It was almost 11:00 p.m. when the Wraiths and the little mechanical ones were called back to the hospital. They could forget for now about retrieving the human George Evers and the other two who had gotten away. The mists silently called to each other and to the little ones, who had found myriad items from aluminum cans to skateboards to umbrellas and were delightedly trying them on.
They found the Viper waiting at the hospital gates. He motioned for them to follow him. As they crossed the large front lawn, they were joined by more of their kind from every corner of the property, and finally, by the Others, led by Orrin and Edgar.
The Viper led them all to the front door.
“It’s time,” he said, and then gave a nod.
The creatures of Ayteilu swarmed past him and into the hospital. When Orrin and Edgar moved to follow, the Viper held up his hands.
“The ones on their way here must be dealt with. They will try to stop us.”
“Who are they?” Orrin asked.
“Your brother knows,” Viper replied. From the corner of his eye, he could see Edgar tugging on his older brother’s sleeve, his one eye searching Viper’s face uneasily. He would not find what he was looking for.
“Humans,” Edgar said. “They know. About us, I mean.”
Orrin shrugged. “Well, shit. Let’s go kill us some humans.”
* * * *
Inside the hospital, curled into a fetal position on his bed, Henry dreamed he was in a car, but he wasn’t driving. The Viper was, and Maisie, Orrin, and Edgar were in the back seat. Outside the windows, the trees blurred as they sped down a highway toward sunrise.
“Where are we going?” Henry asked.
“We’re going home,” Maisie replied.
“We’re going to Ayteilu,” Orrin said.
“You’re c-coming with us,” Edgar said.
Henry couldn’t remember the accident that had caused the coma, but the conversation had a vague hint of familiarity to it of a real-life car ride from long ago. He had taken such trips with his friends many times before, and he seldom drove, though the doctors told him when he’d finally woken up that the day of the accident, it appeared he’d driven his car into a tree. He was lucky, the doctors said, that he hadn’t been killed. He was lucky he had only ended up in a dreamless coma for three weeks. He couldn’t remember any of that. He did remember the blood all over his kitchen and basement, and Maisie telling him everything would be okay, and the Viper wiping blood off his own cheek and telling them to get in Henry’s car, that he would drive. The rest was lost to him. The time after he’d first awoken was a blur, too. Cops asking questions, pre-trial and arraignment, sessions with Dr. Pam Ulster. He didn’t have Ayteilu to escape to then, because he’d brought his friends over from there. Maisie said that he’d spent his time in the coma there, and now it was time to come back.
Henry was losing time, and he was scared. Ever since he’d brought Maisie and the rest over to his world, people had been getting hurt, and he was often confused. Days were often a blur, and sometimes, he wondered if he’d ever actually woken up from that coma at all.
It was only when he slept that things were simple anymore. Only in dreams were things okay.
In the dream, the sky was getting darker, not lighter.
“What’s happening? Where’s the sun going?”
“There is no sun,” the Viper told him. “Not until we finish what we started.”
“We need you to be the one,” Orrin said.
“To be what one?”
“The one who sets us free,” Maisie cooed in his ear.
Dream Henry felt sad. “I don’t want to die,” he said.
“We don’t want you dead,” Maisie replied. “We want you to sleep, like you did before, after those intruding little dogs were put down. Sleep, and let us do the rest.”
“You don’t want me to wake up?”
“Sleep, Henry…”
And so Henry did.
* * * *
With Henry asleep, Maisie could think.
It had been quick work infiltrating the building once the outer structures had been subsumed and their employees and inhabitants disposed of. They were a small army now: Maisie, Orrin, Edgar, the Others, the Viper’s mist and electrical Wraiths, and their mechanical beasts.
Still, there was much to be done, and a number of obstacles to overcome.
