The boatman steered them out into the storm, his vessel riding the waves as they splashed up around the sides, some rising up over the top to soak his passengers as the sky turned from gray to black.
Sister Mazoe looked troubled by the subtle transformations of the world around them, but she said nothing.
The winds picked up, blustering across the wide expanse of sea to fold in on themselves, creating a wind funnel around their little boat that whipped up higher and higher walls of waves that it sent crashing against their sides again and again. The implacable boatman rode out the storm without so much as flinching. He stood on the prow, with his hand on the tiller staring out into the wild waters. They sailed on into the rising tempest. Clouds thickened in the ever-darkening sky, choking out what little light there had been.
Sister Mazoe lit the storm lamp that hung from the pole at the bow, and even as the small flame caught, began to sing forth a brighter light to shine their way.
“What’s happening?” Julie asked, after what felt like an hour or more of being tossed around by the sea’s tantrum.
It was Josh who answered him, not the Sister. “The world is changing … can’t you feel it?”
He could. He closed a second hand around the hilt of Manannan’s sword. Something within the blade was in tune with the elements here, and served as a conduit for Julie through which he could feel the change that as it took place. “It is the magic,” he said. “It’s being drawn away.”
He knew by whom, and he knew where to, and he knew that made the coming fight all the more one-sided as the god drew more and more of the land’s lost magic around himself.
They were doomed before they had even begun to fight.
But then, that didn’t matter did it, because Josh had no intention of fighting.
The waves rose and fell; the wind rose and did not fall.
And through it all, not so much as a crease in the boatman’s hooded robe stirred.
The storm worsened the longer they were out in it. Biting cold winds raged around them. Julie gripped the hilt of the sword, and leaned forward, his forehead resting on the pommel. Every now and then he looked up to see Josh looking back at him. Did the other man sense his weakness? How could he even ask this of him? It was too much.
The way the others looked at him, they knew something had passed between the two men in that tower room, but neither asked what.
Up ahead, he saw the silhouette of another tower in the distance, impossibly far away in the raging storm. The waves crashed against the little boat’s hull, bullying it across the sea. It didn’t seem to get closer no matter how long they sailed toward it, as though the storm held their boat in place while the sea tossed and churned, filling the air with salt spray and brine. The tower was a skeletally black shadow rising up and up and up. There was a crooked twist to it, or an optical illusion conjured by the storm.
Julie felt the first fat drops of rain against his face.
Beside him, he saw that Alex had a white-knuckle grip on the side, while Ellie couldn’t take her eyes off the boatman as he guided them on. She said something, but the wind whipped away her words. He could, however, still hear the song Sister Mazoe sang.
They were taking on water, but the boatman didn’t seem the least bit concerned.
He simply steered his course.
And still the tower remained forever out of reach.
They drifted on.
Julie closed his eyes. They were going to reach the tower; they were going to cross back over to the other side of the veil, and the moment would come when he would have to kill his girlfriend’s brother and end any hope of happiness he would ever have in life. And he knew he wouldn’t be able to do it. It wasn’t a shot at redemption, no matter how Josh tried to sell it to him. It was a one-way ticket to damnation. Then I will do it for you, a voice sounded in his mind.
He opened his eyes. No one in the boat was talking, and even if they had been, the gale-force winds battering the tiny vessel would have drowned out their words.
He looked over his shoulder, back the way that they had come. The ruined chapel had long since disappeared beneath the tumult, then back to the sword in his hands. Could it have placed those words in his mind? Had he heard the voice of Manannan mac Lir, the last man to slay a god?
He had help, the voice offered, wryly.
The tower was closer now. Above it, he saw strands of red, like veins of raspberry ripple, swirling through the black sky. The heart of the spiral appeared to be directly over the tower of Gorias. The spiral wound itself tighter and tighter, the blood-red stain spreading throughout the sky.
The wind direction changed noticeably. It was no longer battering at their faces, but driving them on toward a distant unseen shore. It was carrying them home.
Julie tried to frame a thought, giving shape to a question in his mind. The best he could come up with in the end was perhaps the simplest way of asking it: Who are you?
I have many names; some call me the Answerer, others the Retaliator. I have been called the Godslayer and the Widowmaker, but none of those capture my soul. I am Freagarthach.
The boat dragged across stones, running aground. The shore was still a long, long way away, but the flat-bottomed boat wasn’t getting any closer.
Sister Mazoe stood slowly, unhooking the lantern from the pole in the bow, and stepped down into the shallow water. “We must walk from here,” she told the others, who followed her one at a time out of the boat.
Ellie reached out a hand to steady herself as she descended, her hand resting on the boatman’s, which still held the tiller. “Thank you,” she said.
“You are most welcome,” the boatman said. His voice sent shivers all the way into Julie’s soul.
