Shards and Ashes

Pale Rider by Nancy Holder

SHARDS, ASHES, AND a freaking carton of batteries. Inside the dusty box, there were dozens of double-A six-packs.

Dana whooped, victorious. Lowering herself to a squat on the balls of her feet, she pushed back her dreads and caressed the treasure with her flashlight beam. Then she set the flashlight on its end so that the light bounced off the ceiling, picked up one of the packs, and wiped off the dust. She turned it over, examining it for an expiration date. The printing was too faded. She grabbed the flashlight and was just about to unscrew the head so she could test a sample battery when she heard the creak of a floorboard. She wasn’t alone.

“Shit,” she whispered. As quietly as she could, she clicked off her flashlight and stuck it into the pocket of her hoodie. Then she grabbed the heavy carton and stood, listening. Her heart pounded.

Nothing. Maybe she had imagined it. Or the poor old house was settling some more.

She quietly shuffled out of the room. This was the third time in two weeks that she’d found batteries in places she and her roommates had already searched. She had just known to go inside the ramshackle house and step through the filth and the trash to what appeared to be a home office. Even though she and Jordan had been there before and had carted off anything usable. But this time, she could see the floorboards in her mind, and she’d pried them up.

In the disintegrating world, change was not usually your friend, but life had made an exception.

There was another creak, and then a growl, and something charged at her. She screamed and tore out of the room with her carton. Whatever it was, it followed her into the hall, kicking up years of dust and trash while she banged into the walls from side to side with the huge box. She kept yelling, barreling around a fallen door into pitch-black darkness.

My gun is in my other pocket, she thought.

She whirled around and tried to throw the carton at her attacker—where she thought it might be—but the box was too heavy and it just tumbled through the darkness to the floor. Stumbling backward, seeing nothing, she got the gun out of her other pocket and fired. The thing howled. Dog. Coyote. She fired a couple more shots and ran out of the house. The wooden porch gave way and she crashed downward through the rotted boards to her waist.

Bathed in amber moonlight, a mangy dog leaped out of the shadows. Dana was trapped. She let out a bellow as it launched itself at her.

It howled; then its limp body smacked against her right arm and it crumpled in a heap beside her. It didn’t move. Panting with fear, she planted her palms on either side of her body, fingertips brushing the dog’s dirty, matted fur. She pushed up and out of the hole, propelling herself to freedom as she flopped onto her front then threaded her legs free.

The dog was twitching and panting. Oh, God, rabies. Had it bitten her? With a shaking hand, she felt around for her gun, unsure when and where she’d lost it.

No luck.

She tested her footing. Nothing sprained or broken. She stepped back into the house, listening hard, feeling along the floor with the soles of her sneakers for the gun. She still couldn’t find it. She could come back for it later, but there was no way she was going to leave the batteries. They were just too precious.

Ear cocked, she groped around for the carton, found it, and picked it up again. She was trembling. She didn’t feel any pain. No bites, then. Hopefully.

A creak.

She turned back around to leave. Her knees gave way and she almost slid to the floor.

Silhouetted by moonlight, a man stood in the doorway. Spiky hair, long coat, boots. Her heartbeat went into overdrive.

His dog, she thought, cold and terrified. He set it on me.

They faced each other without speaking. She kept it together. You didn’t live as long as she had—she was seventeen—by losing your cool. But she was very scared.

“I have a gun,” she said.

He raised his hand. “This one?” he said in some kind of accent.

Oh, God. Oh, God, oh, God, she thought. This was what she got. Jordan had told her not to scavenge alone. But she had just known they had to get the batteries tonight. Jordan was down with a bug, and no one else had felt like going.

She licked her lips and raised her chin. “I have another gun.”

“You can have this one back,” he said. The accent was German. He sounded like a movie villain. He looked like one in his long coat. She felt naked in her sweatshirt, sneakers, and board shorts.

“Stay away from me. I’ll call my guard dog on you,” she said, but her voice cracked and she realized she was losing her grip on the carton. Icy sweat was streaming down her body.

“I mean you no harm, Delaney.”

She jerked, even more afraid. That was her given name, and no one at the house knew it.

He raised his hands above his head, and she saw the outline of her gun. She didn’t know what to do. Rush him? Run back into the darkness? Where there might be another dog?

Then suddenly, there was no carton in her arms. It was in his. And they were on the sidewalk outside the house.

“What the heck?” she said.

“Schon gut, keine angst.”

He was very tall, not as old as she had thought—maybe five years older than her—and in the moonlight, she saw that his hair was blond. His eyes were light and he had a superhero face—flared cheekbones, square chin. Pierced eyebrow. Maybe that was a tat on his thumb. He was muscular, his long black wool coat stretching across big broad shoulders. These days, most people were a little too thin. Like her. She was all crazy black hair, brown eyes, and bones. “I got your name from your aunt. Well, from her things. I haven’t actually met her.”

“What aunt?” she asked him cautiously. She and her mom had kept to themselves until her mother’s death three years ago. She didn’t know any of her relatives.

“Aunt Meg.” He waited for her reaction. The name meant nothing to her.

“She’s white,” he added.

Her stomach did a flip. Maybe this Aunt Meg was from her father’s side. Dana didn’t even know his name. Dana’s mom had never told her white ex-boyfriend that she had gotten pregnant.

