“Help me…”
They left Dajani alone in the room with his boy, closing the door on them. With the door closed, the voice inside her head was silenced. She saw Julie looking at her, and realized that Mother Dajani was waiting for the world to come tumbling down. “I’m so, so sorry,” Ellie said, and for a moment the woman didn’t seem to register what she’d heard, but then she collapsed in on herself, falling forward. Julie didn’t let her fall. Mother Dajani curled up into his embrace, her face pressed into his shirt. Even muffled, the woman’s wails were wretched. She kept choking on the sobs she couldn’t get out of her body; her chest heaving, the sounds emerging from her mouth ragged, raw, desperate, and broken.
Father Dajani didn’t leave the room for another quarter of an hour.
Fifteen minutes wasn’t enough for the bereaved woman to compose herself. She looked up at him when he finally emerged, her face blotchy and raw with grief, willing him to tell her there had been some terrible mistake, that it wasn’t her son in there on that slab.
He couldn’t look at her.
He just held out his hand and said, “I need to get out of here.”
“Of course. We’ll take you home.”
Dajani shook his head. “No need,” the man said. “We brought the car. I want to be on my own.”
“I can appreciate that, but you’re in no condition to drive, either of you. Let us take you home.”
The fight went out of him. He shrugged and allowed Julie to lead him and his wife back toward the elevators. Ellie was slow to follow. Instead, she went back into the mortuary to look at the boy on the slab, pulling back the thin cotton sheet so she could look at him.
She glanced back over her shoulder to be sure the door was closed. The last thing she wanted to do was upset the dead boy’s parents. “I’m here. I’m listening.”
She touched his cheek, just as his father had, and in that moment felt a surge of electricity so strong the shock was enough to make her flinch back, recoiling from the contact. The room filled with the fragrance of freshly cut grass damp with morning dew. The contact lasted no longer than the cavernous silence between heartbeats, but the aroma lingered, as did the screams of the damned that had swarmed into her head in that moment. Ellie Taylor looked down at her hand, not trusting herself to touch the dead boy again; not after that.
“Can you hear me?” she asked, feeling stupid, but not knowing what else to do.
He didn’t talk to her this time.
“How am I supposed to help you? Jesus Christ, listen to me … I’m talking to a dead kid.”
She shook her head, and left the dead boy on the slab, determined that she would help him the only way she knew how: she would find his killer.
26
The Horned God heard the agitation in the voices all around him; they knew he was listening. They cried out to him, begging to be heard, pleading for him to take up their fight, to save them; not realizing they were beyond saving. He didn’t care. He craved their desperation.
She was here.
His queen.
It had been so long since they had stood side by side, since his sacrifice.
He searched for her, wandering through the battlefields of his memory until he found the May Queen, on her knees, hands clasped around the bleeding warrior’s wrists as she refused to let him fall. She turned her eyes on Arawn, seeing him walk toward her through the curling mists. “I thought I recognized the smell,” she said, the slight smile undercutting the harshness of her words. “Here to relive the glory of your youth?” He shook his head. “This is down to you, Arawn. All of it. Take a look around you. Breathe it in: the blood, the piss, the shit. The essence of life lost. It’s on you.”
He remembered this place, and with good reason.
This was where he gave himself to death, but it hadn’t been like this.
The ground beneath his feet was slick with mud. Carrion birds had already begun to gather, and there were rats picking at the corpses of three men who wouldn’t be going home tonight. His men. Arms lay across chests and flung out in the mud, legs twisted impossibly, eyes stared blindly.
This was all wrong.
She hadn’t been some beneficent healer offering a moment of peace to the dying. She had been there, yes, but she had demanded her sacrifice. His sacrifice and like her damned birds she had settled on the corpses to feed on their final moments, drawing their dreams out in those last precious seconds, partaking in a feast of what-might-have-beens.
A sword had been driven into the earth, the hilt looking like a funeral cross. It was his weapon. Two black winged birds fought savagely over a loop of gray entrails from the guts of the body beneath it, each trying to steal the food from the other’s mouth even with so much to go around. He watched them for a moment. The choreography of their dance was brutal. It took no more than a minute for one to emerge victorious, the other left to bleed. Even among the dead there was more killing to be done, he realized.