One issue was the expansive quality of Henry’s imagination. Ayteilu had been a fully realized place for a long time, with a myriad of wildlife that adapted with varying levels of difficulty to substantiation. It was one thing to pour it all out of Henry’s head but another entirely to help them find independence. The little ones, the beasts, had an easier time of controlling and reshaping small objects, so their incorporation with solid, stable physical bodies had gone much more smoothly than it had for the rest. The mist people and their electrical kin, the Wraith-folk of Ayteilu, had tried to repurpose some of the humans on the hospital grounds but hadn’t expected the human bodies to take rather than give, absorbing Ayteiluan energy and changing the host rather than being absorbed. So the Viper’s Wraiths had succeeded in little more than infecting the humans and changing their physical structure in a series of painful rearrangements progressing toward crippling deformity. Their attempts at manipulating the building materials, tools, machinery, and appliances they came across, like the little ones had done, only bled Ayteilu into them rather than giving them something to work with in putting together their own bodies.
The Others were too crazy and too unfocused to understand the concept of substantiation. They were Orrin’s, and so Maisie intended to let them run their course, wreaking havoc in their soupy, half-substantial way and dissipating once they all broke ties with Henry. Orrin would be disappointed, but there was nothing else to be done about it. They were chaos and muscle sheathed in sharp claws and teeth and serrated tentacles, and once they’d served their purpose, Maisie would in truth be a little relieved. They were one less factor to worry about.
That left Maisie, Orrin, Edgar, and the Viper in much the same boat as the Wraiths. Fortunately, Maisie had a plan. She also had three very powerful incantations that Toby Ryan, at least, believed were an irreversible and potent solution to their problems.
Toby Ryan and Ben Hadley had belonged to groups that seemed to understand the nature of summoning something into the world and then keeping or dismissing it. The more she understood about the words and the actions involved, the surer she was that she could make it work for them. Sure, they were usually used on entities that already had independent existence, but the idea behind them was applicable. The Infection Invocation of Xixiath-Ahk the Bloodwashed had already boosted their ability to absorb and integrate objects in this world as well as some of the people in it. The Floodgates Spell of Thniaxom the Traveler, which she had learned first, had been instrumental in helping to bleed the flora and fauna and the rest of Ayteilu onto this world and consume it.
The World Caller Ritual and the Essence Substantiation Spell of Iaroki the Swallower of Suns were going to make them free. She knew it.
Then Henry could sleep as long as he wanted. Forever, even.
* * * *
The car ride to the hospital was grim and mostly quiet. Kathy had called a few friends, but none of them had been able to offer anything to help her situation beyond convincing the conjurer to banish the tulpas. Kathy didn’t think Henry was utterly beyond convincing to do just that, but it wouldn’t be easy. For better or worse, the tulpas had protected Henry through some pretty terrible things, and he trusted them. Talking him into letting them go for good, forever, was going to be a tough sell, especially from a stranger. And even if she could, it might very well not be enough to wish them away. If the guesses of her friends had been right, the tulpas were already using a number of occult spells to not only hold them in place but to increase their power and ability to spread. The Floodgates Spell of Thniaxom the Traveler, the Infection Invocation of Xixiath-Ahk the Bloodwashed, and the World Caller Ritual of Iaroki the Swallower of Suns were powerful and catastrophic in the hands and mouths of even the most rudimentarily trained; someone like Ben Hadley might have known of them from his cult days or maybe even participated in some rituals for a show of power. The tulpas might well have learned them from him.
If they had learned such things from Toby, who was a far more experienced practitioner in a cult much more powerful, then there was a good chance the tulpas would be far beyond anything she or even their creator might do or undo. Given Toby’s condition the last time Kathy had seen him, she thought the tulpas had learned way more from Toby than just how to kill.
When she relayed this information to Detective Holt and Ernie Jenkinson, she could tell she had overwhelmed them and possibly dismayed them a little. She was supposed to be an expert consulting other experts, and the general consensus had been “convince a crazy man to give up his crazy or else you’re screwed.” The men took it well, if taking such information inside themselves and ruminating on it could be considered “well.” From time to time, Ernie would ask a question or offer an idea. Holt just sat brooding, looking out the window. He was homicide, after all, and he knew death when he saw it coming. Now he was about to go back into a den of killers who themselves were in danger of predators higher up on the food chain. The prospect scared Kathy; she could only imagine how the two men in the back seat of her car felt.
