“Tell him I’ll do my best,” Julie said.
She inclined her head, listening. Nodded once, in the direction of the doorway and interpreted the dead man for him. “He said he was wrong. Or right, but too focused on the one part of one for one, and forgot all about the fact that two were banished. If something came through in Seth’s place, then something else came here for Eleanor. He doesn’t know what, but he’s sure they are here, and have been for a very long time.”
He was right.
Of course he was.
One for one couldn’t just apply to Seth. That wasn’t how physical laws of the universe worked—they were universal.
“What do they want?”
It was a question the ghost couldn’t answer. Instead, Ellie took her hands away from the dead man’s chest and told him, “Arawn has dispatched Hunters into the city. They are wearing the bodies of normal kids—the missing kids we’ve been looking for, I think—but they’re not themselves. They’re just vessels for these ancient spirits that have come through since Arawn opened the gate. That’s where he was when he died,” her eyes darted toward the dead man on the slab. “Not here. He was spying on them when Arawn found him. He severed the link between the old man’s soul and his body. That’s why he’s still here. He doesn’t know how long it will be until he can no longer maintain any sort of grip on this plane, but he’s trying desperately not to go because the fight is only just beginning. He said the gate is within an ancient stone circle called the fairy ring, in Coldfall Wood. It’s still open and as long as it is, then other creatures from the Annwyn can come through the mists. There are worse things out there than the Horned God. Much worse. He has seen them. You’ve got to close the gate.”
“How the fuck am I supposed to do that?”
Ellie Taylor laughed suddenly; a single sharp snark of laughter she almost choked on. She looked from Julie to the empty doorway and back again. “He said without getting yourself killed.”
“That’s helpful.”
His phone rang.
40
To kill the king, you must become the king.
The thought belonged to the old woman, but it was there inside her head, telling her what they needed to do. Arawn was the king. She could see each point of his majestic crown of antlers in her mind’s eye. The presence of these memories was overpowering. Alex was on the verge of losing herself, like a castaway clinging to the wreckage of a sinking ship. There was no way to sift through them and quieten those that weren’t her own.
She staggered out of the hospital into the fresh air.
Sounds assailed her from every side; kids running toward the big wheel and the fairground beneath it; lovers walking and whispering arms entwined; tourists marveling at the historical buildings in singsong back and forth that sounded like mynah birds; takeaway cartons being cast aside and cans rattling into the trash; the swish of fabric from suits rushing to the office and the clack of towering high heels on the paving stones tapping out their Morse code messages of despair; horns on the river, cars on the roads; the chorus of life that was the city closed in around her. She staggered out of the courtyard and across the cycle path to lean against the iron railings overlooking the river.
It was all in her head now. The grand plan.
Alex closed her eyes, trying to concentrate on nothing more than the next breath, on the simple in and out of it, filling her lungs with the pollutants that pretended at freshness.
The old woman had shared the past with her when she’d gripped Alex’s head in her crow-clawlike fingers, forcing her to see it all. A burden shared was a burden doubled.
She felt like her head was going to explode. The plates of bone couldn’t contain the sheer mass of memories forced into her mind. The blood thundered against them, a constant drumming, drumming, drumming that refused to be silenced.
Alex threw back her head and screamed back against it. She felt tiny. Irrelevant. That wasn’t helped by the fact that her bansheelike wail didn’t cause so much as a ripple on the water below.
No one even looked her way. Had a screaming woman become that common an occurrence in the city that it didn’t even merit a second glance?
Her legs gave out. If she hadn’t been holding onto the rail, she would have gone down in a heap.
The memories refused to be silenced. They bubbled up one after the other, offering her glimpses of lush green fields and towering ancient forests, of kings of the wildwood and queens of the May. They flooded her head with visions of druidic stone circles, of moon worshipers watching a red sunrise and all of the portents it promised, of the land beneath her feet souring and slowly dying. That was the hardest to take. Watching the Blight Priests spread their sickness twisted her gut.
Alex spent another forty minutes leaning against the railing—just staring out across the choppy water as she tried to come to terms with the staggering sense of loss the old woman had burdened her with.
How could the world have changed so much?
How could they care so little about it now? Humanity had a parasitic relationship with the land, like skin cancer.
A ripple of motion in the Thames caught her eye. Within it, Alex half-imagined she caught a fleeting glimpse of a face beneath the surface.
A girl.
But she was gone as soon as she was there.
The memory lingered, and in it she’d been called Jenny Greenteeth. A witch to some, a siren to others; she was a dark and vengeful water spirit. And she was here, returned.
Before Alex could turn away, a kindly old man came up beside her and asked if she was okay. She nodded. “I like to come here to watch the water,” he told her. “It’s got a way of making you feel so small. It just goes on about its journey, ripple after ripple racing toward the sea only to be swallowed up by it. Sometimes I think there’s a life lesson in that, don’t you? That we’re all racing to some place where we can simply stop being us?”
Before she could agree an explosion rocked the horizon.
It was followed by two more in quick succession.
