Free Summer by Sarah Remy Page A

never seen the shit the ghouls get up to. The things they do. It’s bad, Summer. They’re really bad.”
    “Your brother spent every moment of the last ten years trying to protect mortals from this gate,” Barker said evenly, a low growl in the dark. “His best friend brought down the earth trying to close it. And you’ll tell me no, Samhradh? Make very sure, before you speak again. Because I’m bound to listen.”
    “Summer,” Lolo pleaded. “You have to let him close it. Win will find another way home.”
    Summer wiped snot from her face with the back of her arm. “What are the chances of that? Barker?”
    He was quiet for so long she thought he wouldn’t answer. In the darkness of the pit, alien light shifted on far away water.
    “The Dread Host were imprisoned for a thousand human years before Winter cracked a hole in their prison,” he said at last. “And they never found escape. But your brother is a constant surprise to those of us who remember astonishment. It’s not impossible he will find a way when the sluagh did not.  Unlikely, but not impossible.”
    “Summer.” Lolo let go of her wrist. “Winter saved my life. But the sluagh , they eat babies. Like you and I eat chocolate candies. I’ve seen it. They. Eat. Babies. You can’t let them come back. There’s no one left here to fight them off but me.”
    “No one left here...” Summer repeated. Her father was gone, Winter was gone. Lolo was what she had left, and she could hear the terror in the crack of his voice.
    Mercy , Malachi had said, a few weeks before he’d left her. Remember mercy.
    “Close it,” she ordered. “Close it, and this time, make sure it’s closed for good.”

5. Promises
     
    In spite of himself, Richard grew used to the shackles. He learned how to shuffle, one foot and then the next, so the cuffs around his ankles didn’t catch and throw him to the ground. The bronze circles around his wrists were more difficult; they caused the muscles in his shoulders to ache and pull. After only a single stretch of hours on the meandering path, Richard would have done anything for a chance to raise his hands above his head and ease the pain in his back. But the shackles on his wrist were attached to the circlets around his ankles and he couldn’t lift his fists past his waist.
    The gnawing pain in his damaged hand was so constant it became almost bearable. Only when he was jostled or when he accidentally forgot to hold the limb still did the nerves wake in white-hot agony.
    Something had changed. Richard thought the change had to do with Water-Bearer. Ever since he’d tangled with the one-eyed sluagh , Richard’s place in the alien world had shifted. He was no longer forced to walk on the edge of the feathered army; instead he was nudged along at the very center of the Host, protected from the biting wind and acrid air by a barrier of feathered wings and writhing tentacles.
    When the Host stopped to rest, Richard was allowed an allotment of journey-root with his swallow of water. And when, on what he roughly calculated as their fifth day on the narrow path, burning rain hissed in a sheet from grey clouds, the sluagh pressed close, protecting with mottled flesh, warming him as he shivered.
    Richard realized he’d grown used to their foul smell. When he curled into a ball, reaching for sleep, he was unreasonably grateful for the small furnace of a sluagh body next to his own.
    “Why?” he dared ask Water-Bearer on the seventh day, when the sluagh squatted to offer the water jug.
    “‘Why’ is a mortal failing.” Water-Bearer shrugged as it stoppered the water. Its wings ruffled and shed feathers. “The sidhe rarely pause to question the intricacies of life. Best you do the same.”
    “Sidhe?” Richard asked around a mouthful of root. Because he couldn’t lift his hands past his hipbones, Water-Bearer severed bits of turnip with its own sharp teeth, then fed them to Richard. Richard hated it. At first he’d gagged