Was it only two days ago her family had been butchered?
So much had happened in that short space of time that she could no longer distinguish the reality from the fantasy.
On a casual, almost unconscious level, she was aware that she was sitting on a tube platform with Owen holding tightly to her arm, fingers strong against her flesh. She was also keenly aware of the bag on her lap, the weight of the sword in it.
Sarah’s last clear thoughts and images were from when she stood before her home on Wednesday afternoon, then pushing open the door and stepping into the darkness. After that, everything dissolved into a terrible unending dream.
“Sarah?”
She turned her head to look at the young man sitting beside her. Was he real or another dream? Was he likely to turn into a demon, was he—
“Sarah?”
He looked real, forehead shining with sweat, a strong clenched jaw, a bandage on his cheek, his full bottom lip bruised where he had bitten into it. She lifted a hand and squeezed his forearm; it felt real enough, the material of his flannel shirt rough beneath her fingers. And he smelled real: a mixture of sweat, fear, and the faintest hint of blood and gunpowder.
“Sarah?” There were tears in his eyes now, magnifying them into enormous green orbs.
“Are you real?” she asked, her voice sounding childlike, lost and distant.
“Oh, Sarah…does this feel real?” His fingers dug into her flesh, squeezing as hard as he could. “Does this feel real?” He pinched the soft web of flesh between her thumb and forefinger. “And does this feel real?” He leaned forward and kissed her gently on the lips.
A train thundered into the station, stale air billowing around them, disgorging passengers in a noisy frenzy. Neither Sarah nor Owen moved. When the train pulled out of the station a few moments later, there was a brief lull when the platform was empty and silent.
Finally, pulling her lips from his, she sighed. “Yes, it feels real.”
There were tears on her face now, though she was unaware of them. “I thought it was a dream. I hoped it was a dream, a nightmare I was going to wake up from…but I’m never going to wake from this, am I?”
Owen stared at her, saying nothing.
“I was hoping I was in the hospital,” she said with a shaky laugh. She frowned. “I was in the hospital…I think, or was that a dream, too?”
“You were in the hospital.”
She nodded. “I kept hoping I was going to wake up and I’d find my family standing around the bed. But I won’t.” She reached into the bag and touched the cold metal. “And it’s because of this sword.” Warmth seeped into her, tingling up from where her fingers rested on the rusted metal, doubts and fears dissolving in that moment.
“What do you want to do, Sarah?”
Lying atop Owen in a nondescript beige room, the sword held high in her hands…
The metal beneath her questing fingers felt soft and fleshlike. “I was going to give myself up to the police, remember?” She glanced sidelong at the young man. “Should I do that now? It would end all of this madness.”
Owen looked away, staring deep into the tunnel, knowing how he would answer, knowing that Sarah knew it, too. “I’m not sure it would,” he said quietly. “The madness would continue…more elderly men and women would die for these ancient objects.”
“But at least the police would know what’s happening,” Sarah protested. “I could tell them.”
“What would you tell them?”
“Everything. About the Hallows and the dreams and—” She stopped suddenly, realizing the futility of what she was saying.
“The police think you did it,” Owen reminded her. “And the only way for you to clear your name is to solve the mystery. For us to solve the mystery. Avenge your family. Avenge my aunt.”
The sword vibrated softly beneath Sarah’s touch. She was about to say that she couldn’t get involved. The old Sarah would have shied away. But now she was a part of it and had been from the moment she met Judith Walker. And lately she had begun to think that her involvement predated even that. She was beginning to suspect that the dreams were more than just dreams, that they were hints and clues to the Hallows’ true meaning. The small face of the cold-eyed boy Yeshu’a swam into view. “I suppose I should have walked away from your aunt when she was being attacked,” she said. “Maybe if I had, then my family would still be alive,” she added, unable to keep the bitterness from her voice.
“But you didn’t walk away,” Owen said firmly. “You were there when she needed you, and then later, you were at the house, which enabled her to give you the sword, and we were at Brigid Davis’s flat when the skinhead turned up.”
“Coincidence,” she said shakily.
“I don’t believe in coincidence. That’s something I did inherit from my aunt. She once wrote a sentence in a book she gave me that has stuck with me ever since. ‘There is a season for all things.’ And she’s right. There is no such thing as coincidence. Everything happens in its own time. There’s a reason we’re here together. There’s a reason we were meant to meet. My aunt gave you the sword to give to me….” He grinned suddenly. “Not that I’ve had a chance to hold it.”
He could feel the weight of the Horn of Bran beneath his coat, the metal rim cold against the flesh of his belly. “Maybe I wasn’t meant to have the sword. Maybe it was yours all along. Maybe I was meant to keep another Hallow.”
Sarah started to shake her head, but Owen pushed on.
“I think we owe it to your family, to my aunt, and to people like Brigid who died to protect these Hallows to find out what’s going on. We have to try and stop it. Maybe that way we can clear your name.”
She nodded tiredly. “I know.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “What do we do?”
“We should get a good night’s sleep, and then we should go to Madoc, the village where it all started….” He stopped, seeing the surprised expression on her face. “What’s wrong?”
