The Mirrored Shard

10 Deadlands

I LAY ON A road, paved in crushed white shells that poked into me every which way. I got up and brushed myself off. My skin was gray and I felt no heartbeat in my chest, nor air drawn into and out of my lungs. My soul was here, covered in the white dust. My physical body, I hoped, was still suspended somewhere in Chinatown, between life and death, and relying on Conrad, Cal and Chang to bring me back before I became permanently attached to the Deadlands and my body withered away, devoid of everything that made me Aoife Grayson.

I turned in a slow circle, examining the landscape. The road wound through black sand, a switchback snake as far as I could see. Red clay mountains rose to the east; their plateaus and spires looked as if real mountains had melted, peaks and valleys turned to slurry. In the other direction, I saw the faint outline of a distant city wreathed in noxious green-yellow smoke. I could hear the faint whine of air-raid sirens.

Some sort of bird with leathery wings and stained white feathers flew low over me and landed with a squawk on a lumpy object at the edge of the road.

I flinched when I realized that the object it perched on was a body, bloated with decay and covered with drab brown rags. A little farther away, I saw a wheeled caravan, the type pulled by horses, burned out and on its side. Picked-over bones scattered across the sand told me what had happened to the rest of the passengers.

Looking between the city and the mountains again, I picked the city and started walking. There would be someone there, I hoped, who could tell me what I was looking for.

The heat was oppressive—I had never thought about the Deadlands in terms of being a real place, a physical place with gravity and geography and atmosphere. I’d pictured a vast nothingness where the dead, if they still existed in some form, collected like pennies dropped into a bucket.

But it felt as real as any place I’d ever walked as a live person. The heat, the grit on my face, the sounds and certainly the smells, all real. Unpleasantly real.

I tried to tell myself that I seemed as if I belonged here, that no one could harm me. There was nobody here to do it, anyway.

As I walked, the shells crunching under my feet, I saw the air waver on the horizon, where a purple-cast sun burned. There was a dot in the sky here, too—the pernicious influence of the Old Ones had extended even into the land of the dead.

I was distracted by the movement, which had grown larger and faster, a wave of advancing chaos across the black sand.

I stopped walking and watched, mesmerized, as the horizon ceased to be a line and became a lacy black pattern against the pale violet sky.

A buzzing reached my ears, overriding the air-raid sirens and the wailing of the wind across the vast sands, and too late I realized that whatever was coming at me was sentient, alive and hungry.

The sand moved as if it were the skin of a living thing, lifted and formed into a swirling mass that appeared to be made of mouths and teeth.

I screamed, I think, as the first stinging bits of the thing touched my exposed skin, and then turned to run. It was all too clear now what had chewed those bodies on the road to pieces.

It was a curious sensation, to run but not breathe. I didn’t get winded, but my limbs got heavier and heavier, and I started to feel detached from my body as I sprinted, as if I were floating just outside, watching the black tide encroach on me.

As I passed the overturned caravan, something darted out and grabbed me by the arm, whipping me around and slamming me to the ground.

Hands jerked me inside the wreckage of the caravan, and I thrashed reflexively to get free. “Quiet!” someone hissed in my ear. “They hunt by sound. I need you to be quiet.”

I stilled myself. If I had had a beating heart it would have been thundering in my ribs. I’d gotten used to danger, enough so that when somebody who could get me out of it told me what I needed to do, I didn’t panic. I’d have to thank my father for that, if I ever saw him again.

And apologize, because I was rapidly realizing that this entire expedition had been a terrible, terrible mistake.

The black cloud passed over the caravan with a scream, and the hands relaxed their grip on my arms. “Sorry,” the voice said. “But I’m not about to get eaten on account of some Walker too stupid to know about the screaming sand.”

I crawled out of the caravan and slumped in the dirt, grit digging into my palms. “Sorry. I’m new here.”

The figure, who turned out to be a man not much older than me, snorted. “Yeah, I figured that out on my own.”

“Well, you don’t have to be a prat about it,” I told him. “It’s not my fault I didn’t know about those things.”

“Thing,” said the man. “The sand is alive, a parasitic hive mind that tracks its prey by noise.” He pushed his dark hair out of his eyes. It was as unruly as my own and covered with a thin layer of dust.

“All right,” I said. “Thanks for the information. I’ll try to stay quiet on the road, but I’ve got to be going.”

I stood, and the man regarded me with such intensity that I folded my arms across my middle, self-conscious under his gaze. “You’re not just a Walker, are you?” he said at last.

