“That was just to show you it was loaded,” he called out. “Now are you gonna come easy, or in pieces?”
Well back from the door, Gannon regarded the hole that the Wembley’s big 500-grain round-nose bullet had torn through the door. That wasn’t Tucker out there, and whoever it was knew how to use his weapon. It’d only be a matter of moments before he got lucky with a shot. There was nothing in this room to stop one of those bullets. Placing his .44 on the floor, he kicked it through the partially open door.
“You’ve got three seconds to follow that thing,” Blue warned. “Hands behind your head. Let’s go. One . . .”
The man that came out of the room was a complete stranger to him. He was big and moved with a pantherlike grace. His eyes regarded Blue expressionlessly.
“That’s far enough,” Blue said. He used the muzzle of the Weatherby to indicate where he wanted Gannon to stop. “Now I want some answers and don’t stop to think about them. Who are you and what the hell are you doing here?”
Gannon had no intention of telling the truth. He opened his mouth, the lie ready, when he caught a movement at the other end of the hall. Thinking back on it later, Blue wasn’t sure if he heard something, or if it was the flicker in Gannon’s eyes that warned him. All he knew was he had to move. Fast.
Something whispered through the air as he threw himself back, something small and deadly that hit the wall behind him with a slight chunking sound. He was turned around enough to see the man at the other side of the landing. The second stranger spat what looked like a cigar from his mouth and was drawing bead with a .22. There was no way Blue was going to get the Weatherby up in time, no way he could move that fast.
He heard Tucker’s .38 fire right beside him, saw the man lift into the air a few inches, then smash against the wall, a red stain blossoming on his chest. Gannon dove for the stairs. Shaking his head to clear the thunder from it, Blue brought the Weatherby up from his hip, finger tightening on the trigger.
“We want him alive!” Tucker shouted. “One of them at least!”
The Inspector pushed by him and raced for the stairs, Blue hard on his heels. They saw Gannon reach the bottom, saw another man there with his back to them, his hand on the doorknob.
“The door!” Blue bellowed.
Tucker skidded to a stop, tried to draw a bead, but he was too late. Bull opened the door and then all hell broke loose.
The first of the tragg’a tore Bull in two with a crisscross swipe of its taloned forepaws. Gannon froze. His mind went blank for precious seconds as he tried to assimilate what he saw. This. Just. Couldn’t. Be. Real.
Then both Tucker and Blue opened fire. The first tragg’a smashed back into the two behind it, but the press of the creatures pushed the slain one aside and they came in with a rush. The stench of them clouded the air. They howled as the two men on the stairs rained bullets on them. Three of them were down, but there seemed to be no end to them. Four down. Tucker’s .38 ran out of shells. He leaped down the last few stairs, swinging the useless gun into the face of the nearest monster. It broke all the creature’s teeth. Dropping to one side, Tucker rolled out of the way of its talons, drove the gun into its side, his knee into its abdomen.
“The door!” Blue shouted, trying to get Gannon’s attention. He couldn’t shoot for fear of hitting Tucker. “Shut the door!”
He came down the stairs swinging his rifle like it was a club. At the sound of Blue’s voice, Gannon’s momentary paralysis dissolved. He moved forward like a tiger, hands moving in a blur. The first tragg’a he hit in the throat with a clawed blow that took out half the creature’s windpipe. He broke the taloned paw that was coming for his own chest, sidestepped, dropkicked a second of the monsters, then had his back to the door. Muscles straining, he put everything he had into shutting it, but the press of the tragg’a was too great. There were just too many of the creatures.
For Chevier, who was the first of Gannon’s surviving men to reach the foyer, it was like stepping into a scene from Dante’s Inferno. He took it in, leveled his revolver and opened fire. Mercier, arriving on the further side a half second later, followed suit.
