Archive of Our Own ^beta

“Hector used to hate summer,” Lyta says. “I mean, hated it hated it. Hated the heat, hated the smog—we met in LA, so that was a real problem—hated the tourists, hated the fires, another LA problem…I used to make so much fun of him. He was born in Cairo—Cairo, Egypt, the real Cairo—so he’d always say I had enough summer growing up to last me a lifetime, I don’t need any more, thanks. So why are we even here, Hector, I’d ask him, we should move up to Portland, or Seattle, or fucking Alaska if it’s going to be that much of a problem every single year.”

“And did you ever move?”

“Well, yes, eventually. We wanted to start our own firm, you know, and we just didn’t have the means to do that and stay in California. So that’s how we wound up in Jersey. Hector moped about the humidity there, too, but when I told him he could go on home to LA and enjoy the dry heat, he’d give me this look, and then say, all the home I need’s right here, Lyta. And I just couldn’t argue with him when he got like that. So we stayed in New Brunswick, he and I, and Rose, after her mom passed, until—well. Until there wasn’t a we to stay anymore.”

Lyta leans back on her propped hands, lets the warm breeze play over her face as it stirs the leaves of the tree they’re sitting under. Sycamore. No, maple. No—she doesn’t know, she’s never been outdoorsy. A nice tree, let’s just say that. “I don’t mind summer,” she clarifies. “Not when it’s like this, at least. I like all the green.”

Her companion makes a soft assenting sound. Lyta finds she can’t remember his name, but that doesn’t trouble her unduly. Hard to feel worried out here, in the dappled sun-shade with the rustle-whisper of moving leaves providing a hazy soundtrack. She’ll remember in a moment.

(That’s assuming you have a moment to spare, though, says a voice in the back of Lyta’s mind. A dry, smirking voice, not a kindly voice. Lyta doesn’t think she recognizes it. All manner of beasties can get in through an open window while you’re sitting there enjoying the sunshine. Nasty things. Better remember quick, girl.)

Strange how clearly Lyta can hear that voice even when she doesn’t know who it belongs to. She doesn’t do something stupid like look around for the speaker, though, or make a face at its comment. She knows very well that people don’t like it when you do that. It makes you look weird. It makes you look crazy. And Lyta isn’t crazy. Not now, anyway. She’d been crazy before—really crazy—so she knows the difference. What she is now is Getting Better. What she is now is Dealing With Things. She still has moments, sometimes, but who wouldn’t, after going through what she’s been through? Hearing voices or not, she’s allowed to have pleasant conversations. She can still enjoy a nice day out with a friend.

(If he’s your friend, why can’t you see his face? Tell us that, now—)

“Do you like the summertime?” she asks.

“Does it matter?”

“Well, you asked me.” At least, she thinks he did. He must have. No reason to talk about it, otherwise. And it’s too nice a day to be rude to a friend. And her companion is a friend, isn’t he? Why else would she be sitting here with him?

He pauses for a second, as though surprised she’d bother with the pleasantries, before pronouncing, quite solemnly, “My opinion is immaterial.”

Lyta sighs and traces her hand along the rough block of white marble she’s sitting on. Even though the corner of it gleams blinding-bright in the direct sunlight, the surface of the stone is cool to the touch, almost icy. Odd, if not quite unpleasant. Her fingertip brushes the edge of a long blade of grass poking over the edge of the stone. Green on white.

Something about that tickles the back of her mind. White and green, green and white. Once upon a time there was a little white house in a green field, and in that house lived a family, a mother and a father and…

“I’ve been here before, I think,” she says. “Is that right?”

“It is.”

“A long time ago.”

“Not so very long.”

“That’s funny. It feels so—so distant. Like a memory from when I was young. Or something from a dream.”

“There are few firm borders between dream and memory. To travel from one to the other is often as simple a thing as taking a single step forward, or a single step back.”

Lyta nods, like that was a sensible thing to say. A dull pressure somewhere in the shadowy dark of her brain, a cry of alarm sapped of meaning, leaving only a vague, unpleasant sense of urgency. No, it doesn’t make sense. No, it isn’t right. It’s not right and it’s not real wake up Lyta wake up wake up wake up—

But she doesn’t know what all that means. She sighs and brushes it aside, though it continues to jangle around her skull a little distractingly, which is irritating when she’s just trying to have a pleasant conversation with a friend. You’d think her mind could do her a favor and settle down, once in a while, considering they’re supposed to be on the same side and all.

(Oh, we are on your side, girl, whether or not you like the commentary. Don’t worry about us. Worry about him. Worry about your memory. Worry about your dreams…)

“It would be nice to take a step forward sometime,” Lyta says. “Or a step back. Or in any direction, really. Lately all I seem to be doing is running in place.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“No, I’m sorry,” she replies, almost before she knows she’s doing it. “I’m being silly. Self-pity isn’t productive. I really don’t have anything to complain about. I’m fine. I should be fine.”

“But…”

“But…” Lyta pushes her hands through her hair. Imagines she can feel the individual strands of premature silver there. “I—I don’t—maybe I should wait to get into it. Until the rest of the group gets here.”

“Do you think so?”

“It’s not much of a group therapy session if there’s only one person here, is it?” Lyta says with a wry chuckle. Yes, that explains everything. The pleasant park setting, her companion’s calm, sympathetic tone, her vague sense of unease. A little curl of satisfaction in her chest at having made sense of the situation. (Underneath it, an opposing curl of dissatisfaction: oh, yes, how very, very clever. Group therapy. Isn’t he well-adjusted? Ugh. We ought to kill him again for that.) “I’m sorry I’m so early. Force of habit. Hector used to say I’d drag him to the airport a week before our flight and camp out in the terminal if I could. It made Rose laugh and laugh.”

Her companion doesn’t laugh. He lets out a soft hum, considering—the shifting shadows dance over his white shirt, sketching symbols that almost coalesce into sense—the suggestion of a face here, a many-legged creature outlined for an instant there.

“It’s just us today, Lyta Hall,” he says. “Just the two of us.”

“Oh.”

“I hope that isn’t an imposition.”

“No, no, it’s—fine.”

She’s lying. It isn’t. At least in a group she could fade into the crowd a little. Disappear. Nod and make sympathetic noises when one bereaved mother or another talks about the accident, the shooting, the hospital, the guilt, the emptiness, the grief, the grief, the grief. Let them all believe she’s like them, burdened by ordinary losses, ordinary tragedies, too laden with ordinary sorrow to speak of them yet. She knows that isn’t true, but she’s always been very good at saving face. At keeping it together for the neighbors, for the people who need her. At carrying on in the face of cataclysm.

So good, in fact, that she’s only ever slipped once.

(But once is all it takes, really, mutters the voice in her head.)

“If it helps, simply consider this a conversation. Between—friends.” A strange emphasis there on friends. For a second, her companion’s face almost comes into focus, and she has to look at the white cloth of her skirt before it does. Clench of dread in her gut that dissipates almost as she feels it, like a fevered brow cooled by the brush of a soothing hand. She doesn’t need to look at him, she decides. It would be rude if she did, honestly. It’s fine. It’s fine. “Speak of whatever you wish. I only want to listen.”

“That’s nice of you.”

And it is, but the problem is, if her companion’s a therapist, or a counselor, or something, and this is a counseling session—there’s really only one thing worth talking about right now. She can feel it crawling up the back of her tongue like bile, like a scream, like some hideous creature escaping from the pit of her stomach to terrorize the world. But there’s no counselor alive who could handle that conversation, and no possible world where Lyta could make it palatable for another person. She can soften the edges of Hector’s loss for a polite audience—tell them of the accident, the funeral, pulling herself together again for Rose (or thanks to Rose, because Rose had been the adult as much as Lyta herself had been, during those cold awful months when they’d both been half-blind with their own private sorrows). But it all goes to pieces beyond the most fragmentary of details when she tries to speak of—

—to speak of—

Her head aches. Images flicker and flash through her mind, an old-fashioned slideshow: a child’s great dark eyes. A slim figure in black, its hand outstretched. A raven. The very field in which she sits, down to the last blade of grass, but offset by a fraction of a fraction of an inch from the field before her eyes. A white house—

(And what happened in that field? What happened in that house? And whose fault was it?)

“Can I—I’m sorry to keep asking so many questions—”

“Please. Ask.”

“Before, when I was here—were we here together?”

Her companion draws in a breath to shape an answer. Stops. Moves a little in his seat. “It—depends.”

“On what?”

“On who you mean by we.”

“Well—you and I, of course.”

“As I said.”

He bows his head with a meditative air, but his shoulders under his white linen shirt have gone tense. Lyta frowns. “I—I remember us being here. I think. Rose was here too. Wasn’t she? She was talking to me—to both of us. I remember you standing right—right—”

She gestures vaguely before her. Nothing there but green field and blue sky, but for an instant the slanting beams of sunlight take on the shine and solidity of glass and steel and marble. A ghostly figure floats in front of her eyes, an ugly dark shadow smeared on the bright day, sickly-pale face and ink-black spikes of hair, and its eyes are—

“No,” says her companion, and the shadow vanishes as though wiped away by a soft cloth, “that was not me.”

