A TAIL OF NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE: Unpleasant Reunions

Pain. LOTS of pain.

Digging sounds

Shadows.

Being lifted up and carried ...

Soft bed.

I drift in and out of sleep and dreams.

Nothing hurts when I dream, but I catch a glimpse of Kon when I open my eyes. So that makes all the pain worth it. She's sitting by a window, with her back to me. The light dances around her.

Please don't let this be some kind of fever dream!

"Mom," I say. It takes all my energy to force the word out.

She drifts over to me and brushes my bangs back.

Smiling, I close my eyes again.

******

Dreams ...

Soft like feathers.

Dreams ... running all together ... a mush of things that happened—fiddle playing, dancing, fishing—and things that never were—standing on the top of a mountain with Dylan Caid. That's not real, but that's okay. It might as well be real now as I stand there, adrift in the clouds and lost in the sky. He's saying something to me, but I can't hear the words, like someone's put him on mute.

When I look at him again, he's gone.

"More."

The words are echoes. Were they Dylan's words or somebody else's? Either way, they crash against me like waves.

"More is coming. Your story isn't over."

The real story was how Kon beat Mirabelle! That's the one I want to know! I want to wake up and have pizza with her. Or ice cream. Or pancakes drenched in syrup.

"Glass and Stone. That story is done. That never was yours. It reflects you. You bring to it something it hasn't known in a very long time. Since the beginning."

The words wash over me. That's when I realize I'm the one saying all this stuff. When did I get this cheesy?!?

"Since magic first found humans. A great fracture occurred. Something comes, something that will make that seem like nothing but a small tear on the pages of time ..."

When the heck have I ever sounded that dumb????

"As steady as Stone ..."

The mountain beneath my feet shakes, pitching me forward! I should be falling! I should be ...

"As strong as Glass ..."

A crack spiderwebs through the sky as I hang there like an idiot, wondering why I'm not dead.

"As fleeting as ... "

Tap! Tap! Tap!

"Something bad is out there," the voice says. "There's real badness in this world. It's got a heart blacker'n pitch ..."

"That's not how the memory goes. And it was a fake anyway," I tell the voice. "That night never happened. not that way anyway. Not with something knocking. Not at Mr. Unger's house."

But the voice doesn't listen.

But it's not exactly like the voice from the false memory either.

"Jack Jericho, old-fashioned evil came to this world once."

"The Glass Man," I answer.