The rain lashed down, stinging their faces, as they waded toward the distant shore. Visibility was down to a few feet; beyond that, things remained a blur. Above the splash of the sea and their heavy footsteps Julie heard voices. He stopped walking and told the others to do likewise. They weren’t alone out here. The voices were raised in a keening lament. He couldn’t see anyone for the storm. The disconnected song of mourning chilled him far more than either the storm or the sea. The singers approached them. Out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of movement; a dark shape shrouded within the storm. As he turned, drawn to it, he saw it was a man. Worse, he knew the man. Not so long ago he had called him a friend.
Huw “Taff” Carter stood there: adrift, lost, staring with his blind eyes and seeing nothing.
Julie rubbed at his face. The rain beat down. His shirt clung to his skin. The rainwash stung his eyes.
Sister Mazoe told the shade, “Begone, you will find no peace here.”
Taff broke down in tears and wept as they walked away, leaving the shade in the deeper water.
“That was harsh,” Ellie said.
They waded on without another word. The storm gathered force, making headway difficult, as the wind battered them back from the shore as though nature herself was determined they should never find their way back to London.
Thunder rolled, and a crack of lightning opened the sky.
Mazoe led them on. In the distance Julie could just about make out a small golden orb of light, like a firefly hovering in the air before them.
They walked toward the light.
They walked for an hour and an hour more until the storm broke and the light streamed down in bright, unbroken beams. On the hillside before them he saw a dark tower, at its foot an orchard and a ruined chapel, each a perfect replica of the one they had left behind at Murias. “Gorias,” Mazoe said. The light was a lantern, much like the one she held in her hand, and the woman—Not just any woman, surely? Surely, he was looking at Sister Mazoe’s twin?—holding it, beckoned them ashore.
The women bowed to each other.
The eye of the storm seemed to be centered above the tower, which he realized on closer inspection was different in subtle ways to the one at Murias, with a deep fissure runni
ng up its twisting spire.
“Where is the dimgate?” Josh asked, without preamble. “Our way home? Where is it?”
“This way,” Mazoe said, leading them toward the tower.
There was no door, Julie realized, as her path took them around the base of the huge dark tower.
She continued her strange path, walking a second lap around the base of the tower, anticlockwise.
“What are you doing?” Julie said to her back. Above them the red swirl broke and spilled out into the sky, staining the firmament blood red.
“Opening the door,” the Sister told him without looking back, and as they finished their third pass, sure enough there was a door in the base of the tower that somehow they had missed when they’d walked past the same spot not once but twice before.
She opened the door.
Josh was the first to step through. Ellie and Alex followed him. Julie didn’t. Not at first. He waited to be sure they were gone, then asked Mazoe, “This sword? Can it? I mean … is it … alive? Can it talk to me? In my head? Or am I losing my mind?”
She smiled at him. “You need to leave now.”
“You’re not going to tell me?”
Mazoe turned her back on him and walked away. “It is your choice, walk through the door, or stay, but if you do not decide soon, the choice will be taken for you. The gateway cannot stay open forever.”
We don’t belong in this place, the voice of the sword urged. Not when there is a fight waiting on the other side of that doorway.
Julie went through the door.
49
And stepped into the movie set world of Glass Town.
Or, more accurately, into the scaffolding and bare boards behind the set itself, where all of the magic was made incredibly mundane. The others were waiting for him. “This is it?” Alex asked, ducking beneath a two-by-four as Josh led them out into the actual lot, which had served as Eleanor Raines’s prison for a year of her life—one hundred years of theirs.
“This is it,” Josh said, turning around and spreading his arms wide as though offering it up. “Not much, is it?”
“Not much?” Alex objected. “It’s a piece of London that was lifted out of time for a century and hidden in limbo. I’d say it’s more than much.”
“What is this place?” Ellie asked. She, of course, was the only one who hadn’t at least heard of the mythical Glass Town that had haunted the Lockwood and Raines families since the fall of Ruben Glass’s cinematic empire and the disappearance of a young actress that led to an obsession that refused to die.
“It was going to be London’s version of Hollywood, once upon a time,” Josh told her. “Things didn’t work out the way the owner wanted,” Josh explained. “Now, it’s the way home.”
He led them through the streets, past the rows of parked cars and painted façades, the whitewashed steps and neatly trimmed hedgerows that never grew because they were as fake as everything else in this place. He led them to where the fissure had opened out into the street where, for him and Julie at least, it had all begun.
Now, rather than a tear in the illusion, there was a street corner. There was nothing magical about that. They emerged amid a blare of horns. It wasn’t cars this time. The horns belonged to rioters. It was impossible to tell how many there were, because what should have been a busy high street in the heart of London looked more like the depths of Coldfall Wood.
An entire forest had grown in the time they had been gone.
The street was still there, and the shops—but the windows were gone, smashed, and vegetation grew everywhere, climbing up the walls and in through the empty windows, weeds, vines, and moss. Infinite shades of green and brown, all so filled with life.
The magic is returning, the voice of the sword told Julie. Can’t you feel it?
He could.
It was in the air. The tingle prickled his skin. The thrill stirred the fine hairs all along his forearms.