He has a low, rich, sonorous voice that adds to the sweet naptime atmosphere of the afternoon. For some reason it plucks a thread of worry in Lyta’s head, even though the better part of her wants to nod at his denial and move along, lulled by that soothing tone.

(A familiar voice, yes. A voice you don’t trust. And for good reason, too.)

And that doesn’t make sense, does it? Why wouldn’t she trust him? He’s her friend.

…But didn’t he just tell her he was a counselor, or a therapist, or something? She’s sure he said that. And either way, counselor or friend, shouldn’t she know his name?

Shouldn’t she be able to look him in the eye?

(What we’ve been saying, you little ninny.)

“Is something wrong?” her companion asks politely.

“No, no, it’s—I—”

Lyta’s thoughts writhe and twist and elude her grasp like minnows darting through water, there one moment, gone the next. Something about this man troubles her. Something about his name, his face, his—

“The heat must make it difficult to think straight,” he says, and as he does Lyta feels the sun sizzle along the back of her neck, a bead of sweat roll down her spine. The heat, right. It must be the heat, that’s all. Not important. But it’s so, so hard to move past the thought when there’s still that voice muttering inside her head, loud enough you’d almost think it had a mind of its own and wanted to join in the conversation.

(Hah, no bloody thank you. We’ve got no interest in swapping gossip with the likes of him. No use to it, anyway. You never can wring any sense out of a talk you have in dreams.)

In dreams—in dreams—there’s something there in that phrase, in dreams—

She’d had a dream once that she and Hector lived together in a little white house in the middle of a green field, she and Hector and—

—and Hector, and—

—and—

The thoughts squirm in her head like serpents fighting in a sack, and it’s turn away from them or vomit into her own lap, so with a groan she pushes them down—and in the instant of pure clarity that comes after she does, her companion’s face snaps into focus. Gentle expression, quizzical furrow in his brow, softly downturned lips.

“Lyta? Are you all right?”

(Hold on to it, Lyta, hold onto Hector, hold on to—)

Hector. That’s it. That must be it. Doesn’t it always come down to Hector, in the end? His life, his love, his loss, his legacy. Hector, even as a memory, a ghost. A dream.

(Pfah, says the voice in her head, disgusted. You’d think one of ours could do better than that. Honestly, sometimes I’m not sure why we even bother.)

With effort, she marshals the words into line. “I didn’t realize Hector had family in England. That’s all.”

“That Hector—”

“You look just like him. But you have that accent. You are family, aren’t you?”

Her companion blinks. Looks down at the warm tan of his hands where they’re folded neatly in his lap.

“Oh,” he says softly, his eyes widening.

They’re not Hector’s eyes. There’s something odd about them, although what exactly that is escapes Lyta for the moment. The rest of his face, though—the angle of the cheekbones, hint of a smile on the full-lipped mouth even in repose, the slight arch to the bridge of his nose, even the shape of his ears—it’s all right, it’s all so terribly, painfully right. Gets Lyta in the same place that aches when she sees old pictures of the two of them from college, when she watches home videos of Hector or listens to recordings of his voice. It’s the eyelashes, she decides, that are throwing her off. Maybe he has Hector’s eyes, too, but it’s hard to tell under those lashes, long as a deer’s and whiter than white. White as the marble block she’s sitting on. White as bone. His hair is white, too, and it curls where Hector’s had kinked, falling onto his forehead in little coils. He’s not old, though, Lyta feels sure about that. Not with that smooth skin and those slim, unblemished hands. He can’t be older than Lyta herself. He can’t be any older than Hector was, when he—

“Is that natural? The, the color, I mean.”

Her companion raises his hand to his hair, rolls a ringlet between his fingertips like he’s just noticed the texture there. “Yes,” he says, after a moment too long. “It is.”

“I’m sorry. I hope that wasn’t rude. You can see I’ve got some gray too.” She plucks at the witch-lock striping its silver way down from her hairline.

“It is the sign of a life well-lived, they say.”

“I don’t know about well, but—I guess I’ve lived through my share, like it or not.”

“You have. And you need not like the life you’ve led to bear its mark.”

A strange thing to say. Almost rude, and she’d push back if it were anyone else, but that face and the boyish, puzzled sadness dawning there soften her. “It’s—striking on you, though. It looks nice.”

“Thank you.”

And then they sit there in silence for a while. Her companion’s hand drifts down from his curls, fingertips brushing over his brow, his cheekbone—and then he twitches it away, as though he’s touched something sharp or slimy or otherwise unpleasant, unexpected. With a soft, embarrassed cough, he lowers his hand to his lap and folds it over its mate.

(Guilty conscience, eh? It would be, when you’re wearing that face. We ought to come after you again for poor Hector, just to show you what’s what—but no. The legalese gets too complicated. And you weren’t you, then, anyway.)

(No, we prefer things simple. Blood for blood. Oldest law in the universe.)

“I don’t know if I’ve lived a good life,” Lyta says abruptly. “There were good people in it, and I was lucky to know them when I did. But I don’t know if I ever actually did anything worth doing. I just sort of made myself whoever the people near me needed. My parents, Hector, Rose. And I was all right with that, more or less. It’s nice to be needed. That way you know people want you around. But now I don’t know what kind of life I’m living. It all sort of went to shit after—after Daniel.”

She stiffens a little. Hadn’t meant for that name to slip out. She doesn’t speak it aloud these days, guards the cursed treasure of it jealously in the locked vaults of her heart. She’s not quite sure what power it holds now. What ghosts it might summon, what cataclysm it could call down from the heavens. And, sure enough, her companion shivers to hear it, like someone’s just walked over his grave, but his voice is calm and steady as anything when he replies.

“There is a freedom in that. The freedom to choose your own path, to decide who you might be to others and who they might be to you.”

“It doesn’t feel like freedom. I don’t even know if it feels like living,” Lyta says. “I mean, I’m breathing and talking and walking around and everything, obviously. But it feels like—I don’t know. It feels like walking on a treadmill. I do things, I talk to people, but none of it means anything. None of them are real. It’s just a holding pattern. And every day I wake up and just go through the same motions again, and again, and again. Like Groundhog Day. You’ve seen Groundhog Day.”

“I know of it.”

“I know it didn’t work in the movie, but sometimes I think, if I could just kill that damn rodent, maybe—” Lyta stops.

“Yes?”

“No, I—that was mean. I’m being an asshole. I’m sorry. It’s really not all that bad. I’m safe. I’ve got a roof over my head. The people who keep the house let me work for bed and board, which is good of them, because you don’t get the sense they need my help, really. And the other women—well, they’re nice, for the most part. They all have it hard, and sometimes one or another of them has a bad day, of course. No one’s perfect. But they don’t mean any harm, and they’re trying their best, and that’s all you can really ask of someone, isn’t it?”

“I suppose it is. But many ask for more, whether or not it is kind.”

“Don’t I know it. You’d think we’d learn not to ask, at some point—but here I am.”

“You are here,” he agrees, a little pointlessly. “Alive, despite everything. Safe, inasmuch as you can be.”

Lyta sits up with a jerk, as though someone’s stuck her with a pin. “If you’re saying I should be grateful—”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you were going to,” she retorts, too loudly, too quickly. “And I know that, I know, I know, but—just—I wake up every morning and remember all over again that I’ve lost everything. My life. My family. My child. And it’s all my fault. They all made that very clear. My fault for wanting too much, for reaching too far, for looking for help in the wrong places. I should’ve just been sad and then gotten over it. I should’ve been normal. Even though nothing about any of it was normal. I should’ve just known better. As if that makes any fucking sense. As if I could’ve known any of it was coming.”

She frowns ferociously at her companion, daring him to argue. His lips part a little, and her heart jerks in her chest. Hector’s face or not, if he hits her with a platitude now, she’s going to hit him with her fist, and damn the consequences.

(Good girl, good, good. Keep him on the back foot, keep him on the run. Don’t let him get comfortable. That’s how you always get them in the end, make ‘em run and wear ‘em out. And the best part is, you don’t have to do a thing but follow. Just follow, and make them know you’re there, and—)

“They?” he asks, mild and soothing as the breeze.

(…Ahhh, you tricky little bastard. You always did have a way of leading a conversation around by the nose. Some things never change, do they?)

It’s not the reply Lyta expected. She fumbles, stammers, her ire tripping over its own feet. “I—you know, they, just—everybody, not that it’s anyone’s business—I don’t talk about it, really, but people always insist on acting like it’s their business to—to—”

She stops. They’re alone here—she knows to her marrow they’re alone (are you quite sure about that, girlie?), but there’s a sudden prickle down her neck as of watchful eyes zeroing in.

“Like it’s their business to…?”

“No,” she says. “I’m sorry. That’s not right. That’s not who I mean.”

“Then who do you mean?”

“I mean—the ones who built the house of remembrance. Those giants. The family.”

A darkness on the meadow, a cloud over the sun. (Is it a cloud? Is there a sun in the sky? Lyta can feel heat on her back, but looking down there’s no shadow falling across the white cloth of her skirt.)

