The room went quiet, so quiet you could hear the house creak as the wind pushed against it. So
quiet you could hear the snakes hiss almost as loudly as Aunt Prue’s asthma and my pounding
heart. Even the Harlon Jameses slunk away, whimpering behind a chair.
For a second, I couldn’t think. My mind was completely blank.
There was no way to process this—to understand why a man I had never met would change
the course of my life, so irreparably and violently.
What the hell did I do to this guy?
I finally found the words, at least some of them. There were others I couldn’t say in front of
Aunt Prue, or she’d wash my mouth out with more than soap and probably make me suck down a
bottle of Tabasco, too. “Why? You don’t even know me.”
“It’s complicated—”
“Complicated?” My voice started rising, and I pulled myself up out of my chair. “You ruined
my life. You forced me to choose between saving the people I loved and sacrificing myself. I hurt
everyone I care about. They had to put a Cast on my own father to keep him from going crazy!”
“I’m sorry, Ethan. I wouldn’t have wished this on my worst enemy.”
“No. You just wished it on some seventeen-year-old kid you’d never met.” This guy wasn’t
going to help me. He was the reason I was stuck in this nightmare in the first place.
Aunt Prue reached out and took my hand. “I know you’re angry, and you’ve got more right
than anyone ta be. But Obidias can help us get you back home. So you need ta sit down here and
listen ta what he’s got ta say.”
“How do you know we can trust him, Aunt Prue? Every word that comes out of his mouth is
probably a lie.” I pulled my hand away.
“You listen here, and you listen good.” She yanked on my arm harder than I would’ve
expected, and I sank back down into the chair next to her. She wanted me to look her in the eye.
“I’ve known Obidias Trueblood since before he was Light or Dark, before he’d done wrong or
right. Spent the better part a my days walkin’ the Caster Tunnels with the True bloods and my
daddy.” Aunt Prue paused and glanced at Obidias. “And he saved me a time or two down there.
Even if he wasn’t smart enough ta save himself.”
I didn’t know what to think. Maybe my aunt had charted the Tunnels with Obidias. Maybe she
could trust him.
But that didn’t mean I could.
Obidias seemed to know what I was thinking. “Ethan, you may find this hard to believe, but I
know what it’s like to feel helpless—to be at the mercy of decisions that you didn’t make.”
“You have no idea how I feel.” I heard the anger in my voice, but I didn’t try to hide it. I
wanted Obidias Trueblood to know I hated him for what he’d done to me and the people I loved.
I thought about Lena leaving the button on my grave. He didn’t know what that felt like—for
me or Lena.
“Ethan, I know you don’t trust him, and I don’t blame you.” Aunt Prue was playing hardball
now. This meant something to her. “But I’m askin’ you ta trust me and hear him out.”
I locked eyes with Obidias. “Start talking. How do I get back?”
Obidias took a long breath. “As I said, the only way to get your life back is to erase your
death.”
“So if I destroy the page, I go home—right?” I wanted to be sure there were no loopholes.
No calling a moon out of time, no splitting the moon in half. No curses that kept me from
leaving, once the page was gone.
He nodded. “Yes. But first you have to get to the book.”
“You mean from the Far Keep? The Keepers had it with them when they came for my Aunt
Marian.”
“That’s right.” He looked at me, startled. I guess he hadn’t expected me to know anything
about The Caster Chronicles.
“So what are we doing sitting around here talking? Let’s get on with it.” I was halfway out of
my chair before I realized Obidias wasn’t moving.
“And you think you’ll just walk in there and take the page?” he asked. “It’s not that easy.”
“Who’s going to stop me? A bunch of Keepers? What do I have to lose?” I tried not to think
about how terrifying they had seemed when they came for Marian.
Obidias pulled the hood off his hand, and the snakes hissed and struck one another. “Do you
know who did this to me? A ‘bunch of Keepers’ who caught me trying to steal my page from the
Chronicles.”
“Lord have mercy,” Aunt Prue said, fanning herself with her handkerchief.
For a second, I didn’t know if I believed him. But I recognized the emotion playing out on his
face, because I was feeling it myself.
Fear.
“Keepers did that to you?”
He nodded. “Angelus and Adriel. On one of their more generous days.” I wondered if Adriel
was the big one who had shown up in the archive with Angelus and the albino woman. They were
the three strangest-looking people I’d seen in the Caster world. At least until today.
I looked at Obidias and his snakes.
“Like I said, what can they do to me now? I’m already dead.” I tried to smile, even though it
wasn’t funny. It was the opposite of funny.
Obidias held out his hand, the snakes jerking and stretching as they tried to reach me. “There
are things worse than death, Ethan. Things that are darker than the Dark Casters. I should know. If
you are caught, the Keepers will never let you leave the library at the Far Keep. You will be their
scribe and their slave, forced to rewrite the futures of innocent Casters… and Mortal Waywards
who are Bound to them.”
