Chapter 21 The Door

Silas

Marian.

That was the name he had not said aloud in four hundred years.

Silas Sorrel stood in the burning ruin of his brother's son's wedding night and watched the dark above the farmyard open its throat. It had her voice. Gentle. Amused. The voice that once laughed at him across a candlelit table before the Goddess called her to the grey robes and he went to war with heaven.

Silas. Love. You took so long.

His knees gave out.

"Marian," he whispered. "You're... you're there. All this time, you were..."

Waiting. Yes. The dark leaned closer. You fed me so well, my darling. Every thread you cut, every girl you wound into your little puppets. I tasted each one. I've been so hungry.

Something cold slid down his spine.

"I only wanted to bring you back."

And you will. The voice smiled. Just not the way you think.

Odessa

I have never been so afraid in my entire life, and I had been kidnapped by a woman with mannequins.

The dark above the farmyard wasn't empty. It moved, slowly, the way the sea moves under fog. Pieces of it hung down through the broken roof like fingers testing glass. Wherever they touched, the silver threads in the walls went grey and crumbled, and I felt every one of them die, a tiny cold snap inside my own chest.

"It's eating the cocoon," Aurelia said hoarsely at my shoulder. She was fading around the edges, half in the loom, half in the kitchen. "It's using Silas's work as a door frame."

"Can it come through?"

"Not yet. It needs the seal broken or the circle finished." Her voice cracked. "But it's close, Odessa."

Evan reached me. I hadn't seen him cross the room. He was suddenly just there, burning gold at the edges, his hands closing around my face.

"Are you hurt?"

"No."

"Are you you?"

"Evan." I laughed, and it came out wet. "I'm me. I'm fine. We have a bigger problem."

"I noticed." He kissed my forehead hard and fast. "Tell me."

So I told him, as quickly as I could. The Hollow. The two women at the seal. Aurelia's mother's last secret. By the time I finished, the ring of gold around his pupils had gone almost white.

"Two women," he said.

"Yes."

"A mother-line and a daughter-line."

"That's what she says."

"No." He frowned, slowly, and I felt him listening to something inside himself. "That isn't right. He's been telling it wrong."

"Who?"

"Him." He tapped his chest. "The first one."

Finally, the old wolf rumbled, and the voice that came out of Evan's mouth wasn't entirely his. It was deeper, rougher, tired in a way that went all the way down. "Sixteen centuries. And it takes a boy with a mortgaged heart to ask the right question."

Aurelia stared. "Who is that?"

"A friend," I said. "Probably."

The wolf looked at her. His gold eyes softened by a fraction.

"Child of the thread. Your mother was wise, but she was told a half-truth, and a half-truth is the cruelest lie. The seal was never made for two women." He turned his head toward me. "It was made for a pair. One to stand at the door. One to stand beyond it. A guard and a keeper. Not mother and daughter. Mates."

The room went very quiet.

"The first Lunara and I," the wolf said. "We were the first lock. She stood in the dark between the worlds, holding the Hollow back with her thread. I stood in the light, holding the door shut with mine. And between us, the bond. The only thing strong enough to bar the way forever."

"What happened?" I whispered.

"We were happy. Then Silas's father learned what we were." The wolf's voice dropped. "He killed her. And the world has been trying to hold the door with ghosts ever since."

"Then it isn't two sacrifices," Evan said slowly. "It's one of each. A wolf and a woman."

"Yes."

"And we're already bonded."

"Yes."

"So why does it still feel like there's a price?"

The old wolf was silent for a long moment.

"Because there is," he said gently. "A seal like this isn't a spell, pup. It's a promise. And one of you must stand on the far side of the door, for as long as it holds."

My blood went cold.

"How long?"

"Until the end of the world."

Evan

I felt her go still against my chest.

Through the bond, I felt everything. Not panic. Not even grief. It was a quiet, awful settling, like a stone sinking to the bottom of a pond. She was doing the math. She'd already done it.

"No," I said.

"Evan."

"No. We find another way."

"Evan, listen to me."

"I won't."

"You don't get to decide this alone." Her fingers curled into my shirt, and her eyes were silver and steady and full of tears. "You said that to me once. Do you remember? In the garden. I'm not going to let you do this. And I said, you don't get to decide for me."

My throat closed. "That's different."

"Is it?"

I couldn't answer. She was right, and we both knew it.

"I'm not saying I'll do it," she said softly. "I'm saying I'm not going to run from it either. I'm going to look at it, and think, and choose. Not because someone lied to me. Not because I'm cornered. Because I decided."

"And if you choose to stand in the dark?"

"Then you're going to be the one holding the door."

"I can't live with that."

"You'd have to."

"Odessa."

