Not that again. The words shimmered in my mind. There was something different about them this time, and it took me a minute to figure out what it was. The tense. Not shall be reunited, but are reunited. Why the change?
As soon as I asked the question, the words vanished from my thoughts. Nothing arose to take their place. My head hurt. I should drink the tea and go to bed. A few more minutes, and that’s exactly what I’d do.
I turned the page. My heart jumped like a startled rabbit, and I slapped my hand to my chest as if that would slow it down. No. God, no. There it was—the reason I’d never wanted to touch this book again, ever. On the night my father died, I’d taken down this book from its shelf in Mab’s library. I’d opened it at random. And I’d seen this picture.
The illustration showed Difethwr against a black background. The Destroyer grinned horribly, its evil teeth sticking out in all directions. Warts and pustules crowded its blue skin. Its eyes glowed, their flames held within. The image was hideous, repulsive, and I wondered why I’d ever felt compelled to mouth a few of the words on the page. But I had. And Difethwr had come.
There was no creature I hated more—in Uffern, the Ordinary, or the world in between.
Mab said the Destroyer was shadowing me. Was it here now? If I opened my senses to the demon plane, would it be sitting behind me, reading over my shoulder? Goose bumps prickled my skin; I could almost feel its fetid breath on my neck. As the dead dance, the Brenin shall claim what’s his. That’s what the prophecy meant. Tonight, at the zombie concert, Difethwr would try to yank my soul away and hand me over to Pryce to become his demon-incubator.
How could I stop it? I stared at the picture of my enemy, searching for a clue. The Destroyer’s eyes brightened, then flickered. A blue-and-yellow electric shimmer crackled over the illustration, and Difethwr turned its head toward me. Something puffed from its mouth. A cloud of sulfur choked me. Exhaustion dragged at my mind like quicksand—I struggled to keep my eyes open. But I lost. My lids shut, and the quicksand sucked me under.
FOR A LONG TIME, THERE WAS NOTHING. NO SOUND, NO color, no movement, nothing but endless, limitless blackness. My body, my mind, time—everything—dissolved into dark emptiness.
Avagddu. Utter darkness.
I felt nothing. I thought nothing. I was nothing. There was nothing but the void.
Something changed, and it took a long time for my perception to pinpoint it. A dim light flickered, like a single candle in an adjacent room. A tiny spot of … something, a speck of ash maybe, coalesced in the glow. The spot grew larger, a dark kernel within the struggling light, darker even than the blackness that surrounded it. It kept growing. As it got bigger, the spot took shape—horned head, massive limbs. Fire glowed in its eye sockets, and it came forward as the Destroyer.
With the Hellion’s appearance, I knew myself again. But my body remained diffuse, its boundaries blurred and assimilated into the darkness. The flames behind Difethwr’s eyes provided the only light.
“Greetings, daughter of Ceridwen.” Difethwr’s voice sounded thick and bubbly. “It is the last time we will greet thee as such.”
“I’d prefer you didn’t greet me at all, Destroyer.” My own words had the same sludgy feel. I was surprised I could speak. I wasn’t sure where my lips were and couldn’t feel them moving. “I’d prefer you stay in Hell, where you belong.”
“Dost thou not yet understand? This is Hell. Uffern. Call it what thou wilt. Dost thou not feel at home? It is thy realm.”
“Thanks, but I’ll stay topside.” I tried to sound defiant, but it was hard with my words glugging along, all slow and submerged.
Demonic, many-voiced laughter bubbled through the darkness. “It is too late. Thou hast made thy choice—in the slate mine, when thou didst open thyself to Uffern and we seized upon the bond. Then didst thou choose Hell, shapeshifter.”
“I don’t believe you.” Mab had said something about my bond with this Hellion. Something important. But here in the void I couldn’t catch hold of it.
“No matter. Thy destiny cannot be denied. And it is nearly at its fulfillment. Tonight, the Morfran shall feed. We demons shall regain our strength. And what must come to pass, shall come to pass.”
“I’ll stop it.”
“Thou?” Again the Hellion laughed, the chortles and chuckles percolating all around. “What canst thou do, fast asleep? One final time we needed thee as a bridge, so thou hast loosed the Morfran upon the dancing dead. Thou, shapeshifter.” Another laugh, but more distant. “Soon, we’ll not call thee that, either. Soon thou wilt bear the Brenin’s sons and serve him here in Hell.”
Difethwr’s eye-flames flared, then dimmed. As they grew fainter, so did the Hellion. It shrank and receded and finally disappeared, like a pebble dropped into a deep well.
The book had made me fall asleep—without Mab’s tea. I struggled to wake up, but my body wouldn’t respond. Sleep held me in a suffocating cocoon that wrapped around me like warm, wet cotton and wouldn’t let go. Wake up, damn it! I had to wake up. My mind pushed and strained at the darkness that held me captive, searching for a flaw, for any kind of crack or opening. There was nothing. I was sealed in a blank, undifferentiated prison of sleep.
There was no way to fight this. It was worse than any nightmare or teeth-gnashing demon. I knew I was asleep, but I couldn’t wake up. Mab would know what to do. I tried to call her, straining to conjure her in her library wing chair, but her colors refused to rise up. Darkness wouldn’t release them.
The Destroyer’s words replayed in my mind. One final time we needed thee as a bridge, and thou hast loosed the Morfran upon the dancing dead …
This was Pryce’s plan, to keep me out of the way. I would be stuck here, sleeping and useless, while Pryce strengthened his demon horde and the Morfran massacred hundreds of zombies at Tina’s concert.
Tina. The thought hit me like a lightning strike. Tina was the last zombie I’d spoken to before the book pulled me into sleep. She’d be the Morfran’s first victim when the sun went down. Maybe it was happening now; maybe it had already happened. Where I was, trapped in the embrace of Utter Darkness, time didn’t exist.
A vision emerged from the black-velvet void: Tina’s terrified face, eyes squeezed shut, mouth gaping in a scream, as the Morfran gouged her body. She’d be eaten. Pryce said the zombies were just food for the Morfran.
I struggled harder to wake up, trying to wrestle sleep into submission. But there was nothing to wrestle, and nothing to wrestle with—I had no sense of my body or my limbs. The vision of Tina faded to echoes of taunting, demonic laughter. Then all subsided to nothingness.
Maybe nothing was the key.
The never-ending nothingness that absorbed me was an illusion. It had to be. I wasn’t some disembodied consciousness drifting in the void. I knew that. And I also knew the way to shatter an illusion is to focus on what’s real.
My mind searched for some shred of reality I could build on. It was hard. I’d think of something I knew was real—the smell of coffee, Mab’s onetwothree pats, Kane’s silver hair—and try to catch hold of it. But before I could, it was subsumed by the void, like a raindrop falling into the ocean.
I kept trying. What was the last thing I remembered before I plunged into darkness? I groped for a memory. Kitchen, I’d been in the kitchen. I must still be there. What did my kitchen look like? From where I floated, it seemed impossibly far away and difficult to remember, but piece by piece I brought it into my mind. The table—there was a table, right? Yes. I strove to remember what it looked like. Black … there was black, like the blackness here. A blurry image of a table began to form, with a black top … and chrome legs. More black—the counters were black granite. The picture gained a little more focus, and I added the cherry cupboards, the stove, the stainless-steel fridge. I could see myself now, slumped across the table, a pot of cold herbal tea beside me. Juliet’s FANGS FOR THE MEMORIES mug. There—that’s where I really was. In my kitchen, not dissolved into utter darkness.