“What things?” she asked, catching her sneaker toe on a crack in the sidewalk. Their neighborhood looked like a bomb had gone off. Things fell apart all the time. She caught her toe again. Despite the heaviness of the box against his chest, he reached out a hand to steady her. His fingers were very warm and pale against her dark skin.

“Where is she?” she asked. “Aunt Meg?”

“She used to work for my family. In a manner of speaking.” He took his hand away. “My distant relatives.”

She stopped walking. “It was nice of you to Taser that dog and all, but just, you know, get to the point.”

He stopped, too, and faced her. “It’s a sad world when someone who knows a family member of yours is greeted with such hostility.”

“This world is more than sad. I don’t know that you know her,” she countered. “You’re just a name-dropper in a coat.” When he kept looking at her as if that didn’t compute, she said, “I need more proof.”

He nodded. “Fair enough.”

She looked to the right, at a boarded-up building, and had a funny feeling. His face came into her mind, and then there was something black and rectangular. She squinted as she walked, trying to make sense of it.

“Hey,” said a voice, and she jerked her head up. She and the guy were standing in front of her house, which she shared with Jordan, Lucy, Mike, and Anny. The strays that had become family. Wrapped in his bathrobe and plaid pajama bottoms, Jordan was standing on the porch, shotgun pointed in their direction. “What’s up?”

“We have a rule,” she told the guy. “No strangers in the house. Ever.”

He looked from her to Jordan and back again. “My name is Alex Ritter. There. I’m not a stranger. It’s okay to let me in.”

Jordan hesitated. “What?” he said fuzzily.

“It’s okay,” the guy—Alex—said again.

“Cool.” Jordan nodded calmly and lowered the shotgun.

Dana was stunned. “Jordan?”

“It’s really all right, Delaney,” the man—Alex—said. “I swear it to you.”

“It’s not,” she insisted. Too late, she remembered that he still had her gun. She bounded onto the porch beside Jordan and reached for the shotgun. “We don’t know this guy. And he is weird.”

Jordan kept hold of the shotgun and opened the front door. “Come on in.”

“Lucy!” Dana shouted. “Anny! Mike!”

Then they were in the house, and her four roommates were oohing and aahing over the carton of batteries, which Alex was doling out to them like Santa Claus with his bag of presents. Dana looked around wildly. She had lost more time. And this creepy man in black was inside her house.

“These things are over fifteen years old,” Jordan marveled as he popped a couple of batteries into her flashlight, twisted the head back on, and gave it a flick. Light poured forth. She didn’t remember giving it to him. “Awesome.”

“They’re warm,” Lucy said, holding one between her hands. She leaned over and kissed Dana on the cheek. “You’re made of fabulous.”

“She chased away some dogs, too,” Alex offered. Dana glared at him. Everyone else was taking his sudden appearance in stride. Or maybe she had simply fast-forwarded through the introductions.

She held out a shaking hand. “Give me back my gun.”

He did so, willingly, and she stuffed it into her pocket again. Then she turned her back and walked into the kitchen. Out of his line of sight, she slipped through the back door and flew down all the wooden stairs to the cool sand of the beach.

He followed, as she had expected him to, and she pulled out the gun. He looked from it to her face and sighed.

“If you shoot, you shoot,” he said.

Then he walked to the water’s edge and lifted his chin. “No seaweed,” he said. “No seagulls.”

But there was something on the beach, next to his boot. She spotted it at the same time that he looked down. He picked it up—tats all over that hand—and his palm blossomed with a pale bluish glow. Her eyes widened as he put the object in his pocket.

“Sea glass,” he said, as if that should satisfy her.

He turned his face back to the black water. “I was out here earlier. One good thing about the end of the world: the sunsets are fantastic.”

“This is Southern California. Our sunsets are always fantastic.” She kept a good grip on the gun. “You’d better tell me what’s going on.”

“I’m Alex Ritter. From Germany. Berlin.”

Despite herself, she was impressed. Eight years ago, people traveled all over the place. But fuel was getting scarce. Her house didn’t even have a car.

“I flew here,” he added, as if reading her mind. “I have a plane.”

“Holy shit,” she blurted. There were still planes in the world. And they cost . . . she didn’t even know what they cost. Too much to even think about.

He smiled faintly. His profile was sharply etched against the night. It didn’t make any sense that Jordan had let him in, just like that, and everyone had behaved as if it was no big deal. It was a huge deal. He was scary.

“Dana, please, I’m sorry,” he said abruptly, turning his face toward her. “There is no good way to have the talk I need to have with you. Let me show you.”

Before she could reply, he wiped his face with both his hands and rubbed them together. He moved his head from side to side, as if working out the kinks; then he turned to the sea and opened his arms like an orchestra conductor.

Something hummed against the soles of her feet. A couple of her dreads bobbed in a freshet of wind.

Shimmering blue crackles of energy shot from his fingertips. Then the pulsating sparks traveled to the water and hit it with a sizzle. The waves rippled and flared blue, pink, gold like the aurora borealis, which she’d seen in one of the DVDs she’d found while scavenging.

Dana jumped backward so hard she landed on her butt, and she spastically lifted her sneakers as the water swirled toward her. It took her a moment to realize that he’d clasped her wrist and was pulling her to her feet.

