BooksBarbecue
Back Reverie
Chapters (53)
  1. Front Cover
  2. Letter from the Author
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright
  5. Contents
  6. • One •
  7. • Two •
  8. • Three •
  9. • Four •
  10. • Five •
  11. • Six •
  12. • Seven •
  13. • Eight •
  14. • Nine •
  15. • Ten •
  16. • Eleven •
  17. • Twelve •
  18. • Thirteen •
  19. • Fourteen •
  20. • Fifteen •
  21. • Sixteen •
  22. • Seventeen •
  23. • Eighteen •
  24. • Nineteen •
  25. • Twenty •
  26. • Twenty-One •
  27. • Twenty-Two •
  28. • Twenty-Three •
  29. • Twenty-Four •
  30. • Twenty-Five •
  31. • Twenty-Six •
  32. • Twenty-Seven •
  33. • Twenty-Eight •
  34. • Twenty-Nine •
  35. • Thirty •
  36. • Thirty-One •
  37. • Thirty-Two •
  38. • Thirty-Three •
  39. • Thirty-Four •
  40. • Thirty-Five •
  41. • Thirty-Six •
  42. • Thirty-Seven •
  43. • Thirty-Eight •
  44. • ∞ •
  45. • Thirty-Nine •
  46. • Forty •
  47. Epilogue
  48. Acknowledgments
  49. Excerpt from Be Dazzled
  50. One
  51. Two
  52. About the Author
  53. Back Cover

He didn’t expect that. He didn’t know what to expect anymore.

“I’m a little mad,” Adeline said, smirking. A joke. She went on. “I had ballet at the conservatory last night and jeez, Kane. Your sister. She is persistent. She nearly did all of warm-ups with us, trying to get my attention.”

Kane sat up straighter. He had totally forgotten that Adeline and Sophia both went to classes at the conservatory associated with the university.

“Don’t worry,” Adeline said. “I’m not messing with her head. She’s smart. She knows what’s real, what’s not. I keep telling her to ask you all her questions, but it sounds like that’s not going great for her.”

It was exhausting finding new ways to evade Sophia now that she’d come out of her stupor, the reverie fully cemented in her memory. Kane shrugged. “I don’t want her any more involved in this than she has to be. She never should have gotten caught in a reverie.”

“Then we’ll leave her out of it,” Adeline said. “But we need to talk about what happened. Helena is gone. Same as Maxine. And I think we know who to blame. I think you can tell us all about who’s to blame.”

Kane took a deep breath. He was shaking. In an effort to comfort him, Ursula slid a ceramic plate of scones toward him, real slow. It reminded Kane of a detective sliding gruesome photos across a metal table toward the person they were interrogating. He took another deep breath, then two more, and then he talked for a long time.

He told them about his first conversation with Poesy, in which she promised Kane safety from the police in return for his cooperation. So far, that had been true. He told them about the invitation that had appeared in his journal, and the strange furniture that had appeared in the abandoned library, and the conversation he could barely recall beneath layers of floral vapor that curled the edges of his memory. He told them about Ms. Daisy the Doberman, and as he did he realized the dog, like everything about Poesy, shifted forms. Ms. Daisy was a dog, but she was also Poesy’s pet nightmare, the Dreadmare, which he now recognized as the same many-legged shadow that guarded the old mill from him and Sophia, and then followed him on his walk home.