The pair were in the study that night, where Cedric had a bookshelf at his back. There was a chessboard there, and to get into the seat required some awkward maneuvering, and, even when seated, Cedric had to sit closer to the board than he really preferred because there were more things in this room than it could reasonably bear.

They were arranged around a game, and Cedric had said something that supposed something else, something he’d assumed because he hadn’t known, but probably should have known, and his lack of understanding had cut across the Mage’s proud chin.

“Hold your tongue lest you intend to offend me, boy,” Davian said, guttural, readying his venom. “My father: Sir Edward Winchester—”

He paused and then added the end, flawlessly pronouncing each syllable, but especially the last, “—Baronet.”

Davian just continued to stare at Cedric, waiting for a reaction, and then, finding the blank stare unpalatable, he forced a return by demanding, “What precisely does that title mean to you?”

Cedric sat there, quiet. He hated playing chess with Davian.

“It means not a damn soul ever called me Lord!”

He hated playing chess with Davian not because he always lost, but because Davian always won.

“An invented pair of letters appended to one’s name for the paltry sum tallied to maintain thirty soldiers for three years: a sullied invoice to the tune of one-thousand and ninety-five pounds. All to bear upon one’s standard the Red Hand—”

“The Red Hand!” he repeated with increased volume. “A coat of arms that’s not even English?! A bloody insult, the supposed title! A damn… a damn… Hand!”

Davian had already claimed three of Cedric’s pawns and a knight. If he saw the diagonal Cedric had left exposed — Cedric hadn’t seen the error until the die had been cast — the bishop was next, and he hadn’t wanted that, but, still, the others were on the table… and yet—

Davian changed voice and went in a different direction.

“It’s not any more enjoyable to play with you; rather it is quite tedious,” Davian said, looking at the board, and then over his nose at Cedric. “You don’t take it at all seriously.”

So they stopped. And never again did they sit across from each other for a game of chess, because, as Davian put it, it was neither fun, nor fair.

More often than not, Cedric found the ambient temperature in the tent almost completely unbearable.

What made matters worse for him was that there wasn’t a single window to be found in the entire bungalow. Not a single one.

When he went to Davian to disclose his malaise, the man raised his eyebrow, said something to the effect of, “I don’t know how to help you with that,” and explained that he didn’t know why Cedric felt so hot because that wasn’t at all how he’d constructed his summoning. So Cedric walked away none the wiser about the nature of the spell, a spell in which was contained the four walls of the enchanted hideaway, and this enchanted hideaway had been imagined to someone’s exact specification — a specification that required no windows, much less any fresh air to maintain comfort within its influence.

So sometimes when Cedric woke, he found his jacket, took it off the hook, and went outside to seek relief. But he never strayed far.

But even that was only temporary because after they’d been traveling for a while, Cedric got too cold, and when he got too cold, he knew he was too cold because the wind went through the fabric of his jeans and his toes couldn’t wiggle as quickly as he asked them to and he felt his cheeks getting red to compensate for the weather.

Davian projected an aura of heat around himself, but it only went outward six or ten or however many feet and Davian already didn’t like how slow he had to go because he had to wait up for Cedric so asking him to go even slower still was out of the question.

And every day the outside got colder and colder and the inside got hotter and hotter and though Cedric remembered once fearing the return of Dream and dreaded even the prospect of being banished from the stillness of the Dreamcatcher, he soon realized that inside the shelter of his own mind was the only place he wasn’t looking for a thermostat that didn’t exist.

Cedric knew someone was following him.

He knew someone was following him because he had that distinct skin-crawling sensation that always meant someone was right behind you and you knew it even if you couldn’t see it, you just knew it because you knew it.

So he looked behind him—

But there was no one there.

And he did it again, and a third time,

And still there was no one there.

But when he was looking behind himself after that third turn, he thought he should pause before returning to what he was doing (what he had been doing was looking ahead) and it was a good thing he turned around slowly because there standing in front of him was the dog.

Yes, it was the dog, and it was the same dog and he knew it because he knew the color of the fur and the eyes that were black and dark and wet and looking at him and the way the face was all wrinkled up because the humans had made the dog so that it had far more skin than the skeleton really demanded.

Cedric? Well. He hated to admit it but he didn’t really like dogs and he had probably never really liked dogs.

And he wanted to like dogs or wanted to want to like dogs or whatever because it seemed like everyone else in practically the whole damn world simply adored the way the creatures looked at a person and opened their mouth and let their tongues hang out, altogether looking probably more stupid than they really were.

Well there is only one person who can trust a dog and it’s the person they look up at and worship and think of as the big boss.