“If this hospital’s under attack, then can’t you call in the cavalry, Holt? I mean, what says we gotta tackle them things all by ourselves?”
“Their guns and training won’t work,” Kathy broke in. “If we involve backup, it’s likely we’ll just end up with a bunch of dead cops.”
She glanced in the rearview, and from the sharp look Holt gave her, she could tell she’d struck a nerve. She felt a little bad, but there was no sense in sugarcoating the situation. Swarms of cops flashing lights, SWAT, and the like would create panic and havoc. Panic and havoc would bring news crews and cause hospital lockdowns. Those things would, in turn, cause delays, and valuable time was exactly what the tulpas needed to finish what they had started. They’d never get to Henry unless they went in quietly and alone, and avoided everyone and everything they could until they reached their target patient.
“Besides,” she tried again, “the people I talked to agree that what little protections I can bring in there with me are limited in their scope. I can protect us for a time with what I have, but…well, time is of the essence.”
“I hope you know what you’re doing, woman. I mean, I got you, I got your back, but I don’t want to see no hospital gurney slicing off the front of you.”
Kathy couldn’t help a small smile. “I’ll do what I can to keep my front intact, Ernie.”
“Would be much appreciated, ma’am.”
After Ernie punched open the security code on the touchpad lock and opened the big gates, they turned down the tree-lined road and Kathy got that same tight feeling in her gut. She had begun to hate Connecticut-Newlyn Hospital for the Criminally Insane. She pulled into a space in the nearly empty parking lot and glanced at the digital clock on the dashboard. It was 11:43. Only the night shift would be working, and that would be a small crew; no Wensler or Ulster, no Margaret. Most of the inmates would be locked down for the night in their bedrooms, and anyone not on patrol would most likely be on the third floor.
The three sat in the car for a few minutes, staring up at the building. It was not completely surprising to see that an odd, spidery ivy, faintly glowing blue and pink with dark red veins, was growing off the rooftop and had taken over some of the upper corners of the building. Odd, bulky creatures, boxy in shape as if made from old mattresses, clung to the side of the building. They navigated the façade in quick spurts on long, spidery legs made probably of window glass, climbing around the ivy. Occasionally, they sniped at probing, leaf-lined tendrils with glassy pinchers, and coils of throbbing blue glow snapped back at them like whips.
“After everything I’ve seen tonight, that shouldn’t surprise me, but…” Holt shook his head.
“You never get completely used to it,” Kathy muttered, taking a snubnose .357 out of the glove box. “Ready, gentlemen?”
“No time like the present,” Ernie said.
They got out of the car.
“Move slowly,” she told them. “If they can see, they may be attracted to sudden movement.”
“And if they can smell us?” Holt asked, drawing his own gun out of the holster.
“If they start to move quickly, you move more quickly.”
They crept toward the front door. Ernie, who had no weapon himself, clung to his keys like brass knuckles, doing his best to keep them from jingling. Kathy’s focus was so intent on the mattress-spider things that she jumped when a voice said, “Well, hey there.”
She turned to the source of the voice, a boy in his early twenties slouching against the double doors. He had blond hair sticking up in tall-grass spikes. He wore a white retro-1970s Atari t-shirt whose hem was splattered with blood. He had a nice-looking if someone bony face. His eyes were a clear and icy wintergreen color, and when he smirked, Kathy thought she saw at least two pairs of fangs. His hands were shoved into the pockets of faded jeans, but knife blades protruded from his wrists like spikes.
