Kiersten's Arc

Chapter 21 of 33

The black petal sat on the sill through morning. Kiersten did not touch it. Eduardo had followed the dream-thread in. The broken house had no ward against that. If she slept tonight, he would come again, and something behind him would ride the same road. She had two nights to hold until moonrise on the third. She could not sit through them awake. She would break before dawn. She made a plan the small way, the only way she had left. She could not build a ward from outside. She would have to build one inside herself. She sat cross-legged on the boards. She set the pressed roses in a rough circle around her knees. She placed the black petal outside the circle, on the far side of the hearth stone, so it belonged to the room and not to her. Witness pulsed once, steady. "I want the door in me shut," she said aloud. Naming a want had opened her tattoos before. She meant to use the same key to close one. She breathed three, six, nine. She pictured the tattoo above her heart. She pictured a bolt sliding across it from inside. Witness moved with her, not against her. The bolt held. Then she said the harder thing. "I do not want to see him. Not tonight. Not in sleep. Not through pity. Not through memory." Heat rose under her collarbone. Clean pain, the kind she knew. She kept breathing until the heat settled to a warm line. She lay down inside the ring of roses and let Witness take her under. She stood in the copper field again. The grass was still. No figure came to the edge. She waited a long time. The blue shirt did not appear. The grass at the edge stayed green. Quantum stepped in beside her, calm behind his glasses. "You closed it from the inside," he said. "He cannot find the thread. Neither can what walks behind him." Mother Angel's wings folded close as she arrived. "Two nights, child. Then the wood behind the porch. We are coming." Fortune's card-body slid into view, wheel turning on its face. Fortune's legs stopped at the ring's edge. "The door is shut. What was using it is now outside a wall. It will look for another way in. It will not find one tonight." Kiersten woke at dusk on the boards. The roses were dry. The black petal on the far side of the hearth had curled to ash. The tattoo above her heart felt warm and quiet. She had closed the door. She had bought two nights. She looked at the ash and understood the cost. The hunter now knew the dream-road was sealed. He would come by the waking road instead, and faster. The wood behind the porch on the third night would not be a meeting. It would be where he arrived too.