3

Adam

It was good to have money. Adam knew this because he didn’t have any.

“You replaced the tires?” he asked, eyeing the thick new treads on the Cutlass.

They were outside their mom’s trailer. It had rained, washing the air in splattered red mud and the smell of rot. Autumn had set in.

“Yep,” Bobby said. He had two duffel bags. They still had the tags on them. “She’s got a full tank too. So where are we headed? You said Liberty House, but that’s not the final stop, right? Vic’s not there.”

“We?” Adam asked.

“You think I’m not going with you?” Bobby asked.

“It’s not safe,” Adam said, looking to Tilla, hoping she’d help him convince Bobby not to come. “I already had to talk Vran out of it, and he’s got magic, way more than me.”

“Adam . . .” Bobby trailed off.

“It’s not safe,” Adam stressed. More quietly, he added. “I already lost Sue.”

“Cheap shot, Adam Lee,” his brother said. “And it’s not going to work.”

But Adam meant it. He couldn’t lose Vic, but he also didn’t know how many more hits he could take or how he’d handle them if they came. There were parts of him that felt cracked, barely held together, much like the Cutlass’s engine.

If Bobby sacrificed himself to save Vic, Adam knew he’d fly apart.

Their mother looked between them, her weathered hands shoved into her jean pockets.

Adam didn’t know much about where he was headed, but he knew it was more dangerous than anywhere he’d been. Worse, he didn’t have Argent or Silver to back him up.

Bobby scoffed.

“I know there’s a risk,” Bobby said. “I lost my wife, remember?”

Tilla dropped her eyes to the ground. She looked tired. The worry, the endless hospital visits—it all had to be taking a toll.

She deserved some peace from all the chaos her sons had brought into her world. She deserved some happiness, especially after these last few months and all the old secrets they’d dredged up.

“I do,” Adam said quietly.

He hadn’t been able to save Annie. He’d never forget it, never stop feeling his failure like a punch in the stomach.

He swallowed hard.

Bobby’s tone softened when he spoke again.

“I don’t want you to lose Vic too. He saved my life. He went wherever he is because he saved me.”

Bobby wasn’t wrong.

Adam had been down, the cut across his chest pure agony, but Vic had saved Bobby and been lost in the act.

“All right,” Adam conceded, knowing he shouldn’t, knowing that if Bobby died down there it would kill their mom, and maybe Adam too, despite all the things that had passed between them.

“Mom?” Adam asked.

She tsked.

“Go get your man,” she said.

Adam choked. He could have gone his whole life without hearing her say that, but he appreciated the sentiment, that she’d accepted what Vic was to him.

He hugged her hard, with both arms, and she hugged him back.

Adam inhaled her scent of burnt coffee and cigarettes. He didn’t think he could ever remember any other smells associated with her.

“Be careful,” she whispered.

He’d lost Sue. Adam wasn’t certain he’d ever be as close to his mother, but she and Bobby were all the family he had left.

Adam refused to count Jodi. She’d lost any claim to him when she’d kidnapped Bobby and knocked Vic to wherever he’d fallen.

Maybe Adam would get to call Vic’s family his someday. The idea of having Jesse for a brother-in-law tempted a smile, but he couldn’t. The idea of it was nearly as scary as the looming road trip. It put a weird flutter in Adam’s gut, like too much coffee on an empty stomach.

Adam hadn’t called Jesse or Maria, Vic’s mother. He knew he should, but he didn’t know how to explain, how much they should know about the Other Side. No. He’d get Vic back first, then he’d deal with their anger and disappointment.

Adam opened the trunk.

There were gallons of water, boxes of protein bars, and cans of gasoline.

Adam blinked. His brother had prepared.

“What’s in the bags?” he asked Bobby.

“Everything else I could think of,” Bobby said, hefting up the duffels. “First aid kit. Road flares. Guns. Bullets. Knives. Socks. A machete. I would have bought a rocket launcher if I could have.”

“Socks?” Adam asked.

“Homeless people say they need socks,” Bobby said with a shrug.

“You got the guns from the pawnshop?” Adam asked.

“Yeah. How did you know?”

It was Adam’s turn to shrug.

“It’s Guthrie,” he said.

Adam had no use for guns, at least not usually, and he’d prefer not to need them now.

He still didn’t know if he’d hesitate. The druid was a monster, but Adam’s gut roiled to think that he had the right to decide whether John died or not.