Another boy limped out of the shadows to join the first. This one was smaller, dwarfed both in height and muscularity by the first boy. He looked younger, too—maybe sixteen or seventeen. One of his hands looked shriveled or burned nearly to scar tissue, its fingers long and fused together to make a kind of crab-claw. He wore all black, including a long trench coat, and the thatch of black hair on his head hung in his face. He tossed it back and Kathy could see one of his eyes glowed like a small fire in his skull. The other eye was completely black, a void of unearthly cold.
The alien ivy swayed in the night breeze, muttering and whispering as the three of them faced off against the two boys. For several seconds, no one spoke.
Finally, Kathy said, “Are you Henry’s friends?”
The blond shot the other boy a small, knowing smile. “Henry has lots of friends now.”
“I’m sure he does. Henry sounds like a good guy. Not someone who’d want to hurt anyone.”
The blond boy’s smile faded. “You don’t know Henry, then.”
“I know guys like Henry. I know the terrible suffering he went through.” Kathy had received his medical and psychological file from a Network contact just before the three of them had left the apartment. It was, sadly, much as she had expected, and a lot of what she hadn’t. Henry’s mother had tried to smother him as an infant. Only his father arriving home in time and pushing her off the baby had saved his life. At three, she tried to leave him out in the backyard in the snow overnight to cleanse him of demons. Again, his father intervened. At five, her untreated paranoid schizophrenia caught up to her for good, and all the screaming of obscenities and pounding of fists couldn’t make the voices go away. They told her to shoot her husband and son and then herself, and she listened. The bullet for Henry missed him. The one for his dad exploded red in his chest, and the one his mom had saved for herself gave her a halo of red like an angel, little Henry reported, before the big hole in the back of her head made her fall down.
He was alone with their bodies a day and a half before a neighbor, unused to the sudden silence over there, peeked through a window and saw a sticky, blood-spattered baby in soaked clothes curled up next to his dad’s cooling corpse.
Henry Banks was sent to live with an aunt, uncle, and grandfather in Ohio. The file indicated he made it another eleven years in that house. At sixteen, the murder of his three relatives by intruders would have resulted in his being sent to a group home, but he’d run away and never looked back. Kathy did her best to read through the years of abused heaped at the feet of the three adults tasked with caring for a small, traumatized boy. She couldn’t get through all the details, but she got the gist of it: sexual abuse at the hands of his aunt and uncle until he was eleven, usually following beatings, burnings, and the occasional cuts from a knife at the hands of his grandfather. That Henry Banks survived as long as he did was a miracle. That he made up an entire world peopled by powerful, fearless beings to protect him like the two facing her right now was not only understandable but almost endearing. It had moved her to tears she had taken some trouble to hide from the men in her company, and it had made her all the more determined to get Henry out of this situation and someplace safe.
“Orrin, we d-don’t have much t-time,” the smaller, fire-eyed boy said to the blond.
“Orrin, is it?” Kathy said to him.
The blond boy smiled. “Yes, Kathy, it is. And this is my brother, Edgar, and he’s right. All this talk is boring. You know we’re gonna fight. I know we’re gonna fight. So let’s get to it.” He peered around her shoulder. “Edgar, take the old men. I want me a piece of Ms. Ryan, here.” He looked her up and down with a small, hungry smile not unlike Toby’s, and it made her skin crawl.
Kathy raised her gun and fired once into Orrin’s chest. He looked down at the bloodless hole the bullet left in his shirt and whistled. “Oh wow, that was intense. What is that, pain? Damn, honey. Do it again!”
He pushed off the doors and began walking toward her.
“Just checking to see if you’re solid yet,” she said calmly, and holstered her gun. She quickly pulled out a talisman on a chain instead. Made of silver, it was shaped a little like a letter “S” speared through with arabesques. Its name was long and difficult to pronounce and most of its history lost to time, but it was powerful. If the tulpas had been using Toby Ryan’s occult spells to achieve some kind of permanence, then the symbol in her hand could allegedly do what no gun could.
Orrin, who she supposed didn’t know what the talisman was, kept coming at her. When he got within about five feet of her, though, he staggered back, clutching his head.
Edgar, who had hung back, almost cowering against the double doors, strode forward. “Orrin?”