I sighed. “I don’t even know what that is.”

“Souls who escape the Catacombs,” said the man. “They wander, lost, unable to ever find rest. But you’re not wandering. You have a purpose.”

“I’m looking for someone,” I said. I filed away the information about the Catacombs. If Dean was here, that was as good a place as any to start.

“Aren’t we all,” the man muttered. “I’ve been waiting for my brother for decades, but unlike me, he’s got the good sense to keep on living.”

“Well, good luck with that,” I said, unwilling to be sidetracked by another soul who just wanted to keep my attention and freedom for themselves. “I really do have to be going.”

“I’m sorry,” the man said, standing and following me back to the road. “But I have the strangest feeling that I’ve seen you somewhere before.”

“I don’t think so,” I told him, taking a step away to keep my distance. “I don’t know you.”

Yet there was something familiar about him as well, even though I didn’t want to admit it. Something about the way the man carried himself, his direct stare, his mossy green eyes …

It clicked, like a gear slotting into its mate. “You’re Ian,” I said, my voice coming out so soft with shock that the wind nearly carried it away. “You’re Ian Grayson. My uncle.”

The man’s face slackened, and he took a step away from me. “Archie’s child?” He blinked and swiped a hand over his face. “I mean, I suppose it’s not so outlandish that he’d have a child, but …” He reached for me, but I still didn’t trust him that much, so I took another step back. “It’s unbelievable. You look just like him.”

Ian was staring at me as if I were his brother in a wig. “I’m sorry,” I said. “But I really do need to be going.”

“You can’t go by yourself!” Ian exclaimed. “This place is an eternal hell. Nothing good can survive here.”

I turned back to him and fixed him with my own gimlet stare. “You don’t know me. Ian. What makes you think I’m any good?”

Before he could reply, I started walking again—straight to the polluted city and whatever lay within.

I looked back after a few minutes and saw that Ian was following me, his lanky stride the same as my father’s. Both could close a gap quickly, and sure enough he caught up.

“How are you even here …” His mouth crimped. “I don’t know your name.”

“Aoife,” I said. “My name is Aoife Grayson.”

“I see. You’re Archie’s oldest?”

“Youngest,” I corrected him. He wasn’t trying to keep me from walking, so I decided to let him tag along. “I have a brother.”

“Amazing.” He shook his head. “Never thought Archie’d do it. Get married, I mean. He always had girls around him, but he was so damn devil-may-care he scared them off just as quickly. And he was never interested beyond a few dates anyway.”

He looked me over, this time with a critical eye. “Your mother must be a knockout.”

“Oh yes,” I said, trying and failing to keep the bitter tinge out of my voice. “She’s very pretty. And very crazy.”

“I didn’t mean to offend you.…” He sighed and gave me a sideways smile. “See, your uncle Ian never had a way with words. I was never the impressive one.”

“You didn’t have a Weird,” I said. “I know. I read my father’s journal.”

Ian flinched. “You’re blunt like him too.”

I thought about spilling my guts to Ian, telling him that I’d never really known my father before a few months ago, about my time in the care of the city, about everything, but I didn’t. I just walked. I didn’t know Ian, and that meant I had no reason to trust him. The fact that we’d just stumbled upon each other made me even more resolute to keep things close to my vest. After all I’d seen, coincidence was not something I’d ever trust again.

“Yes,” I said at last. “I suppose I am.”

We walked for a time, keeping our eyes on the horizon for more signs of the screaming sand. “I’ve gotten pretty good at avoiding it,” Ian told me, “but sometimes it catches you. Not to mention the Walkers. Some of them are feral, just rabid scraps of the people they used to be, and they want to feed on you.”

“Like zombies?” I said, thinking of Cal’s magazines, stories of creatures raised from the dead by magic or science.

“What’s a zombie?” said Ian.

I thought about how long ago he’d died, and sighed. “Never mind.”

“You don’t belong here,” Ian said in a rush. “Your soul may be solid as the rest of us, but your body, wherever it is, is still breathing. I can tell just by being near you, and if I can tell, then others can as well. However you got here, whatever happened, you have to leave.” He stopped and pushed his hair out of his eyes, a repetitive, reflexive gesture as it was long and covered his eyes. “It’s not safe for you here.”

I kept walking. “I’m aware of that. And I’m not leaving until I get what I came for.”

Ian had to run to keep up with me. “What’s that, then? What could possibly be here for a living soul?”

