CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

No! The exit is here!”

I jabbed my finger toward the front door. The problem with animals? Rational explanation doesn’t work. Nor does a firm “Get back here now!” At least not with cats, which is why I’m really more of a dog person.

I sighed and ran up the stairs. They ended in a hallway with doors on either side and one at the end. All except the one at the end were open just enough for a cat to slip through.

“TC?”

I couldn’t pick up so much as the padding of little paws.

“Look,” I said. “I’m very good at reading signs, and if you’re telling me you wanted out of that basement but don’t want to go home with me, that’s fine. Just let me put you outside, okay?”

“Mrrow.”

His call came from farther down the hall. Then a scratch at the door—which seemed to be the one that was closed.

“Really? Damn it, you are a pain in the ass.”

I turned the handle and—

Locked. There was an old-fashioned keyhole, empty, and when I shone my light, I could see the latch was engaged.

TC meowed again—from my left, through one of the partly open doors.

“Thank God,” I muttered as I pushed open the door. “Now come—”

He leapt onto a windowsill. I sighed and walked in. It was brighter up here. No closed shutters on these windows, just drawn shades.

Partway to the window, I stopped and stared at the floor. The blocks of parquet formed a pattern in the middle of the room. A symbol.

It was about three feet across, with intricately cut pieces of various shades, painstakingly laid out to form a triskelion. Each “arm” was a stylized bird’s head, done in an old Celtic style, like in the Book of Kells. When I got the angle right, I could tell what kind of birds they were, even with the stylized design. The beaks, ear tufts, and facial disks gave it away. Owls. I was taking out my cell to snap another picture when TC yowled.

He was still on the window ledge, now scratching at the blind.

I sighed. “That’s not an exit.”

When he ignored me, I tugged the blind open a few inches.

“See? Not an exit.”

Rising moonlight shone through. If I wanted a picture, I could use more light. I fully opened the blind to reveal a stained-glass window. Odd for a second story. It wasn’t even all that decorative—panels of leaded glass with a deformed circle of yellow glass in the middle. I turned back to the floor mosaic, and when I did, I had to take a second look. The yellow circle of stained glass cast a light that illuminated the head of one owl.

There were two more windows along the side wall. A lot for a small corner room. I pulled up their blinds. One window had a circle of red, the other blue. The moonlight shone through and lit up the other two heads. I stood, marveling at it . . . until fourth-grade science kicked in and I realized the moon shouldn’t be able to hit three windows at just the right angle to illuminate all three heads at the same time. Even if there was a moment when it could, what was the chance that moment happened to be right now?

I drew closer and took more pictures. There was a symbol of some kind in the middle of the triskelion, but it was impossible to make out from this angle. I stepped into the circle and—

I was walking through a field. There was no moment of transition. No moment of internal shock, either. It felt as if I’d been walking through a field all along. Walking and humming. Except my voice was high, like a child’s. Long grass swished as I cut through it, and the tops tickled my dangling hand. I looked down to see a small and slender girlish hand.

When a butterfly flitted past, I watched it go. A white butterfly. Good luck. I smiled and kept walking. I could smell water ahead, the slightly swampy, pungent smell. That’s what guided me. With each step, I heard a clink and a rattle, and I reached into my pocket, felt stones there, and pulled out three. Two black, one white. More black than white. I smiled and took out two more. Two black now, three white. More white than black. I smiled again, equally pleased.

Black, white. Dark, light. Good and bad, bad and good. It depended on how you looked at it, and the interpretation was ever changing. I was a creature of the dark and the light. The night and the day. The owl and the raven. I could choose light or I could choose dark, and it was not a choice of good or evil, but only a choice of one or the other, left or right, in or out, up or down.

I could hear the water now, rushing over rapids. Soon I spotted a small river. On the other side, gnarled trees choked out the sunlight. I smelled the forest, damp and dark and decaying. I looked from the sun-dappled meadow to the dark forest, and I felt no glimmer of preference. Two sides to life, both equally alive, equally rich, equally intriguing.

