“Professor?” he murmured. He pushed himself up to a sitting position, groaning deeply. Everything ached. He felt like he’d been hit by a truck. It took him several tries to get his legs out of the bed, and several more tries before he could put any weight on them at all. He grabbed for the wall to steady himself, thinking, Easy now. He moved one foot and then the other. It wasn’t until he walked all the way to the end of his bed that he trusted himself to move his hand away from the wall. He swayed, a little, but managed to stay upright. So far, so good.

He hobbled across the room, toward the door. The door was heavy, and it took all his remaining strength to pull it open, but the hall outside was empty. Ash felt his heartbeats falling like hammer blows. He wanted to run, but he didn’t want to end up flat on the floor, so he forced himself to move slowly, carefully. It was excruciating, how long everything was taking.

Ash limped out of his room and down the hall. By the time he made it to the staircase, he’d managed to convince himself that he’d been hallucinating. He had to have been hallucinating. The Professor was dead. He couldn’t have been outside. He couldn’t have been.

Slowly, slowly. Each step down the staircase was agony, but he would have gone down a dozen staircases if that’s what it would take to know the truth.

He made it to the first floor and stumbled up to the front door seconds before it burst open and Dorothy appeared, silhouetted against the light.

“Ash?” She reached for him, worry lines etched across her face. “What on earth are you doing out of bed? You’re ill—”

“I—I saw you . . .” Ash murmured, looking past her. “I saw you with—”

The rest of his sentence died on his tongue as a man stepped inside the house. He wore a tweed jacket covered in bits of dust and debris. He had his head bent, absently brushing it off, but he looked up when Ash spoke.

The Professor had always looked alarmingly like his daughter. He had Zora’s strong jaw and dark eyes, and his mouth had the same way of twisting into an ironic smile whenever someone said something that he thought was a little stupid. But there were lines on his face that Zora didn’t have yet, deep frown lines around his mouth, creases that cut across his forehead and fanned away from his eyes.

“Jonathan,” the Professor said brightly, smiling.

Hearing his name brought tears to Ash’s eyes. It was the Professor, really and truly, after all this time. Ash opened his mouth, but he didn’t trust himself to speak.

The Professor took a step forward, clamping a hand down on Ash’s shoulder. “It’s good to see you again, son.”

29

Dorothy