Sarah raised her arm and pointed straight ahead.
Owen turned his head, expecting to see someone standing next to them. But the platform was empty. “What…,” he started to say, and then he saw it. Plastered to the wall on the opposite side of the tracks was an enormous orange poster, the black letters spiky and archaic, a bronze border of twisting spirals and curls. It was advertising The First International All Hallows’ Eve Celtic Festival of Arts and Culture…in Madoc, Wales.
“Coincidence,” Sarah whispered.
“Oh, sure.”
The festival was the following day, on Halloween.
70
Ahriman had always known that Don Close was going to be the difficult one.
A professional soldier, sometime mercenary, and criminal who had served time for armed robbery. In prison, he was known as a hard man, respected by prisoners and guards alike. Close was not a typical senior citizen. Ahriman had suspected all along that torture would not be enough and that they needed to find the right tool to break him.
WHEN HE’D first woken up in the dungeon, naked and chained to a weeping, foul-smelling wall, Don Close had immediately planned his escape. The last time he had been in a similar situation, it had been in a cell in Biafra in that grubby war where foreign mercenaries received little pity and no mercy. He’d killed four guards without remorse, knowing that if he failed, he would face torture and a firing squad. Those killings and all the others he had committed, first for his queen and country, later as a paid mercenary, and finally as a security consultant, had all been necessary. The British Army had trained him well, and he could kill without compunction, without taking any pleasure from it.
But killing the pair who had kidnapped and tortured him would be a special pleasure. The thought had comforted him in those first few days when the man and woman had done little other than humiliate and abuse him, depriving him of food and water, leaving him to stand in his own waste. He thought he could take anything they did to him; he’d once spent a year in a
Chinese prison, where he was tortured on an almost daily basis, until Her Majesty’s Government had negotiated for his release.
On the morning of the fourth day, the dark-featured man had quietly entered the dungeon and, even before Don had come fully awake, had shattered his two big toes with a hammer and then walked away without a word. Don had screamed his throat bloody.
Later, much later, when the pain had abated, Don had realized that any plans of escaping had been effectively wiped away; any movement with a broken toe would be painful and, with his feet pulped to bloody ruin, now impossible. He was also forced to face the chilling fact that he was a seventy-seven-year-old man in poor health and not the robust thirty-year-old military specialist he had been when the Chinese had worked on him.
The question was always the same: “Where is the Hallow?”
Denying that he even knew what they were talking about was pointless. The couple obviously knew that one of the ancient Hallows had been given into his sacred keeping some seventy years earlier. He hadn’t begged for mercy, hadn’t even spoken to the couple, though this had driven them to a frenzy and they had taken out their frustrations on his frail body with clubs and canes.
But they hadn’t killed him.
And he knew instinctively that as long as they did not have the location of the Hallow, they would not kill him. Even now, with his emaciated body covered in cuts and lacerations, he held out some hope. Surely someone in the street on the outskirts of Cardiff would notice him missing and report it to the police. Deep in his heart, he knew it was a forlorn hope; old Mr. Braithwaite who lived three doors away had been dead in his kitchen for the best part of a week before his body had been found.
Late at night, when the rats grew bolder and he could hear them skittering in the straw and occasionally feel their furry bodies brush against his ankles, Don Close knew that he was standing in his grave. All he could do now was to deny his torturers the location of the Hallow for as long as possible.
The Knife of the Horse man.
He would try to take the secret of its location with him to the grave.
THEY HAD taken him prisoner with surprising ease.
He had answered a knock on the door late in the evening to find a man and woman, well dressed, carrying briefcases, standing on the doorstep. The woman had stepped forward, smiled, consulted a clipboard, and said, “Are you Don Close?”
He’d nodded before realizing his mistake, old instincts coming too late. The man had raised a gun and pointed it directly at his face. Then the couple had stepped into the hallway without another word. Neither had spoken again, and they’d ignored all of his questions. When he had threatened to shout, the man had beaten him into semiconsciousness with the butt of the pistol.
He’d awoken sometime later in the back of a car as it bumped across a bad country road. He’d managed to sit up and look out before the woman slapped him hard across the face, knocking him back down onto the seat. Lying with his face against the warm leather, he’d puzzled over the images he’d glimpsed: purple mountains, the distant lights of a village, and a road sign in a foreign language. The lettering was English, almost familiar. Eastern European, perhaps, but there had been no accents on any of the letters. Besides, he knew he should recognize the letters. They were almost familiar. He was convinced then that someone from his checkered past had caught up with him; many of his old enemies had long memories.
When he’d awoken sometime later, he knew that he’d been looking at a sign in Welsh. He hadn’t been in Wales for…for a very long time. And in that instant, he’d caught a glimmer of the reason he’d been snatched. When the car had eventually stopped, a foul-smelling bag had been pulled over his head and he’d been dragged across a gravel drive, down stone steps, and into a chill room. His clothing had been torn and cut from his body, and then he’d been struck unconscious. When he’d awoken, he’d been chained to the wall by his wrists and ankles and there was a thick collar around his neck.
For three days they’d left him alone.