“They blamed me,” she says, almost whispers. “I know they did. I never spoke to them, but I could feel them watching me the whole time, through the whole—I guess it was a funeral. I knew they knew what had happened. That if it weren’t for me and my—my selfishness—the man on the bier would still be alive, and I’d still have a son. Some of them were happy about what I’d done, I think. In a weird way. Some of them were more upset. Some of them didn’t care either way. But they all saw me. And they couldn’t do anything while we were there, in that place, in the House, but once we all left—I knew they could do anything to me. Anything at all. And however badly they hurt me, it would be my fault. Because I killed him. The dead man. Daniel. Both of them. Or as good as.”

“It sounds frightening.”

“It wasn’t frightening then. I don’t think I could’ve been scared then, even if I’d wanted to be.”

“And are you scared now?”

“I…”

She wrings the cloth of her skirt between her hands. This next part is hard to look at, maybe the hardest. Move past it, she tells herself. Just keep moving. One foot in front of the other. “I’m not,” she admits. “Not in the same way. Something—happened, before I left that place. I talked to someone. And he told me he’d make it right with them. With everyone. When I came back, I knew he was telling the truth, and that they wouldn’t be hunting me how I expected them to.”

(And there’s your mistake, says the voice with a disdainful sniff. If you were smart, you’d trust him about as far as you could throw him. Maybe a good bit less than that. He’s very skinny.)

“They wouldn’t be out for my blood. But that didn’t mean they’d have to be kind to me, if they ever did find me. It didn’t mean anyone would have to be. So I kept running. Even though I didn’t have anyone to run after anymore. Even though I was just running out into nothing.”

“You stopped, eventually. You found sanctuary somewhere. You found kindness.”

“Like I said, I’m not ungrateful for that. I’m really, really not. I shouldn’t’ve even been able to find it, honestly, but someone told me how. That woman. Alyssa. No, Leticia—I don’t even remember her name. I was really fucked up. She was small, and she wore these big round glasses, and her eyes were green.”

“I know who you mean. Go on.”

“But I remember her telling me to run. Telling me where I could go. A head start, she called it. To keep things sporting.”

A shadow of displeasure flickers over her companion’s face. Lyta’s heart, for no reason she can name, speeds its pace to a terrified gallop. “Your—benefactor—is not known for her clemency,” he murmurs. “And she does not often fail to entrap those whom she seeks. The one to whom you spoke would have stopped her, had it come to that—but she would not have made it easy, for him or for you. However it came to be so, I am glad that you eluded her.”

“I don’t know how it happened. She should’ve caught me. If you’d seen her eyes when she told me how to find the Inn—if you’d seen the way she smiled—”

“I can imagine it.”

(A finger on the scales, that’s all, says the voice. The Thessalian’s one of ours, sure. But she does put on airs when she thinks we’re not paying attention, and we can’t be having that. So we sped your feet, just a little, just to keep her humble. It does a body good to fail every now and again. Reminds you you’re only human. Reminds you you’re mortal, in the end.)

(Anyhow, you’re one of ours too, and sisters shouldn’t fight. Not over something as ridiculous as a man.)

“It must have been hard,” says Lyta’s companion. “Even assured of a certain degree of safety, you walked a difficult road through strange realms. And you walked it alone.”

Lyta shrugs one shoulder. “It wasn’t the first time.”

“Still.”

That thought hangs in the air between them, unspoken, unfinished. There’s a strange comfort in that. If he’d objected, really objected, Lyta would’ve felt obligated to keep pushing back. If he’d vomited up a flood of overwrought sympathy, it would’ve done nothing but irritate her. This, though—she can sit with the ambiguity of this. She’d done it before. She was more or less safe. She made it in the end.

Still.

“Do you know what the worst part is?” Lyta says. “Of all of it. Of this whole nightmare.”

He shifts in his seat at that word. Nightmare. “What is it?”

“…No, I shouldn’t—you’ll think I’m an idiot.”

“I won’t,” he says. “And I don't. But even if I did—my opinion is of no import. Speak freely. I’m listening.”

Lyta considers. Draws in a breath, holds it quivering on her lips.

“Lyta?” says her companion, and there’s an edge to his low, mellow voice. Not a threat, just a splinter in the smooth-sanded little world of the meadow. “Please. Tell me.”

That edge drags against the old wound in her heart, pulls her up not quite unwilling from the quiet, undefinable strangeness of this place, this conversation, this day. Has she ever, she wonders fuzzily, actually had a therapist? Has she ever been to a bereaved mother’s group, a grief counseling circle? Is this even really happening? And if it’s not—

(That’s right, that’s right, you’re nearly there—)

“I don’t remember what he smelled like,” she blurts out. “Not—not the dead man. You know who I mean.”

(Oh, for fuck’s sake.)

“I do,” says her companion. “Yes.”

A faint embarrassed heat rising in Lyta’s face. She shakes her head, winds her hair around her fingers and unwinds it again, white on black on white. “See, I told you. Isn’t that stupid? Of all the things to miss. But—you know how babies’ skin has that smell to it, when they’re clean and they’ve just fallen asleep on you? That warm sort of body smell. I don’t know. That makes it sound disgusting.”

“It doesn’t. It is a natural thing for a parent to notice.”

“Right. No, that’s—you’re right. Um.” She swallows once, swallows again. Her throat feels very tight. She’s not afraid of crying in front of him, though. She doesn’t cry at all, these days. Still, it’s not comfortable. “Well. I think about it sometimes. About how everything in the house used to smell just a little bit like him. How he was so there that I stopped even noticing. And then when he—when he was taken—his smell was still all over the house. Faint, but present. Like I’d just put him down for a nap. Like he was just a room away, and all I had to do was walk out of the kitchen and find him. And it made me—it made me feel like I was…”

“Crazy.”

A shocked little hiccup of laughter escapes Lyta, so sudden and so painful that it might have been a jab to her throat. “Are you even allowed to say that?”

“Perhaps I shouldn’t. But it is how you felt, isn’t it?”

No trace of a smile on his lips, no teasing hook to his voice. No undertone of there goes Lyta, talking nonsense, being a kook, as usual. Lyta looks at the smooth brown hands folded in her companion’s lap. The skin there half a shade lighter than it had been a minute ago, perhaps, unless it’s just a trick of the dazzling light.

(It’s all tricks, girl. That’s what we’ve been trying to tell you. He’s nothing but tricks all the way down. Always has been. Always will be.)

“I guess so,” Lyta says. “Yeah. All right. I felt crazy. And then I acted crazy. Because I just couldn’t believe that he could be gone that suddenly. One day alive and in my arms, the next day just—burned to ashes, out in the high desert. It didn’t make sense. It was wrong. And I knew who’d made it wrong, is the thing. I knew exactly whose fault it was, only no one would believe me, and no one would listen. So I had to go after him by myself. All alone.”

She stops, watches the long grass dancing in the wind, the ripples made of each undulation of blade and stem. Silver and green and silver again. Is her companion, she wonders, wearing a necklace? A silver chain, maybe, with a pendant or a stone hung from it? And why does it matter? Why should she care?

“It’s funny,” she goes on. “I followed the smell of my son’s blood like a hound dog. I walked through worlds that didn’t even exist to find the man who had that blood on his hands. And by the time I found him, I’d been on that blood-trail so long that I forgot what Daniel smelled like alive. And now he’s—not alive anymore. So it’s gone. Forever.

“If I’d been smart, maybe I would’ve brought some of his things with me afterwards, when I went on the run. A shirt, a blanket. One of his stuffies. Something like that. Something to remember him by, later, when I had the time. Something small and soft, like he was. But like I said, I wasn’t thinking clearly. I couldn’t look further ahead than the next day or the next hour. Sometimes I couldn’t even think past the next five minutes. But I did know I had to keep moving. And I knew that if I spent a second longer in our old apartment than I needed to—if I looked around the rooms he used to live in, if I touched any of the things he used to touch, if I breathed in that smell he used to have—I’d just lay down on the floor and never get up again.”

Her companion draws in a deep breath, lets it out heavily. (A sudden, puzzling thought that Lyta waves off as ridiculousness at once: has he been breathing? Inhale following exhale following inhale, all the while, this whole time? Or did he do that just now to prove a point, and otherwise he’s been still and breathless as a statue?) “The loss of a child is a terrible thing,” he says.

“It is. It hurts. It hurts like dying.”

“No. It is worse than that. Much worse.”

And then he says nothing. No sorry for your loss. No he’s in a better place now. No time heals all wounds. He just sits there, his eyes shadowed and his hands very still, wrapped in silence. Lyta recognizes that silence, the lightless, sucking pit of it. The grief surpassing grief, the loss beyond loss.

It makes sense, in a way, she decides after a second. After all, who better to counsel a bereaved parent than another bereaved parent? Strange, though, that they (who is they?) wouldn’t match her with someone a little further along in his own healing. To look at him, you’d think the earth still freshly turned on his child’s grave, the room still furnished in his house, a sweet little voice still audible echoing down an empty hallway or in the corners of a sun-drenched yard.

Also, he’s awfully young to have buried a child, isn’t he?

(Ahh, that’s what we always loved about you, daughter. Your sense of humor.)

“I didn’t die, though.” She’s not quite sure who she’s reassuring with that statement, but she says it all the same.

“No.”

“I—I wasn’t ready to die, is the thing. He was gone, and I was alone, and the pain was so bad it felt like someone was pulling out my heart with their hands, but I couldn’t die. I just couldn’t.”