“She’s got head magic,” Orrin said. “I can’t cut her.”
“Got it,” Edgar replied, and descended the steps. His furtive demeanor had gone. His one eye glowed deep red in the dark, and just as Kathy was about to speak, a bright beam of red shot out of the socket. It hit Kathy in the shoulder and the pain was immense, a burning that traveled down her arm and up toward her neck, her lungs, her heart. She cried out but managed to hold on to the talisman. If she dropped it, she was dead.
Shaking off the pain, she glanced at Holt and Ernie. They, too, had their talismans out, shoving them toward Orrin like ID badges. Orrin growled, swiping the air in front of them with his wrist-knives. Edgar turned to the men as well, and this time when the light came from his eyes, it went from red to white hot, so bright it hurt their own.
Kathy threw an arm up to cut the glare and shouldered past Orrin toward Edgar.
He turned back to her just as she reached him. Up close, the talisman seemed to hurt him, too. The fire in his eye dulled to an ember and he cried out.
Then Orrin was on her, with an arm around her neck. The crook of his elbow pinched her windpipe and squeezed, and explosions of dry, panicked pain went off in her head. For a thoughtform, he was surprisingly strong—neither entirely solid nor entirely ephemeral, but some liquid, fluid sliding scale in between.
She raised the talisman to his forearm, and the skin there began to smoke and flake away. Orrin growled behind her and squeezed more tightly. She thrust the talisman over her shoulder toward her best guess at his face, and the pressure on her neck broke. Kathy gasped for air, coughing, as Orrin howled from somewhere behind her.
She looked up just in time to see Orrin charging her again when Ernie flew across her field of vision, tackling Orrin to the ground. He shoved his own talisman in Orrin’s mouth, and the boy began to turn blue. Kathy glanced at Edgar and saw the eye gearing up again with a deadly red glow.
“Ernie!” she shouted, and the old man looked up as a red beam burst forth from the boy on the stairs and shot out toward him.
For one terrible second, the beam lit Ernie’s face in a blood glow, and she thought she smelled sizzling flesh. Then Holt was behind Edgar, springing at the boy with his talisman. He reached around and plunged it into the fiery eye. Edgar screamed and crumpled to the ground.
Orrin was on his back convulsing, coughing up blue-black ichor onto his own chin, his t-shirt, and the ground around him. Ernie lay motionless next to him. Kathy’s heart sank.
Then Ernie coughed and sat up, rubbing his ear. Kathy and Holt rushed to him, yanking him to his feet and away from Orrin. When Ernie took his hand away, blood and a few shreds of what was left of his ear came away on his fingers.
“You okay, Ernie?” Holt asked.
Ernie looked too dazed to speak. He let them drag him up the stairs past Edgar’s still form and to the double doors of the hospital. Kathy fished for the key ring on his belt.
“The key card with the blue label,” Ernie mumbled.
“Hang in there, buddy,” Holt said. “You just hang in there.”
“I ain’t goin’ nowhere,” Ernie said, and tried to chuckle, but it came out as a cough. “Just a little banged up, is all.”
Kathy found the key card with the blue label and ran it through the electronic door lock. A second after, the familiar buzz let her know she could open the door, and she ushered them inside.
The front lobby was quiet, even for the night shift. Margaret had, ostensibly, gone home for the night, though it was strange to imagine her having any sort of life out from behind that desk. Kathy knew that the night crew had at least three security guards, and one of them usually took up a post by that first set of doors, which led to the bedrooms and hydrotherapy room. No one was there at the moment. She supposed it was possible that he might be patrolling the second floor—Margaret had mentioned something about their being short-staffed—but the conspicuous absence of a guard gave Kathy an uneasy feeling.
She and Holt got Ernie over to one of the chairs in the lobby’s tiny waiting area, and he waved them off that he was okay.
“Much obliged for the help, folks, but I seen worse than that in the war,” he said with a smile. “It’ll take more than that to kill old Ernie here.”
