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  They were on the highway.

  Ramsey settled back against the faded leather. He didn't know where they were going—Lauren had refused to divulge information, saying instead that it was a "secret," and even though secrets of any kind made Ramsey uneasy he had nodded and smiled and gone along with it—but he wasn't sure he cared. It was enough to be riding in a convertible on a summer day like this, sun and wind slipping over your skin. Lauren's presence so close: he could reach out and touch her hair, her bare olive-skinned shoulder. This is the battle of longing and belonging.

  But at that moment, he wasn't battling anything at all.

  * * * *

  They exited the highway where a sign announced lesterton, pop. 15,000. They followed a road that wound through more fields. It was midday now, elms and maples and oaks casting the shortest of shadows. Ramsey saw a hawk wheeling in the distance. It folded itself into a cannonball and dropped: a hunter's plummet. He wondered what small startled creature had just been sacrificed. The air was warm and dry in his lungs. Aimee and Lauren were listening to the radio, turning it up when the news came on about the disappeared supermodel, then switching it off.

  "Are we there yet?" Aimee asked playfully, and then answered her own question. "Indeed, indeed we are."

  There was a whitewashed wooden farmhouse with a wraparound porch, a large white cat sprawled on the step. Cherry trees and rosebushes grew in the front yard. Aimee cut the engine and they got out of the Mustang, doors slamming. The sunlight, drone of bees, simple beauty of house and yard and fields, the lethargic heat of early afternoon: he didn't know why, but everything felt tilted, off-angle, washed through with the surreal.

  He glanced at Lauren. She was balancing on her crutches, looking at the house with an intent expression.

  As if this were an equation she had to solve or die trying.

  The front door opened and a man appeared on the porch.

  "You're here for Munroe," the man said, "are you not?"

  "Yeah," Lauren said.

  "I'm Sebastian. Munroe's half-brother. I translate for him."

  They gave him their names. Sebastian was maybe five-eight, five-nine, dressed in white slacks, white shirt, dark glasses, sandals. He had a pale, freckled complexion and his coppery hair, brushed back from his forehead in waves, shone in the sunlight. "Come in."

  The interior was breezy, minimalist, with pale wood floors and simple furniture, cut-glass vases of white lilies placed around the living room. A silver pitcher of lemonade, a plate of pastries, and several glasses were arranged on the coffee table. Sebastian beckoned for them to sit down, poured them each some lemonade, said, "You are all first-timers, yes?"

  Nods all around.

  "Then," Sebastian said, and settled into the armchair across from them, "I would like to talk with you a bit first, so that you understand the process involved."

  Aimee said, "Where's the—where's, uh, Munroe?"

  "Preparing," he said. "My brother becomes very light-sensitive at such times, so when you go into the room you will find it quite dim, the shades drawn. This room is much too bright for him." Sebastian took off his glasses. His eyes were a pale, washed-out color, his eyelashes so faint they were almost invisible.

  He said, with the air of someone launching into a speech he had given many, many times before, "My brother is a psychic, yes, but he doesn't gaze into a crystal ball. What he does is shift his mind into a different place, where the past and present and future interweave in strange ways."

  "A different place," Ramsey said.

  Sebastian looked at him. The pale eyes sharpened… then a strange light came into them, and for a moment Ramsey felt as if he'd been—

  As if he'd been—

  Recognized.

  Sebastian smiled, his teeth small and white and sharp. "We call it the Dreamlines. You may think of it as the Twilight Zone if you wish. What my brother learns there, he brings back and shares with us."

  Aimee interrupted, "Another reality? Like, a parallel world or something?"

  "Think of the Dreamlines as a passageway that connects all the different worlds."

  "How many worlds are there?" Ramsey asked.

  "Too many to count, or even know. Far too many."

  "And your brother can just—fly up to this dream-place, hang out?"

  "There are a handful of ways to access the Dreamlines, one of which is through profound meditation. Many of us," Sebastian said, turning towards the two girls, "are psychic in some way, still retain the thinnest of talents that we have lost the ability, the knowledge, to train and develop. But people like my brother—it is a shame, a genuine shame, to think what he could have been. If he had found a proper teacher. But those teachers disappeared long ago."