It was here, and not just in the presence of the Hunt, either. This went deeper than the chalk brothers and their kin. This was rooted all the way down in the land herself.
And that couldn’t be good.
Julie saw the fallen sign of a coffee shop farther up the street, and between them and it, the surface of the road had been torn up by the sudden profusion of roots that had forced their way up through the surface. Through the trees he saw the dirt-smeared faces of the kids, armed with sticks and stones. They looked feral, the grime of the streets like war paint smeared across their cheeks.
“How long were we away?” Alex asked her brother. She turned from the feral children to look behind them, not that there was much difference in the view: more trees, thick boles of oak and sycamore and a carpet of acorn caps and winged seeds.
“I don’t know,” Josh said. “But by the looks of it, a long time.”
“I can’t even…” Ellie said.
“No,” Julie disagreed. “Not long. Days. Maybe weeks. But it doesn’t matter. It’s not about how long we’ve been gone; it’s about it being long enough. Can’t you feel it? This place is different now. It’s changed. Or changing.”
“I can feel it,” Ellie said. “But I don’t know what it is that I’m feeling.”
“The magic is returning,” he said, echoing the sword. “And it’s happening fast. It started with us, with you being able to speak with the dead,” he told Ellie. “And with you trapping Seth in the mirror world,” he told Josh. “But it’s moved beyond that now. It’s reaching out like the roots of the trees there, working its way into every aspect of the city, and this,” he swept his hand out to encompass the forest that had spilled out into the city overnight, “is the result of Arawn’s presence here. It’s only going to get worse the longer he’s allowed to walk these streets. He doesn’t belong here. We’ve got to find him, and end this.”
Josh nodded, and rather than say anything else, turned and walked toward the ruin of the coffee shop and the kids hidden within the trees. As he approached them, he called out, “I want you to take me to him.” When they didn’t immediately answer, he named the Horned God. That was enough to draw one of the boys out of hiding. He wore the remnants of a prep school uniform, his faded red-and-blue-striped tie around his scalp like a bandanna, chest bare, skinny arms covered in cuts and scratches from the new undergrowth. “And who the fuck are you when you’re at home?”
Josh said, “I am his new host. Without me he dies.”
50
She knew Arawn would send his Hunters after her.
Blundering about in her wake, Gogmagot and Corenius weren’t particularly adept at stealth. She’d been aware of them for some considerable time now, lurking, trying to build up the courage to face her. She even caught snatches of their conversation; each trying to goad the other into taking her down. They sounded like children with their borrowed voices, but then Arawn had always believed so firmly in youth, in the vitality and innocence it represented, whereas she had preferred the wisdom of age.
“Come out, come out wherever you are,” she called, knowing they would hear her.
The May Queen decided to make it easy for them, and followed the steps down into an underpass. The tunnel beneath the roads was dark, with barely any light at the end because of the way the steps doubled back on themselves to create a roof. It stank of piss and shit and all of those mortal stenches. The walls had been painted with crude graffiti—not words or gang tags this time, but offerings to her kind, as the children answered the call to rise up. She recognized attempts to paint the antlers of the Horned God in broad brushstrokes of black behind the silhouette of a faceless man, and so many garishly colored flowers around him it could have been the heart of summer. She liked it. If the meadow was her palace, this dank piss-stinking tunnel was her chapel. She could work with it.
She plucked a flower from the painting on the wall, willing it into substance in her hand. It was a beautifully simple daisy; one of her favorites.
She raised it to her nose and savored t
he sweet scent, then whispered a word to draw down the first bee into the tunnel. It came, along with a second and a third, answering her call. Soon a dozen buzzed around the delicate flower in her hand, and still more came down into the darkness to taste its pollen. Fifty. Hundred. The buzzing intensified, amplified by the cramped confines of the tunnel, growing louder and louder by the second as more of London’s bees freshly woken for the season, came down to draw pollen from the daisy. Within a minute there were easily ten thousand bees crawling all over every inch of her skin, tangled in her hair, and climbing on top of each other and burrowing beneath to taste the skin of the May Queen.
Their tiny wings vibrated against her eyes and cheeks as she watched the two fools enter the tunnel. Their silhouettes transformed them into brutish shapes, closer to their natural form as she remembered it.
In this aspect, they were no match for her. The old woman they could have hurt, possibly even ended, bludgeoning her with their crude blows, but renewed, they didn’t stand a prayer. They had no inkling what they were going up against, and but for the fact they had murdered five children before coming for her, she would have pitied them. Now, with the blood of the Sleepers on their hands, they deserved everything she was about to do to them. And more.
She let her fingers trail over the petals of the flower in her hand, ignoring the bees as they swarmed around her, and plucked them one at a time, as though playing a game of he loves me, he loves me not. She didn’t need the petals to tell her how he felt. He had come back to save her in his own sweet, twisted way. For all their differences, they wanted the same thing: to protect the land, though where she chose to nurture and nourish the soil with little acts of love, he chose blood.
“We can smell you,” Gogmagot said, his voice carrying down the tunnel. “Your heat.”
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