“His name is Dean,” I said. Even saying his name brought a prickle of tears, but I fought them.

Ian’s brow drew down. “You can’t bring the dead back, Aoife. They’re here to stay.”

“He was never supposed to die,” I said. “It’s my fault. I have to bring him back.”

“I hate to tell you this,” said Ian, “but whether he was meant to die or not, dead is dead. There’s no help for it once a soul crosses the barrier from life to the Deadlands. It’s not physical, like space and time, but it’s a barrier all the same. I tend to think it’s still physics, just laws we don’t understand.”

Any other time, I would have been thrilled to meet someone who could tell me more about the Gates, confirm or deny speculation, and just generally discuss science, but I waved him off. “No. My mother said that if someone dies before it’s their time, they can be brought back. And she’d know.”

Ian raised one eyebrow. “Your mother sounds like a smart lady, but it’s still bunk. There’s no way you can free a soul from this place. Dead is dead, Aoife. Once you cross, unless you’re using a trick like whatever brought you here, then you’re here for good. I’m sorry.”

“Bargained, then,” I snapped. “Everyone has their price.”

A clouded look passed across Ian’s face, and his eyes grew dark, gauging the road we’d been walking. “You don’t want to go that way,” he said, pointing ahead to the smog-shrouded city.

I stopped walking and folded my arms over my chest. “And why is that?”

He shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. “It’s dangerous there. In the city.”

I softened. If he was anything like my father, he wouldn’t respond well to being pushed around. “Look, Ian. You seem to know your way around this place, and I could really use your help.”

He started to cut in and I held up a finger. “Let me finish. I’m going to find Dean with or without you, and do everything in my power to bring him back to the world of the living. So you can help me, or you can get out of my way.” I dropped my hand and started walking again. After a few steps I stopped and turned back. “But I’d really prefer that you help me.”

My uncle hesitated for so long that I thought he was going to refuse, and I was going to be on my own. The thought didn’t scare me overmuch, but it would make what I had to do that much harder.

At last, though, he sighed and followed me as I started walking again, reluctant to waste any more time. “I suppose I won’t change your mind? Not even when I tell you what’s in that city?”

“Doubtful,” I said. “What is it?”

“This place”—Ian gestured at the sands and the road—“the Ossuary Trail, it’s a neutral zone, where nobody except the most desperate go because it’s so dangerous.” He grimaced. “Like me, for instance. But in the city—the city is safe, because it’s controlled. Controlled by things that have never been part of the living Lands, things that take human souls and twist them past the point of recognition to keep the lights on and the gears turning. To be in the city is to suffer eternal torment, and the souls who escape can never stay in one place for more than a few clock-ticks in living time. They call us Walkers—the damndest of the damned, except for our freedom. Those souls in the city—it’s not a city, Aoife. It’s a tomb.” He shrugged. “Some prefer a tomb and the chance they’ll be turned into kindling to what’s out here, though. Which should tell you exactly how bad it can get in the wild parts of the Deadlands.”

“No, I understand,” I said. I’d seen the same effect in Lovecraft—people staying put in their comfortable lives and risking a Proctor burning rather than chance what lay beyond the walls. “So most of the souls stay in the Catacombs?” I said, thinking back to my conversation with Nerissa.

“The prison of the dead,” Ian agreed. “If Dean is here, chances are he ended up there, on his own or by force. Those who run the Catacombs aren’t picky about what you did in life, just what your soul is worth to them, and in return they offer a little protection. Not really worth it, but the souls they trap just want to exist. You stray from the city, you run the risk of … well … disintegrating. Forgetting who you are.”

“I understand that part, too,” I whispered. That couldn’t have happened to Dean. He had to be safe, to remember me.

I had to be in time.

“It’s hell,” Ian said softly. “This existence of mine isn’t much, but I escaped the Catacombs and I swore I’d never go back.”

“I’m sorry to make you do it for me,” I said, and I was being honest. “But if Dean is there, I’ve got to find him, and I think we’ve proved I don’t stand much of a chance without someone who knows his way around.”

Ian sighed. “Why not?” he said. “We Graysons have to stick together.”

The air grew thicker as we approached the city, and though my chest didn’t rise and fall as it did when I was alive, I could smell it. It was a toxic smell, one of acrid smoke and charred meat but also of rot, the kind of rot that takes centuries to build, the cloying odor of a forest floor, the musk of turned earth, and the rotten tang of flesh regurgitated by insects.