Then again, he had no choice. He’d made a bargain. The Guardians of the West would remember. If Adam had shot John when he’d first seen him all of this could have been avoided. Or not.

Death had set them up. He had to remember that.

His relationship to Sara had changed when he’d found out who she was and what she’d intended for Bobby. Adam had been a fool to think she didn’t have another use for him up her sleeve. He had to watch out for her, find a way to get free of her influence.

Somebody always wanted something.

Then there was Jodi, and also Mel, the mysterious package Sara wanted brought back from where she could not go. Something was wrong with Sara. Adam felt it deep in his gut, and the sloshing coffee-soaked feeling worsened.

He was tempted to suggest they take Bobby’s car, the white refrigerator that had been Annie’s. There’d be more room, but Adam climbed into the Cutlass.

He wanted its familiarity, its speed, and it couldn’t hurt that he’d put a lot of magic into it over the years. That might count for something where they were going.

“Where do we start?” Bobby asked, heading for the passenger door and snapping Adam out of his thoughts.

“I really wish you’d stay behind,” Adam said, trying one last time.

“Not gonna happen, little brother,” Bobby said.

Settling into the bucket seat, Adam felt instantly better, even though the new scar across his chest pulled.

The car was home to him. It had been for a long while, even before Sue’s trailer had gone up in flames. That might have been his way down, his own version of hell. He’d seen John there when he’d come to kill Noreen, Jodi’s mother. Adam had dove through flames to save her, and in the end it hadn’t been enough. John had killed Noreen just like he’d killed Sue.

But as bad as it had been, that wasn’t his personal hell.

Adam squeezed his eyes shut. He could do this.

Tilla walked ahead to open the gate at the end of the long gravel driveway. She waved and Adam waved back as he drove away.

Be safe, he wished, he willed, for all the good it might do.

They crested the little hill at the top of Tilla’s property and she was out of sight.

The rain had left the road soft. The grass retreated in patches, leaving the ruddy ground looking like it bled from open wounds. They passed a flock of crows perched on a barbed wire fence.

It seemed the land knew where they were going and had decided to set the mood.

Adam knew the way, could have found it in his sleep, but he’d never driven out to see it again, not since he’d walked away to arrive dust-covered and thirsty at Sue’s trailer.

Bobby looked sheepish as he stared out the window.

The last time they’d talked about it, Bobby had clung to the illusion, the glamour that had masked the place’s true nature.

Death had concealed it from him, intending for Adam to use his time there to learn to control his magic, which he had, but Adam had always seen through it, had always known it as decrepit and cold.

Adam turned on the stereo and let the playlist from his phone distract him from the memories.

“What is this?” Bobby asked, pointing to the stereo.

“Emotional War Crime,” Adam said. “They’re good.”

They were a bit angrier than he liked, but he could use a little anger to cover his worry.

It had been a lot of work to replace the ancient eight-track and the blown speakers, but it had been the one thing he’d really wanted when he’d restored the Cutlass, to be able to drive to proper music and not have to keep a boom box on the passenger seat.

It meant the car wasn’t as classic, that if he ever tried to sell her he’d get less money, but he couldn’t imagine not wanting the Cutlass, not driving her.

“Thank you for the tires,” Adam said. “I’ll pay you back.”

“Don’t worry about it. I know she’s your baby.”

They reached pavement and the ride smoothed.

“Thanks,” Adam repeated because he did not know what to say.

A few months back, before he’d gone to Denver, before Sue or Annie died, Adam would have fought his brother’s generosity, knowing there would be strings attached. Those strings weren’t so bad now. Adam had forgiven Bobby—mostly. Not that it made going back easy. Nothing about Liberty House had been easy.

The sky had clouded, threatening rain.

“It’s almost Halloween,” Bobby said. “It looks like it out there.”

“Yeah,” Adam said.

He’d wanted to spend it with Vic, maybe at his mother’s. They could give out candy, watch a scary movie, though nothing too scary. They’d both had enough real-life horror since they’d met.

The playlist shifted to something lighter. Adam didn’t mind. Bobby didn’t comment.

He wondered how long it would be, where the road would take them once they reached Liberty House.

It would be long. He expected that much. Otherwise Sara wouldn’t have warned him to drive.

Liberty House emerged from the weathered cottonwood and the dusty, dark-barked scrub oak.