As the ranks of the tragg’a broke under the crossfire, Blue, reeling from a dozen lacerations, fought his way to Gannon’s side. Together, they started to shut the door. When Tucker joined them a moment later, they managed to close it all the way. Blue shot the bolt home. Chevier stepped in closer and emptied his gun into one of the tragg’a that Gannon had only knocked down. Snapping out the spent clip, he dug into his pocket for another.
A sudden stillness settled over the foyer. Blue swayed and dropped to one knee. Gannon and his two men eyed the Inspector who was all too aware of his empty .38 lying there on the floor amongst the dead creatures. Then the House shook as though a giant had taken it up in his hand and rattled it.
Not one of them kept his feet. They were thrown against the corpses of the tragg’a, the stench making them gag. They bounced on the floor like rag dolls. The remaining furniture slid around or overturned; broken glass from framed prints and vases spattered against walls and crunched into corners. And then it was over. Silence, pregnant with danger, fell.
“Mary, Mother of God!” Mercier intoned in a dull voice, taking in the chaos about him.
Nobody moved. They waited for it to begin again. Waited for the door to burst open under the press of the creatures. The seconds dragged out and then the House’s pale luminescence faded and electric lighting flickered into life.
“Thank Christ,” Tucker said. He looked at Blue. “Is it over?”
Blue cocked his head, listening. “That’s the reserve generator that’s cut in,” he said. “I put it on automatic.”
“Which means?”
“The House’s got its own generators in case of . . . well, power failure or something.”
“It’s starting to get light outside,” Gannon said. He got up and looked distastefully at the mess on his clothes.
“I don’t like this,” Blue said.
Across from him, Chevier whispered: “Is that so?” His voice was heavy with irony.
Blue shook his head. This . . . this slaughter wasn’t what he’d meant. When the door had been open, he’d sensed something outside, something so filled with evil that he’d felt his soul shriveling up inside him. That sensation, though lessened, was still with him. It settled as a deep terrifying dread as he fought his way to his feet. Stepping over one of the dead tragg’a, he looked out the window and went numb. Tucker, sensitive to every nuance at the moment, his whole body still charged with adrenaline, moved towards the biker.
“What’s wrong?” he began, then looking outside, he swore. “Jesus H. Christ!” he muttered.
He turned suddenly and Chevier’s gun rose to cover him.
“Put it away, Mike,” Gannon said. He looked at the Inspector. “I think we better talk.”
He too could see what they’d seen. Outside, where O’Connor Street should have been, there was a field of tall grass. Beyond it, a forest. He didn’t know where they were, but they sure as hell weren’t in Ottawa.
Tucker regarded him coldly. With stiff movements, he retrieved his .38, reloaded it and returned it to its holster on his hip. “I don’t think you’re going to believe it.”
Gannon looked from the window to the dead tragg’a. “Try me.”
Tucker, following Gannon’s gaze, nodded. But before he could speak, Merrier asked:
“How’s that door going to hold back these . . . these . . . What the hell are these things, anyway?”
“The door will hold.”
They turned at Jamie’s voice to see him coming down the stairs with Traupman.
“You guys okay?” Blue asked. “Sally? Ms. Finch?”
Jamie nodded. “All of us. But only barely. The bookshelf came off the wall and just about did us in.” He nodded to the window. “We’re in trouble.” His voice was tight with strain.
“How’s that door going to keep them out?” Mercier wa
nted to know. “Shit, how come they don’t just bust through a window?”
“The House has some form of shield around it that repels them,” Traupman explained. “When the door was open, it broke that shield, allowing the creatures entrance. Closed, they can’t get at us. They can’t get in.”
“And we can’t get out,” Blue said. “Jesus. There’s nothing to go ‘out’ to. Where are we?”
“In Tom’s Otherworld, I’d have to say.” Traupman looked worn out.
“Thomas Hengwr is here?” Gannon asked.
“So that’s what you’re doing here,” Tucker said. “What do you want with him? Who’re you working for?”
“We have bigger problems than that at the moment,” Traupman said wearily. “Those things will be back. God help us. The horror’s real and it’s only just begun.”
