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  “How much do you know?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “How about ‘nothing.’”

  “Then this could take all night.”

  Only, we didn’t have all night. I had to get back to the Ridge. To do that, I needed to know what I was up against. “There were lights,” I said. “On the Ridge.”

  “That’s the Barrier,” Delane replied. “It’s what you passed through. It protects us from you, and you from us.”

  Every question I wanted to ask led back to yet another question and then another and another. I tried backing up: “This place is real?”

  “I hope so,” said Delane, laughing. “Or I definitely ate something I shouldn’t have.”

  I knew the feeling.

  “The Barrier’s been here forever,” he continued. “More or less. It’s an energy created from magic.”

  So this was a dream. I was unconscious on the Ridge. “Magic?”

  “Old magic.”

  “But there is no magic.”

  “Not on your side. Some wanted it the same here, too. Course, it didn’t quite work out like that. Why do you think we’re in this mess?”

  I didn’t get a chance to hazard a guess. Another knock came at the door. Footsteps thundered overhead. Delane was already at the door when Pointy Teeth hurried back into the room.

  “It’s Solandun,” said Pointy. “I saw him from upstairs.”

  Delane opened the door, and as soon as Sol entered, I knew my opportunity to ask questions had gone. He didn’t look happy.

  “I couldn’t find it,” he said. “It’s crawling with masks.”

  “What do we do?” asked Delane.

  “We get Mia back,” Sol replied. He offered me a cursory glance. “Do we have grains?”

  Delane shook his head. He looked to Pointy. “Rip?”

  “Maybe I can get a couple,” Rip replied. “Maybe. But you can’t take her up there until they’ve cleared out. It’s too great a risk.”

  “If she’s found here, it’ll be worse.”

  The argument raged back and forth, but I no longer heard their words. If I’d disappeared through the lights and come here, so had Jay!

  I leapt up and pushed past Delane, positioning myself right in front of Sol.

  “Sol, Jay!”

  Sol nodded slowly. It was all I needed.

  “You knew,” I gasped. “About all of this. And the man I saw—the hooded man.”

  Again, he nodded.

  “We have to find him.”

  “You can’t go out there.”

  “I have to. Jay’s here, Sol!”

  Sol didn’t blink. “Yes.”

  “Yes?” I blurted. “That’s all you can say? What about the other kids?” I looked from Sol to Rip to Delane. “They’ve taken six other boys.”

  “They’ve been bringing them over,” said Rip. Then to Sol: “That’s what I was trying to tell you about the Barrier. The same thing happened last night. It was like an Equinox began and then just stopped. We think they have solens.”

  “It was us,” said Sol, wearily. “They took Mia’s brother, Jay, last night. Mia was there. She was wearing the Solenetta.”

  “My necklace?” I asked, increasingly uneasy. “It’s just a piece of junk.”

  No one replied.

  “And what’s it got to do with Jay? Why did they take him?”

  Silence.

  “Sol, why?” I couldn’t stand it any longer. He was wasting time when Jay was somewhere in this nightmare. “We have to do something. He’s my brother, Sol. He’s ten years old.” I took a step for the door.

  Sol blocked my path. “He’ll be found, Mia.”

  Yeah, right. Sol had known that Jay was here all along and he’d said nothing. Now he expected me to believe that Jay’d suddenly just appear? “Who’s going to find him?”

  “We have people looking.”

  “Really? And why would anyone here be looking for Jay?”

  I tried to push past him, but getting by Sol was like trying to walk through a wall.

  “If they find you out there, they’ll kill you,” he said. He raised his hands like he was trying to calm me. “Mia, I’m not going to let that happen.”

  “We’ll see about that.” Pumped, ready, I remembered the phone in my pocket. “I’m calling the sheriff. See what he has to say about this.”

  I switched on my phone. The display was blank. It must have gotten crushed on the Ridge. The thing was ancient. Again I pushed the power button. Held it down. Nothing.

  “Fine,” I said, refusing to look at Sol. “I’ll just go back and open that Barrier-thing. I did it once.”