  "Teachers?" Ramsey said. "Who were they?"

  "A race of men and women with a special relationship with the Dreamlines," Sebastian said, "who can channel the energy of the Dreamlines through their own blood and use it to perform what we think of as magic." He glanced at his watch. "It is time."

  "Wait, wait. This is really cool. These people were, like, aliens or something?"

  "I'm sorry, young man, but it is time—"

  Ramsey said loudly, "Who were these teachers and where did they go?"

  Silence in the room.

  Only the sound of the grandfather clock, tick-tick-ticking.

  "I've heard different things," Sebastian said. "Some people say they withdrew into their own secret cities. Some people say they stayed among us, mingled and mated. So it's possible they disappeared… into us."

  It took a moment for Ramsey to work this out. "So if their bloodlines mingled with our bloodlines—and this Dreamlines mojo thing was somehow in their blood—then maybe it passed down into some of our blood, too?"

  Sebastian shrugged.

  "Like a magic gene," Ramsey marveled. "So other people can do what your brother does?"

  "There are people who have the potential. But potential on its own is not enough. It must be quickened."

  "Quickened?"

  "Awakened. And then it must be trained, developed. These things require a proper teacher."

  "So how did your brother get… quickened!"

  "He refuses to say. And if he won't tell me, he won't tell anyone. And now, young friends, it really is time. It's past time. Aimee, my dear, care to be first?"

  "Sure," Aimee said. But she got up from the couch a little shakily, as if she were about to enter the lair of a person who was, at best, a nutcase; at worst, a serial killer.

  Or else, a voice whispered inside Ramsey, Munroe is exactly what Sebastian says he is. What if this is true, every bit of it? What then?

  And then Aimee paused in the doorway to the hall. Ramsey saw her shoulder blades stiffen beneath her T-shirt. She turned and murmured something to Sebastian, who nodded.

  "Lauren," he said, "would you like to come with me?"

  "Sure thing." Lauren stood up, grabbed her crutches, and swung herself out of the room; they heard a door open and shut from elsewhere in the house.

  Aimee sank down on the couch next to Ramsey. She was hugging herself. The skin of her upper arms had erupted into gooseflesh. "Freaking hell," Aimee murmured, although to herself or Ramsey, he couldn't say. "Freaking me out."

  "What happened?"

  She turned to him. "Are you believing any of this?"

  "Why didn't you go through with it?"

  "Because—" Aimee looked into space, hugged herself again. "Because I just had this feeling that—that this guy, Monteroy—"

  "Munroe—"

  "—Whatever the fuck his name is, he would tell me how I'd die. And when I'd die."

  Through the open windows came the mingled scent of roses and fresh-cut grass, the faint unending drone of bees.

  Aimee said, "I came here for fun, but this isn't fun. This is creepy."

  "How did you even find this guy?"

  "Some friend of Lauren's from New York referred us. You have to get referred. He doesn't see
many people." Aimee rubbed her upper arms. "He sure as hell's not seeing me."

  She sank like a stone into her own silence. He felt an itching along the back of his shoulders. He wrapped an arm around himself, tried to scratch it away. Wondering if he'd picked up a mess of mosquito bites without realizing.

  The creak of a floorboard made him look up.

  Sebastian stood in the doorway, tall cool figure in white, hands folded in front of him.

  "Ramsey," he said quietly.

  The world will burn because of you. The words—printed in stark black felt-tip—floated in front of his eyes. Ramsey blinked them away. He stood up, and the itching spread across his shoulders and deepened, became something much closer to pain.

  "Come with me, please," Sebastian said. "We need your assistance with Lauren."

  Three kids, Ramsey thought, in a house in the middle of nowhere. It's the perfect setup for a slasher flick. Does anyone know where we are?

  He followed Sebastian.

  * * * *

  But this was not the den of a serial killer, or killers. Lauren was not hanging from a meat hook while the brothers closed in on her with carving knives.