“Don’t touch me,” she said as she tried to yank her hand away. He was bending over her; there were rings under his eyes and his pupils were dilated. He was jittery and shaky, like he was on something.

She looked from his eyes to the water. The colors were gone. Her mind started spinning rationalizations and denials. She was spooked by the way he cocked his head and gazed at her with an odd, confused expression, like he was trying to remember what to say.

“I don’t know how else to tell you this,” he said. “But I think it was your Aunt Meg who made all this happen.” He waved his hand. “All the chaos. The . . . ending.”

“What?” she blurted. “How?” She backed away from him, now holding the gun in both her hands; behind him, the black, colorless surf rolled into the night.

“I don’t know how,” he said, so softly she barely heard him. “But please, for the love of God, help me fix it.”

Then he advanced on her and pushed down her arms. She tried to raise them again but she couldn’t. He cupped her face in his hands. Dizziness swept through her and she dropped the gun. He held her still, and she could feel him falling right into her, inside her mind. There was nothing but his blue eyes.

Then warmth raced through her, zinging through her bloodstream, and she began to sweat again. The soles of her sneakers made hissing sounds against the damp sand. Sparks skittered through her veins and arteries.

Then she shot like a comet into the air, into space, among the stars, away from the messed-up world. Suspended above the night, she gazed down and saw Los Angeles in ruins, the way it was, and a huge bloom of red surging toward the shore.

Toward her beach, just below her house.

And then she saw, in that house, two tiny dots of light. She looked at the dot in the kitchen. It was behind the refrigerator, and as it magnified in her mind, she saw Anny’s missing house key. She moved on and found Jordan’s reading glasses between the couch cushions.

She jerked to consciousness, to find that she was sprawled in the sand. He was on his hands and knees, his face close to hers, and when he saw that her eyes were opening, he leaned back on his heels with a deep sigh of relief.

“What did you do to me?” she shouted, trying to get up. But her muscles were strangely flaccid.

“I think I activated your gift,” he replied. She could hear how freaked out he was.

“You think you what?” She felt in the sand for the gun.

“What happened?” he asked.

“You know what happened.” He just looked at her, and she huffed. “I saw things. First the world, and the mess.” She thought of the mass headed for the beach. “Garbage, or something. And lost things.”

She told him about the keys and the glasses. He nodded, looking thoughtful. Then she saw a faint glow around him.

She said, “Did you make those things glow so I could find them?”

“No. I can use energy, in some ways,” he said. “Like on the dog.”

“And on me.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“And you can make people like you.”

“Only when they should,” he replied.

“I don’t like you,” she said.

And suddenly she was overcome with weariness. She couldn’t keep her eyes open. As they drifted shut, she said, “I think you left your wallet in a building on my street.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“Thank you,” he said finally, into the muzziness of her sleep.

When she woke up just before dawn, she liked him a little more, which was terrifying, because she didn’t want to like him at all. He had explained that he’d just found out some unbelievable things—that some kind of supernatural power ran in his family and apparently in hers, too. All his people were missing or dead, but some of them had lived in a castle in the Black Forest. And as soon as he’d gotten inside the castle, he’d turned into Mr. Electric.

Then they were in the house, and he was helping Jordan pull out the refrigerator—a useless appliance except for keeping rats out of boxed food—so Anny could find her house key. Jordan was overjoyed to find his glasses again. There was no one around to make him new ones.

She put all her own valuables in boxes and Jordan promised to keep an eye on them. Then, with shaking hands, she packed a suitcase. Alex was making her be okay with all this. She could tell. She wanted to make him stop, but she was doing it.

And then she was saying good-bye.

They got his wallet and then he walked her into an alley, where a vehicle sat beneath a protective covering. He pulled it off, revealing a beautiful candy-apple-red Corvette. She hadn’t ridden in a car in years. Something loosened in her chest as she slid in on the passenger side. The car smelled of old leather and dust. When they climbed in, he pressed his finger against the ignition, and the engine purred.

“I couldn’t find the keys,” he said. “Do you see them?”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Is this some kind of test?”

He shook his head, watching her.

Settling back, she let her lids fall shut. A blur of light passed through her mind’s eye; then she felt a stab of sorrow, deep and penetrating. It hurt almost like a physical wound. She opened her eyes and looked at Alex.

“There’s something about the keys that’s sad,” she said.

“The keys are sad?” he repeatedly slowly. As they glided out of the alley, he knit his brows. “In the sense of . . . ?”

“I don’t know; I just felt sadness.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “Did you put some kind of double whammy on me?”

“I don’t really know what I did to you,” he replied.

His jet was bigger than she’d pictured it. It was parked in what had once been a parking lot for the beach. Ready to go, it could cross the Atlantic nonstop. She sat to his right in the cockpit. He took off his coat, revealing lots of muscles and a black T-shirt. His right arm was completely tattooed. Tats on the left went up to his elbow. It didn’t make sense that a guy who looked like him would have access to a Corvette and a plane, and that she was flying to Germany with him.

But it didn’t make sense that in eight short years, the world had fallen completely apart. First everyone talked about fuel reserves and no TV, no grid, no net, and very few people. It was as if things were melting. Evaporating. As if the world itself was losing time—or running out of it.

