EverWorld (Book 3 of the Down World Series)

Chapter Forty-Two

Bitterness. On my tongue.

That was the first thing I became aware of—a taste like cold metal that coated the roof of my mouth and the insides of my lips. I tried licking it away but recoiled from the sting of it.

I was lying face down on a hard wooden deck, and as I peeled my head away, I could feel the suction of the slit between two planks ripping away at my cheek. There would be a red mark there for a while. I rubbed at it with a tired hand and felt the pulse of blood rush into the sore spot.

Blinking into the stark light of day, I sat up and found myself in a garden. The deck was attached to a small one-room structure that looked like something from a Japanese movie—sliding doors lined with white canvas. A pond encircled the deck, and lily pads rested in bunches on its still waters. One peek over the edge of the platform revealed schools of koi circling beneath me like sharks.

Water trickled from a stone dragon's mouth into the side of it.

It was beautiful and peaceful, a fact which belied the fear welling up in my gut.

Alexei was here. Somewhere. Hiding, maybe behind the trees or inside that little Japanese house. A hummingbird suddenly appeared before my face, and I flinched away from it as though it might sting me. A small cry escaped my lips, and I heard it reverberate against the nearby woods.

I was completely alone.

Standing on uncertain legs, I made my way over a small arcing bridge that led past the house, and I peeked into the single room through the slightly ajar sliding door. There was no one inside, only a low table in the center with sitting pillows all around it. A bonsai tree sat in the center in a square stone planter.

And yet I felt like the woods were watching me. A creeping sensation worked its way up my spine—there were eyes in the trees, cameras hidden just out of view.

Was he watching me right now?

Above the treetops to my left, I caught sight of a tall structure that I couldn't place at first. But then I realized why it looked familiar. I had seen a drawing of it in Sage's restaurant basement.

It was a protective parapet that spanned the circumference of the house in the middle of the botanic gardens, as though it were some sort of medieval castle. Sage had told me about it once—well, the old Sage had anyway. That the man who built the botanic gardens was an eccentric with more money than God. That once a year he would open up the grounds to visitors, let them bask in the glory of all the nature he had contained within his walls.

And in this reality, I knew that the man who owned this place was Alexei.

In the drawing Sage had made of this place, that castle had been off to the left. Because the centerpiece of the drawing had been the rose garden.

If I closed my eyes, I could still see the Post-It notes Sage had affixed to various parts of the picture: BEHIND THE VINES and UNDER HERE. Which meant that if there was a reason Alexei had bought this property—a reason he had brought me here—it probably lurked somewhere in that rose garden.

Of course, Alexei would have no idea that I knew about the rose garden. He probably thought that I would wake up and try to find my way off the grounds. What if I surprised him instead?

I stood back and took in the angle of the central castle, the way the light fell on it. If the castle had been to the left in Sage's picture, that must have meant that the rose garden was to my right.

My hands clenched by my side, and I wished desperately that I had some kind of weapon to grab on to. But there was none. It wasn't until I made it to the wooden archway that separated the Japanese garden from the coniferous forest that I saw the note Alexei had left for me, stabbed into one of the arch's posts with a rusty screw.