* * *
The voice went away for a few moments, and Lily thought that was that. She didn’t really think anything would happen. Then all sensation left her body and the voice came back.
It will be terrifying. It was for me.
There was no more warning than that. At first, she was too stunned to be frightened, but then the fear came, just as the voice had promised.
It was like being numb, but not the warm, tingly numbness of Novocaine. This was absolute sensory deprivation. Lily couldn’t feel the clothes on her body, the hard rock under her legs, or the weight of her skin on her bones. She couldn’t even feel the panic that she knew she was experiencing; she could only think it. She was disembodied and she wondered if that meant she was dead.
Then the vibration began. Lily didn’t know if it was a sound, a sensation, or something in between, but a steady thrumming became her only focus in the void. It was a distinct pattern, a unique combination of rhythm, intensity, pitch, and duration that was as recognizable as a friend’s voice. It was a song without notes, as complex as a symphony, and startlingly beautiful. It ended and another began. The second vibration was as unique and as infinitely complicated as the first, and it ended just as abruptly.
As fast as a light being switched on, Lily could feel her body again. She could feel, see, taste, and smell the world again. She was still sitting on the same rock, still staring out at the same Atlantic Ocean, but several things were off. The air smelled clearer and fresher. The sky lacked the vaguely brownish smudge of smog ringing the horizon. There were more barnacles on the rocks and more starfish in the tide pools.
Her skin prickling with a preternatural sense of wrongness, Lily turned and looked behind her.
She was still in a Salem. The shape of the shoreline, as familiar to her as the whorls of her own thumbprint, told her that.
She just wasn’t in her Salem anymore.
CHAPTER 3
Lily sat and stared at the impossible sight before her.
A massive castle-like structure loomed where her house was supposed to stand, and beyond that, Lily could make out the outline of a city. She stared at the skyline, trying to make it register. A city larger than Boston stood where little Salem used to be. A city made up of weird buildings that were shaped unlike any she’d seen before. Twisting high above even the tallest skyscrapers were spiraling towers that seemed to be crawling with vegetation. Lily jumped down off her rock and ran up the steep path from the beach, hoping that as she got closer the whole thing would dissolve like a mirage in the desert.
“I’m dreaming. I fell asleep on the rock and now I’m dreaming,” she muttered under her breath, but she knew it wasn’t true. Her skin tingled with awareness of the world around her. She felt completely awake. Whatever was happening to her was real.
Lily crested the rise and met the implacable wall of the castle. Running along its side, she reached a turret that blocked any further progress along the edge and quickly realized that there was no way around the fortification. This structure was built to keep invaders out, whether they approached by land or sea.
She put her hands on the stones, feeling the lichen covering them and inhaling their flinty smell, but still not fully believing they were there. Pacing back and forth along the precarious edge, Lily kept looking over her shoulder at the unchanged shoreline. This view, the one facing out to the ocean, was exactly the view she remembered. She’d seen the same rocks and the same unmistakable shape of the shore nearly every day of her life. Then she turned back to the wall that looked like it had stood there for hundreds of years. It had no business being there.
“What the hell!” Lily shouted, hysteria threatening to take over.
She heard footsteps along the top of the wall, and clapped a hand over her mouth to stop her screams. Men’s voices drifted down to her from the thirty-foot-high barricade—hostile voices barking orders. There was nowhere to hide. Lily looked around frantically, but she knew that if she ran or stayed it would make no difference. She was trapped between a rock wall and the ocean.
A man dressed in dark clothes and holding some kind of foreign firearm aimed his weapon at Lily from over the wall. She stuck her hands in the air in surrender.
“Lady! How’d you get out there? When did you…” The young soldier bit off his questions, as if realizing that he shouldn’t be asking them, and lowered his weapon.
An older soldier joined the young man. He stared down at Lily for a moment, his mouth agape, before finding his voice and addressing her cheerfully.
“Forgive us, Lady. Would you like to take a walk on the beach? We’ll send a detail down to you,” the older soldier said evenly.
“A walk? No, I … Who are you?” Lily asked. Her voice broke, and she found herself shifting from foot to foot, trying her hardest not to cry. “I just want to go home.”
Half a dozen more men joined the two soldiers. They all stared at Lily in disbelief. The older soldier called the others to attention.
“Go down and escort the Lady of Salem back inside her Citadel,” he said crisply. The two soldiers stiffened and saluted.
“Yes, Captain Leto,” they chorused, then rushed off to obey.
Lily stared up at the men on the wall, holding her tongue. Silently, she took in their clothes, which seemed to be made of a new kind of fabric that looked a bit like leather but moved and bent with more ease. The weapons were strange to her as well. From what she could see, most of the soldiers were carrying crossbows, but not old-fashioned crossbows. These were high-tech
and looked lethal. In fact, very little about this place struck Lily as medieval—somehow it seemed both modern and old at the same time.
And, judging from everyone’s deferential tone, apparently she looked like their ruler. Before she could crack that mystery, two soldiers who were hardly older than she was called to her from the beach.
“Would you like us to come up the rise and carry you down, Lady?” one of them asked, still out of breath from running to get her.