All sprawling wood and aged red brick, it reminded Adam of something colonial or southern, or someone’s idea of those times. Thick columns lined the front, their paint long peeled to show the cracked, dry wood. Weeds and grass should have filled the yard, but it was dead, a pool of the red Oklahoma clay. The windows were too filmed with dirt to see past the iron bars.

The east wing had collapsed, its roof imploded, its bricks piled everywhere.

There wasn’t any graffiti, any sign of forced entry or squatters. Not that Adam had expected it. They were pretty far out into the country, and he could feel the lingering touch of magic, some slight taste that said to turn back, to not trespass here.

“What is that?” Bobby asked with a shudder.

“You feel it too?” Adam asked.

“Yeah, it’s a bit like biting aluminum foil with metal fillings.”

“Shit, you’re old.”

“At least I’ve been to the dentist in the last decade.”

Adam bit down a comment.

He did not want to fight so he did not point out that it was Bobby’s dumping him into Liberty House that had made Adam drop out of high school.

They were both tense. Adam could accept that.

“It’s a spell, a bit like the one on the old homestead. It’s meant to keep people out,” Adam explained. He reached out, let his sense trail over the edges of the boundary. The magic was frayed, not solid enough to act as a ward, but he’d bet it spooked off any normal humans and most animals. Not cats though. Cats did not give a shit. He’d have to ask one of the immortals about that sometime.

“It’s fading,” Adam said. “The glamour is long gone so we can see the house as it really is.”

Bobby raised an eyebrow, something Adam could never do.

“The illusion that disguised it,” Adam explained.

“But this is how it always was, wasn’t it?” Bobby asked. “This is what you saw when I brought you here.”

“Yeah. It’s in worse shape now, but it was always pretty bad.”

Bobby opened his mouth, then closed it and shook his head.

Adam did not know if that was better or worse than another apology.

It hadn’t been all bad. He had to remember that.

He’d spent as little time paying attention to the house as possible. Instead, he’d explored the Other Side, where he’d loved and lost Silver after learning to control his magic, to stop his mind from drifting away into the spirit realm.

That had been the entire point actually, another of Death’s plans. She’d wanted him to learn to control his magic. She’d conspired with Silver’s father, the King of the Elves, for Silver to train him, a plan that had worked too well when Silver had fallen in love.

What had Sara said about free will?

With it, nothing ever goes according to plan.

Life got in the way of Death’s schemes.

Good, he thought.

The engine hummed.

Adam watched his brother out of the corner of his eye.

Bobby stared at the collapsing porch, the thick steel door, the prison where he’d committed Adam. His eyes shone as if he might cry.

Adam knew he was taking in the reality, what Death had hidden from him, even as Adam pried for supernatural cracks, a way through to the underworld. The spirit realm was there, but that wasn’t the way. They needed to descend.

“Do we go inside?” Bobby asked.

“I don’t think so. Death said to bring the car.”

“You can’t see it?” a voice asked from the back seat. “It’s right there.”

Adam jumped at the shock. Recovering, he ground his teeth and checked the rearview mirror.

“Who the—?” Bobby started.

“Vran,” Adam said, sounding tired to his own ears. “This is my brother, Robert.”

“Bobby is fine,” he said sheepishly, still staring at the elf.

Vran grinned at them.

The elf wore a black silk shirt, totally impractical for any kind of fighting, and jeans you could have painted on. His smooth skin was pale with a blue-green tinge, a hint to his aquatic nature. His eyes and hair were a mix of navy and black, a color Adam envied.

“I told you I didn’t want you coming along,” Adam said. “Either of you.”

“You need me,” Vran said, flicking a hand at the house. “You’re practically blind.”

He no longer wore a crown. Adam wondered if he’d been stripped of his rank, if Silver’s elevation to the throne of Alfheimr had cost Vran his position in the House of Water, the Cups, where he’d held the title of page.

“What are you talking about?” Bobby asked.

“Really?” Vran snipped. “There’s a gate right there.”

“We’re human,” Adam said. “And I don’t sense a glamour.”

“There isn’t one,” Vran said. “Seriously, drive. It’s big enough for the car.”

“There’s a building there,” Bobby said, gesturing at the obvious.

“Not really. Or not entirely. Just trust me.” Vran’s eye roll signaled his youth. “Or don’t and don’t go anywhere.”

