Jeremy hurled himself down the steps two at a time as the gate exploded behind them. He dove into the marketplace crowd without looking back, twisting his way through the Moirai as Hope and Des clung to his shoulders, flapping their wings to stay balanced. Folk glared at him as he pushed past, but none tried to stop him. Hadn’t Adelia mentioned something about a marketplace accord? Did that mean Moirai couldn’t harm each other here?
“Where are we going?” Hope asked.
“The bridge,” Jeremy said.
“But you can’t travel that way!” Des said.
“We don’t know that for sure. I know the field where Logan died. I have Adelia’s memory of it.” And so many others I don’t understand, he thought.
“Why does Crag have your parents?” Hope yelled in his ear as they ran.
“I have no idea,” Jeremy said, gasping for breath. And why come after him? He was nobody. Cries of alarm rang out behind them. Crag and his parents must have reached the platform. Skidding to a halt at the foot of the bridge, he peered back toward the marketplace. There was a roar, and two massive black creatures lumbered across the far tunnel entrance.
“Golems,” Des said. “Crag has broken the accords.”
“Maybe they’ll stop him,” Hope said.
A fiery ball erupted in the distance, like an artillery shell, some part of Adelia’s memories informed him.
“We have to go,” he said. “Can you channel your energy into me? Like Adelia and Otto did?”
“Yes, but it won’t be nearly enough,” Hope said. “You heard them. We’re minor folk, Jeremy. We don’t have that much power.”
“It has to be enough,” Jeremy said. He reached for his pocket, for the comfort of Adelia’s gold, but it was gone.
“Without Adelia, we’re just—” Des started to say, but Jeremy cut her off.
“Wait.” He reached into his shirt and wrapped his fingers around the snake and bear amulet. Adelia, Zitkala Sa, and Frank had all said it was a powerful artifact. Maybe it would be enough to get them through. A loud crash came from the marketplace, the noise reverberating through the tunnel. “We have to go, now!” The hair stood up on the back of his neck, and goosebumps ran down his arms as Hope and Des poured what energy they had into him. He spared one last look over his shoulder and saw a long, red dragon slithering through the air toward Crag and his parents. The beast looked as if someone had painted it into reality with red and yellow colored pencils. Maybe it would stop him, but Jeremy wasn’t going to stick around to find out.
“We’re going to die,” Des said just before they reached the wall of black.
Jeremy held the image of the French battlefield in his mind. “Probably,” he said, stepping into the wall of black. Everything vanished. The sounds and smells of the marketplace and the abandoned tunnels didn’t fade away; they disappeared instantly when he crossed the threshold of black. His sight and hearing and his sense of direction were all gone. Sudden dizziness gripped him, and panic clenched his stomach as bile rose in the back of his throat. Was he dead?
“Focus, seer,” Hope’s voice was distant but real.
“The battlefield,” said Des. “World War I. Hold the image in your mind.”
He clenched the amulet tightly and felt the bear and snake, wisdom and strength. The battlefield rushed toward them, or he was hurtling toward it; he couldn’t tell which. An instant later, dew covered grass met his hiking boots. The landscape filled in around him, muted colors and a wasteland of barren tree trunks, stumps, and blast holes. A trench opened in front of him. Across from it, in the nightmarish field, iron crosses and barbed wire were strewn about. This was a memory, then. Not a place now. How would that affect traveling? Were they traveling now, or had he trapped them in this place for eternity? Turning from left to right, he saw corpses twisted in the barbed wire. It was a landscape frozen in time.
“Jeremy.” His heart leaped against his ribcage. That voice meant pain. “Jeremy!” He turned around to meet his father’s eyes. Rage. He looked at his mother beside him. Disappointment.
“How are you here?” he asked.
Collars wrapped around their necks with spikes equally spaced on the outside and the inside, pressing against their flesh. They reminded Jeremy of the pinch collars his dad used to train the hunting dogs. Thin streams of blood snaked down his mother’s throat and into her blouse. “How could you do this to us?” she said.
