(I can’t close myself, though, ever. That’s the problem.)
Carra opened her eyes again, only to find Sy staring at her. “What?” she asked.
“Nothing! It’s just . . . you’ve just, uh . . . got something.”
She flipped the eye-shade down, checking the mirror: words, crawling up across her cheekbone like weird blemishes, scattered in stigmata-pimple constellation across her forehead. Having long since trained herself to read backwards, Carra translated and spoke them aloud easily, almost at the same time—
“Now, stop here, right here, right NOW!”
Sy did, jerking the wheel so they pulled over sharply, up onto the road’s hidden shoulder. The resultant jerk woke Kim, who let loose with a flood of curses, half in English, half not. But Carra had already opened her door, lurch-stumbling forward, mist fleeing her path as if blown in pace-long slices of asphalt, rocks, dirt; Sy turned the van off before following, striding to catch her up, hug her from behind, automatically holding her steady.
“What was that?” he wanted to know, as she peered down at her forearms—handwriting still forming itself, tracing along the road-map of her veins, stuttering like badly dried ballpoint. Some of it was spidery, some Palmer Method rounded, equally antique, though the words themselves were curtly, explicitly modern: HERE/NOW. NOW HERE. NOWHERE. YOURE HERE.
CARRA YOURE FINALLY HERE.
This last up her wrist, swerving to avoid the blue double-tree humping across her hand’s back. Behind them, Jude had already scrambled free, quick and lithe; Kim came last, scrubbing his eyes as she checked her palm for the rest, and gasped.
“The hell are we?” Kim demanded—so she showed him.
“DOURVALE,” Sy read over her shoulder.
Jude snickered, then guffawed outright. “Oh waaah.”
The mist, job apparently done, boiled away in all directions at once, allowing Dourvale village to suddenly spring up all around them: a time-bleached square half-mile of Colonial Revival faux-saltbox houses laid out in regimented lines, neat corners and trim right angles barely softened by a half-century of decay.
Trees had grown up through the once straight-laid plank sidewalks, roots wrecking porches and heavy limbs breaking off cornicepieces. Here and there, uncleared seasonal loads of leaf mulch were slowly causing the roofs to tip, sag, or collapse. What few windows remained unshattered reflected only green and black, layered shadows of new growth on top of old. The weeds rose ankle-high, bush and flower lunging higher, ’til gravity made them stoop or break: Deadly Nightshade, nettles, thistles, poison ivy, dandelion, goldenrod, Queen Anne’s Lace. Milkweed pods sagged, popped and empty, having already thrown their fluffy contents to the wind to drift and tangle everywhere the spiderwebs hadn’t already reached.
Around them, the air sang, dully. Cicadas, scratching inside bark; grasshoppers, playing their legs like fiddles. Sussurant lap of Lake water. A distant chime of bluebells, tolling.
And everywhere, the stones—rocks standing unbroken, straight, upright, or at an angle, nether portions submerged in earth so fast they’d take a forklift to shift. Child-sized or adult-, larger than both, smaller than either: exposed glacial chunks, bone-grey and flinty. Each with its featureless uppermost section—its head, its face?—seemingly turned their way, craning or cocked, to mark their position.
Something knows we’re here, Carra thought, feeling a shiver brush her nape. Then looked down once more, just in time to see confirmation cross from her right palm to her left, like a rash: YES YES YES YES YES.
THEY DO.
THEY ALL DO.
“Christ Almighty,” Kim said, softly. “I was up here three days, back when Galit first . . . I slept in these woods, in my car. Looked everywhere, twice. And I swear to you, I saw none of this, then. Not one goddamn speck of it.”
“I believe you,” Carra said. “But it doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it—”
“No, Josh.” She tried her best to smile in a way that might seem comforting. “So you didn’t see it, and now you do—why do you think that is? Because it wasn’t there before? Or because something’s different?”
“Well. . . .” Kim stopped, considering. “I’m with you, this time.”
Carra nodded, still smiling, letting him have a minute—if her time at the Freihoeven had taught her anything, it was that stuff like this took much longer to sink in when you weren’t used to it. Jude, meanwhile, just rolled his eyes so hard they all but crossed. “Fucking mundanes,” he said to nobody in particular.
