“Eury—”
“A world so fucking deprived, you can’t grow one sapling.”
“Please.”
“No, I don’t please.” I pressed closer, until our chests touched. “You took me out of here, showed me life. Abundance. Magic.Power. And you offer me this?”
His hand came up under mine, the palm closing over my own until my fingers closed over the dirt.
“Ihear you. I hear you, Eurydice.”
My heart said otherwise, thudding in my ears. “Do you?”
“Yes.” His chest still touched mine. His voice had fallen to a whisper. “I won’t make you stay. But can I show you something, before you decide?”
I still felt like tossing the dirt in his face. “Show me what?”
He turned his face toward the middle wall. “It’s there.”
“Over the wall?”
“Through it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Eurydice
He ledme through the alleys of the southern district like a son of scorn, like he knew the turns as well as I did. He guided us toward the middle wall, and an uneasy feeling took hold of me the closer we got.
It was the same feeling as when I’d first learned his name.
Dorian.
The wall grew and grew until it obscured even the moon. I so rarely came this close to it, as though it were not to be touched—as though I weren’t meant for such things. Finer things. Better-cut stone. Beyond it lay a world of imagination, of envy.
“This way.” Dorian cut through a last alley, and then we were at the middle wall. A wide street ran quiet and empty along its perimeter. Two portcullises connected the middle wall and the southern district, but those were manned by guard day and night.
Dorian had not brought us to a portcullis. He’d brought us to a rarely traversed point where the southern district met the inner district, a corner with little else but a derelict two-story building that was long known to be haunted.
He approached the building’s front door, but I stopped.
Theo had once dared me to go inside, but I’d refused. He’d gone in himself and come out at a run, truly screaming, tears and snot on his face. He claimed he’d seen a ghost, heard the creak of boards before it came around the corner of a doorway. And we’d never again approached the haunted place.
Dorian pushed the door open. He glanced back. “This way.”
I didn’t move. I wanted to tell him a ghost lived there, but that would be ridiculous. I had seen real ghosts in Sylvanwild. I had seen them in the streets of the southern district. I’d already lived that fear. I’d survived it. I still had no idea why he was bringing me into this building.
Imagination and envy leashed me forward. I followed. He shut the door behind us, enclosing us in a darkness so deep even my night-adjusted eyes struggled to make out the grayscale space.
A big, empty room with doorways leading off. Perhaps it had once been a pub; it had the faint scent of yeast.
I touched a stone wall. “Are we communing with the dead?”
“Something like that.” He started forward, floorboards creaking under him. The two of us passed through a hallway, turned a corner into another room, and Dorian crossed to the other side. He fiddled with something metallic before opening a door I hadn’t even seen. Beyond it lay pure darkness.
He reached for something in his cloak—a Highmark crystal, golden-white. The light illuminated a passageway beyond the door. “Through here.”
I lifted my own crystal from my belt. The passage seemed stone—manmade. “Where does it lead?”