Brightly (Flicker #2) (38 page)

Henry looked directly at Filo, but Filo couldn’t meet his gaze.

For a long moment, Filo stared down at his shoes. This was foolishness, he knew. This was inviting pain. But all he could think was that he’d never really wanted anybody before, not like this. He’d never wanted to be close to another person.

His every nerve was humming with loneliness and want, and in that moment, it seemed that the only thing worse than the ocean of fear that rose up after kissing Henry was the torment of being this close and wasting it.

Filo cupped Henry’s chin with one hand and kissed him on the mouth.

He wanted to kiss Henry harder, kiss him until he was dizzy, but he forced himself to hold back. He could allow himself this much, this moment, but no more. Even now, lingering over the kiss felt almost like a punishment: the taste of Henry’s mouth, lips moving against his with agonizing tenderness, the feeling that something was unfolding within his chest, opening up—and the fathoms of black water he knew would stretch before him as he lay awake tonight, struggling to foresee the repercussions of
“I really like you.”

At length, Filo drew back. He was hyperaware of Henry’s hands, which were knotted in Filo’s shirtfront. When Henry lowered his hands, Filo caught his wrists. The movement was instinctive, like his body had decided that it didn’t want Henry to go before his mind had a chance to weigh in.

“Henry, I think I…” Filo trailed off, his throat seeming to close around the words.
I think I like you. I think I’m afraid of you. Whatever I feel, it’s too much.

He forced himself to release Henry’s wrists. He saw the flash of hurt in the other boy’s eyes, replaced by something harsher.

“Just because I like you doesn’t mean you get a free pass to act like a jackass,” Henry said. “I’ve had enough of those. I’m not interested in any more.” He got up. “Don’t kiss me again until you have something to say.”

Let him go,
Filo thought.
Let it end.

But when Henry opened the front door, Filo blurted, “I don’t know how to do this.”

Henry paused. “What?”

“Any of this. I’ve never—” He could feel his heartbeat in his throat. He tried to speak around it and stumbled over the words. “I’ve never done this before. I’m not trying to be a jackass. I don’t know what you want me to say.”

For a second, Henry just stared at him. Then he smiled bemusedly. “Actually,” he said, letting the door fall shut again, “that’s not a bad start.”

Chapter Nineteen:

“You really think it can be done?” Clementine asked, accepting a mug from Davis as he joined her on the couch. “Crossing into Otherworld?”

It was early morning, and the house was filled with pale yellow light. They had all gathered in the living room, even Alice, though she’d made it clear that she thought going to Otherworld was too dangerous to consider. She sat silently in a chair beside Jason.

The books Matt gave them lay open on the coffee table, along with several loose sheets of paper onto which Lee had painstakingly copied the most promising spell diagrams she’d found. She’d stayed up most of the night to work on them.

These spell bases were more complicated than the ones she was used to. In her own spells, Lee had mostly worked with simple circles and rune sets, similar to the ones Alice had used to purge the houses, but the ones laid out in the book were different. They were designed to carry a tremendous load of magic and amplify its power. The bases had multiple tiers, circles within circles, connecting lines that had to be drawn at precisely the correct angle, and complex symbols and rune phrases.

“With the right tools, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to open a way into Otherworld,” Nasser said. “The two worlds are parallel. They’re connected at all points, above and below. But when you cross from one side to the other, it’s not like stepping through a door. It’s more like getting into an elevator. The physical limits aren’t the same. When you make your own crossing point, you can choose your destination, to an extent. It doesn’t have to be the place directly on the other side.”

“It has to be written into the spell,” Lee said, indicating the diagrams on the table. “You have to incorporate the directions into the base before you cast.”

“But we don’t have directions,” Davis pointed out.

“No,” Lee said, “but we can make our own. With a modified seeking spell, we can use a piece of the crystal the Maiden gave us and instruct the spell to seek the corresponding place in Otherworld. Just a shard of the crystal should do the trick. It won’t need much. That’s also how we’ll come back to the same place we entered, but we’ll use something we brought from this side. Dirt or a rock. Anything like that.”

Clementine looked thoughtful. “A spell like this will require a massive amount of power, even with the circle doing the brunt of the work. The water will make it harder.”

Filo nodded. “We can use raw magic for most of it, but we’ll need a sacrifice, too, for that last boost of energy. Blood ought to do it.”

“How much?”

“Blood or magic?” Filo asked. “We’ll need a lot of both. We’ll probably need two people to fuel the spell. Once we open the way, we’ll have to be quick. The gate won’t be stable, not with all this water disrupting the magic.”

“We’ll need an open space,” Henry mused. “Point Emerson might be a good site. It’s north of Nemo Cove—flat, no trees, plenty of room to work.”

“We shouldn’t do this on the island,” Filo said. “If the spell goes wrong, it’ll blow us all to hell and probably start a fire. I’d rather not burn the place to the ground if I can help it.”

“Is that likely?” Clementine asked.

Lee reached for the loose sheets of paper. “The spell bases outlined in the book are structurally sound. They can channel a massive load of magic, and we can do some tinkering of our own to compensate for the water disruption.”

“Can it be stabilized?” Henry asked.

“Not completely. No matter how carefully we prepare the circle, the amount of energy needed to fuel this spell will make it unstable. It could still overload. We can minimize the risk of failure, but it’ll still be there. I’m not comfortable casting the spell on the island, either.”

“I don’t know where you expect us to go,” Clementine said dubiously. “The mainland’s no good, and neither are the other islands. Too many people. Too much… flammable stuff.”

“What if we cast under the cliffs?” Davis proposed. “They’re not very flammable.”