The closer we got to the city, the worse the stench became. Ian slowed to a plod, and I looked over my shoulder. I could tell by the set of his shoulders and his rigid expression that he was afraid.

I had to keep him talking, get his mind off where we were going. And my mind, while I was at it. I wanted to wake up, to snap my soul back to the living world, open my eyes and see the cobwebbed ceiling of Chang’s shop, but if I did, I knew I’d never forgive myself for failing Dean when he needed me the most. My soul-self could exist here a little longer. It was a small price to pay.

“How did you escape that place to begin with?” I asked Ian, pointing to the city. He flinched and shoved his hands into his pockets.

“In the Catacombs, there are guards—watchers who were never human, never part of anything living. They can be bribed, and I knew things that they wanted to know, things about the other prisoners. I was an informant,” he said, as if dragging out the word physically hurt. “I got them to trust me, to think of me as amusing and harmless. Now I can’t stay in the same place for more than an instant. The Deadlands are infinite. Physics here doesn’t work the same as in a living Land. You could wander forever, compelled to drift, or cross your footsteps a hundred times in one day, but you better never slow down, because everything in this place is hungry for the energy your soul can provide.”

I felt a strong stab of pity for Ian straight through my chest. Whatever he’d done in life, he didn’t deserve this.

“I’m sorry I’m making you go back,” I said softly.

Ian shrugged. “Don’t feel bad on my account. Most Walkers forget their own names over time. They forget everything about who they were. I don’t want that to happen. At least now I feel useful.”

“Thank you,” I said, but he said nothing in reply, so we walked silently as the sun went down and rose again, the sky changing every hour or so from rose to ink and back again.

I must have watched the sun rise a dozen times while Ian and I walked. He was right—physics didn’t have the hold here it did in the living world. Finally Ian and I started talking again.

“You said someone in the city would know where Dean was,” I began. “What are they going to want in return?”

Ian gave a thin smile. “You really are Archie’s daughter, aren’t you? Always looking for the angles.”

“I didn’t learn that from my father,” I told him. “I learned that because he wasn’t around.”

“Ouch,” Ian muttered. “Sorry.”

“Just tell me how bad this is going to be,” I said. I wanted to know what price would be culled from me, either in blood or in promises or in sanity. All of those were negotiable with the sort of creatures I’d met lurking in the shadows between worlds.

“There’s a soul in there, one of the oldest I’ve met who still has her faculties,” said Ian. “A Spiritualist when she was alive. She can find things, people. As for what she wants”—he scratched his temple—“it depends. Sometimes she does it because she thinks it’ll be funny, other times she’ll slice out part of your memories and take them. It’s how she’s stayed sane for so long.”

I looked toward the city, listening to the endless wail of the sirens, the screaming of a place full of mindless pain. “Well, it’s not like I expected this to be easy.”

Ian didn’t say anything, and I had run out of questions, so we walked on in silence, until we reached the city walls.

We joined a clot of gray-tinged spirits moving along the road, which forked into the distance until it shimmered out of existence at the horizon.

“Souls,” Ian murmured in my ear. “The new dead. Just walk with them.”

“Won’t they realize we’re not like them?” I whispered.

Ian shook his head.

“They don’t notice much of anything. Some of them don’t even realize they’re dead yet.”

The figures were in various states of decay and decomposition. I looked at Ian, who appeared as he must have in life, suit and tie and all. “How come they’re in such bad shape?”

“Your soul manifests your true face when you die,” Ian said. “Good or bad. If you’re rotten to the core in life, your soul rots in death. Some of them hang on long enough to learn how to alter themselves so you can’t see all the things they did in life.”

Here and there, I picked out faces that were relatively normal-looking, but there were so many who were little more than skeletons with bits of flesh and cloth hanging from their bones that I focused on my feet, moving over the white ribbon of road. It crunched under my shoes.

“This isn’t sand, is it?” I realized.

“No,” Ian confirmed. “Ossuary Road is the bones of the things that lived in the Deadlands before men. The first creatures in the living world, the first to die. Eventually, even death grinds you down.”

The white dust all over my feet and legs took on a new weight. Who knew what came before the Fae, before men? “The Old Ones, you mean?” I said. “Things like that? I thought they were eternal.”

“ ‘That is not dead which can eternal lie, yet with strange aeons even death may die,’ ” Ian said. “I don’t know, Aoife. We had as little to do with the Great Old Ones in my day as we possibly could.”

We had nearly reached the gates of the city and I looked up at the archway, carved with an open, lidless eye.