I was done in the meadow for today. I’d cut through vines and climb the twisted trees and see what new wonders lay within the forest. All I had to do was cross the stream.

I pushed through the waist-high grass until I saw the water ahead, rushing and crashing over the rocks. Then I stopped.

There was a woman on the riverbank. The ugliest woman I’d ever seen. She looked like a corpse—dressed in tatters, washing her hands in the stream, tangled dark hair writhing over bone-thin arms, skin like jerky, twisted and tough and shrunken. Her face was horrible, with a long nose, blackened, jagged teeth, and sunken eyes—one black and one gray.

“Y mae mor salw â Gwrach y Rhibyn,” I whispered.

She lifted her head, recognizing her name. Gwrach y Rhibyn. Those sunken eyes looked straight at me. Then she began to wail, so loud my hands flew to my ears.

“Fy mhlentyn, fy mhlentyn bach,” she shrieked. “Fy mhlentyn, fy mhlentyn bach.”

My child. My little child.

Death is near. I have seen Gwrach y Rhibyn, and she warns me.

I staggered backward . . . into the bedroom, where I stood in the triskelion circle.

“Well, that wasn’t just a little bit weird,” I muttered.

TC chirped.

“Yeah, I know. These days, weird is my life. I should get that on a T-shirt.”

I struggled to focus. It was surprisingly easy. I had just emerged from a dream state after stepping into a magically lit symbol ingrained in the floor of an old, abandoned house. I should be running for the door. Or huddled on the floor, rocking. But somehow it was like seeing red-eyed hounds and strange men who gave me boar’s tusks. I could mentally lift the vision wholesale and stick it into the already overflowing “crazy shit I’ll deal with later” box in my brain. At least I wasn’t still trying to find rational explanations. That was progress. Or the sign of a complete mental breakdown.

I turned to TC. “Now can we go?”

He scampered out.

In the hall, I spotted him at the end, nudging that one closed door. “You have the worst sense of direction, don’t you? That’s locked—”

TC pushed it half open with his paw.

“No!” I said, lunging after him. “Not in—”

He dashed through. I didn’t spend a second wondering how the heck a locked door got opened, because for once the rational explanation was the one that made sense. It was also the one that had me taking out my gun.

That door had been locked. Absolutely, undeniably locked. If it wasn’t now, that meant I wasn’t the only person here.

I suppose the intruder expected me to tear through after TC, having lured him in with some ripe-smelling tidbit. But while I was fond of my cat, it was a “break into an abandoned house for him” kind of affection, not “run into a death trap for him.”

Gun raised, I kicked open the door and peered in. Steep steps rose into darkness. The attic.

“TC?” I called.

A bump sounded above, as if he’d jumped onto something. Then a loud thump, and I had to stop myself from running up after him.

“TC?” I called. “Are you okay?”

Another thump, lighter. Then an odd bump-bump-bump over the floorboards. I pointed my gun with one hand while lifting my flashlight-phone with the other. TC appeared, dragging something behind him. At the top of the stairs, he stopped and meowed.

“Come down here,” I said.

He answered with a “No, you come here” yowl. When I didn’t move, he nudged his trophy to the edge of the steps. I could make out a rough covering, like fur. He grabbed the fur and pulled the thing closer to the edge.

“Is that a rat?” I said.

It was too big for a mouse. Hell, it looked big enough to be a raccoon—a young one, at least. I stepped forward then stopped, as I remembered why I was staying at the base of the stairs.

“Come down,” I said. “Now. I’m not chasing—”

He disappeared. I fought a groan. I should leave. I really should. But if someone was up there, TC might get hurt. I was about to call him again when the bundle at the top of the stairs moved. He was pushing it toward the edge. Determined to bring his prize with him.

“I don’t want—”

Too late. He gave the thing a shove and down it came, bump-bumping over the steps as it rolled, while he trotted behind it. When his trophy was halfway down, I started to realize what it was, but I just stood there, light shining on the thing, watching it roll, telling myself I was wrong, had to be wrong, until it came to rest at my feet, and I was looking down at the head of Ciara Conway.