“Waywards are supposed to be pretty rare. How many can there be to write about?” I had
never met another one, and I’d met Vexes and Incubuses and more kinds of Casters than I ever
wanted to.
Obidias leaned forward in his chair, cloaking his cruelly deformed hand once again. “Perhaps
they aren’t as rare as you think. Maybe they just don’t live long enough for the Casters to find
them.”
There was an undeniable truth in his words that I couldn’t explain. I guess there was some part
of me that knew a lie would have sounded different. Another part knew I’d always been in danger,
one way or another—with or without Lena.
Whether I was meant to jump off a water tower or not.
Either way, the fear in his voice should’ve been proof enough.
“Okay. So I won’t get caught.”
Aunt Prue’s face was filled with concern. “Maybe this isn’t the best idea. We should go on
back ta my house and think on it. Talk ta your mamma about it. She’s waitin’ on us, I reckon.”
I squeezed her hand. “Don’t worry, Aunt Prue. I know a way in. There’s a Temporis Porta in
an old tunnel beneath Wate’s Landing. I can get in and out before the Keepers ever realize I was
there.”
If I could walk through walls in the Mortal realm, I was pretty sure I could step through the
Temporis Porta, too.
Obidias broke the end off a thick cigar. His hand was shaking as he lit the match and held it up.
He took a few puffs, until it glowed a steady orange. “You can’t enter the library at the Far Keep
through the Mortal realm. You have to enter through the seam.” He delivered the news as calmly as
if he was giving me directions to the local Stop & Steal, to pick up some milk.
“You mean the Great Barrier?” It seemed like a strange place for a door to the Far Keep’s inner
sanctum. “I can handle it. I did it once, and I can do it again.”
“What you’ve done is nothing compared to what you’re about to do. The Great Barrier is just
one place you can get to from the seam,” Obidias explained. “You can cross into other worlds from
there that will make the Barrier feel like home.”
“Just tell me how to get there.” We were wasting time, and every second we sat around talking
was another second away from Lena.
“You have to cross the Great River. It runs through the Great Barrier, all the way to the seam.
It forms the border between the realms.”
“Like the River Styx?”
He ignored me. “And you can’t cross unless you have the river eyes—two smooth black
stones.”
“Are you kidding?”
He shook his head. “Not at all. They’re very rare and hard to come by.”
“River eyes. Got it. I can find a couple rocks.”
“If you get across the river, and that’s a big if, you’ll still have to make it past the Gatekeeper
before you can get into the library.”
“How do I do that?”
Obidias took a puff from the cigar. “You have to offer him something he can’t refuse.”
“What exactly would that be?” Aunt Prue asked, as though she might have whatever it was
tucked in her pocketbook. Like the Gatekeeper would be interested in three linty breath mints, some
nondairy creamer, and a wad of folded-up Kleenex.
“It’s always different. You’ll have to figure it out when you get there,” Obidias said. “He has…
eclectic taste.” He didn’t say any more on the subject.
An offering. Eclectic taste. Whatever the hell that meant.
“Okay. So I have to find the black stones and get across the Great River,” I said. “Figure out
what the Gatekeeper guy wants and give it to him to get inside the library. Then find The Caster
Chronicles and destroy my page.” I paused, because the question I was about to ask was the most
important detail, and I wanted to get it straight. “If I do all that and don’t get caught, I’ll get back
home—my real home? How do I do that? What happens after I destroy the page?”
Obidias looked at Aunt Prue and back to me. “I’m not sure. It’s never happened, as far as I
know.” He shook his head. “It’s a chance, nothing more. And not even a good one…”
“Nothin’s certain, Ethan Wate, ’cept for that you had a shot at a life a your own, and the
Keepers stole it from you.”
I stood up before they could finish talking.
Lena was waiting, in my room or hers, by the crooked cross stuck in the grass at my gravesite
or somewhere else. But she was waiting—that’s what mattered.
If I had a chance in hell to get back home, I’d take it.
I’m trying, L. Don’t give up on me.
“I need to get going, Mr. Trueblood. I have a river to cross.”
Aunt Prue opened her pocketbook and pulled out a faded map, covered with shapes that didn’t
represent any continent, country, or state I’d ever seen. This was more than a doodle on the back
of an old church program. I knew what Aunt Prue’s maps were like, and I knew how important
they had been to me before—the last time I found my way to the seam, for Lena’s Seventeenth
Moon.
“I’ve been workin’ on it since I got here, jus’ a little bit here and there. Obidias told me you’d
be needin’ it.” She shrugged. “Reckoned it was the least I could do.”
I leaned down and hugged her. “Thanks, Aunt Prue. And don’t be worried.”
“I’m not,” she lied. But she didn’t need to be.
I was worried enough for both of us.
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