“I’M TELLING YOU, WE HAVE TO FIND HER!” RIGBY YELLED, pacing the throne room of Number 6 Rue de la Morte. “This can’t wait.”
“Isn’t it enough that she’s trapped here?” Kara asked. She stood in front of a body-length mirror on the far side of the chamber.
“You have no idea the kind of power she wields,” Rigby said. “She could tip the balance back the other way.”
Kara crossed her arms and frowned at her own reflection. “She’s just a little kid, Rigby.”
“A once-in-a-lifetime brilliant little kid,” Rigby growled. He sank low into the dark chair.
“Twice,” Kara said. “You mean twice-in-a-lifetime, right? Your uncle is that smart.”
“Right, fine. Yes, twice.”
“But what’s the urgency?” Kara asked, spinning on her heel. “She’s here in the Dream. She’s contained.”
“Are you even listening?” Rigby asked, spluttering mad. “She is not contained. In fact, being stuck in the Dream amplifies her power here.”
Kara abruptly went still. “You haven’t mentioned that before. How . . . could being stuck here amplify her abilities?”
“Again, like my uncle.” Rigby pounded his fist on the armrest. “He didn’t earn the Lurker nickname for nothing. Since being trapped here, he’s become savagely powerful.”
“But why?”
“Brain physiology,” Rigby replied. “When the brain no longer needs to function in the Waking World, it devotes more of its resources to the subconscious. New neural pathways open up. You become beastly strong.”
“And Kaylie was already strong,” Kara thought out loud.
“You see what I mean, then,” Rigby said. “Now . . . I’ve led Keaton and his Aussie pal to believe I have her, but if they find her first, it could ruin everything.”
“What will you do?” Kara asked.
“What?”
“If you find Kaylie,” Kara said, “what will you do with her?”
“I don’t know,” Rigby said. “I’m not even certain the two of us together could hold her here.”
The throne room fell into dreadful silence. Rigby leaned forward in the black seat and became very still. Kara waited for him to say more, but he sat, motionless as a cemetery. His eyes even had that faraway look like the blank-eyed statues, the monuments to the dead.
It was Kara’s turn to pace. She paced until she heard her bell toll nine, and a flash of red light near the throne took her attention. “What was that?” she asked.
Rigby didn’t answer right away. He was staring at his own right hand. Tiny spidery pulses of crimson electricity jittered along his forearm, his wrist, and even to his fingertips.
“Rigby?”
He blinked and looked up. “I’m sorry,” he said. “What?”
“What was that?” Kara asked. “I’ve never seen you do that before.”
“Nothing,” he said. “Just a little trick I learned from the Masters’ Bindings.”
Kara crossed her arms again. “I don’t like it,” she said.
“Well, I’m sorry,” Rigby said. “Sorry that it troubles you. I can control it mostly, but . . . sometimes, when I’m deep in thought, it just happens.”
“What were you thinking about just now?” Kara probed. “You seemed out there . . . like, just gone.”
“I was thinking there might be another way to neutralize Kaylie.”
Kara squinted. “What do you mean?”
Rigby gave a dismissive wave of his hand. “Something outside of the Dream might actually be better.”
“I don’t think—”
“I hope I’m not interrupting something. But Number 6 has no doorbell for me to ring. And it shouldn’t wait . . . this news I bring.”
In the dark archway, two glistening star-point eyes appeared.
“What’s he doing here?” Kara asked.
Rigby shrugged. It was not an expected visit. I hope he hasn’t come to collect, he thought. I’m not ready for that yet. “What is it, then?” Rigby demanded. “What’s this news?”
“The tidings I bear are sure to be a thrill,” Bezeal said, shuffling into the throne room. His eyes were brighter than usual and somehow eager. “It just couldn’t wait for parchment, pen, and quill. For Kaylie, the enemy, lies in the sure grip of Scoville.”
“What?” Rigby exclaimed. “Are you certain?”
The merchant’s Cheshire Cat grin appeared. He nodded.
“Well,” Rigby said, clapping his hands. “Problem solved. Now, there’s nothing Keaton can do. I hold all the cards.”
Kara walked slowly back to the mirror. She saw the glint in her own eye as she thought, All the cards . . . except one.
Archer steered his longboard toward a less violent Intrusion wave, one headed east, to get a better look at the Forms District. He called up his will to engage Visis Nocturne. The breaches were raging. He shut off the will-draining vision and gazed out to the horizon. The ice-fire was spreading upward. It reminded Archer of the front windshield of the family car a few years back. A tiny rock had flown up from the road and nicked the glass. For weeks, all that showed from the rock was that tiny little nick. But then, over time, the crack blossomed into meandering streaks until the windshield was so shot through with cracks that it needed to be replaced.
“This is too much,” Archer muttered, kick-turning onto another Intrusion wave. “It’s like no matter what we do, the Rift is going to happen anyway.” The wave was just forming, but Archer had seen its type before. The Dream matter behind it was surging in from several directions, feeding a more or less innocent-looking wave, but it would rise up, and soon.
Archer felt the sudden altitude forming beneath his board. It was curling now, and he took every bit of its height and speed, using it to propel himself forward as fast as he could go.
“Archer!”
The voice was so urgent, so sudden, that Archer lost his balance. The board got away from him, and he went headfirst into the Intrusion. The violence of the turbulent Dream wave threw Archer end over end, bouncing him roughly from image to image. Snippets of dreams, hundreds and hundreds of dreams, came raging to Archer’s thoughts, drowning his rational thought in a chaotic mishmash of other people’s subconscious.
Archer found himself tumbling down a long hallway in a colonial country home. Tall windows rose up on either side. Suddenly, at the end of the hall, a young girl appeared, screaming. Her screams echoed into something visible—a bouncing spiderlike thing with hollow red eyes. Thorny limbs took Archer by the shoulders and yanked him into a room where dozens of people were seated.
They were all dressed in black, and no one so much as turned to look at Archer. They all stared straight ahead. There was something there on a kind of stage or platform or . . .
The spider thing heaved Archer forward and flew past the people in their seats, racing forward toward an open casket.
“No!” Archer cried out, but it was no use. His trajectory was fixed, blasting toward the coffin. He fell into it, and all went black . . . until, at last, he broke the surface of the Intrusion surf.
It used a ton of mental will for Archer to pull himself up out of the muck and into the air, but he managed, clawing above the swelling Intrusions long enough to summon his surfboard.
“Snot rockets!” he muttered, resting safely on his board once more. He’d been riding Intrusion waves for a long time, but rarely had he wiped out like that.
His thoughts raced. Who called me?
“I did.”
Archer was a little more ready this time. He didn’t lose control. And this time, he recognized the voice. “Where have you been?” he asked. “I could have used your help, like, a hundred times.”
“It is of no consequence where I have been,” the Windmaiden replied. “Listen to me: there is a new Nightmare Lord.”
“Rigby,” Archer muttered. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
“He must be stopped, and soon,” she said. “Everything depends on it.”
“How?” Archer asked. “So many things have gone wrong that I don’t even know where to start.”
“Start with the Scath.”
“That’s a dead end,” Archer replied. “Rigby’s destroyed the Shadow Key.”
“No!” the Windmaiden exclaimed. “He tried, but it still exists. I have seen it, down deep in the heart of Xander’s Fortune. It is beyond my reach, lying on a ledge in the midst of electrical chaos.”
“You can’t get to it,” Archer said. “But you think I could?”
“Perhaps,” she said. “But I was thinking of someone more powerful . . .”