“Stop him.”
“Excuse me?”
“Every time he comes through. Stop him.” He says this easily, like I have no life outside the wood.
“First of all,” I say, “that sounds exhausting. Second of all, I have this little thing called school.”
“You could always do as your mother suggests and enroll in a homeschooling program.”
“No, thank you.” I’m enough of a freak as it is. Besides, I know what my life’s going to look like when I graduate: all guardian duties, all the time. These last two years of high school are the last two years of my entire life in which I can pretend to be somewhat normal. Two years to experience a life that isn’t completely consumed by destiny and duty and wishing to be someone else, anyone else, even if just for a day. And I won’t give that up just because some traveler feels like playing red rover with my threshold.
Dad wanted me to have a normal life for as long as possible, and that’s what I’m going to do.
“It won’t be forever,” Joe says. “The boy will tire of it eventually.”
I don’t think so. I don’t know what Brightonshire wants, but I think he’s just going to get more determined, and I think he’s going to keep coming until he finds a chink in my armor.
I cross my arms over my chest. Sweat rolls down the back of my neck. Even with the sun setting in front of me, showering the trees with strips of orange light, the temperature hovers in the space between uncomfortable and suffocating. Strange for mid-October, and highly inconvenient. All my back-to-school clothes are long-sleeved shirts, jeans, boots. Cover-ups and layers. August-hot autumn days like this one mean digging through the back of my closet for the few pieces of summer clothing I haven’t boxed away.
“This is your job, Winter,” he says, quietly. “It must be your first priority. This is not the first time someone has discovered the wood and purposely tried to use it to cross over, and all the guardians before you did exactly as I said. They waited for those travelers, they found them, and they stopped them. Every time. It may be exhausting, but it’s the only way.”
I wipe my sleeve across my damp brow. “I don’t know how many more classes I can skip before I get suspended.”
Uncle Joe stands and buttons his suit jacket. He doesn’t even look mildly uncomfortable in this heat. “Your duty is more important than perfect attendance,” he says. “Besides, you could get straight As in your sleep.”
I wish. There’d be a lot fewer late nights catching up on homework. “It’s not about that—”
“Then what is it about?”
But he wouldn’t understand. Somehow, I don’t think Uncle Joe’s ever wanted to be a normal sixteen-year-old girl.
“Nothing.” I push off the bench and it disintegrates into thin wisps of gray smoke. “I’ll figure it out.”
“Good girl.” He clears his throat. “Now, then. We should be on our way. Don’t want to keep the council waiting.”
I place my hands in his. My stomach plummets to my toes, the same feeling I get after a roller coaster crests its first hill. The world shifts sideways and there’s a pressure in my ears, like someone’s trying to squeeze toothpaste out of my head.
And then we’re gone.
IX
A split second later, we’re standing in front of a stone archway on the outskirts of my patrol area. Every guardian zone has one, an ancient monolith of a doorway inscribed with the runic language of the Old Ones. A silvery, transparent mist flows inside the archway. Looking through it is like peering through a rain-soaked windshield, making the trees beyond it look blurry and distorted.
Before Dad disappeared, I had been through this archway only once, when he took me to the council for approval to begin my guardian training. Since Dad disappeared, I have gone through it once a week.
For the first ten weeks or so, I always looked to Uncle Joe first, uncertain if I should cross without permission. Now, I take my hands from his, ball them at my sides, and barrel through the archway without a second glance.
In the space between one step and the next, there is an absence of sound—an odd sensation, considering even in the quietest moments of life, there is a sound track. The hum of electricity through the walls. The hush of the wind rustling the leaves, or causing the old beams in our house to groan. Even the sound of my breath entering and leaving my body, or the sound of my stomach growling, or my bones cracking, or my footsteps smacking the ground. But the complete and total vacuity of sound is a feeling I haven’t grown accustomed to, although I guess that shouldn’t surprise me. Dad told me he’d never gotten used to it, either, and he’d been traveling through the portal on a weekly basis for over twenty years of his life.
I come out the other side in a stone antechamber lit by torchlight. Sound rushes in as if someone has just flipped the switch in my brain that turns my ears back on. The torches crackle on either side of me, while a vein of water trickles down the wall to my right.
“This place is located beneath a lake,” Dad explained the first time we came here. “That’s where the water comes from.”
“What lake?” I asked.
He just shook his head. “You wouldn’t know it,” he said. “It’s not of our world.”
Uncle Joe steps through the portal and we walk side by side down the hall, our boots slapping the wet stone floor. The hall opens into a large room with a vaulted ceiling and three rows of wooden benches curving in a horseshoe shape around the dais against the far wall. Antique broadswords, daggers, and crossbows line the walls. Very medieval chic. The other guardians are already here, along with the intermediaries who watch over them as Uncle Joe watches over me.