“Shut up, Jude,” Carra told him, without turning.
“Oh, but if I do, how will handsome here ever learn? Which he really does need to do fast from now on, considering where we’re going. . . .”
“How about you just let Carra handle all that?” Sy suggested, gently. “Like we agreed to, remember?”
Jude hissed. “Waaah, how could I forget?” To Carra: “Okay then, genius—which way? Do you even know?”
Carra pointed right, then flashed him both palms to demonstrate why. On one palm, in blocky capitals, was written: GAHERIS WILL GIVE YOU IT, IF YOU ASK NICELY. On the other, a slightly more helpful injunction: GO RIGHT.
Jude snickered, instantly defused: “Awesome.” Kim simply stared, mouth open.
“That’d be Gaheris Sidderstane,” said Sy.
“I’d assume, yeah.”
“Okay. Back in a sec.”
He strode back to the van, clambering inside. Bemused, Carra followed, only to find him digging around in the back.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
Sy didn’t look up. “If I’m wrong about this, I’m sorry, but I have to ask—you don’t have much of a plan here, am I right?”
She hesitated. “Not really, no; I usually don’t. Intuition, and all that.”
Sy nodded, pulling out a trade-paperback-sized, blue Chapters-Indigo tote bag. “Good thing I brought these along, then,” he said.
He handed her a tangle of string and fabric that—once unsnarled—proved to be four silk pouches, each tied on their own necklace of twine string, all packed with something that felt like grit or sand. A musty, spicy smell rose from them.
“Charms,” said Carra, understanding. “Rowan wood?”
“Rowan, breadcrumbs, St. John’s wort, iron filings, red thread . . . everything that’s supposed to ward off faeries, except for holy water and church bells. I found them in one of the Freihoeven’s storage chests.” He slipped one over Carra’s head, letting it fall against her breastbone. “Don’t know if they’ll do any good or not, but—”
Carra looked up at him, meaning to either joke about hoping she wasn’t witch enough the thread and the rowan laid her out, or at least say thank you, whichever her brain supplied first. What came out instead, however, was: “You’re amazing.”
“Oh, I don’t think. . . .”
She shook her head, put up one hand to stop his lips, projecting: Shush, enough. You good, uncomplicated, entirely human man.
“Doesn’t matter,” she told him. “I do.”
—and leaned forward, not letting herself think about it, to press her mouth to his. His hands slid up to grip her shoulders, pulling her closer; her arms went around his neck, and Sy spilled over into her, redoubled the blood-din, confirming what she hadn’t known she knew.
This is going to happen. Not now. But—it will.
I’ll make it happen, and he’ll let me.
He wants me to.
Carra only broke the embrace with a wrench, resetting her glasses, as he hitched a laugh and did the same. He was breathing fast, visibly poleaxed, taking a moment to scrub at his face, as though slapping himself awake—man, she hoped she didn’t look like that. The bags, where were the bags?
“Ah-hem,” said Jude from somewhere behind them.
“You guys need any help?” Kim asked.
Sy and Carra looked at
each other. “No,” Sy called, finally, “we’re all done over here, basically. . . .”
(for now)
Right, right, and right, yet again. Dourvale’s denuded main through-road led down to an equally empty shoreline, gravel with stretches of sand; against it, the black Lake rippled, glittering under a chalk-white rising moon. To either side, things ran out until vanishing into the treeline, which was dense and black and jagged.
No lights that Carra could see, but the pull she felt had only intensified—this way, it said, keep on coming, don’t want to be late. Reluctantly, she began trudging, shoes slipping muckily, with Sy, Josh, and Jude trailing close behind.
Lake-noise—soughing air and rippling water, leaf-scrape and needle-fall, insectile drone, the creak of ancient trees shifting under their own weight—pressed up hard against them, a solid wall, vast and deep and alien. Willful malevolence she could handle, and had; human or inhuman, it made no never-mind. But this place’s utter indifference was terrifying too, in an altogether new way. It made her skin crawl.
