He wasn’t ready.
This moment of grace was all that he had. It wasn’t hours, or days, it was a single moment that couldn’t last forever and which, when it was gone, was the end of everything.
There was so much more to do if he was going to save himself.
Arawn laughed bleakly, enjoying the desperation driving that thought.
I told you; you can’t cheat me.
But I can try.
I would be disappointed if you didn’t. But it is all there in your mind. I know the desperate gamble you have made, putting your trust in a coward and a liar, and I have seen it fail already. Do you forget that I am a god? There is nowhere a thought can hide from me.
That’s what I’m counting on, Josh thought, earning a sharp bark of laughter from Arawn.
Now that he had started, reaching out to the children Arawn had used to tear this world apart, the temptation was to undo it all, to reach back in time to a point before his life had fallen apart and rebuild it. It was in his power to save his father from Seth’s meddling in that corner shop robbery, he could bring him back and get to have the normal childhood every kid deserved. He could undo the moment when Boone fell down the stairs. He could stop his great-grandfather from being in the crowded marketplace the day he caught that glimpse of Eleanor’s red dress and recognized her, meaning that the old man died without ever writing the confession that plagued his family for years to come. There was so much he could do. Infinite possibilities. Infinite outcomes. He could protect his mother from that hideous incubus Seth fashioned from the stuff of the Annwyn to set on her. He could save her from that brutal death, alone in the old house on the Rothery. He could go back further, to the point of stopping the idea of a movie studio even occurring to Ruben Glass, or making sure that Eleanor Raines never set foot before Hitchcock’s camera lens. Without that first meeting, there was nowhere for obsession to grow, and without obsession there was none of this. There was no one for one that allowed an ancient being to slip through the cracks and return to this world. There was no Wild Hunt. No once and future king, no white stag, no anything. There were so many ways he could influence the future by meddling with the past, but there was only one life he knew that he had to save so that Julie stood a chance of saving him: Cadmus Damiola.
And just thinking the man’s name was enough to tear Josh’s divine consciousness away from the moment to a place lost in the swirling mists between worlds.
The void.
The old man’s soul walked the mists, still looking for the light.
He burned black in the gray world.
He wore sadness like a veil as the torments of his existence assailed him on either side. He let them lash at him, with burrs and spikes of self-loathing as sharp as any knife. This was his doing. All of it. The ills of the world were on him. He was an old fool. He didn’t belong in the light. He deserved the agony, skin peeled from muscle, muscles flayed from bone, all of it, all of the pain. He deserved it. But it couldn’t be fast. Pain needed to linger. So, each lash when it came was an eternity from the one before, and from the next, allowing him to suffer forever because that was how long it would take for the last ounce of meat to be peeled away from his bones.
Josh saw the invisible lash open a tear across the back of the old magician’s layers of coats, biting deep. There was no blood, only a sticky saplike substance that oozed from the open wound.
Damiola’s head came up and he cried out, but he didn’t stop walking. He shuffled on, believing himself justly punished.
His soul light was the one intense flame in the endless roiling smoke of limbo. Where everything else came and went, flicking in and out of existence, as it followed its path to journey’s end, there was no such luxury for the magician. He was in a hell of his own making. There were no cabinet walls to contain him, no chains or water torture chamber, but his suffering was every bit as creative.
Josh stood before him, waiting for the old magician to approach. The mist curled around his feet, snapping at his heels like a terrier. He walked slowly, dragging his feet. He had his head down again as though he couldn’t bear to see this hellish landscape of nothing, and was simply waiting for his soul to cease to be. “We really have to stop meeting like this,” Josh said. “People will start to talk.”
Damiola refused to meet his eye, no doubt believing him to be yet another punishment of this dark place sent to drive him out of his mind.
“I failed you,” Damiola said. “There. I admit it. Now leave me alone.”
“I can’t do that,” Josh said.
“You weren’t this much of a bastard in real life.”
“I’ve got a sister who would argue with you,” he said. “Now stop feeling sorry for yourself, you aren’t finished yet. I need you.”
This time the old man did meet his eye, and Josh saw the flicker of hope extinguished and in its place the flames of fear burn bright. “Joshua? Is it … are you real?” and then a heartbeat later, “What have you done?”
“What needed to be done,” Josh said, even now grasping the difference between this conversation and the others. There, he had only needed to subvocalize the words; this time he actually spoke to the damned. “Listen to me, old man, you don’t belong here. Whatever you think, there’s no nobility in this. You have suffered enough. This torment you are putting yourself through, you don’t deserve it.” Before Damiola could argue, Josh pressed on. “You want to be redeemed, then save me.” He reached out, resting his fingers against the magus’s forehead in blessing, and commanded his spirit to leave this place.
He stood alone in the darkness.
I have had enough of your sentimentality, Arawn chimed in his mind.
And snuffed him out.
54
Damiola opened his eyes and saw Julius Gennaro looking down at him.
“Why couldn’t you just let me stay dead?” The words came out as a croak; his voice hadn’t been used for a long time.
He tried to sit up, but his body refused to obey him.
A single candle burned in the middle of the burial chamber.
“It wasn’t my choice,” Julie said, and the old man realized the police officer was shaking.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” he said gruffly.
“No fucking kidding,” Julie said. “I did not expect to meet Zombie Jesus in here. Not after last time.”