“Savage little bastards, aren’t they?” she said, following the direction of his gaze.
“Like us,” he agreed.
She smiled at that, seemingly enjoying the inference.
He wasn’t wrong, of course. It was just their nature. But, whatever she said, how could this be his doing?
He looked around him. He knew this place. It was burned into his mind. This was where he had taken the knee, and bowed his head, accepting his beloved’s knife to the jugular. The dead were his. His own corpse was in their number somewhere; lost to the rot. In a hundred years the bones would be gone, in their place a field of wildflowers. In two hundred years there would be a settlement of sorts, the dying these fields had seen forgotten. In three hundred it would be a town, in four hundred years there would be a city, strange-sounding street names all that remained of the killing fields.
Bones grew out of the ground like unholy vegetation; fingers stripped clean of meat by the carrion crows, eyes hollowed out, skin bloated and feeding fungal growths. There was nothing holy or sacrosanct about this death.
“You don’t belong here,” she said. “Not this version of you, my love.”
It was hard to disagree.
He turned to face the May Queen, remembering in that moment how very much he had loved her. She looked at him, something akin to pity in her eyes. He looked from her to the warrior kneeling glassy-eyed in front of her. He barely recognized himself. He certainly didn’t remember this moment, but he could feel her fingers on his own wrists, even though there was still some distance between them, both literal and metaphysical. Her grip was tight, stemming the flow of blood that would leave Arawn as another corpse for the birds to feed on soon enough.
“This is your curse, my sweet,” she told the supplicant warrior. “You died here once, giving yourself and the magic of your blood to the land to buy her time, and you will die again for her soon enough, but now you understand that death is not the end for you. Your entire being is bound forever to our beloved land, and when her need is greatest you will find a way back to her. I name you Mother’s protector, my love. You and your wildlings will wander the mists of the Otherworld, denied eternal rest. Yours will be an eternity of consciousness, trapped in a hell of your own making, where time lacks meaning, and the only thing that can liberate you will be Mother’s pain.”
“Why?” he asked her.
“Who else would sacrifice so much for her? It has to be you. It was always you. Nations will rise, civilizations fall, but you will remain locked out of time, waiting for the moment when she at last cries out for you to rise up, when the last of her magic is spent, when there is nothing left, and you will answer her, giving your blood for her once more to drive away the evil that tears apart her heartland. That is my promise to you,” she cursed him, and he welcomed it. How could he not? He had willingly bent the knee and bowed his head when she promised him his blood sacrifice would be the difference between life and death for Mother. The May Queen had woven a spell around his soul, denying him the e
nd that must come to all things, and in return he had given every ounce of the magic that flowed through his veins, as king of this place, last of his line, and done so willingly.
She was wrong in blaming him. He had done everything she had asked of him. If she had failed and their world had gone to hell, it was her fault, not his. Everything that followed his death was on her: the blood, the tears of a land torn apart, all of it. He was merely a pawn in a greater game.
Behind her, tendrils of mist writhed, snaking toward where she knelt. He hadn’t noticed it before. His first thought was that the mists had come for him, that he would never be free of them, but he didn’t trust his mind anymore.
Arawn moved to take another step when he saw dark shadows slowly coalesce within the fog. It took no more than a few heartbeats for them to gather substance and form, resolving into the silhouettes of four men.
No, there were women among them.
They were hardly warriors. They were battered, broken. He didn’t recognize any of them.
This wasn’t right.
This wasn’t what had happened.
They hadn’t been in this place.