They climbed. She looked down at the coastline. The ocean and sky were the same color. Skyscrapers had collapsed. Streets were broken up. There were no birds. Her mother was buried somewhere below her, in a grave not far from their house because, without transportation, they couldn’t get her to a graveyard.

Her throat tightening, she brushed tears from her eyes and focused, trying to see her mother’s grave in her mind. What she saw was her mother’s face, deep black; her lips, so brown, pulled back from white teeth in a smile.

Her throat tightened. She gripped the armrest so hard the beds of her fingernails stung.

“Why did I come with you?” she asked him through tears.

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Why did I come get you?”

Hours later, they began their descent through a sky the color of old copper. The sun was beginning to set. Snow was falling onto skeletons of trees and vast deadfalls. Anticipation skittered through her as his castle came into view. It sat on a hill, as he had said. Half of it had been destroyed; the other half rose into the aged, metallic sky.

They landed and rolled to a stop. Alex had explained that he’d been adopted by a wealthy couple named Aaron and Maria Cohen. They had been on a trip to Greece when the Collapse occurred. That was what he called it. Explosions, earthquakes, riots. Eight years of looking for them. Finally he’d found a key, and then a bank safe-deposit box. There were his adoption papers, saying that he had been born in a town called Ritterburg, in the heart of the Black Forest. He’d lived in the castle for three months before he’d come to get Dana.

“Here we are,” he said, sounding nervous.

Alex had brought a little foldable ladder. She didn’t really need it. As she climbed down, he retrieved her suitcase and his black duffel. A gritty brown wind brushed over her. Strips of faded blue cloth dangled from flagpoles at the top of the castle, and somewhere a hinge squeaked back and forth in the bitter wind.

Neither one of them spoke as he led the way to the castle. With his long coat and boots, he looked like Neo from The Matrix. There were patches of snow on the ground. They were gray and they kind of smelled, but it was the first snow she had ever seen.

Alex put his hand on the small wooden door cut into the larger, older door, to push it open. The rectangle of wood hung in the air for a second, then disintegrated, falling to the snow in a heap of fine ash. He pulled back his hand and stared at the space where the door had been.

“Shit,” he said. “Things are getting worse.”

“No kidding,” she murmured.

He crossed the threshold, and she reluctantly—so very reluctantly—followed him in. There wasn’t much left. No roof, piles of stone and rubble, blackened walls stretching up hundreds of feet.

“I’ve got all the stuff in my room,” he said. “Books, research.”

Her cheeks warmed. “Do I have a room?”

“Ja.” His smile stretched into a grin. “Just across the hall from mine.”

“You were pretty sure of yourself when you came to find me,” she muttered, crossing her arms over her chest. She didn’t like this place. Things were tapping for her attention just beneath her consciousness, whispering just a little too softly for her to hear.

He looked over at her. “I cast a lot of magics to find you, Dana. I didn’t know if you would come, but I wanted to make sure you would feel welcome.”

“You could just work a spell on me,” she said. “The way you did back in LA.”

“I’m sorry about that,” he said. “I wasn’t proud of it.”

His manga-man black coat billowed around his legs as he crossed the marble floor. Most of the black-and-white squares had been smashed. He led her down a narrow passage bordered on either side by piles of wood and stone. There was more roof there, blocking out the light. Flicking on a flashlight, he led the way. It was icy, and she wrapped one hand around the other. She became aware that a low-level sadness—no, it was despair tinged with anger—crept up the backs of her legs like a needy, starving dog. Freaked out, she glanced over her shoulder, seeing nothing.

“Something’s here,” she announced. “I feel it.”

“What? What do you feel?” he asked, sounding excited. He painted the walls with the beam from his flashlight.

She told him.

“Maybe it’s a ghost?” he said.

“Maybe?” she echoed, alarmed. “Damn it, Alex.”

He opened a door, pulling back his hand quickly as if he expected it to fall apart the way the front door had. His flashlight passed over a stone floor, swept clean. He moved to a table and lit a trio of candles, except she didn’t see a lighter or a match.

He handed a candle to her. In the soft glow, she saw him open his palm, and a small ball of light appeared.

“I’m not clear what your ‘gift’ is,” she said.

“One of them is light,” he replied. “At least, I think it is. I’m on my own figuring all this out.”

They moved toward a bed dressed in a thick, furry coverlet and topped with a stack of pillows. Unhappiness rose around her like a mist.

“This place is bad,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Bad,” he said. “How—”

She pushed past him, not willing to stay inside. He joined her in the hall.

“Better?” he asked.

“Not really.” She looked left and right. “What happened here?”

“They were attacked, as far as I can tell.” He made a face. “There are a lot of bones. And cages.” He pointed to an open door. “That’s my room.”

“Bones? I think we should leave,” she said. “We’ll get the stuff you need from here and go somewhere else.”

“Hmm,” he answered noncommittally.

There was a sleeping bag on the floor of his room, and a heavy wooden table. Stacks and stacks of leather-bound books and several open boxes littered the surface. Candles, crystals, and herbs were spilling out of the boxes.

“Oh, my God,” she said. It would take them days to cart all of it out of the castle.

“Ja, you see,” he replied.

Then he walked to the table and placed his palm on a black book with scrolled gold writing that she couldn’t read.

