Echoes splash through the air, drowning our ears in the clatter of horses. Lexi grabs my elbow and we both twist around, chasing the sounds that come out of every facet in the rocks. Above us the mist thickens into solidified dusk, and I can’t make out where they are, or how many. But one thing I can tell: there are a lot of them.
“Ksenia! There!” Lexi points, and now I see it. There’s a thickening in the shadows that becomes twenty horses, twenty riders, coming straight down the vertical rock face at a gallop. And I know they’ll be on top of us before I can reach Josh, I know it. But I still pull away from Lexi and leap forward, clawing at the emptiness. Wherever he is, whatever slash in the world is hiding him, I’ll rip it open and send him tumbling into the dust. And then Lexi and I will grab his hands and we’ll run, even if we’re only running into nothingness.
But now I can’t hear his voice, not even in that sad, staggered way. The hoofbeats fracture and multiply until every speck of dust jumps with them. “Josh,” I yell. “Josh, keep shouting! I’m so close!”
I see Unselle first, rounding on me in midair with her horse’s legs at the level of my head. The bloody writing, the phosphor burn of her lace and skin. The mink cackling on her chest.
“Hatless it is now, the poppling. Hatless and helpless! All the way home, how I licked the scent of your blood, Ksenia. Sucked you out of air! Poor sweetling, to think so prettily that you might snatch what we own.” She grins, the bright, ragged row of her teeth careening in her face. “You could not even snatch yourself from us, could you? No matter what your eatings.”
I’m trying to think up a decent comeback when her horse pirouettes and its cloudy hooves lash into space, with a noise like shattering glass.
And out of the sound, Josh reels and falls to his knees, just ten feet away from me. He rolls into a ball and rocks back and forth, sobbing so hard that I don’t know if he even sees me.
I start to lunge forward, to seize him in my arms. But the horse is there, blocking my way. And then Lexi is next to me, close enough that I can feel her vitality like a warm shadow along my side. Somehow her nearness is enough to remind me that I can’t just throw myself at Unselle like some impetuous idiot. I need to be strategic. Take some time evaluating, so I can understand what we need to do.
“Try and take,” Unselle sneers. “It will be our pleasure to watch you try! He is bound into our world. Stuff him with the eatings of your world like a pig for the banquet, Ksenia. His skin will still be ours, and his teeth, and the soft marrow slinking in his bones, and the dreams that live like worms, gnawing the pulp of his mind. Joshua bound himself here, and cannot be free.”
But there was something that hideous mock-Josh said to me, while we were plummeting from the cliff. It told me there was just one way Josh could be free. That it wasn’t something I could do for him. But a way is a way.
“And then, Ksenia, it is a chain, our havings. Through Joshua we have you; through you we claim Alexandra. All ours, forever, for whatever games might ease our tedium. You think you leave, oh, so pleased with yourself! But it is a false leaving. Because straight back you came, to nestle in our world like a teeny mouse!” Her leer is growing, pitching in her cheeks. Too many damn teeth inside that scarlet ripple of lip. Her mink yawns and rolls its tongue at me. Completely obscene.
“Your fake world is useless to me,” I snap. “I only came for them.”
While Unselle has been prattling on, the rest of the freak cavalry has come riding in. We’re surrounded by billowing horse-forms, snickering inhuman riders. I don’t see any of the changelings now. Just our captors, whatever they are, in their vile finery.
“As Alexandra came back for you,” a voice says. Reedy and agitating. “That was precisely what Unselle just explained to you, Ksenia. Each of you is bound to the one before. You would have no peace if you abandoned dear Joshua here. Every night your betrayal would sweat through all your pores, until you raced back to us, desperate for relief. No more could Alexandra leave you to such a fate; only a bit of patience, and she would surely return. Ah, all Alexandra’s insolence, and her touching belief that she could rescue you! All she did was to bait the trap herself—although, of course, it still behooved me to punish her intention. But what would we be, my darling Ksenia, if we could not spin love into webs far stronger than spider silk?”
Prince. Maybe he’s partly lying, but there are strands of vicious truth twisted in with the deceit. I just told Lexi that I never would have saved myself if it meant leaving Josh here, and there’s no way I can deny that now. Of course, of course, they’ve used what’s best in us as a weapon to bring us down.
But the suggestion that he was never afraid of what Lexi might do, what I might do, that we were always just helpless pawns—in that, I hear a distinct undertone of bullshit. There’s something he’s trying to obscure. A possibility, a chance. Something he wants to stop us from recognizing.
I don’t look at him on principle, though he’s sidling up just to my left, while Lexi covers my right. Doesn’t stop him from stroking my jaw, of course. He’d love it if I lost control and tried to bite his poisonous green eyes right out of their sockets. He’s thrilled by my disgust too, but that’s more than I can conceal.
Lexi doesn’t have the same compunction I do about staring the creep in the face. She steps around me so deftly I don’t realize what’s happening until she’s right in front of him—though since at the moment he’s, like, two feet taller than she is, she has to crane her neck to blast him with attitude.
I expect her to give Prince hell. But she doesn’t address him at all, except with her gaze. It’s enough.
“Joshua?” Lexi calls, loudly, but into Prince’s face. “You heard him. Each of us is bound to the one who came here before. But they didn’t say anything about you.” She pauses. “And they didn’t mention any of the kids you stole, either.”
“Josh?” I say. “He had nothing to do with that, Lexi!”
