Chương 61: “June’s Nightmare”

She woke at three in the morning screaming. Undoubtedly screaming, the full-body shock of someone pulled out of something terrible, and Vorrath was off the windowsill and the room was cold and dark before she'd finished the first breath of it because he had been half-asleep and the sound of it hit him like a physical thing. Lauren was there in thirty seconds. She sat on the bed and gathered June and held her and June pressed her face into her mother's shoulder and shook.

Vorrath pulled the temperature back to normal. He pulled the dark back to the ordinary dark of a room at three in the morning. He sat on the windowsill and he watched and he did not do anything else because there are things that are not his to do and this was one of them. This, the soothing comfort of a mother and daughter in the dark, was not something he could improve upon or replace. He stayed. After a while June's breathing evened out.

"Same dream?" Lauren asked, very low. June nodded into her shoulder.

"Tell me." June was quiet for a moment. Then: "They came and they took him and he couldn't — he couldn't do anything because the bond broke and without the bond he was just—" She stopped.

"He was just a rock. Just a rock on the window and I kept calling his name and he couldn't—" If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. She stopped again. Vorrath sat on the windowsill. He was not a regular rock. He was thirty-one floors and a hearth and a guardian and three minions and a bond at ninety-nine percent and a threshold space that was almost ready and three thousand years of being the most dangerous thing in every room.

He was also, at this moment, a small purple stone on a windowsill watching a ten year old try not to cry, and the distance between those two things was the whole of what this year had been. He wrote on the water glass. Slowly, so she would see it even in the dark. I am not going anywhere. She looked up. Read it. Her face did something he did not understand yet. I have been here longer than the house, he wrote. I will be here longer than whatever they send. I am not a regular rock. She almost laughed. Almost.

She reached out and put her hand next to him on the windowsill, not picking him up, just nearby, like she had the night in the garden. He stayed very still and she stayed very still and Lauren sat on the edge of the bed and didn't say anything, which was the right thing. After a while June said: "Ten days." He glowed once.

"Are we ready?" He thought about the threshold. He thought about Gerald in the boundary stones. He thought about Cecile's box and Tuesday's circuits and the guardian at the edge of the radius and the hearth at the bottom of the thirty-first floor. He glowed once. She nodded. Lay back down. Closed her eyes. He did not sleep.

He stayed on the windowsill, and stayed until the sky started going gray and June's breathing had been even for hours and Lauren had gone back to bed and the house had settled into the usual quiet it kept before morning. Ten days.