“Welcome home,” Ian muttered. “Can’t believe I’m walking back into this place.”

Two black-clad figures stood by the gate like Proctors, making it seem almost like home. Their faces were shadowed with cowls, however, and I couldn’t attest with certainty that they even had features to hide. Their robes reached the ground, and the only extremities I could see were hands, which held long, clicking devices that spun like oversized pocket watches.

“What are they?” I murmured, careful not to make eye contact. I knew how not to draw attention to myself, and I didn’t want the attention of those things under any circumstances. Over time, since I’d left Lovecraft, I’d grown used to fear and uncertainty as background noise to everything I did, so when the hard, cold kind of primal fear cut straight to my gut, I didn’t ignore it.

“Guards,” Ian said. “Jailers. Protectors. Different things to different people.” He steered me past a group of souls in Crimson Guard uniforms, their faces burned beyond recognition above their high collars.

“Those devices don’t look friendly,” I said, nodding to the contraptions in the guards’ hands. As the needles on the faces of the things spun, one of the black figures stepped forward and snatched a soldier out of line. I gasped as the figure got close enough to me to twinge the shoggoth venom that still lived in the bite on my shoulder, and Ian grabbed my arm, keeping me upright and moving.

“They’re meant to pick out things from the outlands that try to creep into the city and steal souls,” he said. “The decayed, the screaming sands, things like that.”

The figures surrounded the soldier, more of them melting in from the shadows as if they’d dripped like inkblots from a pen, and the soldier began to scream. The appearance of a human soul sloughed away, and underneath was a skeletal thing with long legs that bent the wrong way and arms that scraped the ground. Its hands ended in long, bladed things that lived where fingers should on a person, and its jaw was elongated like a cricket’s, underslung and full of teeth.

I braced myself to see carnage fly in every direction at the thing’s exposure, but the four figures simply pressed closer, and after a moment the skeletal creature screamed and slumped to the ground, nothing but a pile of bones.

“Decayed,” Ian said, and shivered as we walked on. “Hate those things.”

I was glad I couldn’t breathe, because I would have been hyperventilating with nerves. The figures had made short work of the monster disguised as a soldier’s soul, but knowing things like that could be creeping among us made it difficult to keep walking, never mind keep my cool.

“The guards didn’t seem too bothered by it,” I ventured. “The Decayed, I mean. If they protect the souls from creatures like that, they can’t be entirely bad news.”

“Oh, no,” Ian said. “They don’t protect a damn thing but themselves. The Faceless are the worst thing in this place, by far. They feed on the energies of the souls. That’s why they keep the monsters out—so the souls are all theirs for the taking.”

He turned us away from the flow of new souls, which headed toward a central square much like Banishment Square in Lovecraft, where more of the Faceless waited. I craned my neck and saw the Faceless packing the souls in, shoulder to shoulder.

“Get deep enough into the Catacombs and the Faceless disappear,” Ian said. “The old souls outnumber them, and they can fight back. They tend to stay up top, where the pickings are easy, and suck down the last little bit of life in a soul for their master.”

“Master? You mean someone controls those things?” I said, casting a wary glance over my shoulder. I wasn’t sure I wanted to meet such an individual.

“Something, and yes, they wear his sign,” said Ian. “The sign of the Yellow King. He controls the Deadlands. Nobody sees him, but they’re so scared of the Faceless they obey whatever he says.”

“Sounds like a charming fellow,” I said as we made a dozen more turns through a rat’s maze of alleys that took us deeper and deeper into filth and squalor.

“I wouldn’t know,” Ian said. “I’ve never met him and I’m never going to. It’s hard enough to dodge the Faceless without antagonizing them.”

“Has it always been like this?” I asked as the sky blinked out, replaced by rooftops and smoke. “Is this really all that’s waiting after you die? Torture and things like the Yellow King?”

Ian wrinkled his nose against the stale air. The smell was incredibly awful—one part butcher’s shop, one part burning slag and many parts human filth and misery.

“People talk, of course,” Ian said. “They say it wasn’t always like this, that it was a land like any other and if you had a good life, you’d have a good death. An afterlife. But the Yellow King is all anyone knows now.” He shrugged. “It’s not like I can pick up and leave.”

The idea of this being the end of the line made me sick to my stomach, so I changed the subject. “How far are we going?”

“Deep down,” Ian said. “The guts of this place. That’s where she lives.”

He twitched at every sound, as rats—or something—ran over our feet, and I tried to put aside my own doubts and fears and reassure him. I was better at that than reassuring myself.

