“Sure I do,” I heard him say. “You’re the boy who talks to hollows.”
I froze. Emma and Addison turned to gape at me.
I ran back, confronting him. “Who are you?” I shouted in his face. “Who told you that?”
But he just laughed and laughed, and I could get nothing more out of him.
* * *
We slipped away just as a crowd began to gather.
“Don’t look back,” Addison warned.
“Forget him,” said Emma. “He’s a madman.”
I think we all knew he was more than that—but that’s all we knew. We walked fast in paranoid silence, our brains humming with unanswerable questions. No one mentioned the beggar’s bizarre pronouncements, for which I was grateful. I had no clue what they meant and was too exhausted to speculate, and I could tell from their dragging feet that Emma and Addison were flagging, too. We didn’t talk about that, either. Exhaustion was our new enemy, and to name it would only have empowered it more.
We strained to see any sign of the wights’ bridge as the road ahead sloped downward into an obscuring bowl of fog. It occurred to me that Lorraine might’ve lied to us. Maybe there was no bridge. Maybe she’d sent us into this pit hoping its denizens would eat us alive. If only we had brought her with us, then we could’ve have forced her to—
“There it is!” Addison cried, his body forming an arrow that pointed straight ahead.
We struggled to see what he saw—even with his glasses, Addison’s vision was sharper than ours—and after a dozen paces we could make out, just dimly, how the road narrowed and then arched over some sort of chasm.
“The bridge!” Emma cried.
We broke into a run, exhaustion momentarily forgotten, our feet sending up puffs of black dust. A minute later when we stopped for breath, the view had cleared. A shroud of greenish mist hung over the chasm. Looming faintly beyond was a long wall of white stone, and beyond that, a high pale tower, the top of which was lost among low clouds.
That was it: the wights’ fortress. There was an unsettling blankness about it, like a face with its features wiped clean. There was a wrongness about its placement, too—its great white edifice and clean lines contrasting bizarrely with the burned-over waste of Smoking Street, like a suburban shopping center plopped in the midst of the Battle of Agincourt. Just looking at it charged me with dread and purpose, as if I could feel all the disparate strands of my silly and scattered life converging toward a single point, unseen behind those walls. That’s where it was: the thing I was supposed to do—or die trying. The debt I had to pay. The thing for which all the joys and terrors of my life thus far had been a prelude. If everything happens for a reason, my reason was on the other side.
Beside me, Emma was laughing. I gave her a baffled look and she composed herself.
“That’s where they’ve been hiding?” she said by way of explanation.
“It would seem so,” Addison said. “Do you find that humorous?”
“Nearly all my life I’ve hated and feared the wights. Across all those years, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve imagined the moment we’d finally find their lair, their den. I’d expected at the very least a foreboding castle. Walls dripping with blood. A lake of boiling oil. But no.”
“So you’re disappointed?” I said.
“I am, a bit.” She pointed accusingly at the fortress. “Is that the best they can do?”
“I’m disappointed, too,” said Addison. “I hoped at least we’d have an army alongside us. But from the looks of it, perhaps we won’t need one.”
“I doubt that,” I said. “Anything could be waiting for us on the other side of that wall.”
“Then we’ll be ready for anything,” Emma said. “What could they throw at us that we haven’t faced already? We’ve survived bullets, bombing, hollow attacks.… The point is, we’re finally here, and after all these years of them ambushing us, we’re finally bringing some fight to them.”
“I’m sure they’re quaking in their boots,” I said.
“I’m going to find Caul,” Emma went on. “I’m going to find him and make him weep for his mother. I’m going to make him beg for his worthless life, and then I’m going to put both hands around his neck and squeeze until his head melts off …”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” I said. “I’m sure there’s a lot standing between us and him. There’ll be wights everywhere. And armed guards probably.”
“Maybe even hollows,” Addison said.
“Definitely hollows,” said Emma. She sounded vaguely excited by the idea.
“Point being,” I said, “I don’t think we should storm the gates without knowing more about what’s waiting for us on the other side. We may only have one chance at this, and I don’t want to throw it away.”
“Okay,” said Emma. “What do you suggest?”
“That we find a way to sneak Addison inside. He’s the least likely to be noticed, small enough to hide almost anywhere, and he’s got the best nose. He could do recon, then sneak out again and tell us what he found. That is, if he’s up for it.”
“And if I don’t return?” said Addison.
“Then we’ll come after you,” I said.
The dog took a moment to consider—but only a moment. “I accept, on one condition.”
“Name it,” I said.