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Back Reverie Save as PDF
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

The whistle’s silence cut through the birds’ chirping as though it’d cut through the birds themselves. Then a rushing, whispering discord blew through the mill and the moonlight ahead bruised, dimpled, and peeled apart. A pair of double doors towered before them, finished in a lusterless black, and starkly flat against the drifting river beyond. Kane braced himself for the Dreadmare to fly through but minute after minute passed in glassy stillness.

“It’s a door,” Elliot said.

“Yes, Elliot, we can all see the door,” said Adeline.

“Do we knock?” Ursula asked.

“I think we already rang the bell,” Elliot said.

“The whistle opened up some sort of passage into Helena’s reverie,” Kane said. “Maybe this leads to wherever Poesy came from?”

Adeline marched forward, grasped a massive handle, and pulled the heavy door open a few inches. Mellow light spilled out.

“No one’s here,” she whispered. “Kane, what do you want to do?”

Kane felt absurd relief. He considered the door and all that might be behind it. Something told him fate had dealt them a very rare chance to enter Poesy’s realm when she wasn’t home.

Or it was a trap. Either way, they had to enter to find out. Otherwise, manicured or not, all their hands were covered in the crime of doing nothing to bring Helena home.

“Let’s go,” Kane said.

• Twenty-Six •

Trick or Treat

Kane wasn’t sure what he expected, but it wasn’t this.

They entered a room full of height and golden glow, with curving walls made from glass display cases. Turning around, Kane wasn’t surprised to find that the room was actually circular. The double doors they’d just walked through stood alone and without any discernible wall to lead through. Just a door frame made of the same obsidian as the whistle, gilded with gold filigree. It stood upright like a lone domino upon a circular stage at the room’s center. It almost reached the chandelier.

Elliot propped the door open with Kane’s bat.

“I think we’re okay,” he whispered. “But no one touch anything. This place could be rigged.”

They each picked a different area to explore. Kane sought out the squat coffee table and the tea set. There were a few cups ready for use, but Poesy’s specific cup was absent. He moved on to the cases. They were backed by mirrors so that at first each case appeared to hold nothing but far-flung infinity. Then he looked closer.

Curios. Artifacts. Charms. Small, strange objects that each emanated the same reality-bending aura of the reveries. They whispered to Kane of their mysterious magnitude, their stolen vastness. Some lay in pieces, crushed but then meticulously arranged, like an exotic pinned butterfly made beautiful in its unmaking.