But Cedric wasn’t really feeling too much like himself so he bent down at the knees a little and did something that barely felt like something he would ever do or ever think to do and he reached his hands out and when he did that the dog opened his mouth because he was happy and sprang up but only with the front feet and licked Cedric in the face.

And Cedric really didn’t notice how much he didn’t feel like himself because it wasn’t so bad at all to get licked by the dog.

The dog got tired, standing on his hind legs like that, even if he was happy to see Cedric, so he withdrew and stood on all fours again and his tail was moving back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. And Cedric looked at him a little differently this time, because now he knew this dog and maybe a dog you know wasn’t as bad as a dog who would snarl at you because he was listening to someone who told him that’s what he should do.

Cedric looked at the dog, and he looked with curiosity, looking and searching, not for fleas or for ticks or vermin because here he knew such things could not be found but there were other things that were missing too, and they were not missing so much as they were missed.

The dog was naked.

Yes, the dog was naked, and not merely in the dumb way dogs are always but never naked, the dog was naked because he’d been given a collar and the collar had been made his but it wasn’t where it was supposed to be.

supposed to be

And because Cedric knew the dog without knowing the dog he knew what the dog knew but didn’t know because he saw things differently than the people did when they were standing upright.

The collar, the collar, the dog was missing his collar.

eureka!

I have it dog, yes, I have it and I can give it back to you just wait right here right here but then

shit

It’s in the car, Cedric thought. It’s in the car, but the car, can’t get in the car because I don’t have the key, the key, i lost the key

you gave them the damn key

Davian did not let any perceived setback trouble him for long.

One day, snowflakes started to fall from the sky. And it wasn’t any colder on that day than it had been on the days before, or at least, it didn’t feel any different to Cedric, but on that day the sky was practically white and when the snow fell it made the ground white too and sometimes it melted for a few days but it always came back.

Cedric recalled that Davian had said something about how the snow was early that year, and he’d looked Cedric up and down and gave his opinion that it was early precisely on the year they didn’t need it to be early.

“If we were home on Perry, then I might feel differently,” he’d said, flakes spinning in eddies about them.

But by now they were far from the place from which they’d begun, and as they continued to walk farther from it every day, Cedric looked toward the Sun sometimes, even if it were obscured by clouds or sinking behind the horizon, and thought he’d never in his life been this far away from it.

And even though Davian was sometimes despondent about their progress, his foul mood only lasted until he found fresh tracks in the snow.

And Cedric thought that if the snow hadn’t fallen, they wouldn’t have found any tracks at all, but then, between the strange instruments Davian took out every now and then and the way sometimes he stood completely still for a very long time, Cedric had to admit ignorance as to how exactly Davian swore that they were following in the footsteps left by the shifters.

Cedric had been loath to accept Davian’s claim about their kind. He’d then had very different ideas about the nature of the ‘werewolf’, and when he thought back to his meetings with Ben and Daisy at the University, neither individual had ticked off any criteria on his list. Curious, unusual, perhaps; both with a pair of eyes that looked through and beyond the trivialities of modern life, but what was the difference between Teen Wolf and Teen Witch? A different sort of Limitation? He could not yet decide that an altered ruleset warranted the label that felt from Davian’s mouth now akin to a slur.

Davian said the pair traveled by night, so when new light streaked across the sky each daybreak, he was eager to get going. And Cedric had held out hope for a while that Davian’s claims were false, and if he’d been wrong, the whole expedition was built on sand. But in the snow, it was hard to refute the evidence. The Mage would follow a trail of footprints, only to have them disappear suddenly, or morph into the sorts of marks left only by squirrels or raccoons or whatever else.

And as Cedric’s heart continued to fall into the snowbanks, Davian’s only seemed to get lighter, because, as Cedric figured, they were on the right track, and they were going the right way, the only way, and they were covering more ground each day than was their quarry.

One afternoon, Davian must have been feeling particularly good about his progress, because he suggested they stop for a bit of lunch and rest their feet, which made Cedric glad not because he was hungry (he had become quite accustomed to skipping lunch entirely, to the point where a rich delicacy offered from the Mage’s hand would often turn his stomach), but because walking through even the shallow snow made the soles of his feet cold.

And his feet were cold because they were inside tennis shoes that were still colder yet.

Davian stopped, and where he stopped, he was hovering, and he looked about himself and made the snow melt in a wide clearing, and in his survey he brought over an old log that had fallen several feet away, and then it was hovering too, and when it came near he split the log into several pieces to form chairs of a sort, and even though he used magic to split the log, the sound of the breaking wood echoed through the forest.

