flick between the boy’s teeth and the numbers sculpted into the rock wall.
“These caves,” she said at last, speaking to herself as much as to them. “Each house had one. I have been to some of them—invited by the Seekers to whom they belonged. This cave belonged to the boar, the one in Africa to the bear. But they’ve fallen out of use…perhaps because the Middle Dread has been using them for his own ends.” John heard her feeling her way toward certainty as she spoke. “Whatever is done here in this cave, whatever is left here—it looks as though it was done by the boar Seekers themselves, since this is their place. Do you see? Because Emile is here, it appears he was killed by his own family. And a Watcher left frozen here will look like a member of that family as well. It is another way the Middle hid his tracks.”
Maud’s thoughts had begun to mingle with John’s own as she spoke, and suddenly he understood something else. “There’s more—Nott’s teeth,” he told her. It almost felt, in this intense moment, as if he and Maud were one mind speaking with two voices. “If he freezes to death here, his teeth—with their coordinates—are safely kept nearby these walking instructions. A full set of clues.”
The Young Dread began to line up the symbols on their athame to match the coordinates on Nott’s teeth.
“If the two hundred paces Nott uses bring him to other Watchers…What if this two hundred paces will bring us to something else?” She indicated the boar hewn proprietarily into the tunnel wall, and a new rush of thoughts leapt from her mind into John’s.
“The house of the boar?” he whispered. “The Seekers who’ve gone missing…”
“What if they are missing, but not entirely gone?” the Young Dread asked him.
“You think we might find whatever is left of them,” John said, giving voice to her thoughts.
Maud held up the athame’s hilt, showing him the dials, which had been arranged in the pattern on Nott’s teeth.
“I think we must look for ourselves and discover what the Middle has done.”
She reached for the lightning rod at her waist.
18 Years Earlier
Catherine had locked the bathroom door, but she wasn’t in the bathroom. She was sitting on the floor of the tiny room—little more than an alcove, really—which was to be the nursery. This small space adjoined the bathroom and their bedroom and was tucked into the farthest corner of the flat.
She didn’t want Archie to worry if he noticed the locked bathroom door, but she also wanted warning if he came close. She was wearing the focal again, an activity she’d continued to keep secret from him.
She sat cross-legged between the half-assembled crib and the stack of baby things her mother had been sending. Her mother’s gifts had ended abruptly the week before, and Catherine hadn’t been able to reach either of her parents since. Now that she knew the Middle Dread had followed her in France, she was worried that he might be after her family. She was still confined to bed—even more strictly than before—so she couldn’t go looking for her parents, and she didn’t want to send Archie into danger on his own. She was trying not to let hysteria take hold.
Gradually she became aware of a repeated thumping noise that was coming from the living room. Archie had been practicing with weapons every waking moment since their return from France, three weeks before, after he’d fortified their flat with all sorts of door and window locks. (As if locks would keep out a Seeker or a Dread.) He must be punishing the training dummy severely right now, she thought.
Catherine’s mind hummed with the focal as she studied the journal, trying to make new mental connections from the old entries—to understand who had been manipulated, and when. She’d added to the journal the coordinates for the cave in Norway where Emile had been heading, and his father’s drawing. She would go there as soon as she could—she would try to find all the caves as soon as she could—but what else could she learn while she waited for her child to be born?
After an unknown amount of time had passed—it was hard to keep track of time in the focal—she noticed a change in the noise from the living room. It was no longer the sound of Archie striking the dummy but of something else, something heavier—it was the sound of a body hitting a wall. That