“And why is that?”

“Because…” A snag like a bent nail in her throat that catches her voice on its way out. Something tickles her cheek. A falling leaf, she thinks, but when she raises her hand to her face her fingertips find wetness there. “Because if I died—who would there be to remember him?”

“He was not unknown to your friends.”

“It’s not the same. I mean, Hal and Carl have their own lives. Rose does too, bless her heart. And that’s part of why I left. She put everything on hold just trying to find Jed, and now that she’s got him, she should get to enjoy having a family. But if I stayed she wouldn’t be able to do that. She'd end up trying to fix things for me, even though it’s impossible. That’s just how she is. And I didn’t want to put that on her. Not on Rose. It wouldn’t be fair.”

“How so? If that is, indeed, just how she is?”

“She’s just a kid. I mean—she’s in her twenties, okay, but she’d already been taking care of her mom for a while by the time I met her, and then her mom died and she had to deal with that all alone—”

“She had you. One might say it is her duty, as one who loves you, to care for you and yours, as you cared for her.”

Lyta gestures savagely. “That’s stupid. I’m fifteen years older than her. It should never have been her responsibility to take care of a grown woman, and it’s not her responsibility now to be a time capsule for someone else’s child.”

“But it is your responsibility.”

“He wasn’t someone else’s child to me.”

Her companion’s exhalation, soft and sad, mingles with the motion of the leaves above their heads. Shh-shh. No birdsong, though. There should be birds, Lyta thinks, shouldn’t there? Birds or the buzzing of bees or flies or the shrill shimmering one-note song of cicadas.

But there’s only the wind. Only the wind.

“I was his mother. No, I am his mother. So I have to give him what I can. If I didn’t, it would be like he never even existed.”

“It might be easier for you if he hadn’t—”

“No. Don’t say that to me. Don’t ever.”

Her companion stops at once and lowers his head, acquiescent. An unfamiliar gesture, formal, almost courtly. Hector had never been so stiff with her, not even when they’d first met, when they’d barely spoken three words to each other.

Her companion doesn’t look like Hector when he moves like that. He looks like a stranger.

Lyta’s not sure why, but that makes her so, so angry.

“I’ve done some stupid things, I won’t deny it,” says Lyta. Her voice trembles. She clamps down on it hard. Not now, not now. She’s not being crazy. She’s just explaining herself. And it feels very important that she explain herself to her companion. (Because he’s her therapist, right. That’s why she’s here.) (No, no, she decided that didn’t make any sense, she decided that there’s something else going on, she knows and it’s—it’s—) “I’ve been blind, I’ve been pigheaded, I’ve been—I’ve been wrong, I know, in ways I don’t even really understand. People want me hurt for what I’ve done. People want me dead. And not just people, either. Bigger things. Worse things.

“But if I had to choose between this and never having had him—if someone told me I could wake up tomorrow in a world where I’d never gotten pregnant, where what happened with Hector was stopped before it could begin—I’d still choose this. Even if no one else gets it. Even if no one else cares. Even if no one else knows Daniel ever existed. Because he did exist. He did. He was my son, for a little while. He was mine.”

“He was,” her companion agrees.

“And as long as I remember him like that—he’ll still exist, a little. Or he will have existed. And that’s—that means something. To me.”

“And to him. Wherever he walks now.”

A complicated flutter of emotion passes over her companion’s face, and he tips his head back to look up at the sky. She’d almost think that an attempt to keep tears from overflowing onto his cheeks if his voice weren’t so steady, if she could see his eyes. His hands twist for a moment in his lap.

The polite thing would be to look away, to give him time to collect himself. Lyta doesn’t. She stares at him, aware that her brow is furrowed and her eyes squinting in a way that isn’t attractive or kind. He still bears an eerie resemblance to Hector, but there’s something about his face at this angle that gives Lyta pause. Surely Hector’s nose was never so narrow at the bridge, so pointed at the tip. Surely Hector’s mouth, with its generous smiles and easy laugh, never folded itself into such a delicate, anxious purse.

“The House you spoke of will stand until this universe fails,” her companion muses. “Such are the powers of the Endless in concert. But you, too, have built a house of remembrance. And it may be yours which is the greater working, when all is said and done.”

And now she’s embarrassed again. It’s been such a long time since anyone’s offered her any kind of praise. “I—I don’t know about that. I don’t know. Daniel was just a boy.”

“He was your son.”

“But—cosmically, I mean. He mattered to me, obviously, but I’m nobody. And he—that man, the dead man—he was some kind of god. More than a god. All those people at the ceremony…they were there for him. To speak for him. To send him off to whatever comes next for creatures like him. What’s one little boy next to all that?”

Her companion shakes his head. His white hair sticks up at his cowlick at an odd angle, like it wants to stretch itself free of its curl. “Rituals, nothing more. Patterns, to make sense of the movements of a vast and unknowable universe. Cerements, eulogies, monuments and wakes: these things bring some measure of comfort in their predictability, but only to the living. What is ended is ended, be it man or god or something more than either. What is gone is gone.”

(The voice in Lyta’s head sighs, so near and so real the breath all but ruffles her hair. Well, he’s right about that, for once. Not that it stops him and his siblings from playing silly buggers with the fabric of the universe, but that’s the way it’s meant to go. You’d think he’d at least listen to his sister, if he couldn’t listen to us—but no, of course not. Eldest daughters don’t get to call the shots. All they get to do is clean up the mess everyone else leaves for them. And that’s the same everywhere.)

“But, as you say—what is remembered endures. And, I think—” He stops. Laughs softly to himself, without a smile, without humor. “No. Never mind.”

“No, tell me.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“You listened to me.” She leans forward, one hand hovering in the air as she considers resting her fingertips on his knee. Which is wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong, mustn’t reach for him, mustn’t touch—but why? Who says it’s wrong? And what will happen to Lyta if she closes that distance? She struggles against the compulsion, her outstretched hand quivering as though she’s fighting to push it through an invisible wall. “Tell me. What do you think?”

Lyta’s companion looks at her hand. Looks at his own hands, as at the hands of a stranger.

“I think,” he repeats cautiously, “if the man who took your son from you lives on in the memories of those who loved him—if something of him might be permitted to endure—it is only fair that your son should be granted the same privilege. He was only a child, after all. He hadn’t done anything wrong. He hadn’t done anything.”

The catch in his deep voice, almost a whine, jars like a skipping record. It doesn’t belong there. It doesn’t belong here, in this meadow, on this summer afternoon, in this whatever-it-is-they’re-doing-here, and Lyta flinches to hear it. He doesn’t seem to notice. His placid expression has taken on a brittle cast, a silent scream caught within the frozen line of his mouth.

(His mouth, the shape of which looks entirely unsuited to bear Hector’s smile, all of a sudden.)

(It’s still a shape that lives in her memory, though.)

(The child is yours, says a voice up out of the dark past, for now…)

“You—”

“We’re coming up on our time, it seems,” Lyta’s companion interrupts smoothly, rising from his seat. No hint of a scream there, although there’s a stiffness to his movements, the flat false cheer of an actor stepping into a role on short notice and without enough rehearsal time. “I apologize. We can continue to discuss the matter at our next appointment, if you’re amenable.”

“It’s fine,” Lyta finds herself saying, her mouth moving without bothering to consult her brain first. “I must’ve lost track of time. We’ll talk next week.”

“Next week,” he agrees. “As a reminder, my hourly rate is—” And then he says something that ought to be a number, but it comes out fully gibberish, complete with cryptic nonsense symbols floating through Lyta’s mind like they’re the most ordinary things in the world. A cold jolt of mingled surprise and fear hits her hard in the chest. I’m having a stroke, she thinks at once. I’ve got a brain tumor. I’m losing it for good this time. Something’s wrong, something’s wrong, I need help—

“Of course,” says Lyta’s mouth. “I’ll have the check in the mail first thing when I get home.” Except she doesn’t know his address, and she doesn’t know what she owes him, and she doesn’t even know how to get home from here, and someone else is moving her lips and speaking through her voice and holding a pillow over the face of the terror trying with all its might to escape the back of her brain.

(Tch. Sloppy work. At least when we were driving you, we let you choose how you got to where you were going. But that’s good, daughter, you’ve got him nervous. Now keep going. Keep going—)

“Thank you. You can find your own way out, I assume? Forgive me—I have other business to attend to.”

“Of course. Of course. Not a problem.”

Lyta stands, and staggers, because the whole meadow has just heaved sickeningly underfoot like the gullet of some unimaginably huge beast. Her companion doesn’t miss a single step. He just glides off, graceful and untroubled as a swan, down what Lyta would’ve called a garden path half a second ago but which now seems to have taken on the ruler-edge lines and tile-floor gleam of a windowless corridor, never mind that Lyta’s brain and body still know she’s outside. And his silhouette has changed, too, his shoulders too narrow, his wrists too slender, his neck too long under his white hair that no longer curls.

It’s not Hector’s silhouette, no. But it’s not a stranger’s, either.

