“He can’t get Tom back. He knows, deep down, that no one can change the past.”
Cath turned to the hare. “We should help him see it, then, shouldn’t we? Let’s get Tom and put him to rest, like Danny wanted to.”
“But we can’t go to Chromos,” said Barshin. “We’re gray.”
“Then let’s finish this,” said Cath. She unwrapped the bundle of rags that she’d been clutching for so long and laid it on the muddy grass. It was a jumble of scraps of cloth of every color under the sun—greens, grays, blues, and browns, yellows and pinks and reds.
Barshin stared at it. “I saw you making it,” he said. “I saw it got its color back when you got most of yours, and I knew it must be something to do with your soul. But is it meant to have a pattern? A picture? I don’t see—”
“It’s my Chromos,” said Cath. “The colors of me. That gray, that’s the concrete of the Sawtry, and that pink, that’s my stepmum’s nail polish, and the green, there, my old schoolbag, and that white is Ida’s house, and that gray, that’s Ida’s hair. Red, that’s Johnny White’s … loads more. Everything. I made it so I could wrap it around myself and try to get to Chromos on my own. I thought if I could make the outside of myself look like the inside, Chromos might take me in. If I didn’t hide anything, just showed all the colors that I am, I might somehow … fit Chromos. Become a part of it.”
“Why didn’t it work before, then?”
Cath smiled. “It ain’t finished, idiot,” she said. “There’s one more color to get.”
CHAPTER 17
A HOLE IN THE SKY
Danny scuffed his sneakers on the muddy hillside grass. How should he kill Sammael?
Well, what had Sammael done to him? Tried to chop him in half with an ax. Chased him with a pack of dogs. Nearly drowned him, several times. Made him go mad. Nearly turned him gray and hopeless.
Any of those ways would have been a fitting end for Sammael, too. A storm would have been even better. He’d like to kill Sammael with a storm. Except—there was something a little too magical about storms. He had to be sure that Sammael really died and wasn’t just transported into another world or blasted into an acorn and left to lie around the earth making mischief.
He went for practicality.
Picking up the book, he wrote, Danny got a massive sword.
Three more steps along the tufty hillside, and he stumbled over it. A slender silver weapon, somewhat disappointingly thin, in a golden scabbard. In his hand, the blade was weightless as a beam of light. He swung it a couple of times, slashing through the air, watching the silver gleam, and then buckled the scabbard around his waist.
This hillside wasn’t the place, though. He had to do it somewhere far away from Cath and the others. He couldn’t have their disapproval tainting his triumph.
Danny went to a high mountaintop.…
Quickly he crossed out mountaintop and wrote hilltop. The book was quite literal after all, and he wasn’t dressed for snow.
He found himself standing on a hilltop in the middle of country he didn’t recognize at all. A wide green jungle rolled out on all sides below him. He was far from home, and he hadn’t written Ori’s name in the book … but she was at his feet, looking up at him.
“Go away,” he said. “I don’t want you here.”
“You’re my master,” said Ori. “I can’t leave you, whatever madness you fall into.”
Danny turned away from her. I’m alone against the world, he thought. Everyone thinks I’ve gone mad. But I’m right. I know I am.
Without warning, the sky in front of him split from top to bottom, and a huge tear opened up in the daylight. Inside its jagged edges he saw darkness. The clear air sagged aside in gossamer curtains, and the blackness beckoned.
He looked down at the book—had he just written something without realizing it? Had he made a mark like a rip on the page?
The page was half full, but the words ended at Danny went to a high hilltop.…
Danny tore the sky in two?
From inside the blackness, a whispering began. At first it sounded only like the wind through trees, but gradually it rose to a wail, then to a shriek, and then it began to move.
It shuddered.
It shook.
It trembled, harder and harder, until Danny knew that something was about to erupt from it and come screaming out toward him. Frantically, he wrote, The hole in the sky closed up.
The hole in the sky closed up.
And opened again.
The trembling grew worse. Deep inside the blackness, faces gathered. Their mouths were open, each one stretching to wail out a sound that lay between the howl of the wind and the cry of a lost wolf. Hair streamed around their faces, and their eyes were empty and lightless, and they were looking at him, every single one of them.
As the darkness swelled and bulged, he realized they were fighting each other, scrambling toward the hole, and their mouths were opening and closing, taking bits of something from the air around them.
The daylight. They were eating the daylight.
Already the air around the hole was darker. Darkness was easily dealt with—Danny narrowed his eyes and thought of Chromos and expected to see color breaking through. But this darkness held no color. The more he looked into it, the colder his skin became, and the colder the hand that held the pencil, frozen, on the open page of the Book of Shadows. And then he knew.
They were eating the daylight, but what lay underneath it wasn’t darkness.
It was shadow.
His fingers twitched. He had to stop them before they reached him. What should he call them? Banshees? Specters? Zombies?
He began to write—fast and hurried, not bothering to keep his writing small, using up line after line in his haste.
The colors came back—they leapt into Danny’s hand—his sword was made of colors, and every time he swung it, the air was full of color, and it dissolved the shadows.…
He raised the sword into the air and swung it back and forth, waiting for a trail of colors to fly in its wake. But the sword was gleaming, cold and silver, and although its blade was pure and sharp, it left nothing except a glint of light as it sliced through the air.
