My mother couldn’t have looked more shocked if she’d found out I was sleeping with half the Ashford High football team and smoking crack between touchdowns.
I gave her my most reassuring look. She flinched. Apparently what I considered reassuring lately came off a little … savage, I guess. “It’s been a rough few months, Mom,” I said defensively. “I’ll explain it all later. Let my parents go,” I told the LM. “I’ll cooperate fully. You have my word.”
“I do not require your word. I have your last living relatives. Being of such finite duration, humans care deeply about such things. Alina told me her parents died in a car wreck when she was fifteen. Yet another lie. Makes one wonder, does it not? I would never have thought to look for them had you not led me here.”
How had I led him here? How had he followed me to Ashford? Could he track V’lane? Was V’lane duplicitous? Working with the Lord Master? “They’re not my relatives,” I said coolly. “My relatives are dead. When you killed Alina, you wiped out the last of my line, except for me.” I was hoping to make my parents’ value seem a little less than it really was. It always worked in the movies. “We were adopted.”
I snatched a quick look at my mom, even though I knew I shouldn’t. Her eyes shimmered with unshed tears. Great. She disapproved of everything about me, and now I’d hurt her feelings. I was batting a thousand.
The Lord Master didn’t say a word. Just walked over to my dad and slammed him in the face with his fist. My daddy’s head snapped back and blood spurted from his nose. He gave a dazed shake, and his eyes said, Get out of here, baby.
“All right!” I shouted. “I lied! Leave him alone!”
The Lord Master turned back to me. “Mortality is the consummate weakness. It shapes your entire existence. Your every breath. Is it any wonder the Fae have always been gods to your kind?”
“Never to me.”
“Drop your weapons.”
I let my automatic slip to the ground, yanked the pistol from the back of my pants, dropped the switchblade from the cuff of my jacket, and extracted a knife from each boot.
“The spear.”
I stared. If I tried to throw the spear the forty feet that separated us, what good would it do? Even if I hit him dead in the heart, he was part human and wouldn’t die right away. I had no doubt at least one of my parents would be dead seconds after I’d thrown it, if not both.
Stall, Barrons had said.
I pulled the spear from my holster and slid it from beneath my coat. The moment I uncovered it, it crackled and sparked, shooting jagged white charges into the air. Alabaster, it blazed with almost blinding luminosity, as if drawing power from the Fae realm around it.
I couldn’t make my hand let go of it. My fingers wouldn’t unclench.
“Drop it now.” He turned toward my mother and drew back his fist.
I snarled as I flung the spear away from me. It lodged in the wall of the sleek pink tunnel. The fleshy canal shuddered, as if with pain. “Leave. Her. Alone,” I gritted.
“Kick away the weapons and show me the stones.”
“Seriously, Barrons said not to.”
“Now.”
Sighing, I withdrew the stones from the pouch and peeled back the velvet cloth they were wrapped in.
The reaction was instantaneous and violent: The tunnel spasmed, moaning deep in its wet walls, and the floor shuddered beneath me. The stones blazed with blue-black light. The walls contracted and expanded, as if laboring to expel me, and suddenly I was blinded by baleful light, deaf to all but the rushing of wind and water. I squeezed my eyes shut against the glare. There was nothing to hold on to. I clutched the stones, trying to cover them, and nearly lost the velvet cloth to the gale. My backpack banged against my shins and was torn from my grasp.
I howled into the wind, calling for my parents, for Barrons—hell, even for the Lord Master! I felt like I was being ripped in ten different directions. My coat was being torn from my shoulders, rippling in the hard breeze. I struggled to shove the stones back into the pouch.
Abruptly, all was still.
“I told you,” I growled, keeping my eyes closed, waiting for the retinal burn to fade, “Barrons advised against it. But did you listen? No.” There was no answer. “Hello?” I said warily. Still no answer.
I opened my eyes.
Gone was the pink membranous canal.
I stood in a hall of purest gold.
Gold walls, gold floors—I tipped my head back—gold that stretched up as far as I could see. If there was a ceiling, it was beyond my vision. Soaring, towering golden walls to nowhere.
I was alone.
No Lord Master. No guards. No parents.
I looked down, hoping to find my gun, knives, and backpack.
There was nothing but smooth, endless gold floor.
I glanced at the walls, searching frantically for my spear.
There was no glint of alabaster to be found.
In fact, I realized, as I turned in a slow circle, there was nothing on those gold walls at all except hundreds, no, thousands, no—I stared; they went all the way up, vanishing beyond my vision—billions of mirrors.
Trying to absorb it, I tasted infinity. I was a minuscule dot on a linear depiction of time that stretched endlessly in both directions, rendering me of utter and absolute inconsequence.
“Oh, shit, shit, shit.”
I knew where I was.
The Hall of All Days.
I have no idea how long I sat.
Time, in this place, would become an impossible thing for me to gauge.
I sat in the middle of the Hall of All Days—knees tucked up, staring down at the golden floor because looking around made me feel small and vertiginous—trying to take stock of my situation.
Problem: Somewhere out there in the real world, in my living room, in Ashford, Georgia, the Lord Master still had my parents.
I imagined he was seriously pissed off.
It wasn’t my fault. He was the one who’d insisted I show him the stones. I’d cautioned against it. But fault was as irrelevant as my presence in this vast, indifferent place of all days.
He still had my parents. That was relevant.
Hopefully, Barrons was even now speeding his way to them through the reconfigured Silver in his study, and hopefully his comrades were storming in through the mirror at 1247 LaRuhe, and hopefully that slippery pink tunnel that had too closely resembled a portion of the female anatomy for my comfort was still intact and I had merely been expelled by its labor pains, and hopefully within moments my parents would be safe.