For long moments, no one said a thing. Tucker broke the silence finally.
“We’re up shit creek,” he said.
Blue nodded. “Without a paddle.”
Mal’ek’a allowed his enemy’s allies their reprieve. Withdrawing, it left a small pack of tragg’a to keep them from wandering beyond the confines of the House, and turned its attention to other matters.
It did not understand its need to destroy the druid; it only knew that it was a thing that must be done. It had considered itself powerful enough to crack the House, especially attacking it here in its Otherworldly presence, and understood finally that the House was too strong for it still.
Mal’ek’a’s perceptions returned to the fall of the Weirdin bones that the druid had thrown in that glade just before Mal’ek’a had cut him down. The other being, the Maiden, had the power it needed. She was small and untutored in the Way. She would be easy prey. And with the power it would take from her, it would return to confront the druid for one last time.
So Mal’ek’a withdrew and cast out its tragg’a to seek a new scent, much as a fisherman might cast his lines. Urgency was not a question. Only fulfillment was. And only with the druid dead would Mal’ek’a be fulfilled.
Part Three – Warriors and Huntsmen
Things cannot disappear;
they can only change.
—J.W. VON GOETHE
Chapter One
Sara learned, as she willed herself to Taliesin’s side for the second time, that traveling between worlds, and especially year-walking, has its own rules. The one she was taught this time was that one shouldn’t attempt it too often in quick succession.
Firm ground took shape underfoot, but her legs were too weak to hold her and her senses in too much of a whirl for her to keep her balance. She pitched forward into wet seaweed, her temples pulsing with needle-sharp pains. If she’d had anything in her stomach, she would have lost it. As it was, all she could do was curl up in a fetal position and press the palms of her hands against her temples until the piercing pain subsided to a bearable ache.
When she thought she could move without having her head fall off, she slowly uncurled, sat up even more slowly, and took stock of her surroundings. Her vision blurred through a curtain of tears. Not until she’d wiped her eyes dry on the end of her cloak and then wrapped the damp folds of cloth about her was she sufficiently composed to take stock of her situation.
She was still on the coast, though where on the coast, she wasn’t sure. The sky was overcast; she couldn’t tell if the still-wet intertidal zone she was in was left behind by a morning or an afternoon tide. Under that grey pall, the sky looked cold and uninviting. Behind her the land rose steeply, a patchwork of fissured limestone cliffs and black spruce. To her right, the cliffs came right down into the water. On her left was a salt marsh. All around her, twisted pieces of driftwood and brackish seaweed dotted the inlet’s shore.
Wrong again, she thought, but she wasn’t about to try a third time. At least not right away.
She sat quietly for another few moments, pushing back the disappointment that threatened to start a new flood of tears. Back at the quin’on’a lodge she’d felt very brave and sure of herself. But right now, alone God knew where—God knew when—she just wanted to give it all up. What was she trying to prove anyway? That she was as much a wizard as Kieran and the rest of them?
She thought of Jamie and Blue and how they must be worrying. She’d been gone for days—at least it had been days for her. Kieran had said something about time passing differently in the Otherworld and the one that they were native to.
God it was confusing.
She bit at her lower lip to stop its quivering, then got angry with herself. Okay, she said. So it didn’t work again. It wasn’t as though she was an expert. Her major mistake was in expecting everything to work out, one, two, three. She’d rest up a bit and give it another go. But not until this headache was completely gone.
A half-dozen yards from where she sat, a herring gull landed to regard her quizzically. She used to have very romantic notions about gulls—they were the gypsies of the sea, wild and free, housing the ghosts of sailors and smugglers and other such interesting people. That had pretty well vanished the first time she’d traveled east and seen them fighting over garbage around the harborfronts and fishing boats. But sitting here, a million miles and years from the world she knew, that old notion returned.
This gull’s feathers looked clean and well groomed. It had a jaunty eye, like an old mariner’s, and a lift to its step that made her smile.