“I do appreciate your coming with me,” I said. “More than you know.”

“I just don’t want you to get hurt when you figure out this insane plan of yours won’t work,” Ian muttered. “I told you, Aoife—dead is dead. The Deadlands can change you, but you’ll never escape them.”

“And I think differently,” I snapped. “I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree.”

“Until you realize that your Dean is stuck here,” Ian grumbled. “And you might be, too, living soul or no.”

“You must have been the life of every party before you expired,” I told him. “Just a joy to be around.”

“Archie had the same smart mouth,” Ian said. “Nice to see you take after him so much.”

We walked in silence after that, a silence that was thicker and tenser than before.

After a time, we reached a tumbledown brick well house, rife with rats and stink. A soul dressed in garb several centuries out of fashion dozed in the mud, snoring, with a bottle spilling sticky green liquid across the cobbles. Roaches scattered from the puddle when we approached.

“Finch,” Ian said, kicking the man’s foot. “Wake up.”

Finch grunted and sniffed, red-rimmed eyes slowly rolling from his considerable gut to Ian’s face. “You!” he exclaimed. “Stone and sun, Ian … we all thought you’d buggered off for the screaming sands.”

“I did,” Ian said. “But I’m back and I need to speak with her.”

Finch grinned, exposing just how bad dentistry had been at the time he’d died. “They all come back sooner or later,” he said. “Once you’ve had her in your skull you can’t stay away.”

“Enough,” Ian snarled, and I saw something flash across his face, which at first I thought was anger but soon realized was shame. Ian was ashamed to be here, ashamed of what was about to happen.

I resolved to keep a straight face, no matter what occurred, and not reveal any reaction. He was jumpy enough as it was.

“Anyway,” Ian said, “I’m not here for myself. I’m here for her.”

“Oho!” Finch staggered up, and I caught the stench of absinthe as his breath blasted in my face like a furnace. “A pretty little one, ain’t she, Ian?”

“You’ll want to take a step back,” I told him. “I may be little, but I’m not nice.”

Finch laughed, deep and full-bellied, and then kicked open the door to the well house. “Same as it ever was, Ian,” he said. “Go down till you can’t go no more, then follow the trail into my lady’s chambers. She’ll be so happy to see you.”

“You’re a sad, stupid drunk,” Ian growled. “You’ve never been anything but, in life and in death, and now you get to spend eternity knowing exactly how sad and stupid you are.”

“Maybe so,” Finch said, still grinning. “But at least I get to stay up here, Ian. I’m not like you. I don’t have to see her. I don’t need anyone but meself.”

I caught Ian by the arm as he started to lunge for the fat man. “Come on,” I said. “The quicker we get this over with, the quicker I’ll be gone and you can go back to whatever you were doing.”

“Just trying to exist,” Ian muttered as the well house door swung shut behind us and left us in darkness. Gray light filtered through the broken roof, and I could just make out a huge bucket, large enough to hold me, with rusted sides.

Attached to the well chain was a sort of cage, equipped with a lever to move the chain from inside. The well was dry, and I swore I could hear music from far below.

“I know the feeling,” I told Ian as we climbed into the cage. It swung back and forth at an alarming rate, but appeared solid under our feet.

I could be hurt here, I knew that much. My soul was floating free, and if it was injured, I might not be able to come back to myself. I held on to the side of the cage as Ian engaged the lever.

“You couldn’t possibly know what I’m going through,” he told me. “What it’s meant to try to not be snuffed out ever since I came here.”

“Really?” I faced him as the chain unfurled and lowered us into the well. A red glow rose from below, giving Ian’s features a hollow quality, as if he really were disintegrating like the souls we’d seen on the road. I tried not to look at him. It just made the bad feeling I’d had ever since I’d woken up on the road worse.

“You don’t know me,” I told Ian. “You don’t know what my life has been like. I’ve spent most of it just like you—trying to exist, hoping someone much more powerful wouldn’t snuff me out. The only difference is that I’m not afraid. I’m stronger than the people trying to keep me from existing.”

“That’s great,” Ian said. “But in this place, the things looking to take you out aren’t some men in jackboots and a few Fae who whisper sweet lies in your ear. In this place, there are horrors you can’t imagine.”

“I don’t know,” I said, still furious that he was writing me off as a silly child. I’d had enough of that back in Lovecraft. “My imagination is pretty vivid.”

“Well, after this you’re going to have enough fodder for a lifetime of nightmares,” Ian said. “So get ready.”