Then Sy’s fingers met hers in the dark, fitting together smoothly without either of them even having to look. Foliage and underbrush closed around them, too thick for colour; if she’d been navigating with only the faint reflections off the Lake to guide her, they would have been lost in moments. What drew her on, however, had a compass-pull all its own—a divining-rod quiver seeping up through her heels, telling the soles of her feet where best to place themselves.
This way, this way. This.
Without warning, the whole tangle gave way onto grass more flattened than mown: a rectangular lot sloping down to the once-more-visible Lake, on which sat a two-storey stone and timber cottage. It had been built into the slope, sliding glass doors on the bottom floor spilling faint illumination—a slick, strange, blue-green light, so dim it took Carra a second to realize what was making her gut clench, just to look at it.
The light was pulsing. Waxing and waning, slowly, near invisibly. And human beings did not make light like that, not in any dwelling meant to be a home.
As she and Sy stood there, still hand in hand, Jude emerged from the woods, pulling Kim along by his sleeve. When they saw the light, both of them stopped short as well.
“Ah, wei,” murmured Jude, “that’s not creepy at all. Blair Witch re-enactment due to commence in three, two, one. . . .”
As if cued, the light went out. Carra’s hand spasmed, gripping Sy’s painfully. Beside her, Jude folded his arms.
“So,” he said. “They know we’re here, obviously.”
“Yep.”
“Mmm-hmm. Stay out or go in?” Carra forced herself to shrug. “Not much of an answer.”
“It wasn’t much of a question, honestly.”
“Well, there’s that,” Jude agreed and strode forward, snapping his fingers to summon an arc-weld haze of protection. Disengaging, Carra loped after, not checking to see how fast Sy would follow—mainly because, even without touching his mind, she already knew he would.
Palms pressed to the doors’ glass, Jude peered in, conjuring just enough pale purple light to see by. Pulse-lit gloom peeled back, revealing a party-sized romper-room left over from some 70s porno shoot, veneered in classic recreational décor’s luxury ephemera: wood-panelled walls, a bar with built-in stereo, two long leather couches and a beanbag chair (Christ alone knew what lived in there), all bracketing a thick dusty shag carpet. In the doubly unnatural light, every surface seemed heavily stained, glowing bright as Luminol.
Carra reached past to grasp the nearest door handle and pulled. The air that puffed out when it rolled smoothly open smelled no worse than any other long-shuttered house’s: stale, faintly tinged with mould and the memory of tobacco and hash smoke.
Nothing moved at the sound. Josh whispered a Korean swear-word.
They stepped in together, more or less—first Carra and Jude, then Sy and Kim, with Jude’s shadow tagging along in the rear, a step or two behind where anyone watching would have expected it to be.
“Up here, places like this, some people keep rifles,” Kim whispered, sidelong. “For hunting. Or trespassers.”
“Uh huh.”
“So what I’m saying is—I really hope you got the right house.”
“You did,” a new voice answered, to their left.
At the sound, Jude whipped ’round, casting a shimmering, circular wall of power between it and them; the room’s violet light turned actinic, harsh and blazing, with fresh copies of Jude’s shadow spiking out in every direction like guards jumping to attrention. Carra felt her hair crackle and start to lift, her own power rousing in response, pressure between feet and floor gone abruptly tenuous; both Sy and Kim half-stumbled back, as though shoved.
Concealment spell, Jude was thinking, eyes furiously a-roam, searching out targets and not finding any. To which Carra projected back: No. Nothing so . . . traditional.
This is glamour.
“Correct,” the voice agreed. “Glamour, ironically enough, is exactly the right word for it.”
With a wrench, somebody sat up from one of the couches, as though emerging wholesale out of its fabric: an old man, flesh fallen far enough away to leave the framework visible; dirty grey hair, dirty grey beard. Handsome bones. And—
—those same eyes, but paler, the way Gala’s had always been. A diluted imitation of the true Druir peacock-feather, carrion-fly blue.
“Mister Sidderstane,” Carra named him, prompting a truncated little bow, or as much of one as arthritis would allow for.
“Call me Gaheris,” he replied.