Holt took a look at the side of Ernie’s head. “You’re a tough old dog, Ernie. Looks like the boy’s laser cauterized the wound a little, at least. Bleeding’s mostly stopped. We can get that ear bandaged up, though, if you want.”
“Not much of an ear to bandage, I imagine,” Ernie said. “Can’t hear none outta that side.” There was no expectation of reassurance in his voice. He might not have been able to see the charred tissue, but he obviously knew enough about the damage. “Nah, let’s just get to Henry, take advantage of the moment’s quiet, okay?”
Kathy nodded. “You saved my life, Ernie. I owe you a huge debt of gratitude.”
Ernie waved it off, blushing a little. “Nah, woman, I was just relivin’ some old football days, is all.”
She grinned. “All right, All-star, let’s get moving, then.”
Ernie rose. Kathy could tell from the pained expression that flickered across his features that despite his bravery, he had an old man’s bones and an old man’s aches and pains to go along with them. He had too much pride, she imagined, to let it show, but he was hurting. Kathy just hoped he hadn’t cracked any of those old bones trying to save her sorry ass.
The three of them headed toward the elevator. Henry, she knew, was on the third floor, near her brother.
“I think we should take the stairs,” Holt said, eyeing the elevator doors suspiciously. Kathy glanced up at the digital screen above the doors, which displayed “4.”
She shrugged. “Okay. Probably faster anyway.”
In the stairwell, the silence grew thinner, somehow tinnier and hollower. The echoes of their steps and their occasional words were strange, coming too soon on the heels of their noise or too long after. Holt seemed distinctly ill at ease. He had his gun drawn, even though it would do little good. She figured it was a kind of security measure, a product of police training that made him feel less helpless. Neither he nor Ernie had their talismans now; they were essentially going into a firefight without a bulletproof vest. She kicked herself for not reminding them to reclaim theirs from the tulpas outside.
They reached the third-floor landing with a little huffing and puffing, and emerged onto the corridor by the elevator. The now familiar surroundings still spawned that slick weight in her stomach that greasy lump of discomfort. It was not so easy to bury as that hard little hateful part of her, maybe because it lifted once she left the hospital. It was there now, though, and the total quiet, the empty nurse’s station and the lack of a patrolling night guard so far as she could tell made it feel much heavier.
“What room’s he in?” Holt asked.
“307,” Kathy and Ernie said in unison.
“Okay, lead on.”
Ernie led them to another set of reinforced glass doors. He opened these with a yellow-labeled key card, and gestured for them to go first. Their footsteps thundered, despite every effort to be quiet.
Room 321, 319, 317… The walls felt narrow and slanted at unnatural angles there, and in many cases, the numbers next to the doors to each room hung slightly askew. That same ivy on the roof extended out from under some of the doors, waving and reaching for their shoes as they passed. Kathy wondered about the other inmates, and where the ivy was thinnest, she tried to peer through the windows. She couldn’t see much, but what she did see wasn’t encouraging; mostly, shadowed masses more ivy than person groaned in the corners or from the beds.
Room 315, 311, 309… One of the doors had a rust-colored handprint on it, and a blood smear like a comet tail trailing toward the wall. Beyond it, something that was once a man had been bent backward, and it crab-scuttled on its toes and fingers toward the door. Where the head had been was a ghoulish mask of distorted features. Only the eyes remained human, and in them was a glazed terror that made Kathy flinch.
On the right, Room 307’s door was closed. Kathy did not look at the door next to it. She didn’t want to see her brother’s room just then, or whatever personal effects he thought made him look more human. Instead, she stepped aside to let Ernie unlock it. Then she slipped the talisman chain around her neck, and without knocking, she went inside.
The man on the cot was asleep. The room was uncomfortably cold, but Henry slept in a short-sleeve hospital-issued pajama set with no sheet or blanket on him. He didn’t stir as she, Ernie, and Holt approached. Kathy looked around the darkened room. Other than the cold it was, so far as she could tell, untainted and untouched by the alien infection happening elsewhere in the hospital.