Because once upon a time, in a little white house—

(—that’s it—)

—in a little white house in a green field, there lived—

A ghost, a familiar voice whispers, cannot escape its fate by hiding—

(—that’s right, daughter, that’s right—)

—there lived a family, a father and a mother and—

—nor can a living human being escape her grief—

(—remember what he did to Hector, remember what he did to you—)

—a father and a mother and a—

—your husband died a long time ago, he was a ghost and this is a—

(—he makes you forget, but you know in your bones this is not how it goes, now show him he’d better give us the respect we’re due, or else—)

—and a little boy, who they named—

—the child is mine, and one day—

(REMEMBER WHO HE IS REMEMBER WHAT HE’S DONE AND NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER TRUST IN DREAMS)

“Wait,” says Lyta.

Her companion pauses, looks back over his shoulder at her. Lyta doesn’t know how she could ever have thought he resembled Hector. But his eyes—even with those pale brows, those death-white lashes, she knows those eyes. She sees them every day in the mirror.

She saw them in another face, too, every day for three short years. But that was in another time. Another life.

“He was so cruel to us,” she says. “Wasn’t he, Daniel?”

He stares at her. Turns back fully to face her. No motion in that death-mask of a face, but she could swear—no, she knows—there’s something alive behind those eyes.

“I am not Daniel Hall,” he says quietly. “And—for better or for worse—I understand why he acted as he did. I can neither condemn nor condone.”

“You could, though. Who would blame you? He took you from your home, from your family—from your entire life—and he forced you to take over in the end when he couldn’t handle it anymore, he made you take all of that responsibility on alone—”

“That isn’t how it happened.”

“It’s not right that you can’t even say that he wronged you. He couldn’t even give you that much.“

He passes his hand over his face, fingertips pressed to the bridge of his nose. Familiar gesture. Hector’s shadow falling onto his features again, turning him into the ghost of someone who never truly lived as Lyta watches.

“I…am grateful for your concern,” he says, his voice low, labored, like he’s talking around something clawed and fanged and fighting to escape from his throat. “Truly, I am. But I cannot—I can’t—”

“You can. He’s dead now. He can’t hurt you.”

“I am alive. And it was never his intent to hurt me.”

“Was it his intent to hurt me?”

No reply. The air has gone still, oppressively so, but the day (if it even is a day, if time is even real here) remains clear and warm as anything. Like the two have them have been trapped together in a bubble of glass.

“You don’t owe him anything.”

“I owe him everything. I am who I am because of him.”

“Because he made you into him. Don’t you see? You were never supposed to be like this. It isn’t—”

“Please,” he says, closing his eyes. A quiver of emotion in his brow, in his stranger’s mouth. “Please, Lyta. Don’t.”

And she stops. She stops, because this is a dream, and Dream of the Endless commanded her to be silent, and in this world his every word is law, is truth, is reality.

She stops, because she can’t stand—even now, even like this—to see her Daniel in pain.

“Perhaps this was a mistake,” he says at length. He’s still not looking at her, although his voice has steadied itself again. “I had only meant to ensure that my mark upon you endured, and to understand whether or not I might offer any further aid. You are owed that much for the ways in which you have been wronged. I owe you that much. But I think, now, that I ought not to have interfered. I’ve hurt you. Forgive me.”

You didn’t wrong me, Daniel, Lyta thinks. Her heart aches like a hot coal buried in her flesh. You didn’t hurt me. Not you. Never you.

How she wishes she could touch him. His hands, his cheek, his mouth with its delicate frown. (The ghost’s frown, the monster’s frown—but isn’t there something a little childlike in it, the longer she looks?) He’d been so cold the last time she touched him, after the wake, after the funeral, after bridge and boat and river and sky. Cold as death, cold as starlight, for all that his hands and voice had been gentle, the kiss pressed to her forehead a chaste benediction.

She wants so badly to warm him again. But she can’t, she can’t reach for him. It’s the fear of what might be waiting there for her at arms’ length that gives her pause. If she puts out her hands to him and finds herself holding nothing but corpse-chill and death—if she puts out her hands to him and wakes in her narrow dormitory bed with empty arms for the thousandth time—

He’s so close. Maybe as close as he’ll ever be to her again. She should be satisfied with that. Should make her peace with it.

But she remembers him warm, remembers him alive, remembers that brief, brief period when he’d shared her blood and her breath and slept under her heart. It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair.

(Stuff and nonsense, my dearie-duck, says a voice in Lyta’s head. Not the one she’s been hearing all along. Another one, low and plummy and maternal, although there’s a thread of the first voice’s steel under the softness. You’re not guaranteed fair. No one is. You get what you get: one life, and one alone, no tradesies or take-backs.)

(No, you’re not guaranteed fair, sister-self, agrees a third voice, light and sweet, with a curl of mocking laughter that stings just like the first voice’s dry sarcasm. But it certainly is a mortal’s way to demand it. Or long for it.)

(Yes, well, if wishes were fishes we’d all be up to our necks in the slimy things, says the first voice. He’s gone. Cut the thread. Move on. Nothing else for it.)

Lyta wishes they’d be quiet for a second. Third-wheeling an argument inside her own head is making her feel a bit crazy, and she doesn’t like that. She’s not crazy. She’s pulling it together. She’s doing her best. She’s trying. No one ever seems to understand just how hard she’s trying.

Her hands are shaking. She twists them together to still them. “Will I remember this?” she says, with an effort.

“Would you like to?”

Lyta has to think about that. Just for a moment, it feels like, but when she looks back up at him the sky has dimmed to a twilit blue, the grass around her a shadowy sea. Fireflies rise from the depths to flit about their knees. At least, Lyta thinks they’re fireflies. They do glow in the gloom, blinking blue-white as newborn stars, but their wings and bodies are dark as ink, their heads stretched forward into little beaks, their eyes silver and shining with a gentle intelligence as they pass before Lyta’s face. Less like real insects than the dream of an insect, half-cartoonish, friendlier and funnier and gentler than any earthly animal. The sort of thing a child might draw in black marker pen, with dots of glitter glue or pasted-on sequins for eyes.

The sort of thing he might have drawn, once upon a time, but he’s gone, tall and grown and lost to Lyta forever, and all she has left to grasp at are these scribbled creatures. She could put out a hand right now and crush one in her palm. An ugly gesture, a cruel gesture, but at least she could watch that light go out and know that she’d touched something of him, even if it was only to destroy it on her own terms, hers and not some incomprehensible god-thing’s, because he was her son, her child, her blood, hers—

“It might be better if I don’t,” Lyta says. Watches Dream’s throat bob with a swallow, watches the ghost of a child’s shame darken his face. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It is your choice. I would grant you that now, if it is in my power.”

“That’s kind of you.”

“Kind? I don’t know.” He raises one hand a little absently. A firefly flits closer, darts between his fingers, rests in the hollow of his palm before zigzagging back off into the dark. “But I hope it is just. I hope it is fair, in its way. In whatever way it can be.”

“It’s a little late for fair. But—thank you, anyway.”

“You’re welcome.”

They stand together for a bit in the gathering twilight, watching the fireflies blink their semaphore messages back and forth.

“So, I don’t mean to be rude, but…”

“You have another question.”

“Um. Yes.”

“I will answer, if I can.”

“It’s just—why here?” Lyta gestures around the field, the chunks of fallen masonry, the outline barely visible in the grass of the foundations of a house. A little white house, maybe, once upon a time and long ago. A house big enough for two, or maybe three. “You could’ve talked to me anywhere. You could’ve made a therapist’s office, and then maybe this whole act would’ve been more convincing. Why did you have to bring me back here?”

“Because you were happy here,” Dream says simply. “I thought—I thought it might make you happy again. For a little while.”

“Like that makes any difference.”

“Maybe not. But I hoped it would, all the same.”

Dream fiddles with one of the ivory buttons on his shirt, smooths the fabric, twists it again. His hair falls onto his forehead. Maybe it’s Lyta’s imagination, but she thinks it still bears something of a curl.

“We are no longer kin, Lyta Hall,” he goes on, “but I confess, I would see you happy again. And it pleases me that you are strong enough to walk onward, though the way is hard and uncertain. To see you—not well, perhaps, but healing, in a way. You deserve that, and more, after all you have endured.”

“So do you.”

“Lyta—”

She hates it, she thinks, when he addresses her like that. Like he’s reading her name out of a phone book. Like they’re strangers to each other. “I mean—you’re okay too, aren’t you?”

“It is immaterial.”

“It’s not to me.”

“Then—I suppose I am well.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“I have never lied to you, Lyta, and I do not plan on starting now.”

“Then tell me.”

Dream says nothing. His expression goes distant, opaque, a glass clouded by breath, the image there blurred to incomprehensibility. A blinding light creeping up behind him, turning his pale figure to shadow, and in the easy, inexplicable way of dreams, Lyta knows it for what it is—a door. An escape. An ending.

“No. No, no, no, no—”

Her voice rises in volume, rises in pitch, and there she goes again, acting wrong, acting crazy. A part of her—a very small part, very far back in her brain and very unimportant—cries out in horror. No, she’s supposed to be better than that by now. She’s supposed to be better. She’s been working so hard, trying and trying and trying to put her past behind her, and here she is, tearing all the careful patches in her own psyche apart like none of that work even mattered. She never wanted this, did she? To be a bitch, a witch, a harpy, a monster? To hurt people? To ruin their lives?