“I don’t know what it says, either,” he told her as he flipped it open. There was a loose photograph of a woman with red hair, red eyebrows, and big blue eyes. She was wearing a catsuit and body armor strapped over that. She had a black helmet on her hip with ZECHERLE in white. He tapped his finger on the lettering. “That’s your aunt’s last name. Maybe it’s your father’s, too.”

Delaney Zecherle. Her mom’s last name was Martin. Her mom’s first name had been Tenaya.

He turned the page, edged a small photograph from the crease with his thumbnail, and handed it to her.

She caught her breath at the sight of herself as a little girl in a school picture, grinning away, with no notion of what was to come. She was missing her two front teeth.

“I was six,” she said.

She turned over the picture. The handwriting was careful; she read, Delaney Martin (Dana). And the address of their house, the one she was still living in with Jordan and the others. Then, (your niece!).

“Is that your mother’s handwriting?” Alex asked her.

She shook her head. “I don’t know. We never wrote anything down.”

Feelings she couldn’t describe swept upward, making her feel out of kilter. She stared at the handwriting, then at the picture. Her heart tugged.

“This was . . . before,” she said.

“Ja,” he said.

They stood shoulder to shoulder, looking down at the Delaney that had been. Stuffed animals and Disneyland—those had been her hopes and dreams. She felt the heat of his skin and wondered what his life had been like with the Cohens. Jets and flying lessons?

“From what I can tell, your aunt was only here for a couple of weeks before everything went crazy,” he said.

There were some burned fragments of lined paper. She put down the picture and carefully sorted through them. She looked at a piece of paper.

things to do

learn german

On another, she read, I think something’s going on downstairs. Something wrong.

She turned another page of the book, to see photographs of other people dressed like Meg Zecherle. They looked like riot police.

“Those were her teammates,” Alex said. “They were some kind of security guards. They patrolled along a place called the Pale.”

“What’s that?” she asked.

“A border. They had to keep something out. I think it got in.”

She looked at the massive volumes. “All this, and that’s all you’ve got?”

“Most of this is written in Latin. I think. I think some is very old German.” He opened a book at random. “Here or there I found something I could read. Spells.” He looked abashed. “Imagine if you came here. Would you know what to do?”

They shared a grim smile. “There’s nothing more about . . . us?” she asked, not sure which “us” she meant.

“Maybe you can find something,” he said. “There is something,” he went on, reaching for another book. Bound in maroon leather, it was enormous.

He opened it to the first page. There was a black-and-white woodblock print of a man in a three-cornered hat on a horse, with a small child clasped against his chest. The horse was cantering through the night. Clouds billowed in the background, and in the largest of them, a shadowy face smiled wickedly down at the riders.

Alex pointed to lines of text beneath the picture. It was organized in stanzas like a poem, and he began to read aloud, in German. She listened to his voice.

“It’s ‘Der Erlkönig,’” he said. “‘The Erl King.’ Do you know it? ‘Who rides so late, through night and wind’?” When she shook her head, he said, “I keep coming back to this picture. I keep reading the poem. I don’t know why.”

“What is it about?”

“The child is sick. The father is riding with him through the forest, and the Erl King wants him. The boy can see him. The father can’t. He begs his father to save him from the Erl King. But he doesn’t.”

“Cheery,” she said.

The despair tugged at her again, almost like someone pulling on her hand. Anger skittered ratlike up her spine, and she stepped away from the table.

“Delaney?” he asked.

Freaked, she looked around the room. “Is this place haunted?”

“I don’t know.” His expression told her he had come to a decision. “The town’s deserted. We can look for a place—”

A sharp stab of light replaced his face. She saw a circular stone stairway. Saw herself walking down it behind Alex.

She brushed past him and went into the hall. Her thought was to go back out the front door, but instead, she turned in the opposite direction, into the pitch-blackness.

Light flared behind her. She heard the thudding of his boots, and then he was beside her. He had a flashlight. He said something to her in German, gave his head an impatient shake.

“English, English,” he said to himself. “What is happening?” he asked her.

“There’s something down there,” she said, halting before a hole in the floor at the end of the hall. “I saw it. It’s a cage.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “There are a lot of cages down there. But you wanted to leave, and I think we should. We can come back.”

She nodded. He was right.

But then it happened again: the flash of light. The cage.

And the horrible, horrible despair. Cold, miserable, alone. Dying.

Pleading.

“I think I have to go down there,” she said hesitantly.

“Okay, here,” he said, turning and aiming the flashlight at a curved stone wall, then downward at a circular flight of stone stairs. “I’ll go first.”

He started down, taking the flashlight beam with him. She followed for a couple of steps, but then she froze. There was no banister, and she pushed herself against the wall, afraid she’d fall off the edge of the staircase and never stop falling. She was no Alice, and this was no Wonderland. Grief wafted up from the depths below and twisted around her, like people drowning on the Titanic. She recoiled and crossed her arms.

She headed back up.

Then suddenly, rage poured right in, crashing over her head.

Just go down and kick him. Kick him hard, and he’ll fall down the stairs and break his neck. It was as if someone else inside her was whispering commands. Raging because he was the enemy, and the end of the world was his fault.

“Alex,” she said, swallowing hard.

Oblivious, he kept going.

She took another step up.

Kill him. They lied. They told us we were doing a great thing. But we were not.

She teetered on the step and went back down. The rage ebbed. Another step down. It faded.

Another.

It was gone.