“Are you really letting him come along?” Bobby asked, still taking in Vran’s look. “He’s just a kid.”

“You’re one to talk,” Adam said, putting the car into gear. “And he can see things we can’t.”

“Adam—” Bobby said, gripping the passenger’s Oh-Jesus bar.

“He saved my life,” Adam said, flooring it.

Bobby tensed, stiffening in his seat. Adam did too. If Vran meant to kill them this would be an efficient way to do it.

The front bumper touched the porch and the world melted. The house became translucent. They slowed, like driving through cold soup. The walls, the ruined wallpaper, and the broken linoleum floor peeled back, trying to retreat from the car.

The endless days poured back into Adam. The tasteless food, the VCR with the same old movies, the same westerns his dad had made him watch. They played over and over at a lulling, sleep-inducing volume.

The orderlies, massive trolls too like the jocks who’d tormented him in the locker room, lumbered through the halls in their food-stained scrubs. They rarely spoke, but always eyed him, hungry for any excuse to bully him.

Adam could only avoid them and the other patients, wait for night, to escape into a spirit walk. He pretended to be spaced out more than he was, hoping they’d leave him alone.

But the memories of that, of his time with Perak, the purple-haired elf boy Silver had chosen for his disguise, didn’t come now.

Adam wanted to escape, to get out, but they weren’t even allowed outside.

He couldn’t talk to the other patients. If he tried, he only heard stories and rants, psychosis and threats. Once, at lunch, another boy had taken a fork and jabbed it into his own hand. He’d looked normal enough until that incident, until his eyes went wild with hate and something utterly untamed that Adam could feel washing through him, the flimsy defenses that Perak had helped him weave were undone by the sheer strange joy of the other boy’s madness.

“Wish it were your eye,” he said to Adam matter-of-factly, grinning as the blood welled and the nurses watched, unconcerned except about the mess they’d have to clean.

Adam’s stomach ached from the punch an orderly landed when no one was looking.

He tasted the sick smell of his own vomit when the meds were too much. The horrible slowness of trying to mop it up with paper towels because they made him, laughing from the other side of his door as the cold room with the cinder block walls spun. Adam fought back the need to pass out into the puddle of watery oatmeal and weak coffee.

Caught between the memory and the present, Adam’s stomach roiled.

He felt the endless needles, the pinpricks, the restraints.

In his chest, the warlock wound pulsed. He winced, groaned aloud.

It felt like red and black, like anger . . . like jealousy.

He could almost hear it howling, a rabid dog that still recognized and missed its owner.

The last thing he saw was the classroom. Adam sat alone at a desk, in the front row, because they wouldn’t let him sit anywhere else.

The teacher pointed to the board, trying to get something through to him, some concept Adam could not focus on.

The vision dissolved into fog, red like broken blood vessels. Adam hit the brakes as the scene vanished, the inflicted memory popping like a soap bubble. The Cutlass came to a stop somewhere else.

Adam reeled in his seat, swallowing his breakfast back down and getting his breath back.

Bobby and Vran did not look much better.

“Annie,” Bobby muttered.

He was still in the memories.

Gritting his teeth, Adam reached over and pinched his brother’s arm.

“Oww!” Bobby called before glaring at Adam and rubbing the spot. “Why did you do that?”

“It worked didn’t it?”

Shaking, Adam killed the engine. The need to puke was still there. He threw his door open, stumbled out, but held down his breakfast.

Bobby climbed out. He looked sad. He looked hurt, and how dare he? He’d been the one to lock Adam in that place, the place he’d had to go back to, to see and relive.

The wound had dredged up something molten and dark, like smoldering lava. Old anger and old hate vibrated through Adam, and he could see exactly how punchable his brother’s face was.

Adam tried to tamp it down, to remember that he’d forgiven Bobby. He’d let it go. He had let it go.

He stared at the landscape with narrowed eyes, taking several long breaths of the night air until he’d calmed.

The sky was dark green, nearly black. The moon, ever-present in the spirit realm, wasn’t in the sky. On the Other Side there’d been a ruined church where Liberty House had stood, an echo of its mortal origins.

The structure behind them was the same house, the same building as Liberty, but it was more like a corpse. The lines were distorted, curved—like the building was wet, rotting clay twisted by a giant’s hand.

There were no watchtowers here, no boundary markers, and Adam shuddered at the sight. They were truly on their own. They had no one and nowhere to go to for help.