“You have brought the devil down on us, boy, and now we are paying for your sins,” his father said. “I warned you about this.”
“You abandoned us,” his mother said. “Your sister,” she snuck a glance at his father, “she was the only one left to—”
His father’s hand shot out and met his mother’s cheek with a resounding slap. “She’s a good, God-fearing girl.” Crag chuckled as he stepped out from behind them, holding chains to each of their collars.
“I didn’t—”
“You did!” his dad bellowed. “You brought the devil down on us, and now we’re on our way to hell for your sins. Your sins! You were always selfish.” White froth built up on the corners of his dads’ mouth as he raged. Crag let the chain out slightly and his dad took a step toward Jeremy. “You never followed the word with your heart. You didn’t want to repent for the sin you were born with! You—” He grasped the spiked collar and gasped as Crag pulled the chain tight again. A fresh stream of blood wound down and around the taught muscles in his neck.
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As his father lowered his hands, eyes downcast, Jeremy noticed he was grasping the brown Bible with the faded cover. He could never forget that cover. It had struck his bare skin as a boy more times than he could remember. But it wasn’t there a second ago. How did it appear? He tore his eyes from the figures in front of him and the battlefield snapped back into focus. It had been fading away, which meant none of this was real. Maybe Crag and his parents weren’t real, either. This could be his own hell created by the gate. Maybe he didn’t have what it took to travel through the gate and they would be stuck here forever.
“You’re not real,” Jeremy said. Des and Hope shifted on his shoulders. Had they been there the whole time or had they been lost until he spoke the truth?
“We’re here,” Hope said.
“You should have never been born!” his father cried, holding the Bible up.
His mother said, “Oh Jeremy, how could you? Leaving us and consorting with this filth, these—”
“Stop,” Jeremy said calmly. The image of Crag tilted its head. “If you were real, I would tell you about the abuse you put me and my sister through, about the torture and how I spent most of my life wishing I had never been born or that you had killed me in one of your rages.”
“You will repent before you die. You will—”
“I’ll tell you everything I was too scared to tell my real dad. Then I’ll walk away. I don’t care if you’re not real or if this place swallows me up.” Jeremy stepped right up to his seething father. “I was never good enough, and you beat me for it. I didn’t believe enough or remember enough scripture. I couldn’t even lash myself good enough. But now I know you were wrong. You aren’t good enough, and you know it. That’s why you take it out on everyone around you. That’s why you forced us into that commune. That twisted Christianity. You’re an alcoholic abuser who uses religion to control us, to feel like you’re something.” He lifted his finger to his father. “But you’re nothing.” His father sucked in air and lifted his fist.
“Shut up,” Jeremy said, still in a calm voice, looking directly into his father’s rage-filled eyes. “There is a hole in you, just like the one in Crag, and you fill it with the misery of others. If he was really here, I’d tell him the same thing. And you, mother, fake or not, are just as guilty of failing us. I don’t care if you’re a victim. We were your kids, and you should have protected us.”
His mother and father’s eyes filled with red until there were no pupils. “I knew you weren’t real! Hope, I knew it.” As the last word left his mouth, Jeremy flew backward and landed on the ground; fiery pain raced through his veins. Through a haze of tears, he looked up at a sky full of artillery and gunfire. A war without sound, silent as if Crag had pressed the mute button. He rolled over and heard tiny groans from Des and Hope.
“But I’m real,” Crag said, standing over him. “And I have your book.”
“What do you want?” Jeremy spit blood onto the trampled grass.
“You.”
“Why me? I thought you were going for the Raceway?”
“I need a seer with potential. My Folk can take the Raceway without me.”
The bear and snake amulet flared against his chest, scorching hot. Was he reaching the limits of its power? Was he going to be trapped in here forever? Or was Crag going to drag him away?