  “With solens,” said Sol.

  “Then I’ll get more. Someone in this town must have some.”

  Sol glanced at Rip and Delane, then looked to the ground. “Mia, there aren’t any others,” he said, softly.

  I faltered. “Then how do we get back?”

  Rip thrust his hands into his pockets. Delane studied the wall. Only Sol would hold my gaze.

  I watched him back. Stuck? This nightmare was plunging into new depths of terror. I pictured Pete wondering where I was, if he’d even noticed I was gone. And Willie. She’d go nuts if I disappeared. I’d told her that I’d call her. I glanced at my phone in my hand. The useless phone. My only link to Crownsville.

  “It can’t be,” I whispered.

  Trapped here. Only, here was exactly where I needed to be. I thought of Jay in the hands of a psycho somewhere in this hellish world. His time was ticking away.

  “Look, Mia,” said Sol. He sighed, his hand grazing mine with the slightest touch. “Whatever you think, I’m not trying to be difficult. I know you’re upset about your brother. But I have to get you home. You shouldn’t be here. Believe me. There is another way to get you back, but it means returning to the Ridge and we can’t do that until they give up looking. You’ll have to stay. For now.”

  I’d barely processed his words before he walked away from the door. Rip and Delane did the same.

  “She can sleep upstairs,” said Rip, sounding relieved that the discussion was over. “As soon as dawn hits, I’ll go out for grains. We might get lucky. But we should all get some rest. Tomorrow could be a long day.”

  I had no choice but to go along with their plan tonight, but there wasn’t a chance in this world, or any other, that I was leaving this place without Jay.

  Reluctantly, I followed Rip upstairs to a bedroom at the front of the house. The wooden floor, like the beams in the ceiling, was buckled and bowed. I perched on the bed until Rip had left, then crept back to the door and opened it a crack. Rip’s steps sounded on the staircase. Then the three resumed their conversation, their voices muffled.

  “So how much do we tell her?” asked Delane.

  A pause followed before Sol replied. “I don’t know,” he said, his voice deep, weary. “What’s the point, when she has to go back?”

  TEN

  I waited until the house fell silent, then tiptoed downstairs into the darkened room below. I had a two-point plan: Find Jay, then get the hell back to Crownsville. I’d almost made it past the table, when—

  “I wouldn’t do that.”

  Heart pounding, I spun around. A candle lit near the hearth. Sol became visible in one of the fireside chairs. Busted.

  “I knew you’d try to leave,” he said. There was nothing cocky in the way he spoke. He was calm, resigned, as if he’d seen me coming from a mile away. He leaned forward, elbows resting on his thighs, his hands dangling between them as he watched me.

  I folded my arms. So he’d guessed what I was up to. It didn’t matter. I’d made my decision and nothing he could say would change my mind. Nobody was searching for those boys. Alex Dash had been gone for a week, others for months. Surely they would have been found already if someone had been looking. But Jay had only been gone for twenty-four hours. He couldn’t have gotten that far. Every second I waited here was a wasted moment.

  “I have to find him, Sol.�
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  Determined to remain composed, I turned for the door. I could cope with the insanity of stumbling into another world, but only if I focused on Jay. Sol would get no tears or tantrums from me; I wasn’t going to beg for his help. He’d known the boys were being brought here from the moment we’d first talked at school. He’d had plenty of chances to help. He’d done nothing.

  “I’m going to start with the streets,” I said, determined he accept that I was going to find Jay. “Then I’ll check the Ridge. Someone must have seen him.”

  The door was both latched and locked, but a small black key hung from a hook to the right. I took the key and placed it in the lock. Sol’s hand slammed against the door. My heart leapt into my mouth. Refusing to turn around, I felt him close behind my shoulder. I hadn’t heard him cross the room.

  “You don’t trust me,” Sol said, his voice low, and close to my ear.

  “Can’t imagine why you’d think that.” I tugged at the door handle, ready to strike him with an elbow if he didn’t back down.

