Josh nodded.
“I hate you,” Julie said.
“With good reason,” Josh agreed. “But that doesn’t change the fact that this is where we part ways.”
He hadn’t realized that his sister had closed the gap between them and had heard everything.
“I don’t fucking think so,” she said.
“Please, Lexy,” Josh said, resigned to one last fight with his little sister. Why should it be any different? It was what they did. A smile flirted with his lips, but he could see that was just going to piss her off and he needed her on his side. “I need you to go with Julie. I can’t tell you why, but when you are far enough away he’ll explain it all to you. He’s going to need you to be strong, Sis.”
“What are you going to do?”
“To kill the king, you must become the king,” he said. “So I’m going to become the king.”
She looked at him then—really looked at him—and nodded. “Are you sure it’s the only way?”
“It is.”
“And it will work?”
“Probably not.”
“But what you need us to do will make a difference?”
“All the difference in the world. Put it this way, if you don’t, I’m dead.”
“No pressure then,” Alex said. “Okay, we’ll do it. Whatever it is. We’ll do it. You can count on us. We won’t let you down. You worry about what you’ve got to do, not about us, okay?” He nodded. “Just promise me one thing, please.”
“What?” Josh asked.
“That this is where it ends.”
“I promise,” he lied. Sometimes lying was a kindness; other times it was a torment. He wasn’t sure which kind of lie this was, other than a necessary one.
They hugged, the embrace going on too long. He felt the tears threatening to come, and pushed her away with a hollow grin. “Don’t make me get soppy, Sis.”
He watched them go, heading off toward the hall of mirrors within Damiola’s mausoleum. It would take them a couple of hours to get there. His part of this would be over by then.
He walked on toward the Rothery, knowing where he would find the old god. There was only one place he would be by: the lightning-struck tree outside The Hunter’s Horns. So much of it came back to the old woodland, and that tree was the oldest in all of the ancient forest. The first tree.
He walked familiar but different streets, knowing that it was the last time he would pass all of these familiar landmarks that had been signposts for so much of his life. He passed the old secondhand bookstore on the corner where he had spent his pocket money as a teenager, only now it wasn’t a bookstore, it was a chain store coffee shop and all of the fantastic worlds were gone. He stood on the corner where he’d had his first kiss pressed up against the wall by a girl with too much alcohol on her breath and across the street he saw the black hole that had been the window of the electronics store where all the men had gathered at four forty on a Saturday afternoon to watch the football scores roll by on the teletype, worshipers at their chosen altar. Then there was the dilapidated husk of the old Latimer Road cinema with its posters of Myrna Shepherd still on display behind the cracked glass of the box office. These streets were haunted by his personal ghosts. They were the streets that made him. His mind played tricks on him, offering glimpses of his childhood, the flickering shades of friends past walking by on the other side of the road. He would have done anything to be able to call out to them, to live just one more day in their company without a care beyond whatever obsession drove the twelve-year-old Joshua Raines.
And you will, if that is how you choose to use the magic that will flow through you, Josh. If that is what you want, that is what you shall have.
“You promised,” he said. “You promised you would stay out of my head during these last few hours. You gave me your word that you wouldn’t spy on me.”
I did, but it isn’t important, is it? You don’t have anything you are trying to hide from me, do you?
“No,” Josh lied. “But seeing as I’m going to die, I want to spend the last few hours alone with my memories.”
And you don’t want me seeing the pretty little girl you used to lust after, or the lies you told to people who thought you were their friend, the ugly thoughts that won’t go away. I can understand that. No one wants to share their ugliness. Or is it your blood kin? Is that who you are trying to hide from me? Is it Seth Lockwood? Because I already tasted that memory—your grandfather’s funeral, your mother’s murder—it is there in the front of your mind all of the time, that final moment where you could have robbed him of his life but chose a punishment far worse and the fear that doing so cost you your soul. You have no secrets from me. Not now. Not ever. Now come to me, let us finish this. Our enemies will not wait for you to dwell among your ghosts indefinitely. We must be ready to fight for our beloved Albion. Are you ready?