After years in the Mage’s company, there were still some things Cedric did not completely understand, but he had long ago ceased bothering to ask questions. He thought these questions would illuminate things he assumed he was probably supposed to know by now, or something the orphans would have obviously known and he did not.

“Do gather some kindling, would you Cedric?” he asked.

And like many of the things he was asked, Cedric just agreed and said, “Yeah, sure.”

He had done this before. And by now he knew that any kindling he would gather would have to be handled and processed by the Mage before it was suitable to employ to start a fire. The snow had fallen, and it had fallen long ago, so that the water had seeped into the small wood and made it wet all the way through and the only way anyone was going to start a fire, by magical or mundane means, was by getting the moisture out of it first.

‘The Mage can make it dry,’ he thought to himself.

Davian went in one direction, whatever direction that was, and Cedric went in another, and sometimes he looked down at the ground and took little sticks and branches into his hands, and other times, maybe just once, he looked up at the clear blue sky and he saw a white circle there, with little pits and crevasses and shadows though he swore it was a million miles away.

‘Full moon;’ he mused. ‘Again?’

He knew the last full moon couldn’t have been long ago, not because he was keeping track consciously, because he had stopped doing that, or rather never started, but because he had a vague sense of time and distance and other things and that vague sense was quiet when everything went as he expected, but klaxon when things veered off trajectory.

And he might have just kept going because that was the easy thing to do, but he, for whatever reason, lifted his chin up into the air where there were clouds moving slowly across the sky and then he saw that the moon wasn’t full at all but near instead, because it had a sliver missing to one side, and he saw how the blue crowded the places that didn’t reflect and made it look like the moon was less than it really was. Cedric saw this, and then brought his head back down to the task before him.

He returned to the simple firepit where there were more than several large stones laid in a circle. And Davian had left large and thick pieces of timber intended to serve as the fuel for heat under their luncheon, and yet, when Cedric looked around, sticks clutched in his chilled hands, the Mage wasn’t to be found anywhere.

He looked around for a minute, but he was cold, and he was tired, and he’d been walking for quite some time, so he didn’t try very hard before he sat down on one of the logs that had been severed from the rest of its trunk.

And Cedric sat there for a while, looking at the cold wood and not thinking much at all. And when he wasn’t thinking much at all, he threw his paltry offering into the pit so that his hands could be free, and he dug his hands into the sleeves of the opposite side of his leather jacket and curled into himself and shivered, staring at the silent wood and listening to the wind whipping every so often through the trees.

Cedric was afraid of fire. He didn’t like to start it, he didn’t like to be around it (though he did like to be warm), and he was always afraid that when he went to put it out, he was going to do something wrong and make a mistake.

But the air was cold and a cloud had moved across the Moon.

Inside Cedric’s jacket was a box he could feel pressed against his chest. And the box had become a little crushed over the years and worn on the corners and almost but not quite empty and he knew if he took it out, he’d have to set it at right angles so that he could pull the box open and he wasn’t sure how many he had left but there were at least five and not more than t—

Cedric reached his hand up toward the silver zipper, the zipper that was colder still than his cold fingers and he pulled it down and slipped his hand into the top of the pocket and felt the box within. Even if the logs were wet, he thought, the matches weren’t. If he found even one small part where the water had left the stick and the bark might light — wood that had some moisture within, some, but not too much, would light, and he knew this from the hissing it made when the vapor pressed itself through the gaps, and the cracking of the logs when that hot gas made its escape.

But before he could find the starter, the Mage appeared and the fire was lit.

Cedric supposed that Davian had once been a voracious reader.

He supposed this because while the flat in Manhattan had more books than one man could read in a lifetime (supposing, of course, that the man quite Ordinarily lacked the boon of longevity), the enchanted tent in the wilderness had a library above and beyond even that.

But Cedric supposed that at one point the man had changed, because though he sometimes sat within the library nursing a pipe or a fragrant after-dinner liqueur, there was only one book Cedric ever saw him reading.

And once or twice, perhaps not noticing that Cedric was even paying attention, he had called it the Book of Life.

And this was the same book that Adam had proclaimed stolen when he’d appeared as a burglar in the West Village flat on that fateful evening, and it was the same book Davian had, later that night, described as a diary in which he kept memories of the family he had once had long ago.

But it must have been a curious diary, because not once had Cedric ever seen him put pen into its pages.

And maybe he did it when Cedric was sequestered in another room, or, most likely, Davian had an entirely different way of putting his own entries into the strange book he’d called the Book of Life.

And strange it was.