But as he watched the leader emerge from the bank of fog, his face gone, Arawn knew it didn’t matter. The faceless man was here now, proving that death held no dominion over his kind. There was gristle and bleached bone where there should have been a grimace, there was a deep wound where his nose should have been. In his hand he held a great blade. The sword was right; it was Manannan’s cursed weapon, engraved with a spell that bound it to the heart of Albion. But this wasn’t Manannan. He had no shield. Behind him two more figures took shape: one lacking a jaw, the other with his guts sliced open. Blue flame flickered across the fingertips of the older man, marking him as a druid. The last figure, a woman, remained in the mist, her ethereal form solid enough for the twin bolts she fired to burn as they struck, one burying itself high in his right shoulder, turning him violently as the other struck level with the first. His entire body convulsed as the metal pierced Arawn’s cloak of leaves to bite into the soft meat of his chest.
He staggered beneath the onslaught, clenching his teeth against the pain and wrongness of it.
A distant voice trapped in his mind screamed. This wasn’t what had happened here. These four with their bolts and blades hadn’t finished him. But that didn’t stop the sword slamming up into his gut, doubling him up even as his would-be killer opened him up.
Blood gurgled around the sword’s hilt as he closed a trembling fist around its blade. He pulled it slowly out and cast it aside, turning to face the others even as the mist threatened to overwhelm his vision, turning the world to black.
“Why are you doing this?” he said, or tried to. The words lacked any clarity. They had no shape to them. He was dying. Again. Differently.
“Because, dear heart, you don’t belong here; not now. Mother needs you,” the May Queen told him, her voice carrying back to him all the way across the mists of time to where he stood back in Coldfall Wood.
The leader stepped forward, and with three vicious hacks took his head not so cleanly from his shoulders.
He saw it all, detached, seemingly from the view of the towering oak, no longer one with his body. He saw the whole thing like some horrible play being acted out for his own punishment.
May Queen turned her gaze upward, as though she saw him up there: his soul still shining brightly, unable to let go.
“We will see each other again, my love,” she promised.
27
Cadmus Damiola was dying.
He had known it for a long time.
Maybe it was punishment for what he’d done to Eleanor, or more likely something utterly prosaic like cancer. It didn’t matter much to him either way. He could feel the disease inside him. It had begun as a pain in his shoulder, such an innocuous thing, and had progressed to become a throat that felt like it was lined with razor blades, which made it impossible to swallow. It was just a matter of time, but if one man in London understood just how unimportant time actually was, it was Damiola.
The wooden slats of the old park bench dug into the base of his spine like some flagellant’s punishment. He wasn’t twisted; there was no comfort in pain. He didn’t enjoy it. The bottle didn’t help much, either. He took another swallow and wiped his lips with the back of a grubby hand. No amount of cheap whiskey was going to shift the burden of guilt he felt for what was happening to them. He should have known better. He looked through the cemetery’s iron gateway. Not many people got to see their own grave. It was a humbling experience. The old stones would be around long after he was gone. They’d already stood against the elements for the best part of ninety years. The sharp edges were weathered smooth and pitted where the frosts had worn away at them, but they would easily stand for another ninety or more, even if they were abandoned to nature.
He had known something would come through; that was why he had taken up his lonely vigil. He had just assumed it would emerge here, through the weakness he had made in the veil, not somewhere else. He was nothing more than a foolish old man with a little knowledge—and as the saying went, that was a dangerous thing.
Damiola had spent the longest part of the night, through three o’clock—he’d once heard about how more people died at that hour than any other, which with the moon silver on the rooftops around him, was a disconcerting thought—wondering how it had come this far, how things could have got so out of control. It was more than just cause and effect, or the notion of balance. Seth, Eleanor, Josh, him, they were the instruments of something so much bigger than that.
He saw a crow watching him from the iron gateway. The bird’s head inclined slightly as it ruffled its feathers and adjusted its perch. Those beady black eyes darted left and right, never settling for more than half a second on any one place in the old street. The crow gave the old man the creeps.
Damiola needed somewhere peaceful where he wouldn’t be disturbed. What better place could there be than his own final resting place? He pushed himself unsteadily to his feet and shuffled toward the gate, causing the bird to fly. It moved off into the cemetery, settling on one of the stones.