Josh saw the tall figure of the antlered Arawn standing in the shade of the lightning-struck tree, waiting for him. The others were already assembled: the Gatekeeper; the Knucker, the impossible wooden warrior; Robin Goodfellow. And they were surrounded by so many other creatures; all of them waiting to witness Josh’s sacrifice.
“Yes,” he said, knowing his voice couldn’t possibly carry, but knowing that it didn’t need to.
Then come; give yourself to me.
53
“Take it, it’s yours; it always was,” Arawn told Josh as he hesitated.
The dense cloak of leaves and the clothes of moss, grass, and bark beneath gave the figure substance, but in the shadows of his face Josh could see he was fading. And fast. He wasn’t made for this place. Time here tore at him, peeling away the layers of skin like flakes of dust. Soon there would be nothing left but the eighteen points of the antlers that curved wickedly away from Arawn’s temples, and the bleached white bones of his skull, which, too, would crumble to dust and blow away on the swirling winds. Arawn held out an elaborately carved staff for Josh to take. The bulbous head had been hollowed out to resemble the same antlers that grew out of his skull.
Josh reached out, closing his fingers around the rowan staff.
And felt the thrill of possession, as the Horned God’s essence flooded into him, overwhelming his sense of self. The entire world reeled around him. Nausea purged his gut, vomit staining his borrowed clothes. He couldn’t let go of the staff; the muscles in his hand contracted around the ancient wood so tightly nothing would be able to pry it out of his dying grasp.
He felt himself dying one muscle at a time. The agony was unbearable; the realization that he’d been lied to, worse.
There was no grace.
The god swelled into him, filling every inch of his mind, devouring him, even as the leaves of his cloak began to burn and curl and the moss of his shirt slowly rotted away, stinking of mold as it crumbled. He stared into the god’s eyes, seeing himself there, and he still couldn’t break the connection; his hand stubbornly refused to relinquish its grip on the rowan staff, even as it was killing him.
You lied to me, he fought desperately to remain himself, flailing around inside himself, in search of anything that might anchor him to himself, so that he might stay Joshua Raines just a few seconds longer.
Of course I did, Arawn said. I am a god. You are nothing.
Josh threw back his head and screamed as he felt himself diminish. The world around him narrowed down to two points of darkness: Arawn’s eyes, burning into him. He saw his own pathetic body twisting in pain as the ancient Lord of the Underworld took possession of his bones. The golden leaves turned brittle and fell away; all the seasons of their life happening in just a few seconds, until nature’s cloak was nothing more than dust on the ground and Arawn stood before Josh, naked and vulnerable. There was fear in his face—an impossibly young face, broad featured, handsome, but more than anything, innocent—as the god that had been holding back the years abandoned the last body it had stolen, giving it to time. And like all things, it became dust.
&nb
sp; Yes. Yes. Yes. Arawn was rapturous inside his mind. Josh felt it disappear one memory at a time; his life snatched away and consumed by the Shee creature. He desperately tried to cling on to something: a memory, one thing, just the one that would let him linger. But the sheer force of King Stag’s will was enough to drown him beneath a tide of so many other memories that didn’t belong to him. He tried to fix on Eleanor’s face, on her red dress, as she’d rushed away down the rainswept street the first time he’d seen her, but like the headline on the newspaper stand, the details bled into each other, losing all shape and substance as the rain wept down. When the memory girl looked back at him, she didn’t wear the hauntingly familiar features of Eleanor Raines. She wore the face of the old woman, Emmaline Barnes, in her hospital bed, though it, too, melted beneath the memory of rain, becoming younger, a beautiful summer child, and then maturing, the lines of life deepening as she wore the nurturing face of a mother that could have been any of a thousand women he passed on the street every day, but could only ever have been a young Emmaline Barnes.
She reached out to him.
