“We’ve got to turn it off!” I say. “We’ve got to turn everything off right now! Dude, we’ve got to shut Chester’s down!”

THIRTY-SIX

“Oh the weather outside is frightful”

Beyond the frost-etched window of my bedroom, fat snow-flakes drift lazily to the ground. Unlike me, they know no urgency. At the abbey, snow obeys a simple prime directive: fall without cease. It began two days after Sean went to work at Chester’s, and has not stopped for twenty-three.

My heart suffers a similar accumulation, with chill piling in treacherous drifts and valleys. Despite our efforts to beat it back, winter claims more of our world with each passing day. Ours has dwindled to paths shoveled between waist-high white walls crusted by ice. I do not know how to navigate this new terrain. I fear my nana’s snow goblins lurk in these drifts, waiting to carry off those who stray into the blinding wintry white.

Sean has not been able to reach the abbey nor have I been able to leave for fifteen days. We venture into the countryside with hatchets and saws only to procure timber from hard-iced, felled trees so that we may keep our fires burning bright. We have run dry of gasoline; generators squat in silent reminder of auspicious times we no longer enjoy. We have precious few candles and lack ingredients to make more. If not for the batteries Dani spent obsessive weeks stockpiling as protection against the Shades months past, it is possible we would all be dead, unable to protect ourselves from the amorphous apparitions that may yet lurk within our walls, although we’ve yet to glimpse one since the night Cruce was interred in his subterranean sepulcher. Some say the Unseelie King took them with him when he left. One can hope.

Night sees us gathered in common rooms to conserve supplies. It is impossible to say when this snow will stop. The sky is night-black or storm-leaden but for an occasional shaft of brilliant sunshine piercing clouds. If we do not soon remove the weight of accumulation from the roof of our chapel, we will lose both roof and interior supports. Ice will crush our altar and drifts will take our pews. Early this morning the rafters creaked and groaned a somber hymn as I prayed: God, grant me serenity, wisdom, strength, courage, and fortitude.

But all is not snow at our abbey. Oh, no.

All is not chill within or without our walls.

My wing of the abbey is a temperate sixty-five degrees, with not one fire burning.

My chambers are nearer eighty, sweltering for one born and raised on the Emerald Isle. I mop my brow and tuck damp tendrils behind my ears. I unfasten the top button of my blouse and dab at my skin.

Beyond the window, the sharp-shaved crystalline fire-world funnel towers over the abbey, glittering bright as diamonds in a capricious ray of sun. Between it and the perimeter wall of my bedchamber, snow is conspicuously absent.

In that narrow boundary, grass grows.

Grass, by thesaints, green as St. Patrick’s clover! Kelly green as the misshapen shamrock that symbolizes the mission and integrity of our order to See, Serve, and Protect.

Against the crumbling mortar flush to my bedroom wall, sultry flowers in every shade of boysenberry and orchid, cerise and Byzantium bend and sway with blossoms so heavy on delicate stems they droop and nod, deceptively dulcet on a breeze as conflicted as my soul; temperate one moment, frigid the next.

Were I to crank the window and part the leaded glass, the scent that drifted in would intoxicate me. The blossoms reek of spices that make me think of Persian carpets and far-off lands where hookahs are smoked for breakfast and sultans keep harems, and life is lazy, licentious, and short-lived.

But well-lived, Cruce would say.

I blot sweat from my palms and smooth a blueprint on Rowena’s stately desk. I must know and I do not want to know if what I have begun to suspect is true.

Although the IFP is tethered to a piece of earth that has been fired to a kiln-smooth, porcelain black gloss, were one to approach it, one would feel no heat. The fire world is contained.

Yet, between the IFP and our abbey grows that loathsome grass despite the snow, that grass upon which Cruce lays me gently back in my dreams, amid fragrant blooms where he makes me feel things for which I despise myself come dawn.

I am not wise in the ways of geography. I know east when the sun rises. I know west when it sets.

Rowena protected many secrets, clanking keys in the bracelet of power that remained on her wrist, held over our heads, until the day she died. I discovered a cache in her bedchamber four nights ago when, desperate to resist another torturous slumber, I occupied myself by studying every inch of the Grand Mistresses’ apartment, seeking telltale clues of false panels or retractable floorboards. In the faux bottom of a centuries-old armoire I found maps, sketches, and plans, many of places that baffle me, in which I am unable to divine her interest.

Also therein I found blueprints of the abbey on scrolls and bound in large flat volumes, both Upstairs and Underneath. It is the blueprint of the subterranean chamber and adjoining passages wherein the Sinsar Dubh was once entombed, over which I now place the transparent sketch I have prepared of my wing.

I smooth them together so they meet, corner-to-corner, and press my tongue to the roof of my mouth in silent protest, a technique I perfected when young to keep from crying out when lambasted by another’s intolerable emotion.

Cruce’s chamber is beneath my bedroom!

Begging the question: does the false summer that makes grass grow and flowers bloom come from the fire world adjacent or the iced prince below?

I decide maybe I can stand Ryodan, at least today, because when I say shut Chester’s down, the dude doesn’t even ask me another question!