“Alex, wait,” she said. “There’s something bad. Really bad.”

He was standing at the bottom of the stairs. She got to him, and to her surprise, he put his arm around her protectively.

“There’s something that’s angry. It told me to . . . ,” she began. And then realized that she didn’t really know this guy, and she had watched him charm his way into her home.

“To what?” he asked.

What the hell am I doing? she thought. She felt as if she were waking up after a long, strange dream.

“It told me to leave,” she lied. “And I think—”

And then she felt the sorrow and the terror. It was longing and keening and fear. She thought she heard a moan and caught her breath. Was someone down here? Someone alive?

“I think we should hurry,” she said.

“You’re okay, though?” he asked.

“Does it matter?” she snapped, because she was afraid of him. “Why don’t you just zap me so I’ll do your bidding, master?”

He knit his brows and took his arm away, exhaled, and ran his hand across his forehead. She saw how tired he was. He’d just flown halfway across the world, for God’s sake. But she hadn’t asked him to. She hadn’t asked for any of this.

He reached out a hand toward her, then lowered it. The flashlight beam glinted off the piercing in his eyebrow. No, not the beam. There was light around him, as if he were glowing from the inside. His eyes were almost luminescent.

“I feel like you’re supposed to be here. And ja, I pushed to make that happen. If things were different I would never have invaded you. . . .” He shrugged. “But they’re not.”

“Invaded?” she repeated.

He walked on. She walked behind him, staring at the back of his head, at his shoulders. She could almost see tendrils connecting her to him. She didn’t feel like she was supposed to be in the castle, but she did feel like she was supposed to be with him. Was that his doing? Was he leading her down there to do something to her?

No, she thought, but how did she know that?

At the bottom of the next landing, a white strip gleamed. Luminous paint. There was a sign in German. EINTRITT VERBOTEN. She knew verboten meant “forbidden.”

The sorrow came back. A silver trickle of strange sounds, like wind chimes, breathed against her ear.

“**––*–*–.”

Twinkling like starlight.

“**––*–*–.”

And she knew it meant “Mama.”

“Hello?” she called out.

“Delaney?” Alex said.

“Shh,” she ordered. She listened hard.

“**––.”

Mama.

“Where are you?” she whispered.

Silence. And . . . weeping, and then a kind of gasping, like strangling. And another voice, higher-pitched:

“––****.”

Help.

She ran forward, past Alex, who tried to reach out a hand to her. Then she stood at the beginning of a double row of cubes, or boxes, that stretched far into the darkness. The sounds were all around her now, coming from the boxes. Whispers, cries for help. Help that never came.

She ran to the closest one and stood facing it. There were bars across the front, and what appeared to be shattered glass in a semicircle on the floor. The moan again:

“********.”

She felt emotions: Loneliness, misery. Shock. They hadn’t expected this to happen to them. Something else was supposed to have happened. Someone else was supposed to be waiting for them. Whatever had been in here had been abandoned, dumped into cells.

“It’s evil. So evil,” she said.

Then her knees buckled. She felt her eyes roll back in her head. Light blossomed in front of her, reaching to the ceiling in ribbons of color, like the aurora borealis Alex had conjured on the ocean. Shadows appeared, then snapped into sharp silhouettes. Misshapen figures rode huge black horses whose hooves sparked as they galloped six inches above the ground. Tiny, gibbering things crouched on the saddles. Dogs, breathing fire, wove in and out between the horses’ legs as they cantered along a hill. At the head of the parade, a tall figure wearing a helmet decorated with two enormous antlers turned to look at her.

The deepest fear she had ever felt shot through her soul.

Then everything vanished.

Wordlessly, Alex picked her up and carried her out of the room. Up all the flights of stairs, to the main floor of the castle; and there she felt the rage again. Kick him. Stab him. Kill him. He raced across the marble floor and through the rubble and the ash of the doorway. Out to the leveled forest, in the gray, smelly snow.

He set her down on a rock and bent down in front of her. He took both her hands in his. They were cold.

“Are you all right now?” he asked her.

She blinked at him. “What was in there?” she asked him. “And what were the things with the horses?”

“Horses?” He looked bewildered. “What did you see?”

She told him. Then, still not sure it was the right thing to do, she told him about the rage.

“It told you to kill me?” he repeated, the blood draining from his face. “That I was a liar?”

She nodded.

He made a face and muttered in German. Then he said, “I guess it’s haunted.” His shoulders rounded, and he patted her hand as he got up and plopped down beside her. He gestured to the castle. “I don’t think the answer is there.” He clicked his teeth and scratched his chin. “I thought you would find it.”

She was quiet a moment. Then she said, “You glowed. When I looked at you, I saw light.”

“I’m Mr. Electric,” he said. He opened his arms. Blue crackles shot from his fingertips. “We can go back to your home. I can make your refrigerator work.”

She heard the disappointment in his voice. “But Alex, something was going on with your family. They did something bad. And maybe we’re here to fix it.”

“You can’t go back in there,” he said.

“I think I have to,” she replied, feeling sick to her stomach at the thought.

“But not tonight.” He sighed. “I have a car. We can go to the village.”

