CHAPTER 13
We stood on a barren plateau of dark rock. Gray boulders jutted out here and there, shot through with blue veins. Above, a night sky spread, glowing with mother-of-pearl haze, as if someone had wrapped the upper layer of the atmosphere in a pearlescent veil. Beyond the haze, the night sky spread, the kind of sky that you would never forget, alive with the light of distant stars, where nebulae rioted and clashed.
I had been here five times. I never saw the light change. It was always like this: a diaphanous haze and the universe beyond, unreachable and cold. Too big. Too vast. If you looked at it too long, it filled you with despair.
In front of us a wall rose, hundreds of feet tall and sheer, made of the same rock as the plateau. A gate punctured it. It was wide open and from where we stood, we could see that it was a hundred feet deep. I once looked at a piece of chalk under a microscope during my brief time at college. I don’t know what I had expected, but I saw globules made from circles of delicate lace, except instead of thread, the lace was crafted with calcite shells shed by millions of microorganisms. The gates looked like that. Layers and layers of elaborate pale khaki lattice in dizzying patterns, some places resembling spider web, others a beehive; yet others forming delicate mandalas. Holes punctured the gates here and there, only to reveal more patterns.
“I don’t like this,” werewolf Sean said.
“It’s a place of serenity, but not happiness. You have to turn into the wolf form now. The prophets will let you in if you look like an animal. They view animals as part of nature.”
“The gates look like jaws. With teeth.”
“That’s because they are. If you try to enter as you are, they will close on you midway through.”
He studied me for a moment. “We can go back.”
“No, we can’t. The Archivarian is in there.”
“Tell me about this Holy Seramina.”
“I met her when Klaus and I were looking for my parents. Something about my power appeals to those of Eno. They feel a kinship with me and they let me enter. I talked to three of them, and Seramina was one of those three. She’s a Kelah. Her people live in large cities they call nests. Each nest is led by the royal pair and a council of advisers. Each nest also has a holy one, a spiritual leader, to whom all look for guidance. The holy ones see into the future, but they foresee only disasters, so they can save their people from misfortune. Seramina foresaw a colossal creature that would devour the nest, but she wasn’t believed. The threat was too strange. Nobody had ever encountered a creature like that. And Seramina was mating at the time, and mating interferes with the holy one’s ability to see into the future. The creature arrived and devoured the nest, eating everyone within except her. She watched them all die. Now she’s here, among others in the Sanctuary.”
“That’s a lovely story,” Sean said. “We should go back.”
“You can wait here, but I have to go in.”
He shook his head. His body blurred and a massive wolflike creature trotted over to me. I put my hand on his furry back—he was so large, I didn’t have to bend down—and took the first step through the gate. It remained open.
We walked in silence, the wolf and I. Something watched us. I couldn’t see it, but I felt the weight of its gaze. I didn’t want to be here.
The gate ended. A garden spread before us, filled with wide trees, their bark black and smooth. Each tree grew apart from its fellows, its blue glowing leaves shimmering within a dense canopy. Bulbous orange fruit hung from the branches, glowing like paper lanterns. Long silky grass, a dull, gunmetal gray, filled the spaces between the trees, spreading into the distance. No birds sang. Nothing disturbed the silence except for an occasional breeze that rustled the branches. I fought an urge to hug myself. When Homer wrote about the bleak plains of Elysium where the ancient Greek heroes lived after death, he must’ve had this place in mind.
Sean bared his teeth.
“I know,” I told him.
A swirl of tiny white lights drifted from the trees, lining up to light a path in the grass. We were being summoned. I followed it, Sean moving next to me on silent wolf paws. We walked deeper into the woods, but the trees didn’t become denser. It remained the same: a tree, some fruit, and the grass, then another tree…
We came to a clearing. A stone wall blocked the way, leaning to the side slightly, its surface slicked with moss. The lights flared and vanished.
A creature stepped from the shadows behind the wall. She was eight feet tall and slender, with leathery skin the color of butter. She stood upright on two long legs. Her four arms, delicate and narrow, put you in mind of a praying mantis or a damselfly, but her eyes belonged to an owclass="underline" large disks of blood-red with round black pupils. A gossamer tunic obscured her body, made with diaphanous layers of pale glittering fabric.
“Dinaaa.” Her voice lingered in the air, refusing to fade.
“Holy Seramina,” I said. “You called and I came.”
“You brought your wolf.” Seramina said. The echoes of her voice hung above the grass.
“Yes.”
“It’s good,” she said.
She knelt by Sean and looked into his eyes. “He doesn’t like me.”
“He doesn’t like this place.”
Seramina rose. “It is calm here. It is quiet. We have serenity. Peace. You will need peace soon, Dina.”
“I ask for your wisdom,” I said the ritual words. “I ask for your guidance. Oh holy one, tell me what danger lies in my future.”
“You will be offered that which you cannot refuse,” she whispered. “It will kill everything that is alive inside you.”
Fear squirmed through me. “Is there any way to avoid it?”
“No. It will come to pass. You cannot stop it, because you cannot deny the nature of who you are.” She knelt by Sean again, studying him. “When her soul dies, bring her here. She will never live again, but she can exist here, with us. She can be one of us, one of the broken. She will find peace here. That is my prophecy.”
She stood up and walked away into the trees.
I turned and followed the lights out. The Archivarian sat cross-legged just inside the gates. Beyond them a portal opened. Not a gate defined by a technological arc, not a tunnel, but a ragged hole punched straight through reality.
At our approach, the Archivarian rose and followed us without a word.
We walked through the tear. The universe died. There was empty blackness and then the back room of Wilmos’ shop burst into existence around us. The air smelled of energy discharge and gunpowder. The sounds of many weapons firing at the same time pounded on my ears.
The wolf tore and Sean spilled out, wearing nothing except his subcutaneous armor.
He grabbed me and pulled me to him, his eyes wild. “I’m never taking you back there.”
His lips closed on mine. The kiss seared me and for a moment I tasted Sean and the forest inside him.
The human Sean broke free. His body blurred. The massive lupine monster brandished a green knife and burst through the door of the back room into the gunfight.
I pressed myself behind the wall and peered out through the doorway. The front wall of Wilmos’ shop was gone. A ragged gap, its edges smoking and sputtering, had torn through the storefront. The werewolves had taken cover behind the counters, firing short bursts at the street, where the Draziri, hidden behind a couple of overturned merchant stalls, returned fire.
Sean flashed through the room, a dark blur that cleared the gap and burst into the street.
Sean!
“Idiot!” the older female werewolf yelled.
The werewolves line erupted with shots, as they tried to provide cover fire.