The old guy’s mouth opened wide and his hand gripped the rail tighter.
It looked for all the world as though he was having a heart attack, but quickly became obvious that he was staring in appalled shock at the familiar view of St. Paul’s and all of those unchanging rooftops, spires, and domes suddenly bathed in flame as arsonists struck building after building.
Alex knew what was happening.
The Wild Hunt was abroad, taking back the streets after a millennia’s exile. The Hunters were ruthlessly efficient in the war they were waging on the city, aiming one brutal strike after another at iconic landmarks, and wouldn’t be satisfied until they’d brought the whole place down around them.
That was their endgame. Their win.
They were here to tilt the balance of nature and bring the old world back, the ancient woods and their earth magic. She remembered the words of the old woman when she’d called Arawn the once and future king, condemning him to return to the land at the time of her greatest need, and Alex understood. The land had faced a million threats, but none so dangerous as the voracious appetite for progress and industry that had gripped the last few generations.
“You don’t belong here,” she told the memory, and turned her back on the landscape of the riot unfolding across the river just as a young woman—breathtaking in her simple innocence and beauty, a summer child if ever there had been one—emerged from the main door in a hospital gown. She looked at Alex. A flicker of recognition passed between them before the woman walked away.
It was in the eyes.
Even across the short distance of the cycle path, it was obvious that she was staring into the old, old eyes of the hibernating goddess she’d spent the last few years caring for. From within the shared memories, the bitter pain of transformation from mother to maiden, from maiden to hag, hag to mother, mother to hag came back to her. Each time, the toll the change exerted on the goddess’s flesh was beyond imaging
. It wasn’t like she simply changed a mask, slipping from one identity into the next. Each time she was born again demanded fresh sacrifice.
With the earth’s magic long since soured, the only vitality of creation lay in blood. She remembered the rituals of sacrifice that welcomed the Queen of the May, though in her mind they were more vampiric in nature than the jingling bells of Morris dancers and garland wreaths and maypoles could ever be. There was something so much more sinister about the dance that ended with youngest and most beautiful being offered up to the hag so that she might be born again.
Alex looked again at the woman’s back as she walked away, at the gap in the surgical gown that exposed the curve of her spine and its ladder of bones, and the flawless skin there, and knew that she was looking at a rejuvenated Emmaline Barnes. Sacrifices had been made and the ancient goddess was born again.
Instinctively, Alex moved to follow her, but before she’d even let go of the railings she felt the phone vibrate in her pocket.
Julie’s face looked up at her from the screen as she answered it.
“Hey, you,” she said, still watching Emmaline Barnes.
“You busy?”
“Always. What’s up?”
He took longer than she’d have liked to answer. A seed of doubt flourished, rooting in her belly.
“Josh is a mess. Damiola’s dead.”
That stopped her cold.
She didn’t ask how.
Dozens of questions occurred to her, shock bringing them thick and fast. She only asked one, because it was the only one that mattered in that second.
“Where are you?”
“Just left the cemetery. We’re heading toward the old wood behind the Rothery. I’ll explain later.” Julie gave her a rendezvous point on the south side of the river, on the outskirts of the estate. It was no more than twenty minutes’ walk from where she was. Five in a cab.
“I’ll be there. Look after him, Jules.”
“You know I will.”
“I know … But I’m asking anyway.”
“Stick to the backstreets,” he told her. “It’s hell out here.”
Alex walked out on her responsibilities at the hospital. As the crow flies, it would have been quicker to stick to the main roads, but with fires rising across the city, and the fact she couldn’t transform into a black-winged bird, Alex had no choice but to take a convoluted path through backstreets and narrow alleyways. She kept on walking until she saw three people coming toward her in the opposite direction; Julie, Josh, and a woman she half-recognized but didn’t know.
Her brother was a mess. He looked like a tramp buried beneath layers of coats. He was wearing Damiola’s on top of Boone’s. He must have been roasting beneath the weight of fabric. His face was red and puffy from where he’d been crying; though, there were no tears now, only steely determination.
He leaned on Julie.
“You look like crap,” Alex said, her lips twitching into something that never quite became a smile.
“Love you, too,” Josh said. “He told you?”
She nodded.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. I’m not good with stuff like this.”
“Just say you’ll help me finish this.”
“You know I will. You and me against the world, Bro.”
He laughed at that, and it was almost as much of a laugh as her smile had been a smile.