Filo shrugged. “If you’re fine with potentially turning part of that area into a smoking crater and maybe brining a big chunk of the cliffs down in the blast.”

“Actually, I’m not really fine with smoking craters
anywhere
,” said Davis. “But there has to be someplace we can go.”

“There is.” Sitting up straighter, Jason turned to Clementine. “The first time we went to Nemo Cove, you mentioned another island.”

“Troll’s Island?” Clementine gaped at him. “You realize that the name is completely literal, don’t you?”

“Well, yeah, but—”

“That means the island belongs to an
actual troll
.”

“I understand what ‘literal’ means, thank you.”

“We don’t go there.
At all
,” Henry emphasized. “That troll will kill you as soon as look at you.”

“How do you know if you never go to its island?” Lee asked.

“Sometimes it comes to ours, if it gets hungry enough,” Davis said. “It hasn’t done that since the year Clem came, when we were thirteen. The last time, Anna ran it off.”

“Not before it ate my dog,” Henry said bitterly.

“Oh.” Lee paused. “Does it eat… other things?”

Clementine leaned forward. “It’s a troll. It eats
everything.
When it came lumbering out of the trees, we were in the field. It wanted one of us. Poor Brian was standing between Henry and the troll, barking like crazy, when it grabbed him. Anna heard us screaming and came tearing out of the house. The troll’s been wary of this island since she scared it off, but if we set foot on its territory, all bets are off.”

“You named your dog
Brian?
” Jason asked. That seemed to be the most disturbing part of the story to him.

“When I was
seven
,” Henry said, indignant. “Cut me some slack. And watch how you talk about Brian. He was the best dog.”

Clementine patted Henry’s knee. “He died bravely,” she said, then looked at the others. “The point is that we can’t just show up on Troll’s Island. We’d get ripped limb from limb.”

Filo considered that. “What kind of troll is it?”

“It’s a water troll,” Henry replied. “So it doesn’t turn to stone in sunlight, but the sun does dry it out and make it drowsy. It sleeps during the day and hunts at night. It eats fish, mostly, and seals when it can catch them. The merfolk are too quick for it.”

“So it hunts off the island,” Filo said, “leaving a window of time when it’s not around.”

“Right,” Clementine said slowly. She started to nod. “If we time it well, we can be in and out without the troll ever knowing we were there.”

“We’ll just have to hope we don’t come back during the middle of the day,” said Davis. “I have a feeling the troll would notice something like that.”

“It won’t just be one person,” Jason said. “If Anna chased it off on her own, I think a group of us should be able to do the same. It’s not ideal, but it’s possible.”

“Supplies are something to think about, too,” Henry mused. “We have some camping gear in the basement. I know it’s not meant for caving or whatever, but we can at least sort through it and see if it might be any good.”

For the first time, Alice spoke. “You’re forgetting something.”

“What?” Jason asked.

“The time distortion.”

At that, Lee froze. She’d been so focused on the diagrams that hadn’t considered that. Even if they found what they were looking for and made it back, they might discover that they’d been gone so long that it no longer mattered.

Filo picked up one of the books and flipped to the back. “This book is about the structure of Otherworld, including the time distortion. Most of Otherworld isn’t mapped, obviously, but parts of it are, and some of those maps are reproduced here. Look.”

Leaning forward, Alice examined the page to which Filo had opened. It showed a black and white map of North America, covered in shaded swatches and squiggly lines. “What does this mean?”

“In our world, time always flows at the same pace,” Filo explained. “In Otherworld, it flows in currents of varying speeds—sometimes faster than in this world, sometimes slower, sometimes at the same pace. See the different shades? That shows the different currents and their locations, as accurately as possible.”

Filo indicated a roughly circular area in the northwestern part of Washington State. The San Juan Islands were in the middle. “In the corresponding locations from here to here, time flows
faster
in Otherworld. We’re right in that current, and the place we’re looking for lines up with Deception Pass, so it’s in the current, too. If we spend, say, a week on the other side, less time will have passed in our world.”

Much of the eastern side of the state, Lee noticed, was shaded to indicate that time passed slower in Otherworld. She thought of Summerhill, the town where they had entered Umbriel’s coronation revel. One day in that revel had lasted almost two weeks in the human world.

“You trust this information?” Alice asked.

“It came from a Guild library. If they don’t know, who would?”

“The guy who gave you these books also tried to kill you,” she said.

Henry looked up. “When Matt agreed to help us—to help
me
—he was trying to get something out of it. He knew giving me bad information would come back to bite him. And when he handed the books to me…” He shrugged. “He’s lied to me often enough that I can tell. He wasn’t lying, Alice. The books are legitimate.”

“I certainly hope so.” Alice pressed her mouth into a thin line. “So who thinks this is a good enough idea to bet their life on it?” She seemed to be addressing the group, but she only looked at Filo, her expression pinched.

Meeting her gaze, Filo said, “I am.”

He looked like he wanted to say more, but he remained silent. For a moment, they stared at each other. It was Filo who finally looked away.

“I’ll go, too,” Clementine said. The determined light in her eyes made her look like the girl at Deception Pass again, the girl on the platform high above the forest floor, wading out of the water or wreathed in flames. “I like to bet my life on something crazy every now and then.”

“And me,” Henry volunteered.

Clementine whipped her head toward him. “No. You don’t need to—”

“You know what they have in caves?
Cave animals.
Shocking, I know.” Henry shot her a hard look. “I’m going.”

“None of you know much about medicine,” Nasser said. “And hopefully you won’t need to. But in case you do, I should come.”