Dandelion Fire Read Online Free PDF Page A

side.
    “You will stay, yet.” The man's voice deepened. He rose from his chair, filling the little room. The fire dimmed behind him. “The walls are of my imagine. They will not breach.”
    Henry's hand was on a knob. The doorway was trying to disappear. Instead it flickered and narrowed back to its usual self.
    Henry stepped into nothingness, and he closed the door behind him.
    Henrietta knew her parents wouldn't want her to wake Henry, so she hadn't asked. She'd left Richard and Anastasia bickering over their breakfast and hurried up tothe attic. She tapped lightly on Henry's door, and when she didn't hear any response, she went in.
    “Henry?” she asked.
    Henry was facedown on his bed. His arms were tight against his sides. Henrietta dropped onto the bed beside him and poked his shoulder. “Henry? Wake up.” She stood, slid her hands beneath him, and rolled him onto his side. “Are you feeling better?” she asked. “Up now! We've got places to see.”
    Henry's eyes were swollen shut and sealed with crusted grime.
    Henrietta backed into the doorway, but she couldn't leave, and she couldn't look away from Henry's face. Blue webs of veins stood out behind his lifeless skin, and his dry lips were swollen and splitting.
    “Henry?” she asked again. His eyes were the worst part. The eyelashes that were still visible beneath the inflated lids were glued to his cheekbones, tangled in gunk that his tear ducts had pumped down the sides of his nose, around the corners of his mouth, and even across his temples and into his hair. Patches of the flesh-toned eye glue had hardened on his pillow.
    Henry's body stiffened. One leg rose an inch off the bed, and a moist groan rattled in his throat.
    “Are you awake?” Henrietta asked.
    “No,” Henry slurred. “I'm dead.”
    Henrietta moved back to the bed. “Um, Henry, can you open your eyes?”
    The skin of his bulging eyelids quaked briefly.They looked like they'd been stretched around plums. “No,” he said. “I can't.” He licked his lips and winced, then put his hands up to his eyes and felt gently around the sockets.
    “They're huge,” he said. He started scratching carefully at the crust, and Henrietta grimaced and turned around.
    “I'm gonna get you a rag or something,” she said. “I'll be right back.”
    Downstairs, Henrietta ran hot water over a washcloth and looked at her own eyes in the mirror above the sink. She felt worse now, for thinking that Henry had been faking. But she had seen the lightning strike, and if any had hit him, it had to have been some invisible strand. And she'd never heard of lightning giving anyone puffed-up, goopy eyes. Usually they just died or went deaf or had troughs plowed in their skin that made it look like the bark on some old lightning tree out in the fields. It had been the troughs and the charred, split skin that had made her realize she didn't really want to get struck by lightning. She'd checked a book out from the library, and the first picture was all it had taken. Under the right circumstances, she was still willing to consider being sucked up by a tornado.
    Maybe Henry had allergies. She smiled. Maybe he was allergic to pollen, he had hay fever, or something. Allergic to pollen and lightning.
    She was spending more time in the bathroom than she needed to, but she wasn't exactly in a hurry to look at Henry's face again.
    Upstairs, Henry heard her climbing back to the attic. He had managed to sit up on his bed, and he'd scraped his eyelids mostly clear. Pinching the soft flesh, he lifted, leaving eyelashes stuck to his cheeks. Then he lifted higher. He blinked, lifted his lids up again, and rolled his eyes. He saw nothing. Not darkness. Nothing. Exactly the same thing that he saw with his elbow or the back of his knee. He felt his throat constricting in panic. He tried to swallow his fear back down, but it was rising too fast, moving into terror.
    “Henry, that's disgusting,” Henrietta said. “Put your eyelids