  The room was small and bare and shuttered. Thin blades of sun slipped through the blinds, offered enough light to see by. There was a small round table and three chairs. Lauren sat in one, her face pale and apprehensive.

  In the chair across from her sat the person called Munroe. He was a small, compact figure, taking up much less room than Ramsey had expected. He had a baby-cheeked face with a tapered, pointed chin; his complexion was pale and freckled, his hair redder and thinner than his brother's. His small hands rested on top of the table, as if he were eager to prove he had nothing to hide.

  "Ah," he said pleasantly, and his eyes shifted to Ramsey. They were large and slanted down at the outer corners, giving his face a melancholy cast. But the thing Ramsey noticed most was how colorless they were.

  Eyes as pale as glass, as ghosts.

  "Ramsey Doe," Munroe said. He gestured to the empty chair. "Usually my brother sits there, but for the moment he'll simply have to stand. Please."

  Ramsey sat down, keeping his eyes on the small, strange man. Munroe's smile was as thin as his brother's. "I was sharing some information with your sister," he said, "when I sensed something strange. Something lacking. I understand what it is now. It is, quite simply"—and he turned his hands palms-up on the table—"you."

  Munroe closed his eyes.

  Ramsey waited. Lauren still wouldn't look at him. He could hear the tick-tick-tick of someone's watch. Munroe opened his eyes, and now they were no longer colorless; now Ramsey understood the tension in Lauren's face and body, as his own breath was sucked away from him.

  Munroe's eyes had turned into something not human, at least not in any way Ramsey understood the word. The whole of his downward-slanted sockets were filled with a molten sheen. They cast their own, silvery light into the room.

  And Munroe began to speak.

  Words that were not English, not any language Ramsey could recognize, poured fluidly, breathlessly from him. "… Sentika niosl maladyic sheritoka vyuorikiano …"

  Sounding like gibberish, a child's pretend language, yet spoken with the authority of an adult.

  Sebastian also began to speak, his voice deeper and rougher than his brother's, the two like rivers intersecting and overlapping and dividing again:

  "… He will go," Sebastian said, in a perfect monotone, "as he is meant to go, he has no choice, and you must not follow. It is death to follow. For there will be a stage that awaits, blood in the desert, blood and music and war, for the one who wrought the plague walks again, sings again, and has begun to harvest her children …"

  Sebastian paused, and listened to his brother in silence for several moments before chiming in again:

  "… The winds of the labyrinth blow again, but the song is a dark one, a corruption of praise, a corruption of power. The friends of Salik will come looking for you and you must not let them catch you, or they will use you as bait and you will cross over. You will cross over. You may help him then …"

  Sebastian paused again. Munroe was no longer speaking but whispering.

  "… There is death ahead but it is not what you think it is. So don't be afraid. Don't be afraid. For Del will play his game, Del will be the wild card. There will be a great, strange gifting, there will be another Teaching, and a new kind of necromancer will rise to walk among us. Will defend us…"

  And now the words falling from the small man's lips had grown too faint for his brother, for any of them, to hear. The smaller man opened his eyes, and Ramsey saw again the strange silvery color, shifting like liquid in the hollows of his face. Munroe continued to whisper, and now it seemed as if the bees from the front yard had taken up residence inside Ramsey's skull, buzzing just behind his eyes. He pressed his hands to his temples but kept his eyes on Munroe, unwilling to miss even a half-second of this—

  —And now the backs of his shoulders no longer itched but burned, as if someone were peeling away his skin, layer by layer—

  The whispering stopped.

  Munroe's eyes altered their blind, preternatural gleam to the colorless gaze of before. Contacts? Ramsey thought. Does he manage that with contacts? Does he—

  And the voice from before, like leaves rustling inside him: What if it's all true?

  "Now," Munroe said, as smilingly pleasant as a host offering coffee, "I would like some moments with Ramsey alone. Lauren, that is all I have to share with you today. Thank you, and you may go."

