I began walking the wards every day after the day I collapsed while working them. There was nothing else I could do and feel useful. I couldn’t fix anything that was going wrong—except for making sure our wards were as strong as we could make them, all the while counting the days and bracing for Midwinter Eve to come. Midwinter Eve, when Cariocecus—the Shadow Man—had promised us he’d return.
We started working on a gate the very next morning. No one was willing to risk the giant gap anymore, not after the firbolg and then the Dirae.
Walls that you can’t see, only feel, don’t always make people feel safe.
I was watching them work on that gate when Carolyn found me one afternoon, a few days after the night our little band had turned back the Dirae. She didn’t say anything, just came and stood next to me, watching in silence as Drew, Jack, and Greg fit two-by-fours together to build the heavy gate. Up at the forge, Matt, Phelan, and Thom were working on iron bands for those gates, to reinforce then, make them heavier, more dangerous to some of the monstrous things we might have to face.
“How’s Jay?” I asked her after a moment of silence. I felt something settle on my shoulder, something I couldn’t see. Longfellow, probably.
Carolyn drew a ragged breath and sighed quietly. “I don’t even know anymore,” she whispered. “I can’t tell if there’s a change or not. He sleeps. He hallucinates. Sometimes he talks to me, tells me things that I don’t know that I can or should repeat. But mostly, he sleeps. I can’t tell if the fever’s better or worse. It’s so hard.”
I put my arm around her and squeezed her close. “Are you okay?”
“No,” she said, tears welling up along the rims of her eyes. She took a deep breath, seeming to steady for a moment. “But showing it isn’t going to do anyone any good, so I’ve got to pretend that I’m fine—that everything’s going to be fine.”
“Everything will be fine,” I told her quietly. “We’ve all come too far for someone to die of a little scratch.”
“It’s hot to the touch,” she said quietly. “And it’s oozing this…this gross stuff.”
I frowned a little. I hadn’t been privy to the details of what the Dirae’s claws could do, but it certainly sounded unpleasant. “Did it just get to be too much?”
“Jacqueline’s looking in on him,” Carolyn said. “She told me I should go out and try to get some air. She said I looked like I could use it. She was right.”
I nodded and squeezed her again. “You want to take a walk?”
“I could probably use that, too,” she breathed, then shivered. “Are we going to stay in camp? Just in case?”
“I don’t go much beyond the borders anymore,” I admitted. With the depth of snow in the area, it was getting harder and harder to move around even inside of camp, let alone beyond it where we rarely tread. There was a path down to the greenhouse nestled a few hundred yards from the ward-lines, tucked up against the crumbling sciences building, but beyond that, there really weren’t any paths away from camp. Even the sheep and horses stuck close to home these days, munching quietly on the fodder we’d gathered before the weather fouled it all.
Carolyn nodded slightly. “You know, Jay wanted to go out to the barrows,” she said softly as we walked away from the gateway, along the wall and southward toward the ravine. “After the we did…whatever the hell we’re going to do to make Cariocecus go away. He wanted to go out to the barrow and honor the dead we’d buried there.”
“Again?” I asked before I could stop myself. She laughed a short, quiet, bitter little laugh.
“Yeah, that’s what I said. I told him it was too cold. He said that he knew it, but it’s the dying time of the year, and we should always find time to honor the dead whenever we’re celebrating being alive.” Her lips thinned. “He’s starting to scare me a little, Mar. But I just love him so much…”
“I know, Care,” I said. “Thom scares me sometimes, too.” Not quite like that, though. Wow. Maybe the whole seeing dead people thing is affecting him more than I thought it might.
“I don’t know what I’ll do if he dies, Mar.”
“Jay isn’t going to die, Care.”
“How do you know?” she asked, almost demanding.
I pointed to myself. “Has visions. He’s in them.”
She exhaled a shaky breath. “They’re not always right, though.”
“He’s in too many for me to be wrong, Care,” I said, injecting as much confidence as I could into my voice. In the back of my head a tiny voice was screaming that she’d never forgive me if I was wrong.
I’d better not be wrong. Don’t you dare make a liar out of me, Jameson Thaddeus MacKenzie. Don’t you dare.
“He’ll be fine,” I said firmly. “You’ll see.” He’ll be fine. So with Cameron. Everyone will be fine.
And we’ll beat Cariocecus’s ass into the dust and go on with life. Because that’s what we do. Kick ass, take names, lick our wounds, and go on with life.
Life.
He’ll make it. We all will.
The queasy feeling in my stomach reminded me that there was the distinct possibility that I could be wrong. I didn’t want to notice it, but I did.
For some reason, I always did.
Please. This time, don’t be wrong. I can’t afford to be wrong.