Then they were all sitting, somehow; Sy and Kim on the other couch, Carra on the beanbag with Jude leaning back against her knees, hands dialled down, but eyes still trained on Gaheris Sidderstane’s ancient face. The old man was talking, possibly had been for some time. A mere blink, more glamour, not effortless so much as—uncontrollable, perhaps. Like it exuded through his pores. Like he simply couldn’t bother trying to restrain it any more, with such a very tiny bit of time left in which to do so.
Here and there, beneath his skin, Carra glimpsed the cloudy jellyfish shapes of several competing forms of cancer. She wondered how many different pain meds he had to be on in order to organize his words this beautifully, rolling them from his tongue in a rasping Jeremy Irons drawl.
“. . . saw you coming, of course. Though when I say ‘we,’ it’s really my sister I mean; she’s the scryer in the family. You’ll have to wait to meet her, slightly later on, I expect, for she’s rather shy in company, these days . . . a symptom of her transition, poor dear. But then, we all have our crosses to bear.”
Kim shook his head, sharply, as if shaking himself awake. “’Scuse me,” he managed, eventually. “Uh . . . why are we here?”
Gaheris blinked. “Because Miss Devize brought you, I expect. Do you play some particular part in this errand?”
“Well—I’m the one who came to her, so. . . .”
“Ah, so you’re the injured party. Very sorry, young man. Our aunt can be quite the hazard.”
“She took my girlfriend,” Kim blurted out, before amending: “Ex-girlfriend, I mean.”
“Ah yes, she does that,” Gaheris agreed, unsurprised. “Droit du seigneur. The others don’t exercise it, in the main, but Enzemblance does still take the occasional girl, or man . . . sturdy fellows such as yourself who can last a long time, down there in the dark. And children, too. Children most of all.”
“Why children, though?” Sylvester chimed in, polite but curious, ever the good interviewer.
“Because Torrance Sidderstane—our great-grandfather—didn’t understand what she was when he made the deal with Lady Glauce. Enzemblance was supposed to inspire him, but the poetry he wrote didn’t sell, and he blamed her for it. So he cut her throat and drowned her in the Lake outside. Enzemblance being as she is, however, the only one who died was their daughter—still inside her,
unborn. She’s been trying to get her back, ever since.”
“Where’d that son of hers come from, then—Saracen?”
“Oh, she came back to Torrance after he was put away, once the TB got bad enough; held him down and had her fill of him, then left him to die in his own blood. That’s where Saracen comes from, and he’s all hers—son of a leanan-sidhe, a true faerie love-talker, the way Ganconer only pretends to be.” There was a strange relief in Gaheris’s voice, as if finally telling the truth eased some intolerable pressure. “But she wants more, always; a girl preferably, a boy most. Which is why she will kill Galit Michaels’s child rather than let him free, if she can at all help it.”
“So how do we stop her?” Kim demanded.
“I have something you can use to open the door to the brugh—the high road, not the low. Given their druthers, my cousins prefer to hide, not fight; they can wait for you to get old, then come for you through the walls, when you least expect it. Yet if you can force the issue, they must emerge or forfeit what they consider their honour. It’s entirely your business how you choose to proceed against them, after that.”
Carra nodded, poised to ask him to elaborate further. But here, another voice interposed from nowhere in particular, similarly proper, saying: “Gaheris, wait. No.”
“It needs to be done, Ygerna.”
“Not by you.”
“Or you, apparently. While they, on the other hand, seem to have volunteered.”
Soft: “That’s not fair. . . .”
Gaheris sighed, weary.
“None of this has ever been fair, sister mine. It’s life, only that—our life. Unfair by its very definition.”
From behind him, the sigh met its match, low and liquid, a mournful, breathless keening. And the pulsing light pulled itself together, knitting solid form from what Carra had previously thought a mere blur across her glasses’ lenses: dust and dried tears, the eyes’ exhalation. Became a woman whose drowned countenance, lit by its own sick yet sensual glow, shared most superficial points of similarity with Gaheris’s own, save that it was eternally young, eternally beautiful, and terrifying in the extreme.
We Will All Go Down Together Page 44