The real torture had begun on the fourth day.
The day after they’d broken his toes, they’d asked him about the Hallow. Maybe they had expected a quick answer; maybe they’d thought that the starvation, humiliation, and pain would have weakened him to such a state that he would blurt out the secret without a second thought. They had been wrong, but he suspected that they weren’t entirely unsurprised, nor were they displeased. It gave them a reason—if reason they needed—to hurt him. They would do it slowly and take great pleasure from his suffering. During a life spent in military service, he had come to recognize and despise the type: the pain lovers.
Closing his eyes, he prayed to a God he’d long thought he’d forgotten. But Don Close did not pray for a release from the pain or even a quick death. He wanted a single moment of freedom to take his revenge on the couple.
THE DOOR creaked open, but he resisted the temptation to turn his head and look. He would not give them the satisfaction.
Don caught the hint of perfume—bitter, acrid—before the young woman with the raven hair stepped around him, a pitying smile on her full lips, though her eyes remained cold and unfeeling. “I am so sorry,” she said quietly.
“For what?” he demanded. He tried to put as much authority as he could muster into his voice, but all that came out was a hoarse croak.
“For all this.” She smiled.
“I notice it didn’t stop you laying into me.”
“I had to. Ahriman would kill me if I didn’t.”
Don filed the man’s name away in case he ever got a chance to use it. He knew the scam. This was the honeypot. The couple were playing the good cop, bad cop routine; when he’d served in the Military Police in Berlin, it was a ploy he’d often used himself. He’d play the bad cop while his partner, Marty Arden—poor dead Marty—would play the good cop. He knew the script almost by heart. Next she’d be telling him she wanted to help.
“I’d really like to help you.”
She’d tell him she was terrified of Ahriman.
“My husband…Ahriman has a temper. He…frightens me.”
Of course, she had no control over him.
“You don’t understand, I’ve no control over him. He’s like an animal.”
But if he gave her the location of the Hallow, she’d be able to help.
“If you tell me where the Hallow is, I can help you escape, I promise.”
“I don’t…I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he mumbled through cracked lips.
“Oh, Donnie,” the woman whispered, using his childhood nickname and sounding almost genuinely upset. “He knows you have the Hallow. He already possesses nine. And he’s about to get the horn and the sword. The only two outstanding Hallows are the Knife of the Horse man and the Halter of Clyno Eiddyn. You have one, and Barbara Bennett has the other.” She smiled as he started at the name. “You remember Barbie, don’t you? She was such a pretty girl…she always wore her blond hair tied back in two braids. You two were inseparable that summer…a couple of little lovebirds. And guess what: Barb is here, too…in the next cell, in fact.”
Close was unsure if the woman was lying or not.
“I’ll try to keep Ahriman from working on her, but I don’t know how long I can keep him away. And he’s worse with the women, much worse. He tortures them…in unique ways.” The woman let the word settle as huge tears sparkled in her eyes.
If he hadn’t known the scam, Don might almost have believed her.
“He’s killed all of the others,” she went on. “Sexton and Rifkin, Byrne and Clay, and all the others. He has their Hallows. He’s obsessed with them. He’s determined to own them all. If you give yours up, then he won’t start on Barbara for a while. And I can help you escape. I can help you both escape.”
“How do I know you have Barbara here?” he whispered.
The young woman with the stone gray eyes raised her head and smiled. “Listen.”
A bloodcurdling scream ech
oed off the stones, and then a woman began sobbing, the sound piteous and heartbreaking.
And Don Close wept then, not for himself but for the woman who had been his first love.
AHRIMAN PRESSED play.
A CD reproduced perfect sound. Barbara Bennett screamed again and again, replaying screams she had uttered just before she had given them the location of the Halter of Clyno Eiddyn.
Before she had died a month earlier.
“QUICKLY,” THE woman insisted, “give me something so that I can make him stop it. I have to tell him something.”
Close looked at her. It was only a knife, nothing more than an ancient sickle-shaped knife, the point snapped off, the edges dulled and rounded. He hadn’t looked at the Hallow in more than a decade.
The scream that echoed down the corridor died to a dull sobbing.
Was it worth dying for, worth listening to Barbara—little Barbie, with her sweet smile and bright blue eyes, exactly the color of the autumnal sky—being tortured by this evil man? He should have married the girl; maybe his life would have been different. It certainly would have been much better. Last he’d heard, she married an accountant in Halifax.
Barbara screamed again, and now Don heard a dry, rasping chuckle.
“Tell me,” the woman said urgently. “Tell me. Make him stop.”
Ambrose had said never to reveal the locations of the Hallows. Even now, all these years later, Don could feel the old man’s moist breath on his cheek.
Individually they are powerful; together they are devastating. Once, they made this land; together they can unmake it.
Did he believe it? There was a time when he would have said no, but he had fought in some of the most dangerous corners of the world, he had watched African witch doctors, Chinese magicians, and South American shamans work their various spells. He had once fought alongside an enormous Zulu, the bravest man he had ever seen, fearless in battle, who had taken scores of minor wounds without complaint, but who had curled up and died without a mark because he had been cursed with juju.
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