Page 115 of Ascendant King

His face was pale, and I said firmly, “None of this is real.”

“Maybe. But I don’t like it.” For a moment, he stopped breathing, then continued, forcibly regular. We passed three more open doors, refusing to even pause. Then, suddenly, even though a moment before we had been walking through an endless hallway, we were on stairs.

As we climbed, I said, “Do you think we’re alone here?”

At the top of the stairs was a solid wooden door, a gold handle in the center. Cade looked at it.

He reached for it, and the door opened into a room filled with color. Sitting in front of an easel, Summer looked up, smiling at us.

“Good. You’re finally here.”

Chapter

Thirty-Eight

“Summer,” I said. It wasn’t even strange. Somehow, I had expected to see her, expected that all of this was her. She saw the world in different ways, and if this was what the inside of her head looked like, I couldn’t blame her for how she behaved.

She sat in front of an easel, an enormous canvas standing on it. Her long, dark hair flowed down her back, her pale face tilting into a small smile. She wore a white shift that hung to her calves, her bare feet resting on the bars of her stool.

“Where are we?” Cade asked. The door had closed and disappeared, trapping us in with her. The room we were in was filled with streaks of color, each textured like oil paint on canvas.

I should have felt afraid. Despite how harmless she seemed, Summer Morrison was more powerful than Cade in his depleted state, and I wasn’t willing to attack her without knowing what she was capable of.

“This is my transition space. You all have yours, that blank nothingness. I decided to decorate mine.” She said it as though it was simple, but from Cade’s raised eyebrows, the way he glanced behind him to where the door had been, it was shocking.

“You’re responsible for the graffiti in Los Santos?” I asked, even though it wasn’t really a question. “Why?”

“Because it’s wrong, what’s going on.” Summer dipped her paintbrush into her paint palette, filling in blues on her canvas. As she painted, water seeped into the room, pooling around our ankles. “Everything is wrong. I don’t like it.”

I moved my foot, trying to take a step toward her, but the water dragged me down, rising to knee level quickly. “What’swrong?”

“The world. Magic is poisoned, and if we don’t fix it soon, then we are all going to drown.” She put down the brush, picking up another and dipping it into a dab of green paint. She started at the top, filling in a canopy of green, moving down, then beginning on a trunk. “Do you know that when the world went wrong before, god drowned it?”

A tree grew in fast motion in front of her easel. A solid brown trunk and green leaves filled in, doves blinking into existence as she added them with dabs of white paint.

“I think we should do that,” she said quietly. “Because right now, nothing is going right. Nothing.”

Her voice cracked.

“Summer…” I trailed off, unsure what to say. Her father was dead; she was alone here in a house of horrors that she had created.

She sketched quickly with her paintbrush, and soon, Elizabeth was nestled in the roots of the tree, her skeletal frame cradled by soft green grass. I glanced at Cade. All the other people we had run into had been pantomimes, Summer’s echoes of real people.

Warily, I circled around Summer and her easel, wading toward Elizabeth. When I reached her, it became obvious she was real. Her eyes fluttered open, and she frowned at me.

She croaked, “Where?—?”

Then, she saw Summer and tried to struggle up. I reached for her, grasping her arms and helping her to her feet.

“Don’t move,” Summer said quickly. “Stay there.”

Elizabeth froze, still trembling, her weakness making it hard for her to stand. I gripped her tight, keeping her on her feet.

Slowly, she stopped trembling, her body gaining weight, her cheeks filling in, her eyes sharpening. Cade was standing behind Summer, looking between her painting and Elizabeth. He gasped, frowning down at his own arm, pulling back the sleeve.

His tattoos were gaining color, darkening to a midnight black. When he looked up at me, I could read surprise in the slight twitch of his eyebrows.

“Okay. I’m done.” Summer put her brush to the side, resting her paint palette in her lap. “I’m ready to discuss drowning the world.”