?

I didn’t have a choice. If left unchecked, the Omphalos would destroy Midia and, with it, my daughter and my son. I didn’t have a choice and yet I hesitated, not wanting to curse myself by seeming eager to die.

Who would I see beyond this door? My mom? Tom? Maybe I was confusing this with my childhood ponderings of heaven. Our family hadn’t been religious, but other kids in my class had talked about heaven and hell both with passion. One kid, Doug, had told me I was going to hell. I’d gotten mad and punched him in the nose. In the car on the way home, my father told me that hell wasn’t real, that there was plenty of evil on earth, like little girls punching people over words. He’d leveled a stare on me I’d never forgotten.

I’d apologized to Doug first thing when I’d gotten back to school, too, and never used my fists in anger again. Not until Midia and the hook and the nightmares that went along with that.

Back to the door. Back to my death. I stared, unmoving, trying to force myself forward. I didn’t want to jump. I didn’t want to fall. I also didn’t want to admit how good it sounded, that somewhere deep inside me I wished for all the hard stuff to be over.

I took a breath, then two, and when that did nothing for my calm, I ran at the wall where the outline of a door stood. I turned to ice. My heart stopped. For one frightening moment, I could not suck in air to take a breath, I could not feel my fingers or toes.

I was free.

Elated, I spun in the air—and it was all air and cerulean skies—laughing at the freedom. I was free; free of the pain and misery of being human. Free of disease and death and the thousand petty evils that humans stewed in every day.

Had this been what Jasper felt all the time? Tempered, perhaps, by the vessel he’d been in, but had he felt this light? This good?

The door I’d run through was black now, and as sad and depressing as before, perhaps more so. Beyond the doorway lay my body, pale and still. The sight of my body didn’t scare me. Why would anyone cling to their mortal flesh? Here, there was no pain, no worry. Even thoughts of my kids didn’t distress me. They were taken care of, they were well.

I was free.

Wait. Why was I here?

Thoughts of my mom, of Tom, of an empty, black socket where an eye should be floated into my consciousness. Right. I was here for the eye.

I swam this way and that, or maybe I flew. There wasn’t any up or down. No destinations, no obstacles. I thought myself forward and forward I went, though, if there wasn’t anything to get to, was I even traveling at all?

“Mom!” I shouted the word and it vibrated outward like ripples on a pond.

I didn’t get an answer. Not from her, anyway.

A familiar golden glow warmed the horizon and then Tom came into view. His face was lit up with a joy I hadn’t seen in a long time and it was with a surge of love that I found myself swimming into his arms.

“Oh how I missed you,” Tom said, the whispers of his words brushing me.

There were millions of questions I could have asked, but I distilled it into one. “How have you been? Really?”

The slightest taste of sorrow, quickly gone. “I struggled before I was murdered. I fought against death, I need you to know that. For the kids, for you. I fought. But once I was free from my body, even inside you, I only felt peace.”

Something that had been gnawing at me forever floated to the forefront of my mind. “What did Amara do to you?”

“She released me into the Source.”

“Is that where we are?” I hadn’t trusted the Originators when they said they took the souls collected by their Skriven and released them to the Source. I’d figured it was some sort of con and the souls were used or tortured somehow. Weird to think that Amara had actually spoken the truth.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Tom continued. “We can be together in a way we never were when we were alive.”

Our marriage, ruined by his infidelity and my unwillingness to forgive. None of that mattered here.

I wanted to say yes, but something niggled at the back of my mind. Not Neutria, and that made me sad. “I have to find something.”

“Here?”

“Yes. The Spider Queen’s eye.” There wasn’t any urgency, at least, not until I said it out loud. Then the importance of my quest grew. I held onto that feeling, unsure if I could get it back if I let it go. “Do you know where it might be? Or how I could find it?”

“Devany, this place is peace. Come, let me show you.”

I wanted to, so badly. I wanted to go with him and find the thing we’d lost so long ago. The bubbly elation that pricked my skin didn’t help. Nothing seemed so important as going with him to find happiness. Why couldn’t I let myself find happiness? Why couldn’t I take it by the hand when it presented itself to me? “I can’t,” I said, sorrow thrumming through me. “I have to find the eye.”

The place changed then, it darkened. The air pressed down on me and I descended, not unlike my wild ride on the Queen’s back. Gasping, I waved my arms, trying to get uplift again and failing. I was falling.

I was falling and when I looked down, the ground rushed up to greet me.

SIXTEEN

I expected pain, still holding onto the idea that I had a physical body. When agony didn’t roll through me at my sudden stop, I had only a few seconds of relief before catching sight of the madness around me.

Half-formed dog faces danced in the sky. Cats with three eyes and eight ears, people with two heads and five bodies twisted and rolled around in the clouds. The trees weren’t any better with dancing elephants or ballerinas with lizard tails frolicking in their leafy depths. Grey fish and dolphins swam in the sidewalk’s concrete.

Where the hell would I find the memory of a stolen spider’s eyeball in this mess? There weren’t any people, no one I could ask for directions, and the thought of walking on top of moving creatures made me sick to my stomach.

“Spider’s eye,” I said, half hoping something would answer me.

Nope.

“Hello?”

Nada.

What would happen if I never found the memory? Would I ever get out of here?

A glimmer of movement to my left caught my eye. A raven cawed at me, then tipped its head, waiting.

“I don’t suppose you know where the Spider Queen’s eye is, do you?”

The bird cawed again and took flight, landing a few yards away on another branch. It looked back at me then repeated the same flight/land thing.

“Great.” I stepped off the sidewalk and followed the bird, keeping my gaze firmly ahead. The raven was the best lead I had and more important, it looked normal. I needed normal.

The raven led me along a nightmare path, pausing every so often to remind big, stupid me that I needed to follow. I made it a point to focus on the bird, wanting to avoid the transcendental hallucinations around me.

The bird flew up and over a small rise and landed on a drying rack beside a circular hut. As I topped the rise, the craziness fell away and the world took on a more normal veneer. The village before me looked a lot like Odd Silver, though there weren’t any buttes along the southern edge of town.