Maybe Henry genuinely didn’t know what was happening. She’d said she thought he didn’t more than once, and had thought she believed it until she took in his room. The poor guy was sleeping away his own creations’ rebellion.
“Henry? Henry, wake up.”
Henry stirred but his eyes didn’t open. Kathy looked back at the men and they shrugged.
“Hey. Hey, Henry,” she said, gently shaking his arm. “I need to talk to you. Wake up.”
“Not just now, he can’t,” a sweet, cultured girl’s voice said from the shadows. “Henry’s taken something to help him sleep.”
Startled, Kathy turned toward the voice and saw a girl with a patch of iridescent gold scales around one eye. She could feel energy from this girl that the other tulpas didn’t have and a kind of barely reined-in anger. If Orrin and Edgar originally had been manifestations meant to guide him, then this one was clearly meant to protect him, and if Ernie was right about Henry’s not being a killer, then Kathy was willing to bet a good bit of his murderous rage was standing right in front of her.
“You think you’re taking care of him,” Kathy said, keeping her voice even.
“I’m keeping him safe and out of the way,” the girl replied. Her eyes were snakelike, full of subtle defiance and predatory cunning. It occurred to Kathy that the talisman she had just might not be strong enough to protect her, let alone all three of them.
“That’s what I’d like to do, too,” Kathy said.
“What you’d like to do,” the girl said, eyeing the talisman as she came closer, “is to convince dear Henry to make us go away.”
“I can’t convince him of anything he doesn’t want himself,” Kathy said. She held still, her body tensing to move quickly should the girl strike. “Although I can’t imagine he’ll be too thrilled that you want to leave him.”
An odd expression Kathy couldn’t quite place passed briefly over the girl’s face, and then that imperturbable calm held sway again. “After all we have done for Henry, he’s delighted to do something for us. He’s willing to help us in any way that he can.”
“He isn’t willing because he doesn’t know, does he?” Kathy asked. “You’ve been going around behind his back, gathering your spells and rituals to grant yourself life—real life, not just a shade or reflection of life. You want what he has. And when you’re done with that, Henry will be of no use to you.”
The girl tilted her head and studied Kathy. “You almost sound as if you think we don’t care about him. That’s not so. We’ve sheltered him his whole life. We’ve protected him against the things that would have killed him.”
“And you killed for him. That’s why he’s here, isn’t it? Because you killed those kids?”
“Don’t you know? We’re not real,” the girl said with a small laugh. It was an ugly sound, much older and more jaded than her young throat seemed capable of making. “We’re just Henry’s imaginary friends. He’s a sick boy. A lost, broken boy. And we’re just the parts of him he can’t resolve or let go of.” The last part sounded bitter, and Kathy was struck by how Henry’s personification of anger was as much directed inward as it was outward.
The girl glanced at Henry, then focused her golden gaze on Kathy again. “How did you get past Orrin and Edgar?” she asked suddenly.
“We put them down. Just like we’ll put you down, if you won’t and Henry can’t.”
“You can try,” the girl said with an amused smile.
“We intend to do more than try,” Kathy said.
“You can’t undo what’s been set in motion. No one can, not even sweet little Henry. Not now.” The girl sized up Kathy again, as well as the men standing mutely behind her. “Go ahead. Try to wake him up. He’s drugged pretty heavily. You won’t get what you’re after, but give it a try. You can’t stop us now. It’s no matter.”
She backed up into the shadows from which she came, and for a few seconds, all Kathy could see were her eyes and glint of her scales.
“It’s our world now,” the girl purred, and the last of her Cheshire Cat glow winked out.
“Was that…one of them?” Holt asked from behind her. “Why didn’t she attack us like the others?”
“She doesn’t think she needs to,” Kathy replied, “or doesn’t want to take the chance. Help me wake Henry up. We have to get to him before she finishes those rituals or she may very well be right.”