  Lauren pushed back her chair with such force it nearly toppled over. She muttered something beneath her breath and left the room.

  "You too, Sebastian," Munroe said quietly. "I know this is an unusual request on my part, but Ramsey Doe is an unusual boy."

  "As you wish," Sebastian said.

  He stepped from the room and closed the door behind him.

  Ramsey said, "You know my last name."

  "Or rather, the true lack thereof." Munroe smiled again. He folded his hands on the table. "You long for home," he said quietly.

  Ramsey shrugged. "Not really."

  "You are nostalgic for the lost paradise. You long to return, but you cannot escape your chains." Munroe's eyes assumed their silver sheen, opaque and glinting in the half-light.

  "You sound like a bad poem," Ramsey said.

  The eyes narrowed.

  "You are double-named, double-souled, but your vessel is poor and unfit. You were not meant to carry what you carry. That is why the pain has started. It will only grow worse, and you will have no choice but to wither inside it. You are running out of time, Ramsey Doe. And it was borrowed time to begin with."

  "I don't know what the hell you're talking about."

  "Your moment is coming for you."

  Ramsey started to speak, but Munroe cut him off.

  "You are a danger to yourself," Munroe said, "and to her. You have to go away."

  "What—" Ramsey tried to keep still, say nothing, but the word came from him again. "What"—and he couldn't help exploding: "What the fuck is going on in my life?"

  "I'm sorry. I see only glimpses." He raised a finger in Ramsey's direction. "You want to go," he said. "It's the only way to uncover the truth of yourself."

  "What did all that stuff mean, the stuff you said earlier? Blood in the desert—"

  "There are some places, mystical places, where windows open up between realities and creatures may pass between. Where many things are possible, dark and light things both. I was speaking of such a place."

  "Creatures from another world can live in ours?"

  Munroe frowned. "No. There are always exceptions, but—our minds may travel places where our bodies may not follow. Our bodies are bound to the physical laws of our home-realm."

  "You said there are exceptions," Ramsey said.

  "There are always exceptions."

  Munroe leaned forward in his chair. His pale eyes gleamed.<
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  "You should be dead," he said. "I've never encountered anything like it."

  Ramsey wasn't sure he'd heard correctly.

  "When you were a very small child. It is written all over you, that death. But something interfered."

  "I don't understand." But Ramsey felt something inside him, an echo of deep recognition. Yes. I was dying. I was dying.

  "When your father shot your mother," Munroe said, "and then you, and then himself. There's a mark on your chest, where the bullet went in. You should have died. But something interfered."

  "That's not true," Ramsey said. "That can't possibly be true."

  It wasn't my blood. There were no wounds on me. It was someone else's—

  "It was someone else's blood," he said.

  "Your blood," Munroe said quietly, "changed. And your body tells the story. Bodies often do. Those marks on your back, for example. They serve as a kind of symbol. Stigmata."

  "There aren't any marks on my back," Ramsey said. He felt an odd sensation in his hands. He realized they were trembling.

  Munroe was silent a moment. Then said, his voice thoughtful: "Not yet."

  Ramsey tried to get out of the chair, so he could get out of the room, but there was no strength in his legs.

  "There are others," Munroe said, "who could tell you more. Who could maybe tell you what you are."

  "Others… like you?"

  "Better than me. Stronger than me. I'm only a seer, and a middling one at that."

  "Your brother said they've all disappeared."

  "I love my brother," Munroe sighed, "but he doesn't know what he's talking about."

  "How do I find them?"

  "They will find you eventually. Some of them are already looking."

  "Can I trust them?"

  "You can trust one." Something faint and metallic shifted through his eyes, like quicksilver, there and gone. "A woman. There's someone with her—a man. You can trust him as well."

  "What more?" Ramsey said.

  Munroe was silent.

  "What more? Is that all you can tell me?"

  Munroe shrugged, lifted his hands a little, as if to say C'est la vie. Ramsey felt as if he'd hiked to the edge of a cliff, about to see the landscape below for the first time—only to have a blanket of fog drop down and smother the view.