  I tugged again. Sol’s hand darted to the lock. In one swift motion, he palmed the key, and then forced his fist back against the door. On the other side of my body, his other hand smacked against the wood. I was caged.

  “Believe of me what you will,” he said, his breath warm on the side of my neck. “But I can’t let you go out there. I won’t.”

  I studied the prison he’d formed around me, the muscles in his arms straining as he pushed against the door. There was no way he was going to give up.

  Cautiously I turned to face him. I no longer believed Sol wanted to kill me, and that was something. But with him standing this close, I felt like I had on the day he’d given me a ride in his truck. His presence consumed the space between us. The way he loomed over me—there was just something so physical about Sol.

  “I don’t understand why you won’t listen to me,” I said. He wasn’t going to scare me. “What do you expect me to do?”

  The only light in the room came from the hearth. It caught just one side of Sol’s face. The golden flecks in his eye glimmered. His jaw cast deep shadows across his chest. Darkness and light.

  “I want you to trust me,” he said, towering over me.

  But how could I, when all he’d ever done was lie?

  Defeated, I lowered my head. This wasn’t real. It wasn’t my life. Life was school. It was Mickey’s. It was going with Andy to prom! For once, everything was how I’d wanted it to be. And then Sol had entered my life. Now I didn’t even know where I was.

  “I don’t know what to think,” I whispered. “Is any of this even real?”

  Though I remained between Sol’s outstretched arms, he didn’t once touch me. I could smell him all around me. It was the scent from the shirt in his bedroom and from the cabin of his truck. It reminded me of Crownsville.

  “It’s real, Mia,” he said.

  Finally, he lowered his arm and backed away. He wandered across the narrow room to the fire. After placing the key on the arm of the chair, he reached for a brown bottle on the hearth.

  It was only then that I realized how fast my heart was pounding. And it wasn’t from fear of all that had happened since the Ridge. It was him. He did this to me. It wasn’t the same nervousness I felt when I was with Andy—those feelings were explainable, understandable. They were right. With Sol, the feelings were deeper, more mysterious. It had been easier to avoid those feelings in Crownsville. I could just stay away from him. Now I couldn’t escape them—couldn’t escape him. Sol was my only link to Jay.

  I glanced at the bottle on his lap. “Poison?” I asked.

  “Almost,” he replied. “Rip makes it. It’s not good.” He offered me the bottle.

  Resigned to the fact that I wasn’t going anywhere, I sighed. I mean, what could I really do? I didn’t know where to find Jay. And even if I could find him, I’d then have to return to the Ridge and get us both to Crownsville in one piece. I didn’t even have my necklace, which clearly was part of the reason I was here.

  I headed for the fire, dropped into the opposite chair, and took the bottle from Sol. I drank a long swig. A spicy, burning liquid set my tongue aflame and brought tears to my eyes. Almost choking, I handed it back. “You know I’m not twenty-one.”

  Sol smiled. It was the first smile I’d seen from him since we’d stepped through the lights on the Ridge. “Me neither,” he said. “I won’t tell.”

  “How old are you?”

  “I’m nineteen.”

  So I’d been right. He wasn’t seventeen.

  “Then what the hell were you doing at Crownsville High?”

  He looked away. It was a classic Sol move. But as trapped as I was, Sol was trapped here too. This time he couldn’t escape my questions. “You promised you’d explain,” I said, dipping my head to reclaim his gaze. “When we were out there before. You said you’d tell me everything.”

  “All right.” He pulled back his shoulders. “Mia, I was in Crownsville because of those missing boys. We believed they might snatch someone older next. We needed to be on the inside.”

  Okay. It was something, including a confession that he knew exactly what was going on.

  “Then you know who’s taken them. You know who has Jay. Sol, you have to—”

  “He calls himself the Suzerain,” Sol said, before I could finish. “And he’s taken over Brakaland from here to the mountains.”