If he was right, the Horned God—or whatever the thing that had come through from the Annwyn really was—was gathering the creatures of the Wild Hunt to his side. What would happen to the city when they were all gathered? He shivered, looking at his mausoleum and knowing that no goose had walked across his grave. If he understood the mythology correctly—and it was always hard to separate truth from legend—the wildlings were more akin to forces of nature than living breathing heroes, but that was how the collective myth functioned. It created realities we could understand from our limited point of view, shaping the stories handed down from generation to generation into something fantastic where giants climbed up beanstalks and wolves dressed in granny’s shawl. To Damiola’s mind they represented the sheer destructive force of the world at its most catastrophic. They were a cataclysmic force waiting to be unleashed.
How did you stand against that?
You don’t, he thought bitterly. You hide and wait for the world to end.
But he couldn’t do that anymore than he could run.
Damiola had dared to hope they might have been lucky. It was naïve of him. Nature always sought out balance. Julie’s visit, trying to guilt him into helping, had done nothing more than put the lives of those five children on him. There was no escaping the fact that they weighed heavily. They were as good as lost if he didn’t at least try to save them, but short of going toe-to-toe with Arawn’s wildlings he didn’t know what he could do.
Stop lying to yourself, old man. You know exactly what you’ve got to do, and you know exactly what will happen when you try and do it, which is why you’re putting it off.
He walked among the gravestones, trailing his fingertips across the rough surfaces of a few of the closest, not thinking about what they represented.
He reached his own mausoleum.
&n
bsp; The crow moved four times during his sad parade through the dead, keeping him in sight every step of the way. He saw a battered sign declaring no loitering, no ball games, and couldn’t imagine what sort of kid would willingly hang around a place like this. The crow cawed and rose up above him like some kind of omen. He did his best to ignore it.
The ironwork around his final resting place had seen better days; it was choked with weeds and climbers, colorful blossoms just beginning to flower on the vines offering a brilliant counterpoint to the rust. He pushed the gate aside and entered. Instead of taking the few short steps down to the doorway, he lay on his back in the grass and looked up at the sky. The world was never less than strange from this perspective. The clouds gathered, foreshortening his view of eternity.
Damiola pushed all of the thoughts of Arawn and the wildlings from his mind, banishing the face of Seth Lockwood and the memory of his rage as they cornered him.
He needed to be in the moment.
Clear.
Calm.
The crow watched him intently.
It was impossible to pretend it wasn’t there, so instead he used it, concentrating on the minutia of its feathers, the tiny imperfections as its wings beat a steady rhythm against the air, rising and falling, drifting, rising and falling, as it circled overhead. The bird’s oily black feathers glistened slickly in the moon. Damiola concentrated on his breathing, with each inhalation imagining he drew the universe and time into his body, and with each breath that slipped out between his lips he let his soul out to merge with the source of all things, sending it back whence it came. He’d learned the trick from a fakir almost a century ago. He tried to remember the man’s name … it sounded like a foreign land or maybe a mountain. Alkeran. That was it. It was the only thing about the fakir that he did remember. There were no details to the man’s face when he tried to bring it to mind, but that was memory for you. He hung the clothes of recollection on sensory triggers, smells, funny little ticks or gestures, and more often than not forgot to fill out the skeleton with simple things like names or faces. What he did remember was the story of how the fakir claimed to have come by the sacred knowledge whilst on pilgrimage to some remote corner of Tibet’s perilous mountains. A guide had taken him north—a month’s walk through thin air and ice—into shadows of the highest peaks to pay homage to a holy man who they claimed had taken up residence beyond the snow line. The man, they said, had lived a thousand years and more, and possessed wisdom from the oldest of the mystical texts. They called him the Eternal. Alkeran spun a good yarn, and his fractured English hid the fact that he had been born into a life of relative privilege in the Raj, not forced to work the tea plantations until his fingers bled, and the more obvious lie that no man could live for a thousand years. But no one was interested in the reality of it; they only wanted the showmanship. That was the secret to selling the illusion. Alkeran was on the same touring circuit as Damiola, more often than not a day or two ahead of him at smaller venues, no more than a week ahead at the major theaters, lifting the red curtain to offer the good, ordinary people of England a glimpse at the mysteries of the subcontinent where men could live an eternity.
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