He staggered after her.
He was dying.
But he clearly meant to take her with him. She was cool with that. Death couldn’t obliterate the happiness she felt.
She’d won.
And he’d never hurt anyone else again.
Chad charged over the machine-gunned bodies that filled the hallway, threading his way through them with the ease of an accomplished obstacle course runner. He only dimly perceived the shouts of the others behind him. He was rushing toward something, and there was nothing that could hold him back.
The blade knew the way.
The open doors of a massive bedroom stood open before him.
So many open doors tonight.
All of them leading him here.
To his destiny.
Giselle smiled when she saw Chad.
The last element of the dream trinity.
She saw him pull up at the sight that greeted him upon his entry into the room.
And she gave him a little psychic push.
A nudge he never suspected had an external origin.
GO.
Then he was moving again.
Dream.
Chad’s heart hammered, and unalloyed joy suddenly pulsed through him.
GO, came the voice he assumed was that of his own belligerent psyche.
The blade carried Chad forward again.
Rose up of its own volition.
And thunked into the back of the creature threatening Dream.
The Master staggered away from Dream. His hands clawed impotently at the blade wedged like a fishhook in his back. The convulsions that gripped him made the task impossible. His head wobbled on his shoulders like a kite caught in a high wind, and the rest of his body shook like a condemned man riding the lightning. There was a stink of sulfur and burning meat, and his eyes radiated light, reflecting a fire burning from the inside out. His body assumed the consistency of melting wax, and the room’s other occupants began to back as far away from him as the walls would allow.
The strange convulsions increased in intensity.
The creature became a barely discernible blur in the middle of the room.
Then there was a pause.
A blip in reality.
A held breath.
Followed by a wet explosion.
Chunks of the creature’s body thumped against the walls, and a rain of blood and vaporized organs fell on the witnesses to the thing’s demise.
Dream blinks. It’s not right. This isn’t right. He’s dead. But she’s not. She should be gone, too. Shouldn’t be here. But-Chad is here. He looks … changed somehow.
She finds herself accepting his embrace, and she turns her face into the warm crook of his neck and begins to cry. He holds her tight. So tight it feels as if he’ll never let go of her.
EPILOGUE
The Master’s death brought about the return of the true house, stripping away the layers of illusion to reveal an old, modestly-sized dwelling in an advanced stage of disrepair. The dimensions of the house appeared to contract, but the impression of shrinkage was yet another illusion-the structure’s drastically reduced size was just the restoration of reality. Evidence of the vanquished power was manifested in other ways, some subtle, some obvious, like the shapeshifters, who’d only been humans artificially endowed with the trappings of lycanthropy-they reverted to human form now, including the few that hadn’t perished in the tunnel massacre.
The banished people of Below returned to the surface world in a steady stream throughout the night. News of The Master’s demise elicited smiles and cheers, and some of the refugees from that netherworld sought a degree of vengeance by taking their anger out on the handful of apprentices who’d managed to avoid being machine-gunned in the second-floor hallway. By dawn of the next day, the remaining apprentices were all dead, victims of rough justice. Most of them were lynched-their bodies dangled from tree limbs, twisting in the sturdy morning breeze.
Chad didn’t participate in the reprisals.
But he made no effort to halt them.
The apprentices were sociopathic monsters masquerading as real humans-the continued functioning of their lungs was only a waste of perfectly good oxygen.
Let ‘em twist.
He supposed he might even have helped string a few of them up had he not been so completely focused on Dream. He allowed her to cry in his arms for a long time following The Master’s death. She felt so fragile in his arms, like a bird with a broken wing, and all he cared about anymore was taking care of her. He vowed to become the kind of friend she’d always needed. Perhaps, eventually, he could be more than that to her, but, for now, that was all that mattered.
Being a friend.
And seeing her through this season in hell.
Dream didn’t want to ever leave his embrace. She clung to him the way a drowning woman would cling to a piece of driftwood. Desperately. Gripping him by the shoulders so tight that her fingers felt welded to his flesh. As if she were trying to merge with his flesh, become one with him, to seek some ultimate solace in his new strength. Because he was a changed man.
That so complete a transformation could have occurred over a twenty-four-hour period was nothing short of astonishing.
A miracle.
It was like the old Chad, the one she remembered from high school, had been magically restored to her. But this transformation was nothing as simple as that. He was different now. More compassionate. More empathetic. She didn’t need him to tell her these things, to claim that he’d changed, and she didn’t even need the current demonstration of concern.
She could feel the change in him.
She could reach into him and touch it.
The realization was only a momentary surprise. The strange, unknowable creature that had ruled this place had been a master weaver of illusions, but the power that created those illusions had been very real. And he’d told her the truth about her own abilities; they were vibrant within her even now, stirring to life, becoming stronger, striving to become something … new.
Dream meant to develop these abilities.
And use them in a positive way.
She owed that much to Alicia-and to the memory of her other dead friends. A morning search of the second-floor rooms had a revealed a number of shocking, repulsive things, so many it was almost possible to become inured to depravity. But just a glance inside the room where her friends had died had been enough to repudiate that notion. The image of Karen’s decapitated head on a tray was awful enough, but the thing she found most disturbing was the way Alicia had died.
At her own hand.
With Shane’s Glock.
The way she herself had intended to die so recently. The stark, irrevocable fact of Alicia’s suicide repulsed Dream, offended something primal within her. A vital, compassionate woman-a force for good-had been removed from the world, and she would never return. Could never return. It wasn’t right. It should never have happened, and there was no way to change it. It made Dream feel useless. Powerless. And perhaps even a little angry at a friend who now would never have a chance to fulfill her life’s rich promise. The frustration Dream felt was so intense, she sensed she was experiencing what she would later see as a watershed psychological event in her life.
She would be a long time overcoming her grief-perhaps would never overcome so deep a reservoir of loss and regret-but she doubted she would ever entertain suicidal thoughts again.
She had survived.
She had Chad.
And a new sense of purpose-to do good, to make the world a better place.
Those things had to count for something.
As the morning deepened and the sun rose higher in the sky, the people of Below, the former banished people, began the long trek down the mountain. An exultant Lazarus led the way, and he sang to the heavens in his rich baritone, a glorious, soulful sound, a bluesy cry to the angels.