Danny pushed the sword back into the scabbard. The wailing faces were bursting through the hole now, tumbling over each other in their desperation. The air was grimy with shadow. As Danny breathed, it choked his nose and dried his throat.
He wrote frantically. Danny was in control. He pushed the shadows away. He pushed them with his hands—the world was fine—everything was fine—Danny beat the shadows—he could do anything—
“Nice try.”
A figure stepped through the shadows, straight from the air in front of Danny. Curly-haired and thin, he wore a torn shirt, and the bare soles of his feet struck hard against the red earth of the hilltop.
Danny looked up into the coal-black eyes. Finally, they were together.
This was how it would end, then—he had written that he, Danny, was as powerful as anything could ever be.
And in answer, Sammael had come.
Sammael pushed aside the faces as if they were the branches of a weeping willow. They recoiled from his hands and settled down behind him, simmering.
It’s because he’s got Chromos on him, thought Danny, desperately. If only I had written that I had Chromos on me, they wouldn’t have been able to touch me—
“Honestly,” said Sammael. “Can’t you do better than that? That book is another world! Can’t you fight a few moaning faces with it?”
The faces jostled and lunged toward Danny. Sammael batted them lazily backward, and again they shrank away.
“I’m not scared of the faces,” said Danny, gripping the hilt of his silver sword defiantly. “As soon as I can think of the right words, I can beat them. I can do anything.”
He found that his face had twisted into a tight smile.
Sammael threw back his head and laughed. The faces leapt in fright, and a gleam
of sunshine caught his black curls. When his eyes came back to Danny again, his cheeks were shining.
“You think you can kill me?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you even know what I am?”
“You’re dead,” said Danny.
“If you say so,” said Sammael. “You really want me dead?”
Danny didn’t have to hesitate. “Yes!” he said, gripping the sword and the Book of Shadows. “It’s what everyone wants! Without you, there’ll be no more bad dreams. No more huge storms, or people going mad or suffocating in the shadows. We can just live how we want.”
“But without dreams,” said Sammael.
“So what? We don’t need dreams. We’ll just go to sleep, and wake up safe in the morning. It’ll be amazing.”
Sammael looked at him quietly, and for a second, Danny saw it again—the way that face could look evil or kind, terrible or soft, how it could remind him of his worst enemy and his best friend.
He forced his eyes away, refusing to be drawn in. He knew what he was looking at now. Those gray streets—that fearful sky—this was the fount of all of it.
Danny adjusted his grip on the pen. Then Danny killed Sammael with the sword, he wrote.
Carefully, he put the book down on the red earth and took the sword in both hands, raising it above his head. Closing his eyes, he swung downward.
When he opened his eyes, Sammael was still standing close to him, exactly where he had swung the blade.
Sammael shrugged. “We’re still on Earth,” he said. “I am of no earth.”
“Fine,” said Danny. “How about this, then?”
He took a new page in the book.
Suddenly, Danny discovered that his sword was made of a magic metal. It was the one metal in the universe that could kill anything. It could chop Sammael into tiny little pieces that could never be put back together again. Sammael had no idea that any metal like that existed.… He looked up at Sammael, who was watching him write, and felt the tight little smile tighten further. But it was a new metal that had just been invented, and nobody had any way to defend themselves against it. Not weapons. Not legends. Not words. This was the deadliest thing in the whole universe, and Danny’s sword was made of it.
Carefully, he put the Book of Shadows and the pencil back into his pocket, and then he picked up the newly magical sword.
Sammael stood in front of him, framed by the shadow faces. As Danny looked at them, their mouths opened again and more sound came out. Not wailing this time. A high, soft keening that wandered across the air and tumbled up to the clouds. There was music in it, and there was sorrow, and regret.
The faces still pushed and shoved around Sammael, but they never got too close; they left a wide space around him, free from shadow, as they strained forward. They’ll leave no space around me, thought Danny. Once he’s gone, they’ll try to eat me alive. But I’ll stop them.
And for a second, he looked at Sammael and saw him framed with the last light left in that part of the sky, and he saw that the light was clinging to Sammael, pressing itself close to him in an attempt to escape the devouring shadows. The light was seeking refuge in Sammael, and he was standing there in his filthy clothes, with his battered, ancient face full of scorn, and he was shining as brightly as a lantern in a vast midnight forest.
It was a trick. It was all a trick designed to throw Danny off his purpose. But the time for Sammael’s tricks had come and gone.
Danny kept his eyes open and swung the sword.
The magical metal flashed.
* * *
Sammael’s broken corpse lies on the red earth.
After all that horror, it is over. Danny stands and leans on his sword. The world is free of Sammael, and he is the one who has freed it. If only he had done this long ago, Tom might still be alive—
But there is nothing to be gained from thinking that now. Sammael is dead at last. At least Danny thought of the right words, wrote them down, and finally made it happen.
He remembers, in that distant time before his ears were singing with blood and his arms were shaking with relief and his stomach was churning with bile, that there were other creatures in this too.