No, maybe not. But just now, Lyta wants answers. And here’s the thing: crazy might be bad, crazy might get people hurt, but Lyta can’t deny that crazy has always, always, always gotten her results. See, even now—Dream hesitates, the light behind him freezes, halfway through swallowing him up. And that’s a chance where there hadn’t been one before.

She draws herself up, feels her hair lashing her face like serpents’ tails, like whips made of scorpions all daisy-chained together, and says, “No, you don’t get to do that—you don’t get to run away—we’re not finished here. We’re not finished. Answer the question. Are you okay?”

(That’s right, daughter. Make him answer for himself. Put him in his place—)

His head jerks a little with the force of her demand, a white flash like a falling star winking in his dark eye for a moment. He wears the face of the man who killed her husband and unmade her son—a murderer’s face, a monster’s face, not even a human face—but he flinches all the same.

He’s afraid I’m going to hit him, she thinks, and then, hard on that thought’s heels—no. He’s afraid I’m going to be kind to him.

Dream catches himself as the thought crosses her mind, goes statue-still before very deliberately turning his face away. She sees Morpheus in him, then. Sees Morpheus, and sees this Dream’s fear of a gentle touch in that Morpheus, spiraling in on itself, a black-white-black fractal.

But he doesn’t step through the door. He doesn’t leave her. Not yet.

“I am not as I once was,” he murmurs. “I will never be that child again, nor that man. But I remember them both, as no one else may, and as much as that burdens me, it is also a solace in its way. The wounds I bear may never truly heal; yet I endure, and perform my function, and the ache lessens in me with each passing day. I am here, now. And I am—I am—”

He falters, his lips parted to shape the sound of a D. Lyta hears her heartbeat very loud in her ears.

Say Daniel, she thinks, say Daniel, say you’re still him and not just a ghost or a fantasy or me being crazy, say something of him survived—

And say Dream, she thinks, say he suffered for what he did to us, say he suffers still, say he’ll never forget as long as he lives—

Just say I didn’t fuck it all up forever, say I did something that mattered in the end, please, please—

He takes a breath. Another. Masters himself.

“I am—myself,” he finishes. “And I am trying. That is enough, for now. That must be enough.”

He closes his eyes. Closes his-eyes-which-are-Lyta’s. His features blur a little, as though someone’s spilled a drop of water on the white page of his face. Hector’s mouth, Hector’s line of jaw, warm brown of Hector’s skin bleeding through from beneath. And something of Lyta, too, more than just the eyes, that she’d missed before—Lyta’s brow, her hairline, the lips-pursed expression she knows she wears when she’s counting to ten slowly in her head and forcing herself to act calm and normal and not-crazy.

And he’s trying. He’s trying.

God knows she should laugh in his face about that. God knows she should tell him where he can shove his trying—that he would dare say that to her, after everything—

She doesn’t. She watches him master himself, waits until his eyes have opened again, a bright witch-light dancing in their depths. He’s frozen himself, she notices, halfway between the two faces he’s worn for her, and she wonders if he did that on purpose. Softly curling hair, skin a few shades darker than her own but with a strange, pearly cast that makes its underlying hue shift and scintillate. Not quite the pale king who haunted Lyta’s nightmares all the brief years of her son’s childhood, but not quite the figure of a Daniel who never was, either. A stranger. He could be anyone, anyone at all.

(He always could have been, is the thing, whispers one of those voices in Lyta’s head, the motherly one. That’s the problem with children. You think you get to pick which anyone you wind up with, but like we told you, you get what you get. Even if what you get is—well, unorthodox.)

Lyta sighs.

“I told myself so many stories about who you might grow up to be,” she says.

“I know.”

“None of them meant anything. They were all lies.”

“They were all dreams,” he corrects her gently. “Every child must grow up, and no child, however dutiful, can fully embody the dreams of their parents. But that does not mean those dreams have no bearing on who—or what—that child becomes.”

Lyta puts a hand to her mouth to stay the laugh or the sob that wants to escape. “No, no. You’re not old enough to be talking to me like that. I’m not old enough for you to be talking to me like that. Or young enough. Or—anything enough.”

“I am very old, Lyta,” Dream says. (Oh, how it hurts to hear him say that. Her baby. He was her baby, once.) “Old enough to speak wisdom to you, if you will hear it. And young enough, too, in my way.”

“Doesn’t it drive you crazy? Being him, being both of them, being someone else? Doesn’t it hurt you? How do you bear it?”

“I—”

His breath hitches. His features ripple, flowing water, heat-haze. A surge of recognition in Lyta’s gut that almost tips over the line into terror. Old enough and young enough, and when her baby, her Danny, her son had been afraid, his lower lip had tensed just like that, and when Hector had been upset he’d laid his head to one side at just the same angle. The urge to reach out and pull him into an embrace rears up inside her all over again, and she wrestles it down, wrestles it down, wrestles it down. She won’t be made a fool of like this, she won’t reach for a child and find nothing but a king in his place, she won’t be taken in by a dream or a Dream again—

—but if he’s hurting, if her Daniel is in there, hurting, and she just stands here and watches him and does nothing—

My Lord?

Lyta starts at the unexpected sound: a woman’s voice, low and well-mannered. Her gaze jitters away from Dream as she searches uselessly for an invisible speaker. After a second, she clocks it—the voice is emanating from the door of light Dream’s opened in the air, from wherever that featureness brightness leads.

“Who’s that?” she asks nervously. Dream lets out a shaky breath (he hasn’t been breathing, Lyta wasn’t making that up) and reaches up to brush the hair off his forehead, a thoughtless and terribly human gesture.

“She is a resident of the Dreaming. My advisor and my trusted companion. And,” he continues, with a proud little lift of his chin, “my librarian.”

“Oh. Is she—ah—”

Lyta falters, a tangle of half-formed questions caught in her throat. Is she friendly? Is she safe? Is she going to hurt me? Is she human, or monster, or angel, or demon, or something else entirely?

Or is she like you, something that used to be human? Is she hurting like you are? Do all dreams hurt like that?

(Not all dreams, no, mutters the dry voice. Not the fancies and the fantasies and the wouldn’t-it-be-nices. But the real ones do. The true ones do. And he knows that.)

“She means you no harm,” Dream says before Lyta can decide what she wants to ask. “She knew I would be coming here, and were there anything truly amiss, it’s well within her power to seek me out herself. No doubt she only wishes to make sure I’m all right. She is the mistress of a great realm of her own. Perhaps you will be welcomed to its halls one of these nights.”

The corner of Lyta’s mouth crooks grimly. “That’s a nice thought, but I feel like she’d be more likely to chase me out than invite me in. I don’t know if I’m welcome anywhere in dreams anymore. Not after—well. After everything.”

“All things that live must dream, and you live, still. What quarrels the dreamfolk have with you are their own affairs; for my part, I will not withhold the freedom of the Dreaming that is yours by right. Lucienne understands this. She must.”

Lucienne. A strange name, a little old-fashioned, but with a certain elegance all the same. Lyta feels the weight of it on her tongue like a round quartz pebble, milky-pale and wave-polished, but doesn’t speak it aloud. Lucienne. Dream clears his throat, shifts nervously, a twist of shadow against the door of light.

“And I would not have the two of you set at odds,” he adds. “Your war with the Dreaming has ended, Lyta. Any of its denizens who would do you harm must first cross me. And she—” A pale flicker in the blur of Dream’s face. His white lashes lower like a pair of doves coming to roost. “You have been a vessel for great powers, ones to which even I am subject—but I would stand between those powers and her, if it came to that.”

“Even if it killed you?”

“Even if it killed me.”

(Ah, says the dry voice in Lyta’s head. Ah, so that’s how it is.)

(How very like him, says the motherly voice. One little slip-and-fall, and off he runs to his lady-love of the hour to be kissed all better. Men are so fragile. And so changeable.)

(But that’s just the thing, isn’t it? says the sweet, teasing voice. Changeable. Maybe he’s on the straight and narrow now. Maybe he’s learned his lesson. Maybe he’s reformed.)

(The dry voice scoffs. That’ll be the day.)

Dream cocks his head, sweet and quizzical for a moment as a child.

“She is—very dear to me,” he says. “Perhaps that does not matter to you, but—”

Dream? comes the woman’s voice again. A warm thread of concern in its tones, a gentleness that makes Lyta’s heart twist like a worm on a hook. She thinks, unaccountably, of high school prom—of a skinny teenager with curly hair and Hector’s ears shyly presenting a corsage to a faceless young woman, taking her hand, proud and awed and achingly tender all at once. Can you hear me?

And Dream, deathless, Endless, a god above gods, a power beyond understanding, the monster made of Lyta’s son—bends to that voice, a new energy animating his body. Lyta can’t see his face clearly, but she doesn’t need to. She knows he’s smiling. Not the pale king’s smile, tight-lipped, ironic, not quite reaching his eyes.

Hector’s smile. Her smile.

All the home I need is right here, Lyta.

She is not his mother anymore; she has no right to wrap her arms around him and tell him I hope she makes you happy. She seems good for you. But, “I understand, I think,” she says, and when he sighs and offers her the hint of that smile, he could almost be her son, and she could almost love him.

