Instead, I reached out and touched a branch on one of the sickly, sparse trees as I went by. It crumbled, leaving a tacky substance on my fingertips. My own magic glimmered softly beneath the sticky stuff, shields ensuring that it wouldn’t sink into my skin and contaminate me, too.
Which it certainly wanted to do. It smeared across my fingers without help from me, seeking a way in so it could infect this new, healthy territory it had found. I lifted my hand, hoping for a way to get it off my fingers quickly without betraying my cool exterior, then hesitated. There was always a heart to the darkness, and it was just possible I could let the muck guide me there.
Not all that long ago, the very thought would have gotten me in trouble. I was grateful that the stuff didn’t instantly slide through my shields and gobble up my soul. Even so, I concluded it probably wouldn’t be all that smart to grab another branch and get more of the glop on me. Naturally, that’s what I did: coated both hands in the unpleasant crumbly sticky goo, then closed my eyes and did my best to feel whether it wanted to tug me in any particular direction. It reminded me of driving on a worn road, where the wheels of the vehicle slid into ruts and rumbled along there whether the driver liked it or not. It meant turning aside was difficult, but I wasn’t looking to turn aside just now. I wanted that easy pull, and it seemed like it should work.
Nothing happened.
After standing there long enough to start feeling foolish, I opened my eyes again and swallowed a squeak. Apparently my definition of nothing and the garden’s definition of nothing were not the same. I was no longer in a meadow. I was no longer in a garden, for that matter. I stood on the very edge of a black precipice, wind rushing up to rip tears from my eyes. I couldn’t see a damned thing below me, but above me was the center of the vortex, screaming silently against the small bones of my ears. Hints of shimmering green quartz ran through the black stone beneath my feet like a source of light, the only real light visible in this place. It gave me an unearthly glow and struck me as just the faintest, tiniest strike against the dark, against evil and misery and dreadfulness as a whole. I said, “Where there’s life, there’s hope,” out loud, and edged one quarter of an inch farther over the cliff, looking down.
The vortex above me was pulling even harder now, straining to haul me upward into it. Straining to pull the very bottom of the world up into it, as far as I could tell, and that made me think there was something at the bottom that it wanted.
Before I let myself think about it, I dived off the cliff.
I had fallen off the side of forever once before, in the Upper World. Then, a thunderbird had caught me. This time I was pretty certain nothing was going to catch me, but I was less afraid than I should have been. I had no idea where the bottom was, though once in a while I got a brighter glimpse of the falling world around me, as the green quartz flared and darkened again in the cliff face. I whispered, Raven? inside my head, and though my oldest and best-loved spirit animal didn’t actually appear, he offered something he had never shared before: a gift of wings.
I didn’t fly. My fall didn’t even slow. Not until the bottom of the pit finally came into view, a thin green light that strengthened and brightened as I fell closer. At the critical moment that sense of wings flared, slowing me, breaking my fall. I hit the ground in a three-point crouch, feeling like a goddamned superhero, and bounced to my feet crowing, “I’m Batman!”
Bouncing up was nearly my undoing. The vortex’s upward pull dragged me up several feet before it lost its grip. I fell again, far less gracefully this time, and stayed down when I hit.
The green light was coming from a crack in the pit’s floor, which I could now see clearly because my face was mashed into it. The rock broke away under my weight, which was probably a bad sign, but it didn’t collapse entirely while I stared into the light and tried to wrap my mind around what I saw.
Apparently I’d stumbled on the shamanic version of Snow White. An emerald-green stone casket—not really a casket, more a cocoon—was buried beneath the pit, and Annie Muldoon lay within the cocoon. Quiet, soothing power pulsed from it, bringing a soft and unexpected scent of mist and leaves with it. I pushed my right arm into the crack, seeing if I could touch the cocoon.
I couldn’t, quite. It had been well buried. I twisted to look toward the vortex, wondering if the cocoon had in fact been really well buried and that the vortex was only just now managing to tear its way through the earth to reach it. Assuming the shards of quartz in the cliff were related to the casket, it seemed fairly likely. Which meant—
Well. It meant we’d barely timed this right. If Morrison and I had been half a day later in arriving from North Carolina, the vortex would’ve gotten to Annie before I did. As it stood, I was afraid to dig her out for fear we’d both go flying up into the great mouth of darkness in the sky. I was going to have to go down to her.
Goose bumps stood on the back of my neck and swept down my arms, sending a chill into my belly, where it churned around a little bit. I had never had a problem with enclosed spaces until two weeks ago, when I’d had to make a mad run out of a collapsing cave system. Since then, I’d discovered a growing tendency toward heebie-jeebies when presented with squeezing myself into tight spaces, which had happened more often than seemed reasonable in a mere two weeks. The upshot was a quick internal lecture about tough luck and the lesson therein, not that I could think of any useful lessons beyond “Stop getting embroiled in mystical altercations that squish you into crevasses and cracks,” which seemed like sound, but possibly unfollowable, advice.
I knocked some of the thinning pit floor away with my elbows and knees while ruminating over all of that, and fell five feet onto Annie Muldoon’s crypt.
This had all started with a crypt, or darned near, anyway. Me and Gary, we’d gone hunting for a lady I’d seen from an airplane, and we’d shoved the top off a church altar that we’d started thinking of as a crypt as soon as Gary had wondered out loud if maybe a vampire was in it. I had sworn up and down that there was no such thing as vampires, and indeed, there had been no vampire, only a screaming woman who ejected herself from the altar-cum-crypt at a high velocity.
“You can scream,” I told Annie through my teeth, “but if you turn out to be a vampire I am going to be really pissed off. Vampires don’t exist.”
Annie, sleepily, murmured, “Of course they do.”
I screeched and bucked backward. The vortex howled delight and tried to seize me. Swearing, I dug my fingers into Annie’s cocoon and hauled myself closer to it. Her lashes untangled, revealing eyes that were vividly green in the cocoon’s light. I wondered what color they were supposed to be and muttered, “There are. No. Vampires.”
Annie’s gaze and voice both grew clearer, as if she was just learning to focus. “What on earth do you imagine the Master is, Joanne? Oh! Joanne!” Even caught in the cocoon, she reached for me like a mother might, fingertips trying to graze my cheekbone. “I know you,” she whispered in astonishment. “You’re my Gary’s Joanne. My father painted you.”
I gave myself a quick look to see if I’d been war-painted recently without noticing. I hadn’t, or at least not on any body parts that were easily visible. A couple seconds later I realized that probably wasn’t what she’d meant, and turned red enough that I could see my skin turn a sickly brown in the sarcophagus’s green glow.
“Am I dreaming?” Annie asked, then looked pained. “How many patients have I heard say that, but...I remember...I remember...I was dying. The god came. The god.” Her eyes widened in a breathless admiration I knew all too well. “The horned god. Did he really come? There was the stag and the cat,” and she took a moment out of her admiration to look exasperated at the very idea, which made me absolutely adore her. I was going to bring her home not just for Gary, but for me, because