A horse. A girl. A hare. A dog.
All of his friends, when he saw them last, were suffering. He can put that right.
He writes in the book—words he can’t quite keep track of as they rush from his pencil—something about a horse and Death and a home. The horse will be all right. He has seen to that.
As for the others—
It is time to build a new world.
This time, he watches himself write, and the words are small and purposeful, and the letters are precise.
Danny makes the world again, from the beginning.
CHAPTER 18
HOME
Cath kept close to the walls. She never felt safe in this town. Once she had hoped that she might never have to see it again, but hope was a vain thing. Overhead, the shadows had gone. The sky was clear and pale, and winter had crept back timidly into the air; an edge of sharpness scratched around Cath’s cheeks and nipped Barshin’s ears.
On the ground, everything was still gray.
“Is this necessary?” asked Barshin. “You hate this place.”
“I told you, I know what I need,” snapped Cath.
“And I hate this place.”
“Makes two of us, then.”
“And we’re being followed by that … creature.” Barshin shuddered, risking a glance over his shoulder at Shimny. The ghost horse was plodding blindly along behind them, nose to the pavement, knees sagging. “Why is she still following us?”
“You was fine with her when we needed her,” Cath pointed out.
“She’s dead,” said Barshin. “I don’t like dead things. They’re unnatural.”
Cath squinted back at Shimny, pale and lumbering, faded eyes blank. It was easy to see it from Barshin’s point of view. The horse didn’t exactly make your heart glad.
“I reckon we’ll need her again,” said Cath. “And she’s not doing any harm. Nobody else notices her.”
Cath was right. The people who walked past them had their heads down, eyes fixed to the ground. Their skin was still gray from their time under shadows, and although they weren’t aimless anymore, none of them looked interested in wherever they were going.
“I can’t believe I used to live here,” said Cath. “It’s grim.”
“It wasn’t like this then,” Barshin reminded her. “It hadn’t been shadowed.”
“The Sawtry didn’t need no shadows. It had its own.”
When she said the word Sawtry, a cold hand poked its fingers into her belly and twisted them about. She hadn’t forgotten the estate while she’d been living in Ida’s house, but she’d managed to convince herself that she would never have to come back there.
The wide spaces of the beach. The grass-covered dunes. The foothills. The fields. The forests.
Cath’s heart bled dark crimson into her chest. She clutched at the bundle of rags slung over her shoulder. Spring green. Turquoise and primrose yellow, and the purple of heather on a heath. Grays, light and strong. Browns, bright and dark. A hundred shades of green, from yellow to sage to brilliant jade. She had caught them all, mashed up plants, mixed in dirt and berries and the dark juices of tree sap, and dyed any fragment of unused material she could find. And the cloak was almost finished. Almost.
The sky flickered.
Barshin glanced upward. “What’s he doing?”
The sky flickered again.
“Maybe it’s just a storm coming?” suggested Cath. “Bound to be something strange happening, what with all them clouds on the move.”
“I don’t like it,” said Barshin. “I think we’d better hurry.”
“He won’t write anything about us,” said Cath. “He wouldn’t dare. We’ll be safe.”
Barshin looked at her, his ears twitching. There was a gold light in his eyes, which couldn’t have been th
e reflection of the lifeless sun. Then the sky flickered again, and this time the flickering was red. There was no mistaking it for lightning.
“He is grieving,” said Barshin. “He has lost a person he loves. It is a very simple thing, and it breaks your world, so that you must build it anew. My guess is that he’s going to write a new world and destroy this one.”
The sky gave a groan, and there was the gold again in Barshin’s eyes, and when Cath looked up, she saw that the sun was directly above them. It had taken on the size and color of a late evening sun, blazing and orange, and it was sinking in the sky, not toward the horizon but straight downward, growing slowly larger.
The ground should have been bright with sunshine. But the ground was gray. People were still gray. Nobody looked up.
“Can they see it?” Cath pointed upward, aware of the warmth on the top of her head.
“No,” Barshin hovered for a moment on his haunches, front paws dangling in the air. “They’re not looking for it. They won’t see it. They won’t know anything till it’s all over.”
“How long have we got?” Cath cast a desperate look about her. They’d left the market square behind, but she could still see Shimny in the middle of it, dolefully sniffing at the fountain.
Barshin shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “A few hours?”
“Shimny!” Cath yelled across the echoing market square. “Shimny, come on!”
The horse lifted her head, ears pricked for a second.
The sky flashed scarlet.
This time, Shimny saw too. As the sky cracked, all the patches of her coat that had once been black flooded with a red that shone as bright as blood. She tossed her head and snorted, taking a step or two backward. Her white patches turned gold.
“Shimny!” Cath yelled again.
The horse reared up on her hind legs and came galloping toward them, red and gold coat gleaming in the growing strength of the sun. As she reached Cath, the girl was afraid for a second to touch her, sure that the scarlet patches would hold the fierce heat of flames.
But Cath was made of fire, wasn’t she? Nothing could burn her.
She reached for the horse’s mane and found it cool under her fingertips—cooler than life could be. Despite the color, the horse was still dead. But that didn’t seem to matter now.
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