"Evan." She smiled, and it broke my heart in half. "If I go into the dark, I won't be gone. I'll be on the other side of a door you're holding. We'll still have the bond. I'll hear you every single day."

"That's not..."

"It's not nothing."

"It isn't enough!"

My voice cracked across the kitchen. For a moment nobody breathed.

She reached up and wiped a tear off my cheek with her thumb.

"I know," she whispered. "I know. That's why we don't decide tonight."

Josh

I don't recommend cutting cursed silver wire with a dull knife.

It took me four minutes to get my hands free. By the time Mia got hers loose, I had a dozen bleeding cuts and my temper had gone completely. We stood in the farmyard in a ring of puppets who weren't moving, because they had no one telling them to. Their strings had gone dead. Overhead, the sky had gone wrong.

"Josh," Mia said. "The house."

I looked.

The farmhouse was peeling. The walls were folding back like the petals of a dying flower, and inside the opening, in the white-gold glare, I could see my sister and my best friend and a ghost, and above them something black and huge and pressed up against the roof like a bruise.

"Odessa!"

I ran.

Mia was right behind me, with Kessa's dropped sword in her hand. We hit the porch together and crashed through the front door into the hall, and for one terrible heartbeat, I saw it, the thing in the dark, and my whole body told me to run the other way.

Then I saw my sister's face.

She looked at me across the broken kitchen. She was glowing. She was crying. She was holding my best friend's hand.

"Josh," she said. "Don't be mad."

"I'm already mad. What did you do?"

"I found a third way." She wiped her eyes. "Sort of. It's a work in progress."

I stared at her.

Then, because my sister has always been the only person on earth who could do this to me, I started to laugh. A cracked, hysterical sound. Mia grabbed my arm to keep me upright.

"She found a third way," I said. "She's found a third way. The sky is trying to eat the house, and she's found a third way."

"Come here," Odessa said, and held out her arm.

I crossed the kitchen and she hugged me, and I held her tighter than I had in ten years. Over her shoulder, Evan looked at me, wrecked and sleepless and absolutely terrified, and I nodded once, the way you nod to a man who's about to step into fire.

Whatever it is, I thought, I'll carry my share.

Silas

The dark took him gently.

That was the worst part. It didn't hurt. It slid under his skin like warm water, and every thread he had ever cut, every woman he had ever kept, every puppet and prayer and four-hundred-year plan, unspooled out of him like a tapestry coming unraveled.

Marian, he thought. Please.

Hush, love.

"You said you'd come back."

I did. Didn't I? The voice was so tender. Look at me.

He looked.

There was no woman in the dark. There never had been. There was only an enormous, patient, starving thing, wearing her voice like a coat, and it had been wearing it for four hundred years.

"Oh," Silas said softly. "Oh, God."

Thank you, said the Hollow, for the door.

And Silas Sorrel, who had cut a thousand threads and never once felt the knife, felt the very last of his own pulled out of his chest in a single long, bright line.

He didn't scream. He just looked up at his daughter.

"Aurelia," he whispered. "I was wrong."

Then the light went out of his eyes, and the dark poured into the farmhouse like a tide.

Odessa

The roof came off.

I watched it go. Beams, shingles, stars, all of it peeled away into the black. The wind that came down was cold and wet and smelled like old stone. Every candle in the farmhouse blew out at once. The silver in my chest rang so loud I thought my ribs would crack.

And in the center of the kitchen, in the circle, Silas's body folded to the floor like an empty coat.

"Father!" Aurelia lunged for him. I caught her.

"He's gone."

"He's not, he can't..."

"He's gone, Aurelia." I held her. "I'm so sorry."

The Hollow had no face. It had no body. It simply filled the sky, a vast, slow, hungry dark, and in it I could hear every voice it had ever eaten. Thousands. A choir of women, whispering, begging, singing a single note in perfect, terrible harmony.

Lunara, it said, in a voice that was all of them at once. Daughter of the thread. You have been so very brave.

"Don't," I said.

Come to me.

"No."

I will make it quick. I will make it kind. The dark bent down toward me, curious. You have such a lovely heartbeat.

Evan stepped in front of me, gold fire rolling off his shoulders. Josh was on my left. Mia on my right, sword raised. And on my other side, translucent and shining and unafraid, Aurelia, daughter of the man who'd started all this, taking my hand.

"We aren't asking," I said.

I felt the old wolf rise in Evan, huge and ancient and ready. I felt the silver rise in me. And somewhere between us, in the space where our bond lived, I felt something new unfold. Not a lock. Not a seal.

A hinge.

"Evan," I whispered. "The moon."

"Yes."

"How long until it's full?"

He looked up at the torn sky. Through the void, very faintly, I could see the edge of a silver disk beginning to crest the horizon.

"Tonight," he said.

I closed my eyes.

Tonight, then.