They walked and talked, not looking toward their final destination. There was a denial in the way they looked down or looked at each other as Alex filled in the gaps they didn’t already know; how Emmaline Barnes, the old woman she’d been looking after forever, had finally broken her silence to call the locked-in kids Sleepers, and begged her to protect them. She didn’t explain how she knew what they were. How was she supposed to explain that the May Queen had planted the images right there in her head as her fingernails dug into her temples? Alex told the others how when she’d rung around the hospitals, she heard the same thing every time: in less than twenty-four hours Annie Cho, Bethany Laws, and Kate Jenkins had all died, all of them in suspicious circumstances. There were only two Sleepers left. Two girls between Arawn and closing the gate to the Underworld. Both Ellie and Julie knew the names. As they crossed the litter-strewn streets of the Rothery, they offered the police perspective, sharing the mundane narrative from the incident room. Alex finally looked toward the specter of Coldfall Wood, the ancient trees coming to life for her in a way that they never had before in a lifetime of living in their shadow. Julie told her that the working theory was that Stephen Blackmoore and Rupert Brooke were behind the deaths. Which was right, but so very, very wrong, as well. Alex struggled with how to frame the truth that she’d been caring for a hibernating deity—the mother, maiden, and crone deep-rooted in myth—and that Blackmoore and Brooke were no longer themselves, but Hunters doing the bidding of a reborn Stag King in severing the mortal ties that bound them still to the other place. She saw it all now, had glimpsed the grandeur of what was lost, seen the kingdoms unfurled before her, the bright beauty of the shires and rolling hills, the shimmering blue waters of the inland lakes and the stark-white cliffs that marked the edge of Albion. She had seen it all as it had once been, back before the first invasion of the Bain Shee and their Blight Priests and the souring of the land as mankind plundered Mother’s heart for all of her riches. She felt sick drawing on the memory; conflicted. No one ever believed themselves the villains of the peace, but having glimpsed what lay beyond that wall, remembering the horrors of the vampiric creatures lurking there, she could almost understand why Arawn would lay waste to everything to stop them, such were the stakes in his mind. This wasn’t his world, though; this wasn’t the place the May Queen or the Horned God had left behind. It had moved on. Whatever essence of magic there might have been once was long gone, in the same way that the coal and oil reserves were being depleted. It was the way of all things. New forms of energy would be found, be it the sun, the moon, or the air. Things hadn’t changed that much in the centuries since the land had yielded up its last dregs of magic. The land endured. No matter the hell it was put through, it endured.
She looked around them, at the red-brick Eden that was the Rothery, as man-made a canker on the corpse of the world as ever built, but she didn’t see the rot; she saw homes, safe places, and despite everything, despite the grime and the decay and everything that had happened to her family here, for the first time in years she saw hope, too. That was just how close the bond was between the mythological, the monstrous, and the mundane. “But I know how we win.”
“How?” Julie shook his head. “There are four of us. We don’t have tanks or guns or bombs. There’s nothing special about any of us.” She didn’t contradict him. “We don’t have a prayer.”
She wanted to tell him prayers were useless anyway. He was right; they wouldn’t stand a chance going toe-to-toe with the old gods and their rioting faithful. But they didn’t need to. That wasn’t their win. “We need to look for the exhaust port in the Death Star.”
Josh burst out laughing. He shook his head. “Trust you to nerd it up in the face of certain death.”
“It’s a gift,” she agreed. “We didn’t start this war, and the fighting on the streets are the first skirmishes of something much bigger. We can’t allow Arawn to dictate the terms of this fight, because you’re right, we can’t beat him like that.”
“It’s about more than just him,” She said. “He wants what we want, but is capable of acts that to us must seem incredibly evil simply because all he cares about is banishing the greater evil.”
“Like the greater good?” Ellie said.
She nodded. “Exactly that.”
“Then how do we beat him and his kind without the greater evil winning?” Ellie asked for all of them.
She thought of Aos Shee’s weapon, Freagarthach, that the old woman had shown her, and the warrior’s tomb where it lay waiting for a righteous soul to wield it once more. It offered hope. Light in
the gathering darkness. “The greater evil, they’re monsters of mythology. It is about balance. There are the Bain Shee—the evil—on one side; the Aos Shee—the good—on the other: light and dark. They are mythic creatures, creatures of the fae lands. Dökkálfar and Ljósálfar, the Norse called them, opposing sides in the eternal conflict of good and evil. It doesn’t matter what we call them; they don’t change. Names don’t mean anything. They don’t make a difference. Their nature remains the same. There is us, there is them. We need a weapon equally mythic in nature to fight them. A sword to kill a king. We won’t find that here. We’ve lost the magic, whatever there once was, but we might, just might, find it over there. So, we do what we came here to do. We walk into the woods, find the gate we know is in there, and cross over to the other side,” Alex almost said to the Dark Side, but caught herself before that slipped out. “And find that sword. Arawn wants the gate closed, we know that much, so we can’t let that happen. Not on his terms. The Sleepers are in there. Their spirits. Souls. Whatever you want to call it. Kids are in there because of what you did.” She looked at her brother as she leveled the accusation. He didn’t deny it. “There may only be two left now, but that’s still two innocent kids holding the way open. We need to do everything we can to find that sword, and if we can, bring those kids home.”
She set off with purpose, marching toward the trees.
The ancient forest had begun to spill out into the streets of the council estate. Nature in all of her glorious color and vibrant life had begun to peer up through the cracks and make her presence felt. The trees themselves wore mosslike green beards. The east wind blew through the branches, stirring the leaves into a gentle rush of sound like urgent whispers spreading through the trees back to the Gatekeeper waiting by the archway into the Annwyn.
Coldfall Wood Page 24