It was a Mercedes; why was she surprised? They didn’t even go back for their stuff. They drove into the deserted village. Some shops were still filled with goods; they got toothbrushes and food and changes of clothes. Sheets in packages. They broke into an inn and commandeered two rooms. She wasn’t sure which would make her feel better, to sleep in the same room or apart. She wasn’t sure of anything. She remembered how great it had felt to find that carton of batteries. It felt like that had happened to someone else. Not here, anyway.

“What did you want out of life, before I came for you?” he asked her, as they shared a bottle of wine—she really wasn’t much of a drinker—and ate some canned baba ghanoush. They were sitting on his bed. He was wearing a pair of black drawstring pajama bottoms and a gray T-shirt. She had on an oversized T-shirt and leggings. Not very glamorous, but in a way, that was better.

“Batteries,” she said. “Endless quantities of them.”

He smiled crookedly. “I’m older than you. I was laying plans for my adult life. We were really rich.”

“Did you, um, have a girlfriend?”

“I always had a girlfriend.” He waggled his eyebrows and sipped from their bottle. “I was going to follow in my father’s footsteps, be rich, then save the rain forest.”

“I think you added that last part to make yourself sound more noble.” She thought about the voice in the castle telling her that he was a liar. Maybe it had lied.

He handed her the bottle, and she cradled it in her lap. “I wanted my mom not to die. And I wanted to meet my father.” Her voice dropped. “And I wanted to be safe.”

“I think you need your own bottle of wine,” he drawled. “Because you got nothing on the list.”

“Are you saying I’m not safe with you?” she asked. She meant to tease him, but her voice shook.

He blew the air out of his cheeks. She wanted to take it back, but she decided to let it hang there, and see how he responded.

“I think,” he said, “that we should go to sleep.”

But she was too afraid to sleep. She went to her own room and lay down, but she felt too vulnerable that way. She paced, wondering if Alex was awake.

From her window, she could see the castle, and she made a face at it, like a little kid. She never wanted to go in there again. But her purse was in there. Her clothes. She hoped Jordan remembered to take good care of her stuff. She had her mom’s jewelry, meager as it was, and some souvenirs from the days before—report cards, birthday cards, a Barbie doll, and her favorite stuffy, Clown Bear.

Sighing, she leaned her head on the glass. Coolness pressed against her cheek and then the sky exploded into colors. Blue, pink, purple, shimmering and flaring; she stared, transfixed, as gray clouds billowed into being. The moon rose and became the face in the book Alex had shown her. Staring at her. Whispering to her, in words she didn’t understand. In a rising and falling voice, like someone reciting a poem. She put her hand on the glass and felt such a pull.

“Alex!” she shouted.

She heard him spring out of his bed and race across the hall. Within seconds, he was standing beside her.

“I see it!” he cried. “That’s the Pale. I know it. I can feel it.”

“The face is the Pale?” she asked.

He cocked his head. “What face?”

She pointed. It was staring at them both.

No, it wasn’t.

It was staring at Alex.

She looked at him. He was bathed in moonlight, every inch of him. His skin, his hair, his eyes.

She told him, and he held out his arms. “I don’t see it,” he said. He gazed back through the window. “Delaney, what if I’m the lost thing that you were supposed to find?”

And she didn’t know why—maybe because he was afraid—but she put her arms around him. His body was very solid. He was staring out the window; now he gave her his attention. She rose on her tiptoes and brushed his lips with hers. Cautiously, he kissed her back. Just the one kiss, chaste, and then she unloosened her arms.

“Just when it couldn’t get any weirder,” she said, and he chuckled. Then his smile faded.

“I think we should drive toward those lights. Now,” he said.

As soon as they got into the car, it began to rain. Wind blew. Alex turned on the windshield wipers as he drove back through the town, to the castle, then past it too, as the lights intensified.

Nothing whispered to her.

“Did I mention that you’re very pretty?” he said. “I like your dark skin.”

The raindrops painted shadowy tattoos on his face, and she wondered if he had them in other places, too.

“I like your tats.”

“Danke,” he said.

The rain came down, and she thought about her mom, and as she often did, the faceless man who had been her father.

The lights filled the sky; it seemed that if they drove forward any farther, they would drive into them. Alex stopped the car, and she opened her door.

He came around to her side of the car and laced his fingers through hers. As if on cue, it stopped raining. The earth rumbled beneath her feet. Shadows billowed against the colors, gauzy and diffuse. They started to coalesce and thicken, taking on the shapes she had seen in the castle, by the cages.

“Oh, God,” she whispered. He squeezed her hand. She couldn’t squeeze back. She was too terrified.

The flares of color vanished, and a figure on a massive horse faced them. It was dressed in ebony chain mail covered with a black chest plate. Its black helmet was smooth, with no eyeholes and topped with curved antlers that flared with smoky flames; fastened at the shoulders, a cloak furled behind like the wake of an obsidian river. In its right chain-mail gauntlet, it held the reins of the horse. Its left arm was raised, and another hand in a gauntlet rested on its fist—that of a rider beside it.

The rider beside it was smaller, dressed much like the other, except that red hair hung over its shoulders. Then it reached up its free hand and pushed back the faceplate of its helmet. It was the woman in the picture. Meg Zecherle.

Her aunt.

She stared at Dana, sweeping her gaze up and down. “Delaney?” she said softly. “Dana? Is that you?”

Alex stepped in front of Dana, placing himself between her and Meg.