And then Josh comes forward. Actually crawling straight beneath Unselle’s horse, as if its legs were a bridge. He looks terrible, sickly pale and battered, his old-lady sweater dangling shredded pink-sequin stars.
Kay is riding on the back of his neck: a parody of all the horsemen around us. She waves to me, her paper-doll hand jerking, and points to Josh’s head. Then she folds herself up like a fan and ducks down the back of Josh’s sweater. The whole thing was so quick that I’m not certain anyone else saw it.
My black bowler hat slants on Josh’s snarled hair. Unselle gives a quiet hiss when she sees it. Like I thought, then. He stops a few feet from her horse and huddles in the dirt—and all at once I know that I can’t just rush to him, wrap him in my arms, absorb all his pain. He’s feeling things he has to feel, at least for now. No matter how much they hurt.
“Josh?” Lexi says again, more gently this time. She finally turns and looks at him. The trails of his tears have sucked up the dust, so his face is scored with mud. Green glitter flings back motes of light when his weight shifts. “You owe me for Xand, and you know it. What are you bound to? From everything they’ve said, that’s the start of the chain. But I don’t see how it could have been a specific person who was already here. Not unless there are things I really don’t know.”
“What happened to Xand?” I ask, but it’s a stupid question. Because from the broken way Josh gapes up at Lexi, from the way he won’t look at me—I have a pretty good idea.
Xand is dead. Josh was complicit in his murder. And even after that, Lexi came here with him. It’s an act of such mind-blowing bravery and grace that I stare at her. Like, I might have to reassess my ideas of what human beings can be.
“Lexi,” Josh says. And then he stops, words kind of chewing around in his face, like he’s just realizing there’s nothing remotely adequate that he can say. “Kezzer tried to stop me. She tried to get through to me. And even Kezzer, even with everything she means—I couldn’t hear her.”
Prince, Unselle, their retinue: they all break out in their off-kilter grins at that. As usual, there’s nothing they love so much as watching us perform all our charming, frenzied human dramas for them. But that might actually work to our advantage, I think. They’re not about to interrupt. Not as long as we keep them entertained. They’re so sure it’s futile, so sure we’re too weak and dumb to beat them, that they can afford to kick back and watch the show.
“She did more than that,” Lexi tells him. “She climbed the stairs. She went after you. Do you know what that means, Josh?”
Josh has been refusing to look at me, but now he can’t keep it up. I get a single, shame-crumpled glance. “Kezzer? You—oh, you didn’t—”
“I dug myself out of my own grave,” I tell him. “And then I was too late, anyway. It sucked.” I hesitate, because I don’t like to talk to Josh so harshly, especially not when he’s already trashed by grief—but Lexi’s right, everything is hanging on getting him to tell us the truth. “Josh? You owe me some answers too. How did you get us into this?”
I see it now, the whole amnesiac act he put on after I found him. Maybe he was genuinely disoriented at first, but pretty soon everything he said was a blind, a deflection. To keep me from asking him precisely one thing: Josh, what have you done?
“You made a deal,” I blurt, with the jarring sense that I’ve known all along. Known in a way that I couldn’t quite access, couldn’t bear to touch. You sold us both to them, forever, without even asking—but I still love him too much to spit those words at him. You knew what you were doing, even if you duped yourself into thinking it would all work out. “Josh, what was it?”
But don’t I know that too? All around us, our hosts start tittering. They huff my dismay like a drug.
There’s only one way he can be free, Ksenia Adderley, and it’s not within your power.
“We were out of options, Kezzer,” Josh says. He’s trying to look at me, but his gaze keeps shunting aside, or slipping off my face like the fall of a dying bird. My bowler hat slides down and hides his round brown eyes. He shoves it back, reflexively, like he hasn’t even registered that he’s been wearing it this whole time. “I—everywhere I looked, there were all the choices we didn’t have. So I made the only choice that was left.”
Well—the only choice except the one we both dreaded: to see what kind of lives we could create apart from each other. But I’m not saying that either.
“You didn’t pledge yourself to a person, did you?” Lexi’s voice carries a jolt of revelation. Unselle’s red scroll of a mouth puckers in all at once, though the rest of them are still caught up in the show. She jabs a look in Prince’s direction, and I can read the worry in it. The pleasure of watching us fling accusations at each other is vying with the risk that Lexi will figure out too much. “You’re bound to an idea. The idea of you and Ksenia, together forever. The idea of a perfect love that can never end. But God, Josh, what you did for that!”
“I paid our rent,” Josh says—for the first time, with a snap in his tone. “Someone had to, Lexi. I never could have asked Kezzer to deal with that.”
“Olivia Fisher,” Lexi says. Flat, quiet, dangerously controlled. “She was rent?”
Josh’s gaze darts around. And, okay, I know they’ve been collecting children. I’ve seen the kids tagging after Unselle, like a bunch of lobotomized ducklings. Bleary, docile, totally checked out, their tiny hands pawing at her skirt. I’ve even wondered if there was anything I could do to stop it, and come up blank; I was in the exact same trap with them, after all. But the idea that Josh would have helped with that—
He did, though. His cheeks shift in this evasive way, like something rolling over underground. Shame rumbles inside his flesh. That was another part of his deal, then; Prince required more than just the two of us. What am I, that I managed not to see it?
“You’ve been paying for your dream with other people’s grief, Josh,” Lexi says. Her voice so soft it burns. “So your dream is what has to die.”