  I paused. It wasn’t just because he’d answered so openly. It was the tone of his voice, heavy and filled with distaste for this person who’d taken Jay. I shivered. It was like finding Sol’s sword in the trunk. I had to know. But did I really want to? “Brakaland?” I whispered.

  He nodded. “That’s the name of this country.”

  This country? The country I’d tumbled into. Suddenly I felt very small.

  “The guy who has Jay,” I asked, needing to understand. “When you spoke of him, it didn’t sound like you were much of a fan. Why?”

  Candlelight flickered on Sol’s face as he drank deeply from the bottle. He stared distantly at the candle’s flame, frowning as if he saw something I couldn’t see. “Because he wants to destroy your world,” he said.

  * * *

  “We live in the spaces you don’t use,” said Sol, “in a parallel world hidden by the Barrier. But our world is shrinking. As your populations and cities grow, we lose more of our land. There were some who wanted to send emissaries, to bargain and keep the peace. Another force wanted to fight back.”

  Just a moment ago, I’d thought no further than Jay and the Ridge and the twisted cobbled streets of this godforsaken town. Now a whole world opened up around me. One I didn’t know. One I didn’t understand. One that had taken Jay.

  But, in debate class, Rifkin always said that the crux of any argument was knowledge. He taught us that the speaker who truly knows a subject, who can interpret it, bend it, examine it from every angle, was the speaker who won. If I was going to find Jay, I needed to know everything.

  “The Suzerain is a man called Finneus Elias,” said Sol, as if sensing that I wanted him to continue. “He’s a man of magic and persuasion. He knows your world. He has been there many times. He convinced some that if he were in control we could fight to hold back the boundaries of your world and protect our own. Many disagreed and the two sides split. It turned into a great war. Eventually, he was defeated, but Elias didn’t give up his cause; he just went underground. He abducted those who were skilled in magic to build a new force.

  “Years passed. No one thought Elias would ever return. And then he came back, only this time the force of his magic was much stronger than anything Brakaland had ever seen. He opened gateways, other Barriers to worlds within worlds, gateways that were not meant to be opened. He liberated the Warnon Mines in the southern deserts, which was once a Barrier to a demon world.”

  “Demons?” I spluttered.

  This was insane. It was a story from one of Jay’s games. It had to be. I reached for Sol’s bo
ttle. Maybe that drink wasn’t so rotten after all. The initial sting from my first gulp had worn off. Now I just felt numb inside.

  Sol leaned back in his chair, his gaze once again distant. “They’ve infested this place,” he said. “The Suzerain claims he’s the only one with the magical power to protect Brakaland from the demons. But the war between the Suzerain and the demons is a false one. He purposefully released the demons to start this war. To make himself irreplaceable. He is their master.”

  And this was the man who had Jay. My panic rising, I could barely speak. “Was it him? The man on the Ridge?”

  I only realized I was clutching the bottle when Sol gently took it from my hand. He watched me closely, like he was ready to catch me if I fell. I could only imagine the look on my face.

  “I need to show you something,” he said. “It will make it easier for you to understand.”

  He placed the bottle back on the hearth, then headed to the door beside the staircase at the rear of the room. With legs like Jell-O, I followed, my mind racing with visions of Jay on the Ridge. I thought of the night that Alex had disappeared. I should have done something more. I should have gone into the fields and stopped it, and then maybe Jay would never have been snatched. But why had he been snatched? For what possible reason could this Suzerain want a ten-year-old boy?

  A small, shadowy room lay behind the door. Shelves lined the walls and the glint of bottles and jars was visible in the dim light. Sol must have known what he was looking for; a second later he returned with a large leather-bound book in his hands. He took the book to the table in the center of the main room.

  “This is why the Ridge is so important,” he said, as I joined him.

  He opened the book to a map, the same map I’d seen at Old Man Crowley’s with that line of tiny golden stars. I viewed it with increasing trepidation. Now I knew what it meant.

  “It’s the way through, isn’t it?” I asked. It was a struggle, but I had to remain calm. Analyze. Understand. Think. Jay needed me to be strong.