“Wisdom and strength,” he whispered, clasping it between his fingers. Frank and Zitkala Sa. They fought to find freedom from not just others but from the idea they held of themselves. Ideas others had put there. Crag stepped toward him with a collar dangling in one hand. Jeremy stumbled to his feet and stared into Crag’s black eyes. Trembling, he wanted to run but forced his spine to straighten and hardened his gaze, facing Crag’s red skin, sharpened teeth, and fingernails like claws.
“Put this on,” he said, holding the collar out. “You will help me wipe away the filth in this world, boy.”
“Boy, that’s what he calls me,” Jeremy said, nodding to the replica of his father.
“Put it on!” Fire erupted from Crag’s hand.
“I see you, Crag. Racist. Selfish. Child. You never left that battle, the one where you died. You’re still there. Scared and alone. The Folk banished you because they were truly Moirai born from the fusion of human emotion, but you aren’t. You’re something else. You’re a ghost who kept enslaving others even after death—”
“Shut your lying mouth, seer, and serve me!”
“No, you can’t hurt me. I see you. You’re a freeloader. A slaver. Not even a zombie, and definitely not Moirai. You’re nothing but a thief.”
“But my Folk can hurt you, Yankee! And they can make you serve me!” The copies of his parents stepped toward him.
“Run!” Hope and Des screamed.
“No.”
“But—”
“Strength and wisdom,” Jeremy said, pulling the amulet from his shirt and holding it up to the copy of his father. He pressed the amulet into the thing’s chest. It screamed and dropped to the ground, convulsing. His mother leaped on his back, but he threw her off.
“You can’t!” Crag said.
“I can.” Jeremy’s body throbbed with power. Had he siphoned it from the convulsing form of his father? He wanted to leap into the sky and fly or grab the sun and pull it down. Looking at Crag, he saw him as he really was, wearing a gray Confederate coat and hat, covered in blood, intestines falling out. As he watched, the stomach wound healed in slow motion until Crag was a smiling boy in a coat that didn’t fit and a black-billed hat that sank over his eyes. How did that boy come to be the racist murderer that stood before him? He looked at his mother and saw her form shift to one of the lesser Moirai. Under the flower print dress, she was the gray color of Nod.
“Kill him!” Crag, the human boy in the oversized coat and hat, screamed, pointing at him.
“Watch out!” Hope’s voice was a shrill whistle in his ear.
He raised his amulet and met the gray Moirai mid-charge, pressing it into her forehead. Energy poured out of her and rushed into him. Gazing into her red eyes as they faded to a solid blue, he whispered, “I’m sorry,” before she fell to the grass, unmoving.
“I will—”
“Die,” Jeremy said. “You will die on this field.” The sound of artillery and gunfire rushed into the silence like water flooding a canyon. Crag swiveled every which way. “You will die for every Moirai you’ve enslaved and murdered.”
“You can’t do that!”
“But I am,” Jeremy said.
The French battlefield shifted around them, replaced by rolling fields filled with cannons and horses. Jeremy’s mind buzzed like an electric generator as he held the vision of both the World War II and the Civil War fields at the same time. He felt like he could hold the image of the entire universe in his mind.
“No,” Crag gasped, looking down to see his gray uniform, noticing it for the first time. His black-billed hat slid sideways, and he cast the antique rifle away.
“Shoot that gun, boy!” a fellow confederate roared as he leaped over a barricade. Crag lost himself in the memory and dashed off, cowering against that same barricade. Jeremy almost felt guilty as he watched the violence swallow up the young boy.
“Jeremy?” Des said. “We can’t last here much longer.” She trembled on his shoulder, and he looked over to see her holding Hope’s limp form. He pulled her from his shoulder and cradled her in his palm.
“It’s okay, Des,” he said, pushing energy into both of them.
“What happened to Crag?” she asked.
“I don’t think he’ll be leaving for a very long time,” Jeremy said as he released the image of the Civil War battlefield. Crag faded with it, and Jeremy, Hope, and Des were left standing in a fresh field. The smell of wet grass and trees drifted by. There wasn’t a corpse in sight.