Standing on legs that were still a little wobbly, she caught up her guitar case and looked around. Her gull wasn’t alone in the sky above her. Others dipped and bobbed in the grey air. She saw black guillemots by the water where the limestone cliffs plunged into the sea. A double-crested cormorant flew straight inland from the sea. She watched its flight and then paused, pulse quickening, when she saw a trail of smoke up on the clifftop.
So she wasn’t alone.
Even remembering who her last trail of smoke had led her to, the way her luck was running today, whoever was tending that fire wouldn’t be a red-haired bard from old Wales. Indecisively, she stood and stared, weighing her options. There weren’t very many and they didn’t take her long to go through. Either it was Taliesin’s fire, or it wasn’t. She could either wait here and never know, or she could go have a look. She glanced skyward. The sky was darkening more and it was probably going to rain soon. She sighed. Standing around here wasn’t going to get her anywhere.
Once the decision was made, she almost wished she hadn’t made it. It was one thing to decide to saunter up and have a look, but quite another to claw her way up through the dense undergrowth, and slip and slide on the limestone. She wished she didn’t have her guitar to lug around with her. She wished that whoever’d made that fire could have had the common decency to build it on a nice convenient beach instead of on top of the world. She wished that she’d never gotten out of bed that morning that she’d found the ring, wished she’d never found the ring in the back of The Merry Dancers. (Well, that wasn’t exactly true, but she was in a grumbly mood.)
Three-quarters of an hour later, breathing hard and more disheveled then ever, she reached the crest of the cliff. She pushed her guitar up ahead of her and crawled the last couple of feet to collapse on a slab of limestone that broke the solid line of old spruces that stalked the skyline. Like a fool, she looked back down the way she’d come and almost toppled over as the sudden feeling of vertigo swam through her.
She’d come up that?
She leaned back on the stone to catch her breath, then forced herself to her feet with a soft groan and headed west along the clifftop to find the fire. There wasn’t as much underbrush up top as there had been on the way up, but the low branches of the spruce snarled in her hair and tugged at her cloak. It was hard to go quietly.
One thing Sara’d learned from her adventures so far was that one never got what one expected. And so . . . pushing aside a heavy bough, she found herself looking into a small clearing. The building that stood just back from the lip of the cliff took her by s
urprise.
Of course, she thought, looking at the structure. What else would I expect to find here?
It was a small round tower, about twenty feet in diameter and two stories high. The foundations were stone, the walls timber with wattle chinking, the roof turfed. It was old and looked as though it belonged on a heathy cliff watching the sea from the shores of old Ireland, rather than sitting here, the grey stone greyer still in the dying light, surrounded by black spruce and cedar.
It was very quiet around her. The sea on the rocks far below was a distant sound. Behind the grey cloud cover, the sun finally sank, and twilight edged into night. As though that was a signal, the forest awoke around her.
The trees seemed to stir their earth-laden roots, and rattled their branches like sabers in the wind. Things rustled in the undergrowth. Then a howl tore through the forest—a primal reverberation of savagery given throat and loosed on the world to wake what terror it might. Goosebumps lifted on Sara’s skin. Then hard on the heels of that howl, coming like a balm against the pain encompassed in that wailing cry, she heard the clear bell-like notes of a harp, underscored by a soft drumming.
Fear and hope ran through Sara. Heightened senses filled the night with terrors, while the tower beckoned like a sudden haven. She tore across the clearing like an arrow loosed from a bow, her guitar case bouncing against her thigh, her heart in her throat. The howl came a second time, just as she reached the door to the tower, and she threw herself against its hard wooden surface, hand scrabbling for a latch or knob to get it open.
The music stilled. With her face pressed against the door, Sara felt the forest closing in on her. She lifted a hand to pound on the door, and when it swung open she stumbled inside. Her guitar case clattered on the hard wood under the rush-strewn floor. She looked up to see a huge, bearded man towering over her, his blue eyes bright with curiosity, corn-yellow hair braided with beads. As he slowly closed the door behind her, Sara turned to look across the room.
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