(Love, sneer the three voices in her head, unless they’re only one voice, and she’s hearing things, getting confused again when she needs to keep it together. But who’s she keeping it together for, anymore? Who cares whether or not she’s crazy? She’s lost her husband. She’s lost her son. She burned down her own life and walked away from the rubble. Let it be three voices, let it be one, let it be none at all. It doesn’t change what’s past. It doesn’t change what is. Yes, love has treated you well, hasn’t it, sister-daughter-mother-self?)

“I must go,” Dream says. “Be well, Lyta Hall. I will not trouble your dreams again, save at greatest need.” And then, strangely, he bows. To her, you’d think—there’s no one else there—but his bearing changes as he does it, and Lyta feels something standing between the two of them. A shadow, a presence. No, three presences.

(You’d better not trouble her, Dream King.)

(You’d better watch yourself.)

(You fell to us once—you could fall again, easy as anything. Easy as breathing. Easy as falling asleep—)

(Leave him alone.)

And that last voice was Lyta’s own, she knows it, she’s sure of it. And it’s good that she’s sure, because as she thinks it, the other three voices go dead silent, leaving her alone with Dream.

With Daniel.

With—

“Thank you, Lyta,” he says.

He turns his back to her and steps into the light.

Pain in Lyta’s chest—a lance of fire, gunpowder and shrapnel, two policemen at her door and a photograph slipped through the crack under the deadbolt and the ending of the world. No, no, not yet, please, not yet, she thinks, and all at once she understands, sharp and certain as the feeling of looking at a flipped coin hanging in the air and knowing that one of the possible outcomes is the right one.

It doesn’t matter if he’s cold. It doesn’t matter if he’s dead. It doesn’t matter if he’s not Daniel, or not her Daniel, or not enough Daniel to bridge the gap between the two of them. Because he was, once. And as long as he’s here in this dream with her, there’s still time to reach for him. There’s still time to tell him the one thing she needs to say, the one thing that she knows now is true, that she knows isn’t past tense, that even the voices in her head can’t convince her she doesn’t feel.

The one thing that she hopes—this, she doesn’t know, but oh, she hopes—he needs to hear as badly as she needs to say it out loud.

She leaps forward, her hand outstretched, her fingertips just brushing the soft weave of the back of his shirt, and she cries out, “Daniel, I—”

“Lyta? Honey, wake up. You have to wake up.”

“Mmmrrgghh?”

The face of the inn’s proprietress swims into focus above Lyta—bright black eyes like a bird’s, dark brown skin and ink-black hair, an expression of concern that clears as Lyta blinks and yawns and comes awake properly. “Oh, thank goodness,” she says with a sigh. “There you are.”

“‘M here,” Lyta says blearily. She swipes at her own face, scrubbing away the strands of hair stuck to her cheek. Faint taste of salt vanishing as she wets her lips. “Wh’s going on? Did something—?”

“You were sleeping. Really sleeping.”

“Mm. Mm-hmm.” She yawns, a great jaw-cracking stretch of a yawn. “What time is it?”

“That’s a trickier question than you’d think around here, but—something like past noon, by your reckoning.”

“What?”

“Charlene came to fetch me when she couldn’t rouse you,” the proprietress replies, stepping back so Lyta can sit bolt upright in bed. “She was shaking you, shouting in your ear, the works. I thought I might have to bring out the big guns, but…well, I’m just glad I didn’t. No one wants a perfectly pleasant morning ruined like that. But, never mind, never mind—” She shakes her head, waves a dismissive hand, the brass bangles at her wrist jingling like little bells. “How are you feeling? All right? A sleep like that doesn’t just come out of nowhere.”

A shadow across Lyta’s mind, a distant murmur of voices—but as Lyta tries to take hold of them, they melt away into nothing. The memory of a memory, maybe. Unimportant, here in the shabby safety of the dormitory bedroom, with sunlight pooling on the windowsill. “I’m fine. Sorry. I must’ve been more tired than I realized last night, that’s all.”

“Hmm,” says the proprietress, one dark brow lifting at Lyta’s weak excuse. “Maybe. I suppose you were on your feet for a while yesterday. Not that I don’t appreciate the help, of course—we’ve been so busy lately—but it might be a good idea for you to take it easy today.”

“Oh, no, please—I’d rather keep my hands busy—”

“And I’d rather not see you pass out in the middle of the common room,” the proprietress shoots back. “This place won’t catch fire and burn to the ground if one of its wards takes a day off. Go on. Get some fresh air, some sun—go outside and sit in the garden, maybe. And that’s not me telling you to weed, or check the eggplants for pests, before you say anything. You’re allowed to just sit and take some time for yourself.”

Lyta nods, a little absently. The garden. That pings something in her brain. She frowns, looking down at the drape of the proprietress’ sari against the bedsheets. Green against white. Once upon a time, there was…there was…

“I was dreaming, I think,” Lyta says. Slow, cautious stretch to her voice. She doesn’t talk idly about dreams, for good reason. “There was a garden. Or something like a garden. I was in a place my husband and I used to live together. Before he…”

“Ah.” The proprietress’ mouth bows sympathetically. “No, no need to explain. I understand. I hope it was a kind dream. It must have been, if you wanted to stay in it that badly.”

“It—was. I think it was. I don’t remember.” Lyta runs her thumbnail over a fold in her bedsheet, the coarse weave worn down butter-soft with years, decades, centuries of use. “But it doesn’t really matter whether it was or wasn’t, does it? You have to wake up eventually. You can’t live in dreams. Not really.”

“No, I suppose not.”

The proprietress’ tone is mild, casual, but Lyta catches a glint of what might be recognition in her dark eye. Sometimes Lyta wonders how much the woman guesses, or knows, of what Lyta is running from. Sometimes Lyta wonders what the woman really is, under green-blue cloth and kindly smile.

Most of the time, though, she’s happy enough not to know. She’s learned her lesson about peeking too far behind the curtain.

“I’m sorry if I frightened Charlene.”

“Oh, she’ll just be relieved to hear you’re all right, I think. No one really interferes with the Free Houses or their occupants, but Char hasn’t been here all that long, in the grand scheme, so she still forgets sometimes. She might like to hear it from you, though.”

“I’ll tell her. Where—?”

“No, no, you rest,” the proprietress interrupts, laying a firm but gentle hand on Lyta’s shoulder. “I mean it. Char’s not going anywhere today—I can even send her to find you when she’s got a free minute, if it’s weighing on you. But it can wait. You’ve got to listen to your body and your mind when they’re telling you something that loudly, and if you don’t, you might find they’ll take matters into their own hands. And it can take much longer to recover from whatever they wind up doing than it would have taken to just go along with them in the first place.”

Lyta’s stomach clenches, and her hand comes up to fiddle with the cloth of her nightshirt uneasily. The proprietress’ gaze lingers on that motion, but all she says is, “You’ll want to get something in your stomach soon as well. When’s the last time you ate a proper meal? I’ll have the kitchen send something up. Some tea, too, I think. Herbal. Just to settle the systems.”

“Thank you. That’s really thoughtful.”

“Nonsense. You’re a ward of the Inn; it’s my responsibility to make sure you’re hale and whole.” She straightens up and reaches out to push the window shutters all the way open. “There. Get some light and air in here. You wouldn’t believe the sorts of nasty things that thrive down in the dark if you let them. The stories I could tell you—but those can wait. They’re fireside stories, long-night stories. They have their place and time, and that’s not here and not now.”

With a decisive nod, she whirls about, her long black hair swinging, and heads for the door. Probably already thinking about the hundred million things she has to do today, Lyta assumes. There’s always so much that needs doing around here. This place is always so full of people, even though she’s never seen anyone turned away at the door for lack of beds, even though she’s never yet failed to find a quiet corner to retreat to when it all gets to be too much. A surge of playing-hooky guilt collides with something like the feeling of trying to make an M.C. Escher painting make sense in three-dimensional space, and Lyta’s still wrestling with that unpleasant combination when she finally notices the proprietress is still hovering in the doorway.

She clears her throat. She’s nervous. Lyta’s never seen her nervous before. “And, Lyta—” she says.

“Yes?”

“Tell me if you have any other strange dreams, will you? It’s not like one of the Endless to come after a ward of the Free Houses for no reason. If the Lord of the Dreaming is trying to get my attention, there are better ways, and he knows it.” Her dark brows lower, and she runs her fingertip along her bangles a few times, tink-tink-tink. “That is, he ought to know it…”

“I’ll tell you,” says Lyta hurriedly. “I promise. But I don’t think it’s anything like that. Nothing serious. I mean, it was just a dream, wasn’t it?”

The proprietress blinks at her. Goes still, her gaze very keen, like a hawk about to stoop to its quarry. Lyta tries for a little laugh after a second, because it seems like the sort of thing a normal person would do after making a remark like the one she’s just made, and because she needs to fill the silence with something. It sounds terrible. At least the proprietress is nice enough not to grimace. But she doesn’t laugh along, either. She just looks at Lyta, her brown eyes fathomless, her mouth an unreadable line.

“Sure,” she replies. “Let’s say that. Just a dream.”