The thing was leather-bound, with a spine that had a deeper color of tanned skin laid overtop the base. Stitched, too, with contrasting thread, so that the whole thing looked a little patchwork even as not a single strand was torn or floating or otherwise unattached to the cover.

Davian would lay it on his woodwork desk and when he opened it, it lay flat, and though Cedric tried desperately not to impinge upon the Mage, sometimes he saw him staring into the centerfold, intent, focused, enraptured by paper upon which, at least to Cedric’s reckoning, not a single word was printed.

And when Davian left his desk, even for a moment, even if he were only teleporting to the other side of the room to refresh his cup, he always, without fail, closed the book, and locked it.

The book had a latch on it, a sort of buckle in a greenish, well, metal, Cedric supposed, though he’d never touched it, so he’d never felt it sap warmth from his skin in the way most metals usually did. And Cedric figured whatever the latch was made of, the key was made of the same thing, not because he often saw this key, but because he could hear the clinking and scratching that the two made when the one was put into the other.

Davian would close the book, carefully, putting each page back in place, not a single corner mislaid, and he affixed the leather strap into the mechanism and sealed it shut. And when it was sealed shut, he used the key.

But one night, he did something he had never done before. And maybe it was because he was drunk, although it had become difficult to tell where drunkenness ended and withdrawal began, or maybe it was for a completely different reason entirely; Cedric had no way to know for sure. But at any rate, Davian was sitting at his desk and he left the book open while he summoned a chair at his four o’clock, that is to say next to but not underneath the desk, and with a voice that was quiet and calm and genteel, he asked Cedric to join him.

Cedric did not have any reason to refuse him, but as he stood and walked across to the other side of the room, he was immediately struck with how he did not feel altogether very well at all.

Davian could, and often did, drink coffee at all hours of the day. He preferred an espresso in the morning that was so thick in the tiny porcelain cup that it was nearly like syrup. When the Sun was high in the sky and a need for water finally overcame him, he might have a hot black coffee and pontificate on the proper way to roast a bean: blond, never burnt. And after dinner, he had still more caffeine to invigorate him and energize him and help him remember all the points on which he wanted to lecture to his pupil.

But Cedric was not like that.

He could have a coffee after dawn, and he had come to like it; often preferring it iced because anything else put heat into his insides that he was desperately trying to get rid of. And sometimes he might have tea at lunch, cold again, though it was still a foreign habit. But he had found he could not ingest the chemical after that hour without suffering its effects at their most undesired time. If he drank too much coffee, too late, he simply laid in bed and never fell asleep.

But Cedric, little different in some ways than any other person who has been told what is good for him but refuses to listen — had lately developed a habit of drinking coffee long after the hour when he knew he should stop.

And that was what he noticed in his body when he stood up and walked across the room to join Davian at his request alongside him at the desk. His nerves were jittery, his pulse was unsteady, and his very heart felt as if it were shaking instead of resting between beats.

When he sat down in the chair, he felt a little more quiet in his tired muscles, but less settled in his mind because he had come to fear Davian, and he had also come to feel as if his stomach were flipped over the wrong way whenever he saw Davian staring unblinking and placid into his leather-bound book.

“Cedric, I want to apologize,” Davian began.

Cedric heard him, but he was shifting himself over the unpadded chair, because when one is over-caffeinated, the buzzing is least obtrusive when one is in motion.

Forced to stop and sit and wait, on the other hand, the vibration can render itself almost completely dominant over the sensitive mind.

“I have used you ill,” he said, making a point to look at Cedric with eyes that seemed wide open. “When I am consumed by my work, I do so struggle to think of anything else, and I see that I’ve lately been rather churlish towards you.”

Cedric did not say anything, but he gave his attention.

“Such impressions are difficult to forgive, much less forget, and I am not so naive as to imagine you are much different from myself when it comes to remembering those delivered injustices, but—”

He paused, and Cedric took a shallow breath, because that is all he could manage.

“I do hope you’ll permit me your patience during these times. We have come so far, and victory is within our grasp; I know it. It is always darkest before the Day dawneth.”

Davian turned away from Cedric then, and he looked toward the book, but not truly into it because his eyes were closed and his head faced forward, and when he did this, he began to chant, a strange chant, because what little Cedric knew about magic had never been invoked by any practitioner he knew in any such way.

But chant Davian did, talking to the book with Cedric beside him, as if there wasn’t a single thing that should by his pupil be thought unusual at all.

Speak the life you have inside; Speak the light you cannot hide; Speak the things you know and yet; Speak the things you won't forget; Speak the shapes that words make true; Speak the sights the old once knew; Speak my mem'ry now made two!

