It wants to tell a story—a strange story—and true mastery is just about letting it tell that story through you.
The stars twinkling in Emrys’s field of vision began to stretch, pulling into glittering strands that hung in the air like smoldering spiderwebs.
Wield the weird.
Wield the weird.
The phrase looped through Emrys’s addled thoughts, again and again. Slowly, he realized he wasn’t just thinking the words—he was saying them, unconsciously repeating the phrase like a mantra …
“Wield … the … weird.”
Or like an incantation.
All across the room, the glittering strands shivered with excitement. Something was coming—they sensed it. Something momentous.
“Wield …” Emrys said, his voice heavy with strange authority. He pictured the Atlas and its blinking eye. Willed the relic to help him save his friend.
“ … the …”
The strands brightened. The light was dazzling, ecstatic. Emrys could feel them parting—a curtain pulling wide.
“WEIRD.”
The air between Emrys and the hourglass warped like twisted fabric. It was as if that small weft of reality were just a layer of silk that could be easily swept aside by a deft hand. Alien colors shimmered between its folds, light peering through from some other impossible source. The colors were beautiful and awful—they whispered to Emrys of forbidden questions with terrifying answers. A torrent of eldritch energy poured over the hourglass, tongues of eerie brightness licking the bulbs.
The glass cracked.
As slowly as the red sand poured down, a single line spread up from the lower bulb, across its narrow throat, and toward the golden rim.
Then, with a sound like a hundred voices screaming, the glass shattered. A sea of red sand spilled onto the reliquary’s marble floor. It poured from the broken relic, whipping through the space with the ferocity of a sudden storm until the air was full of crimson whirlwinds. Emrys’s spell and its strange energies were completely consumed.
Now there truly was screaming, he was sure of it. Emrys saw bizarre figures rising in the storm, dozens of humanoid shapes molded from red sand. They lurched unhurriedly past him, reaching for something or someone beyond his field of vision.
Serena’s grip was yanked from his ankle—but this time the world didn’t stop.
“Serena!” he screamed.
“Emrys!” she called back over the din.
“Help mee-EEE!” a third, eerily hollow voice echoed in the distance.
They were Edna’s reedy howls, but her voice grew harder to hear with each passing moment, as if she were being dragged away.
And then, as abruptly as it had begun, the storm was over. The winds subsided, and ruby sand drifted slowly to the floor. The room grew thunderously quiet.
Emrys whirled around to find Serena was just behind him, terrified but unharmed. Her wide brown eyes gazed back at him from beneath a layer of fine red dust.
Edna Milton was never heard from again.
EPILOGUE
It was an unseasonably warm afternoon in New Rotterdam. The sun, which had been wan and pale all week, burned with renewed intensity, dispelling the city’s ubiquitous fog. It was as if nature itself had taken notice of Emrys and Serena’s victory over the Wandering Hour and found it fit to celebrate.
Or maybe it was just due to global warming.
It had been less than a full day since Serena had been half-devoured by a monster with the face of an old woman, and despite their exhaustion and shock, none of them wanted to be indoors. Serena, in particular, couldn’t bear to be in her apartment, where the memory of the red hourglass was too vivid, as unconquerable in her mind’s eye as it had been when she’d tried with all her might to shatter it.
Emrys recognized her need to assert some control over her fear; to get up and do something, however small.
And so they were honoring the dead.
The adults of New Rotterdam would likely never know what had happened to Edna Milton’s victims. As Enoch Pierce had learned the hard way, adults didn’t really want the truth if it didn’t conform to their preconceived ideas about how the world worked:
Monsters weren’t real.
The people in power could be trusted to take care of things.
The tragedies that befell other people’s families couldn’t happen to them.
But Emrys, Hazel, and Serena didn’t have the luxury of embracing those comforting lies. And they couldn’t let the names of the dead remain unspoken.
They spoke Casper Jennings’s name at the laundromat and Betty Grimm’s in Arcadia Park. They read Emma Winthrop’s poem aloud, and, just outside the fence of Gideon de Ruiter Middle School, they watched a video of a band performance the school had posted online the year before. Brian Skupp had a tuba solo. Emrys thought he was pretty good.
Their path home brought them through the Shallows.
“We should tell Mr. Pierce what happened,” Emrys suggested. “He deserves to know. He was her victim, too, after all.”
Hazel touched his shoulder. “You’re right,” she said. “That’s good of you to think of him.”