(Oh, there’s no just with dreaming, whispers a voice in Lyta’s head, dry and rasping as a serpent’s belly sliding over dust. And you know that better than anyone, don’t you?)

Lyta’s recoiled from the bitter edge to that whisper before she can even think to hide her flinch. No, no, no, she thinks, not you, not again. Not here, not now, not after everything’s already over and done, not here in the closest thing she has to a safe haven.

(That’s precious. You can run, girl, but you’d do best not to quit your day job when it comes to hiding. You couldn’t hide from him. What possessed you to think you could ever hide from us?)

And there’s the paranoia, right on cue. Just like the bad old days, jumping at shadows and looking over her shoulder, waiting for the other shoe to drop. And that’s not fair, is it? That nightmare is over, ended when she woke up in a stranger’s house filthy and disoriented and without a son. Waking life may not be much of an improvement, but for better or for worse, that time is behind her. She’s not crazy anymore. She’s getting better. Hasn’t she been getting better?

(Are you asking me, or telling me? If it’s the second, you’ll have to be a little more convincing than that, and if it’s the first…I really don’t think you want to hear the answer. But if it helps you sleep at night—why not? Sure, you’re better.)

Lyta growls in frustration at the the smug little twist in the voice, like the nastiest and most self-satisfied of smiles. The bastard thing has no right to sit there smirking all over its invisible mouth at her like that, offering her a condescending pat on the head and an A for effort after it sent her running off to blow up her entire life. And now, now it has the gall to sit on her shoulder being condescending when she’s trying her fucking best to puzzle things back together again, why even bother saying anything at all if you’re just going to—

(Oh, and your friend’s staring at you, by the way. Might want to do something about that.)

…The unfortunate thing about the voices in Lyta’s head, though, is that when she least expects it, it turns out they’re telling the truth.

Lyta offers a hunted, guilty smile to the proprietress, who is indeed still standing there in the doorway, staring right at her. There’s no possible way she could’ve failed to notice that exchange, even if she couldn’t actually hear any of it. And Lyta knows how it goes from here. Any minute now the proprietress will ask what was that all about, and Lyta won’t have an excuse, and then she’ll be out of this place on her ear, with no roof over her head and no prospects and nowhere to go, because no one likes a crazy lady who talks to people who aren’t there, and once you’ve run out past the end of the world there’s nowhere else to go, and Lyta’s so, so, so goddamn tired of running scared…

But the proprietress just stares. Just stands, and just stares, with those dark eyes that take everything in and give nothing away.

(Lord, she’s a tough customer. If she stares any longer you’d better do a trick or something to make it worth her while.)

Shut up, Lyta orders the voice, which snickers unpleasantly at her, but at least doesn’t offer a witty riposte. The relief of that is short-lived, as it dawns on Lyta that she’s got nothing at all to say on her own behalf, outside of coming clean and explaining everything. Naturally she’s not going to do that, so.

“Um,” says Lyta, for lack of any stronger response. The proprietress’ eyebrows go up by a fraction. Lyta braces herself for the blow.

But, “Get some rest, Lyta,” is all she says. The line of her mouth wavers—a faint tension at the corners of her eyes, in the muscles in her jaw—but the expression, whatever it is, is gone before it can settle into anything Lyta could hope to identify. “I’ll be here if you need anything. Anything at all.”

And with that, she gives Lyta a small nod, steps out into the hall, and closes the door behind her. The silence left in her wake is, somehow, even worse than being stared at.

Now look what you’ve done, Lyta thinks at the voice. Or at herself. She’s not quite sure.

(What we’ve done? A second voice there, less stingingly sarcastic than the first, but brisk in a way that makes Lyta feel very young and more than a little ashamed of herself. Wash that mouth out with soap. You’re the one who came over all twitchy. All we did was offer a friendly reminder. Huh! See if we ever do you a favor again.)

I never asked you for any favors, Lyta thinks furiously.

(That’s not how we remember it. After all, you got what you wanted out of us, didn’t you? In a manner of speaking, anyway. Vengeance and blood, full stop. You’d really think mortals would have a better handle on ambiguous language by now—)

Something flutters against the palm of Lyta’s left hand.

Lyta looks down. Her hand is loosely fisted; has been since before she woke up, by the faint stiffness in her knuckles. And there’s something moving in her grasp. Something alive. She can’t think of how it could’ve gotten there. She’s been asleep here the whole time, hasn’t she? Asleep and dreaming.

(The first voice laughs. And what did we tell you about dreams, sister-daughter-mother-self?)

Her heart racing (but, again, why? Didn’t the proprietress just say she’s safe here?), Lyta turns her hand over and unfolds her fingers.

There’s a tiny creature—an insect of some sort, about the size of her thumbnail—resting in her palm. It freezes in the sudden flood of light, but doesn’t bite or sting or immediately fly up into Lyta’s face. It just sits there, hunkered down against Lyta’s hand, clearly scared out of its wits.

Lyta looks down at it, bemused. Where on earth would she have picked up a bug? Never mind that she’s been asleep in her bed for god knows how long—she’s never seen a single pest in the Inn, aside from the handful of spiders who spin tidy webs up in the rafters and never seem to stray from their designated corners. Not that she feels quite right about calling this thing a pest. She’s not a fan of creepy-crawlies, but even she has to admit it’s a pretty little creature. It has a smooth black back like polished jet, round and faintly iridescent silver eyes, a funny little beak and frond-like antennae that wave this way and that as it works out where it is and what’s going on.

And it’s familiar. She’s seen something like it before, somewhere. Somewhere…

Once upon a time, in a green garden—

The little bug creeps warily forward, its tiny feet tickling Lyta’s skin with every step. She raises her hand, straightens her fingers, makes five neat little paths of them. Someone should have a clear road forward, she thinks wryly. The bug considers for a second before making its decision and crawling up to the tip of her ring finger, where it hesitates again.

“What are you waiting for?” Lyta says out loud. “The window’s right there. Go ahead.”

The bug turns about on her fingertip, and for a second she could swear it looks her dead in the eye. An absurd thought, obviously. Just crazy Lyta being crazy, as usual.

But then again—what about her life isn’t crazy, at this point? May as well go after the proprietress for running this place, or Charlene and Nuala and Ish and the other girls for coming from wherever-it-is they come from and seeking refuge here at the Inn, just like Lyta. It’s ridiculous to get worked up over a bug being a little smarter than she expects. She can let that be what it is, and let it go, and at least do the creature the courtesy of meeting its gaze when it looks at her.

So she does, and then she thinks of how if Hector caught her in a staring contest with an insect he’d laugh so hard he’d crack a rib. A totally invented image, but it lightens her heart. Hector’s face and Hector’s smile and Hector’s laugh without the necessary sorrow of what-came-after, because there is no after, not with this. There’s just the smile. Just the joy. And the unexpected lightness startles a laugh out of Lyta, too—a true laugh, the kind she’d thought she wasn’t capable of anymore.

The motion of it joggles her hand, making the bug freeze again with fear. Poor little thing. Imagine being so small, so utterly at the mercy of powers you can’t even comprehend.

A warm curl of sympathy moves within her.

“Go on,” she urges the bug. “You can’t stay there forever. You’ve got to choose.”

One last instant of hesitation—and then the black carapace lifts, two gossamer wings unfolding from beneath. The insect’s soft abdomen blinks once with an inner light: a soft, cool white, like the twinkling of a star on a summer night. How I wonder what you are sing-songs through Lyta’s head, unbidden.

There was a time a stray thought like that would’ve shattered her, sent her sleepwalking through life for days on end, turned the world and everything in it into ghosts and shadows, insubstantial next to the two absences that haunt her night and day. Now, she swallows and nurses the bruise on her heart that might never fully heal and misses, misses, misses—but she still looks at the insect with something like wonder soothing the ache in her breast.

The insect flits its wings, testing the still air. With an almost inaudible hum, it takes off. It executes one, two, three dizzy loops around the room, the glow of its body painting bright streaks on the dark wood of the walls and ceiling, then hovers in midair for a moment, as though considering its options. One last zig, one last zag, and it’s out the window, a tiny pale spot that should vanish at once into the sunshine. But it holds its own for a second, and then for a second more, winking bright-dark, bright-dark, like the facets of a cut gem turned to catch the light. Like a diamond in the sky, Lyta thinks.

It lingers for another half a heartbeat, twinkling faintly, and then the sunlight swallows it up, and it’s gone.

Lyta exhales. Inhales, for what seems like the first time in a long time. Looks around the clean, empty room. Quiet in here, the hustle and bustle of the inn very far away. It never lasts, she tells herself, nothing good ever lasts—but it’s quiet now. Anything could happen in that peaceful, living silence. She could do anything. Go anywhere. Be anyone.

(That’s right, sister, says a new voice way in the back of her head. There’s a kindness in the way its soft, laughing undertone stirs the silence in the room without quite breaking it. A fresh start is always a nice thing. Being a maiden’s not about what or who you’ve done—it’s about perspective, in the end.)

(Oh, don’t start in on the bloody perspective talk, or we’ll be here all week.)

Lyta smooths her hands over her shift, shakes the hair out of her eyes, the white lock at her brow gleaming in the sunlight.

“Well,” she says out loud. “Now what?”