Strange and Ever After (Something Strange and Deadly #3)(80)

He chuckled. “In that case, after we see the world we’ll open a school.”

My eyebrows shot up.

“For all the kids like me,” he added. “All the kids who got kicked around by life but want somethin’ more.” He twined his fingers through my hair. “For all the kids who never even dared to dream about a life as perfect as mine is right now.”

I swallowed as cold crept over me. Nothing about our life was perfect. This sunny morning would end very soon, and the darkness would seep back in as it always did.

But for now it was good. For now I had my inventor. My Daniel.

I pressed my ear back to his heartbeat.

“I’ll call it the Joanna Sheridan Institute,” he declared. “After my mother, of course, and we can all be teachers there. Joseph’ll teach about magic, I’ll teach about machines, and Jie can teach self-defense.”

“And what will I teach?” I asked.

“What do you want to teach?”

I chewed on that for a moment—but then the obvious answer came. “Literature, of course. Oh, and geography. I daresay I am more than qualified to discuss that nowadays.”

“I daresay you are,” Daniel murmured.

“I like this dream,” I whispered, my words sailing off with the sand and the sun and the wind.

“Me too,” he whispered back. “And when this is all over, it’s exactly what we’ll do.”

“Promise?”

“Yeah, Empress.” He squeezed me just a bit tighter. “I promise.”

I stood before the spirit curtain again. It was the strangest sensation—seeing my body stand in the middle of my cabin though I knew I was asleep.

I blinked. The curtain hovered before me instead of behind, and when I looked down, I was standing in the real world.

Cautiously, I reached for the shimmering doorway to the dock.

My hands hit a cool, flat surface.

I pushed. Nothing happened. For some reason I was trapped on the earthly side of the curtain. I leaned into the light, struggling to see the spirit dock. Yet it was like staring through a window in a thunderstorm—a thousand lines of gold trickled and slid down a pane I could not cross. The view on the other side was blurred.

Except . . . the more I squinted, the more I thought I could see an old man. No, the Old Man. He shook his cane in the air, and his mouth moved as if he was shouting at me.

I pressed in, straining to hear something from the other side. The hairs on my neck and face pricked up, and when I laid my ear flat against the curtain, it sparked with static.

But the faintest sound also crept through. A voice—the Old Man’s voice.

I screwed my eyes shut and focused all my energy on shoving into the wall, on catching any strands of his words. . . .

Stupid girl!

It crashed into me. I straightened, the curtain flickering and fading—but briefly granting me absolute clarity.

The Old Man, cane in hand and toothless mouth wide, roared at me, By blood and moonlit sun, stupid girl! You cannot enter without the clappers. Only by blood and moonlit sun.

I stumbled back from the curtain. It flamed once, so brightly my eyes screwed shut. . . .

And they stayed shut, for with the disappearance of the curtain, my body fell into a deep and thoroughly dreamless sleep.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I awoke, the Old Man’s words resounding in my skull. By blood and moonlit sun. It was meaningless to me.

As I sat there staring at the ceiling, a hiccup caught in my throat. It was as if a taut line were slackening—whirling back into me.

I shot up in my bunk.

The falcon was returning. A day after I had raised it, the leash that bound us was drawing tight.

Scrambling from bed, I bolted to the cargo hold. Daniel’s crates were back inside, the hatch open. In moments my feet sank into the sand, and I ran toward the pyramid. The sun was in the western sky—midafternoon—and if Marcus took as long returning here as he had traveling south . . .

He would arrive in the middle of the night.

I found Joseph pacing beside the obelisk—back and forth along the sand, up the pyramid, down again, and eventually in circles. Daniel waved at me, crouched beside the outermost buried copper line. Jie stalked among our buried army.

“He’s . . . coming,” I said breathlessly when I reached Joseph’s side.

His lips pinched tight. He nodded once, and I could see him mentally counting the hours as I had done.

“What should I do?” I asked.

“What we have been doing.” He opened his hands. “Waiting. Restoring our strength. And praying.”

The day passed accordingly, with obsessive checking and rechecking of our traps. Then a meal. Then more checking and rechecking. But our ambush was as well laid as we could make it.

Three giant circles of copper wire were rigged to the pulse pistols, plus a final fourth line that would detonate the pulse bombs. My twenty-five rows of dogs before the obelisk and fifteen rows behind the pyramid were hidden and ready. They shimmered with dormant power, awaiting my command to reawaken.

And always, the falcon closed in.

Before the sun set, Daniel moved the balloon to a less obvious location farther in the ruins. He came shuffling back to us just as the moon started to rise. Joseph took up residence atop the pyramid, spyglass at his eye. Daniel, Jie, and I sat at the bottom—hand in hand. Then we all began our mind-numbing wait once more.