The Vanishing Throne by Elizabeth May

Author:Elizabeth May [May, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
Published: 2016-08-23T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 22

CATHERINE SUGGESTS we wait in my room in case I need to grab my weapons and ride out quickly. She has Tavish sit on the settee while he watches Gavin and the others in his vision. He remains quiet, his marble eyes wide and glassy.

Catherine and I lean against the pillows on the window seat, watching the storm outside in the fake Edinburgh. Swirling rain and ice smack against the window with tremendous force. The street lamps are all lit along the pavement, though it’s barely dusk.

I want to open the window, but I’m afraid the illusion might shatter. I’m afraid the Edinburgh of my imagination might disappear to reveal the glittering rock that makes up the vast underground city.

And yet . . . I’m tempted to test that. Could I explore the Edinburgh built entirely from my imagination? Just me alone in the place I helped destroy.

“You could make the sun shine,” Catherine says, resting back against the wall and watching the rain with me. “Or make rainbows. Two or even three if you wanted.”

I know she’s only asking me this so I can help take her mind off what might be happening to Daniel, Gavin, and Lorne. As if by shifting the weather’s illusion into something serene, it would be a comfort, however small. I want to try—just for her. But I’m held back by the longing to keep Edinburgh exactly as I recall it, downpour and wind and all.

“What if I don’t want rainbows?” I ask her, feeling the cold draft every time the wind pounds the rain against the window. It’s so real I find it hard to believe that we aren’t really there. “What if I want to remember Edinburgh storms the way they were? They used to last for days, remember? Weeks, sometimes.”

I look past her to Tavish, rigidly seated on the settee, his alabaster eyes unblinking. He’s still in the vision, entirely focused on the place where he’s trained his Sight. I could wave a hand in front of his face or shout at him and he would never even wake. It takes touch to draw him out again.

Tavish is framed by the open doorway that leads to the pixie city, the light of a thousand other doors rising to the very top of the hive structure. They each create a thousand worlds, some pockets of our old lives. I wonder at which point the magic that formed those worlds cracks and bends and eventually reveals the truth: that none of it is real.

“Yes,” Catherine says dryly. “I never could go outside in the wind without breaking an umbrella.”

“What did you create behind your door?” I ask her, not wanting chatter about umbrellas or rainbows anymore. It only serves to draw our attention away from this world we live in now, where the people we love are always in danger. “Your bedroom, too?”

Gavin says I can’t bring back the dead, that I can’t live in an imagined world where my mother is

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