He took her hand, but it wasn’t him in the memory, it was Arawn. Josh had been replaced. The parasite was consuming his existence one experience, one thought, and memory at a time.
He fought his way back to the present, to the lightning-struck tree and the boy crumbling to dust before him, and knew that the only time he had left could be counted out in those flakes of dust. As the last hit the ground he would be gone.
Consumed.
In that moment there will be only me. And I am everything.
You made me a promise, my life for the children’s.
You care so much about them?
Time narrowed down to a single second. When it passed, he would be gone.
In that second, he was both god and man.
In that second, he had the powers of both.
And that second would last.
Josh thought like a god, reaching out with his free hand to freeze that last flake of dust in the act of falling, and all around him the world stood still.
Very good. See, I did not lie entirely. Time is a construction of the mind. We are outside of time. We exist.
Show me the children.
No.
Show me the children.
No.
Show me.
No. Show yourself. Look. The Sleepers are gone. If you are determined to save them, you must bring them back. Reach out. Find their souls. Reclaim them from the mist. Give them flesh once more.
He didn’t ask how. He was a god. The divine spark burned brightly in him, even if only for a single second. That was all it took. Josh sent his essence hunting, focusing his mind on the five Sleepers who had held open the door. They were there. Frightened. Alone. Confused. Wandering. He whispered a word of joining, not knowing how he knew to vocalize it, and in five mortuaries across the city, five girls, all of the same age, all having fallen into the same tragic locked-in state and been murdered in their beds by the chalk brothers, heard his call and opened their eyes. It felt like it should have been more miraculous. All it took was a word, but then, in the beginning that was all there was, the word.
They weren’t the dead god’s only victims, he realized, thinking of the children who had been stolen to become the hosts of his Hunters, and found himself swimming with Jenny Greenteeth through the litter-clogged water of the Thames, only she wasn’t Jenny at all, but rather Penny, a young girl Arawn had drowned with his own two hands before welcoming the spirit of his water witch into her corpse. Josh sank down into the dirty waters, enveloping her sleek body as she swam and swam, darting between vessels sailing the river, and even as, eellike, she skimmed the bottom in the shadow of Parliament, he brought the rockweeds to life, reaching up to snag her ankles and tangle in her hair and fill her mouth even as she tried to curse it. The rockweed fronds burst as he closed her mouth, their salty sweetness filling her throat. She gagged on it, coughing, and as the coughs wracked the swimmer’s body, he used his godlike power to drive the parasite out of her mind and into the seminal fluid that spilled over her tongue. Her body purged itself.
With the Huntress gone, there was nothing left within the swimmer; no intelligence to control her muscles or mind. She didn’t breathe. Dead, she floated there like so much flotsam.
Go home to your body, he sent the thought out into the Underworld where Arawn was truly king, and as its lord had no problem in finding the lost soul that had been Penny Grainger. She seemed not to understand, or not dare believe, so he repeated his message, his words like a silver thread that led all the way back to her body. Go back to the tree and wake Charlie; take him home, you will be safe there. Tell him his love for you saved you every bit as much as your love for him kept him safe. There is happiness waiting for you, Penny. For both of you. Live the lives you were always meant to. You did a good thing for him, Penny. Live brilliantly. You deserve to.
He saw her leave the water and run, and keep running and knew that she would find the boy waking in the protective arms of the tree in the heart of the great wood.
He found the chalk brothers underground.
They had become an entire ecosystem with insects and fungal growths sprouting from every orifice.
Open your eyes, he whispered, and they did, choking and gagging on the mushrooms in their mouths as they tried desperately to breathe.
Live.
It was a command they could not refuse.
The last one was Puck, the trickster, Robin Goodfellow, King Stag’s red right hand who he watched dance at the head of a huge pack of rats, picking a path around the perimeter of the newly grown woodland to the ancient tree. Mud and blood clung to his clothes. This time he used the rats, causing them to surge up Robin’s back and drag him down, their bloated bodies swarming over him, teeth and claws biting and scratching, and as they drew blood, offered the parasite a way out of its host body. They supped fragments of the Hunter into dozens of their hungry mouths, and dozens more, dividing and diluting the trickster until his essence was spread out among a hundred rats, forming a tainted pack within the pack.