A scintillation rose from the center of the book: a glowing sphere with refracting edges where the light split into its constituent colors. And as the white light lifted half a foot or so out of the pages of the book, Cedric watched, and waited.

And in the bundle of light was the young girl, Lila; the same little face that was bound in the picture frame now sitting several feet from Cedric in the wooden chair.

It was like the images Davian had shown him on several occasions that he’d pulled from the Dreamcatcher; like looking into a tiny hole in a shadowbox, there was a frame around the memory where the real became something encasing the conjured. And like the images caught and pulled from the Dreamcatcher, the moving pictures were completely silent and made no sound at all, and Cedric could practically hear his own heartbeat resonate through the caffeinated blood pulsing through his neck, temples, and mind. But it still wasn’t at all like the Dreamcatcher because these sequences stopped after several seconds and restarted and played again and again, so that when they’d sat there for about a minute, Cedric had seen Lila look toward them and inflate her cheeks with her breath before pulling the skin dramatically outward so that her lips were pressed in a strange line wider than was natural, and before Davian spoke, they had probably seen Lila do this some twenty times.

“The memories get shorter and smaller the more you handle them,” Davian said quietly.

He let Lila make that face several more times before turning the page.

The light didn’t leave when he turned the page, but the Lila within changed, and she was dancing, and turning around in a circle, and on this fragment it was hard to notice where the seam was, so it just seemed Lila kept turning and turning without count.

Davian didn’t say anything about this one, and just kept staring at it for a while, and Cedric watched, but after a while he thought he was feeling as dizzy as the girl within, so he blinked and looked away.

But Lila kept spinning.

He heard Davian let out a little, “Mm,” as if he thought something, but kept it within himself without opening his mouth.

And he turned the page again, and it was still Lila, and she was smiling a little, looking at them, and then she opened her mouth and pointed at a big gap between one tooth and the next, and Cedric noticed that the pink of the gums was a little less than it could or should have been, and where the tooth was gone, that color was dark, and so too was the whole thing, if it could be described as such, a little grainy, somehow in shadow while it was composed of nothing but beams of light.

And she kept pointing at the gap in her teeth while Davian spoke.

“That’s why we have to get the Dreamcatcher back,” he said. “The memories here, most of them, have been here for many years, and the more I look at them, and the more they sit here waiting for the rest of the details to be filled in…”

He paused, and then continued. “The more they degrade beyond repair.”

Davian looked to the side, toward Cedric, but not at him, and his eyes were closed in mourning as he turned to the next image.

And there in the light was something he recognized, because there was the waterfall in the background, and the waterfall was so pale it was almost white in places, but there was blue there, a piercing sort of blue that went into the back of Cedric’s eyes and made him want to close them.

But he kept looking.

And he kept looking because he saw something, and what he saw was what couldn’t here be seen.

Yes, he’d seen this scene before, because it was the waterfall he recognized in the image pulled from the Dreamcatcher. Lila wore the same clothes and the same smile, but the ragged brown bear was gone, completely gone, and Lila was using her little hands to pull on Davian’s fine coat.

And so too, completely gone, was Adam.

“She was born sick,” Davian said. “She was born that way because of something she was exposed to before she was born, so I was able to heal her when I found her, at least—”

He stumbled. “Partially.”

“If I had been there, to help, before she’d been born, maybe it would have been different,” he said, still looking at the moving images.

He closed his eyes, and then he closed the book too, and he said quietly, “But that’s not the way it happened,” and the shadow overtook where the light had been, and Cedric blinked to adjust to the changed room.

Cedric was trying to be present with Davian in his grief. But between his nerves that were soaked in stimulant and the lack of sleep that had been accumulating, he could not so easily endure what the Mage had put upon his chest. His mind drifted, and he thought of the key, the collar, and the dog.

“Did Lila,” he began, saying the name with some effort, “ever have a pet?”

Davian, who hadn’t been looking anywhere, looked toward him, but not at him, and waited to respond. “No,” he said, slowly. “Perhaps she would have liked that, but…”

He pushed the metal into the buckle and engaged the mechanism.

“She was allergic.”

And then Cedric said something, because he was thinking about things that hurt him, but reflected a light back when he looked at them.

“Maybe they’re together,” Cedric said weakly, trying to bring the light forward into the space between. “She and Sam… In—”

Davian finished the sentence bitterly. “In Heaven?”

He turned his face all the way around then, and his eyes were tired and he didn’t say anything for a moment and Cedric thought he should eat his words but he couldn’t.

“You don’t believe that,” Davian said as a matter-of-fact. “I know you don’t.”

Cedric felt his cheeks flush scarlet.

And then the Mage added, “And neither do I.”