“This isn’t the Other Side,” he said. “Where are we?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Vran asked, climbing out to stand beside him.

“No,” Adam and Bobby said together.

“Death made that house with her magic. She made it for you, Adam, but her magic isn’t like ours. It left a gate that only you could open. We’re on the road, the spiral, that she showed us.”

“And that’s why everything is all Salvador Dali?” Bobby asked, waving toward the twisting landscape.

“What?” Adam asked.

“Melted watches, that kind of thing,” Bobby explained. “Like plastic left in the oven.”

“I don’t know,” Adam admitted.

It made sense. Everything was misshapen, the original lines set at weird angles.

Even the trees, cottonwoods like the ones outside Liberty House, were bent. Twisted and pale, their bark stripped by the dry wind, they jutted out of the earth like half-buried bones. Adam knelt, touched the ground with his palm.

Dust. It was all dust, with none of the mud or water he’d have felt back home.

He couldn’t feel any magic, any life. This place, this whole world, was dead.

This might be how Death saw the world, how she experienced it. After all, mortal sight wasn’t like immortal sight. Sara’s entire perspective might be twisted by her nature. Yet she said she couldn’t come here.

“This isn’t somewhere I’ve been, but it fits the description, an underworld,” Adam said. “There’s supposed to be an ocean though, a sea.”

Adam felt for his magic, slight as it was. It was there, but the landscape didn’t feel like the Other Side, teeming with life and power. There wasn’t much gas in that tank.

“How do you feel, Vran?” Adam asked.

The elf closed his eyes, and let out a breath.

“Dry,” he said. “This place. All of it.”

“Yeah,” Adam agreed.

Vran was a sea elf. It made sense that he’d translate his sense of magic through water. All of the spells Adam had seen him cast had involved his native element. Adam didn’t like removing the boy from it.

“But you said there’s supposed to be an ocean,” Bobby said.

“Her intel might be wrong,” Adam said. “She can’t come here.”

Sara had always been an information broker. It put something hard in his belly that she might have faulty intelligence.

“Why not?” Bobby asked, testing the ground with his toe.

“It’s one of those rules I don’t understand,” Adam said. “But I think maybe, this place, the underworld, is part of her. She can’t cross into herself.”

“But look at it,” Bobby said. “It’s a whole world.”

He waved to the horizon.

He wasn’t having any trouble seeing, any trouble perceiving this place. The Other Side took magic to experience, and Adam had never gotten an exact idea how far into it Bobby could see. His brother had magic, though Adam had never learned its full extent.

“They’d need it, wouldn’t they?” Adam asked. “I mean, the dead do outnumber the living.”

Vran was looking at them, at everything, with an expression of pure fascination. That made sense too. His people lived forever if no one killed them. To him death was an abstract, not an iced tea–swilling chess master who’d forced Adam into the world’s worst road trip.

Death was forever. It had to be bigger than life, but that didn’t add up either. There were billions of people in the world, and billions and billions more had died. Even if this was a whole world, it should be overcrowded with shades.

He saw none, and wasn’t anxious to.

“How much salt did we bring?” he asked Bobby.

“About five pounds,” Bobby said.

Adam gaped at him.

Bobby chuckled.

“What? I watch TV,” Bobby said. “And I was there when Silver set the wards around Mom’s place.”

“Well done,” Adam conceded.

“So how do we find Vic?” Vran asked.

He’d wrapped his arms around himself as if to ward away the cold, but the place was warm enough to Adam, and Vran was used to an ocean’s depths.

Adam knew it wasn’t the temperature. He felt it too.

The very air of the place tasted strange. It brushed against Adam’s senses, magical and mundane, like probing fingertips.

How much more must Vran be feeling it? Adam wondered how quickly he might regret having tagged along.

“Can we get back this way?” Adam asked Vran. “Is the hole still there?”

“No,” the elf said. “Just the house.”

So it was already too late. Closing his eyes like he wanted to drift off to sleep, Adam searched inside himself for his connection to Vic.

You there? Adam asked, sending it along the line.

No answer, but the link remained. It might be his imagination, his hope, but he thought it felt a little stronger, strong enough to follow, strong enough to reel it in.

Vic was there, but he was far away, farther down the spiral. Death hadn’t lied. It would be a long trip.

“What now?” Bobby asked.

“We drive,” Adam said. “We descend.”