Danny Ash lay on his stomach, unmoving. For a moment, Josh thought he was dead; his breathing was barely perceptible. Then he heard the teenager weep and felt the wave of absolute loss as the boy grieved for the life the parasite had promised him. He looked up, looked at Josh, and actually seemed to see him. “I was whole,” he said. “For the first time in my life I was complete. And you took that away from me.” His heartbreak was absolutely devastating.
Josh reeled away from his grief and anger, recoiling so forcibly he saw again the lightning-struck tree and the last flake of dust from the boy that had been Arawn suspended in the air before his eyes. And kept on spinning away until he saw the bark-and-branch-encased body of a boy, on his knees, growling like a dog, and beside him his keeper, the Gatekeeper. He reached out to draw the soul of the boy out of the wooden cage, searching for his spark in the ether. He called out, but as he opened his mouth, his tongue twisted, and the two words that emerged bore no resemblance to anything he had ever said: Hwaet! Áríseaþ!
The answer that came was desperate, broken; a sob, a single word from the mouth of Jamshid Kirmani. “No.”
He focused on the voice in the mists, using it as a lodestone to draw him forward until he found the wretched soul that had started so much of this in the name of supposed honor. The boy’s soul was tortured; he bore the cuts and lacerations of a thousand thorns and brambles that cloaked him as the Knucker, but they were no match for the wounds the murder of Ollie Underwood and Aisha Kahn had inflicted upon it. The boy’s demons were written everywhere on his skin, refusing to heal. Beneath the armor of bark there was blood, lots and lots of blood where the thorns had scratched the skin raw. He cried tears of blood. And in those tears Josh saw the crimes the boy had committed and how they had twisted his soul beyond breaking.
It doesn’t have to be this way, he promised the boy. There is redemption her
e. You can be different this time. You can make amends. All you have to do is return with me, open your eyes.
Or at least those were the words he thought, but what Jamshid Kirmani heard was something else entirely: Hwaet! Áríseaþ!
And those two words terrified the boy because listening to them the first time was where it all began to go wrong for him.
“Leave me alone.”
Hwaet! Áríseaþ!
This time the response was a tortured wail as Jamshid slammed the heels of his hands into his temples, each punishing blow punctuating the next word out of his mouth. “Just. Let. Me. BURN.”
And the force of each word was enough to char the wooden armor; raising smoke, then flame, from the great beast’s carapace. The air around him turned black, and from the black-sprung flame, Josh used what little magic it took to banish the Knucker and leave the boy to die.
The Gatekeeper was less and more than the others. He was broken in ways that Josh couldn’t bear as he touched what little remained of the boy Tommy Summers had been. He found him hiding in the mists, a tiny frightened child of a spirit that had died long before his flesh had been stolen. A boy that had lost his innocence to the abuse of his supposed protector. It sickened him to the core, and made Tommy every bit as much a victim of his life as the boy he’d sacrificed to open the dimgate. His stunted soul was in such sharp contrast to the man who strode across the green with the slavering Knucker at his side, eager to inflict pain.
Josh coaxed the boy forward, promising him that he was safe, that he would always be safe now, that it should never have happened to him, and the boy listened, though did not willingly return to his flesh until the Gatekeeper was long gone and the twisted version of Tommy Summers he had been was gone along with him.
He was broken, but he would heal.
There, Arawn said inside the last tiny cavity of his mind. You can’t save them all. But not everyone deserves to be saved, Josh. Some people need to own the terrible things they do. But you kept your side of our pact; you brought the Sleepers back. I allowed you to restore the flesh playing host to my kin. It is done. Now I will keep my side of the promise, I will save Albion. You should be happy; what you have done with your life is more than many ever accomplish. Now it is time to welcome oblivion.
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