“Honey, I have so much to tell you,” Meg said, ignoring him. “I was so glad when your mom found me. I was going to come for you. But then . . .” She exhaled. “Then it all happened.”

Tears welled in Dana’s eyes and she opened her mouth, but Meg held up her hand and turned to the black figure. It inclined its head. Meg seemed to be listening to it. Then she turned her attention back to Dana.

“I’m sorry, but we’ll have to save that for later. But we will talk. I promise.”

“Just tell me who my father is,” Dana said.

“He was a good man,” Meg replied. “But, honey, he passed away before you were born.”

“Oh.” Her voice was tiny. Tears welled, and she knew right then that that was what she had wanted her life to be like, before. She’d wanted to have a dad. That would have been her magic.

“I’m sorry,” Alex murmured.

She nodded, a tear spilling down her cheek.

“You’re going to have to believe a lot of things that will sound pretty crazy,” Meg said.

Dana wiped her cheek. “I think you can skip ahead.”

“Okay, but if you need me to slow down, just tell me.”

“We will,” Alex said.

Meg leaned forward in her saddle. “There was a war. A terrible war, between two magical races. What we might call fairies are known as the fair folk. And the other side are the goblins.”

Dana pressed her fingertips over her eyes. She could feel herself tensing, as if bracing herself to hear things she was incapable of handling. She began to shake. Alex put his arm around her waist and pulled her protectively against his side. She did the same. She needed someone to hang on to.

“Hostages were taken on both sides. Infant children, since their code of war demanded that children could never be harmed.

“Finally, it was over. A truce was declared. They agreed to exchange hostages. One baby of the fair folk for one goblin, every Midsummer’s Eve, until there were no more. That way, peace would be kept until both sides were made whole.

“For years, my lord faithfully brought a captive goblin baby and laid it in the cradle in the forest,” she said, inclining her head in the direction of the tall, black figure. “From the other cradle beside it, he would take the fair child left by his goblin counterpart, and bring it home.”

Her lord? Dana thought, with a sudden rush of panic. The stranger who was her aunt called the thing beside her such an archaic name?

“One Midsummer’s Night, the local nobleman was riding through the forest. From a hiding place, he saw the exchange. Months later, his wife gave birth to a tiny, sickly girl. The nobleman remembered the swap, and the next Midsummer Night’s Eve, he replaced the fair child with his own. What he didn’t know was that his baby carried a plague.”

“Your . . . lord . . . took the plague back with him to the fairies,” Dana ventured, and Meg nodded.

“The humanness of the child went undetected because it was so sick. Nearly all the fair folk died, but the goblin babies in their care seemed to be immune. War threatened to break out again, but the goblins were able to prove that they had had nothing to do with what had happened. But they used the plague as leverage. They demanded the immediate release of all their children. The fair folk couldn’t care for them anyway, and asked the goblins to keep their own children safe as well, until the plague was gone.”

Dana pictured the cages. “But the humans took the goblin babies instead.”

“The noble and his lackeys trapped some of them before the goblins arrived to collect them,” Meg said. “In all the confusion, the count was off, and neither side realized it.”

“But that happened, when?” Alex said.

“Eight hundred years ago,” Meg replied.

Alex’s arm tightened around Dana.

“But if they were in those cages all that time,” Dana said, “wouldn’t they grow up?”

“They only age in their own realm. On this plane, they stayed babies. Miserable. Lonely. Unloved. For centuries.”

“Scheiss,” Alex murmured.

“Alex didn’t know,” Dana said quickly, and she knew that to be true. She knew he was good. And that she was safe with him. “About any of it.”

Meg nodded. “I believe you. I was recruited by the Ritters to guard the place where we’re standing. The Pale. The border between magic and nonmagic worlds. They said it was flimsy. Things were getting across that shouldn’t.”

She looked over at the figure beside her. “What they were worried about was the Erl King. They were afraid that he’d find out about the goblins in the castle dungeon.”

“The Erl King? Holy shit, Alex,” Dana blurted.

“Ja,” he said, and uttered a string of German.

Meg looked a little confused, but she continued. “The Ritter elders never told anyone the truth. But I found out. I saw the cages. And I busted their lie wide open.”

“It was revenge?” Alex’s voice shook. “The goblins destroyed the whole world because of something my family did hundreds of years ago?”

“It was a rescue mission. Fair folk and goblin. Your people fought back,” she said to Alex. “During the battle, some of them found out and joined our side. But by then, the Pale had fallen. Magic poured into this world and overwhelmed it.”

For a moment no one spoke. Dana found Alex’s hand and held it.

Meg’s features softened. “Magic made our world sick. The fair folk baby that was stolen was the first domino. The goblins toppled next. What happened would have happened eventually. But not for a long time.”

“And the fair folk baby survived,” Alex said.

“And had children. And they had children. And that means . . .” Meg’s voice trailed off.

“There is still magic in the world.” Dana looked at her trembling hands. “As long as we’re here.”

Alex twined his fingers with hers. “But even if we leave, how many will be left?”

Meg sighed. “We don’t know. We don’t even know how to find them.”

Dana raised her head. The flames on the Erl King’s helmet flickered in the night wind. A flake of ash fluttered away, and as she thought about all that he must have lost, too, it began to glow.

She whispered so quietly it seemed as if the wind took her words away, “I find lost things.”