Damiola saw the huge two-handed greatsword in the other man’s grasp, and the ancient Celtic runes inscribed along the length of its blade. He recognized the ancient script, and knew well what it meant, but for the life of him could not understand why that should be. “Do I want to know where you got that?”
“Not really.”
“But it has something to do with why I am back here?”
He nodded.
“Everything,” Julie looked at the two other people inside the cramped mausoleum. At first, he thought Julie was seeking their permission to explain, but then he realized they didn’t know what he was about to say, and because of that didn’t know how to go about saying it.
“Spit it out, Officer Gennaro,” he told Julie.
Julie didn’t look at him. Instead he looked at the curious arrangement of mirrors that had been used to imprison Seth Lockwood. They were out of place, rearranged by Josh the last time he had been in here. The mirror Julie Gennaro looked at himself in had a web of cracks spidering through its silvered glass. “Josh needs you to undo whatever you did to make that,” he said.
“Why would I want to do that?” Damiola asked, meeting his gaze through the backward land of the mirrors.
“He thinks he knows how to defeat the Horned God. He told me that to kill the king, he must become the king. He made a deal for our lives,” Julie wasn’t looking at the mirror now; he was looking at Alex. “He traded his life for ours. He’s given himself to Arawn.”
“That’s what he meant when he said I wouldn’t like what he had in mind? And you let him?” Alex said quietly, the full weight of
what their last goodbye had meant sinking in. “You didn’t try and stop him?”
Julie shook his head. “I did. I tried. But he has a plan.”
“Oh, well, that’s just fucking peachy, then,” she said. “He’s just turned himself over to a god that wants to destroy every living thing and feed the blood to the land because he thinks it will bring the magic back, but it’s okay because he’s got a plan? Well? What is it? What’s my brother’s plan?”
Julie looked over at the empty mirror. “Seth.”
Alex shook her head. Then she looked at the old magician and grasped the true meaning of his resurrection. “He’s dead, isn’t he?” she said flatly. “He’s already dead and we weren’t there beside him. We just left him.”
“No,” Julie argued. “He’s got a plan. He bought us time. We can’t fail him. Not when he needs us the most.”
“Needs us? He’s gone. The old man is proof of that, isn’t he? He’s here because my brother isn’t.”
“Yes,” Damiola said. He didn’t bother telling them what he’d seen in the mist. It wasn’t important now. “Arawn has taken over his flesh, body and soul. He’s snuffed Josh out of existence. There is no room for him inside his body anymore, and nowhere for his soul to hide. The boy bought our lives with his sacrifice, so yes he’s gone.”
She didn’t cry, which he thought she might. She was made of sterner stuff.
“Then how can we help him? That doesn’t make sense.”
“He could have killed Seth the first time we were here,” Damiola said. “But he didn’t. It wasn’t mercy. None of this was,” he meant the mirror prison and everything else. “But he wasn’t prepared to risk Seth finding a way out of Hell, not today, not in one hundred years’ time; not without knowing there was someone watching. Someone who would stand against him if they had to. Because Seth couldn’t be allowed to walk free. A year in that prison might be a hundred out here, but that wasn’t punishment enough for what he’d done to his family. He fed Seth something, a bone from his finger, dividing his body so that out here he would never die, not for as long as part of him still lived in the Annwyn.” He understood Josh’s plan then; it all came painfully clear in all of its desperation. “He might have surrendered himself to Arawn, but the god doesn’t possess all of him. By god, that’s a risk. Stupid, stupid boy. But there’s still that single bone; a piece of him free of Arawn’s essence. We have to get that bone if we’re ever going to have a chance of bringing him back.”
“That was his plan? Find a piece of his fucking finger and use it to magic him back into his body? You have to be fucking kidding me, Julie. You agreed to this?”
“I didn’t have a choice,” Julie said, looking down meaningfully at the sword in his hands. “And if we fail, he begged me to end it once and for all.” He looked at the old man. “So, will you do it? Will you free Seth?”
“What choice do I have?” Damiola said, but he was anything but happy about it.
He crouched down beside the candle, placing both hands flat on the stone on either side of it and blew out the eternal flame. For a moment it looked as though it might reignite, the wick threatened to burn again, but he pinched it out before it could. The old man remembered the words of the chant he had used to seal the tomb. How could he not? He said them again, this time as part of a ritual of undoing. He had no idea if it would work until he saw the filaments of bluish light emerge from the cold stone. The light smoked as it chased along each and every crack, drawing the miracle back into his flesh. The enchantment undid the latticework of raw energy that had enclosed Seth Lockwood in the mists of the Annwyn.
He looked into the mirror, into Seth’s prison.
And like the last time Josh had tried to summon his personal demon, there was no sign of Seth’s rage-twisted face in the cobweb of cracks.
“Show yourself,” the old man demanded.
That earned a ripple across the surface of the mirror and two fresh cracks through the glass before it turned supple and ultimately liquefied. Damiola rose slowly and walked across to the mirror’s face, pushing the flat of his hand gently against the surface. The glass molded itself around his fingers like dough. He pressed more firmly and the rippling surface parted around his hand, resealing itself around his wrist.
The way was open.
But still there was no sign of the gangster.
“Officer Gennaro? A little assistance, please.”
Julie moved up beside him, peering into the lightless square. “What do you need me to do?”
“Bring the bone back,” Damiola said, and before Julie could argue or ask how, Damiola pushed Julie with all of his strength, unbalancing him. With the huge sword in his hands Julie couldn’t reach out to break his fall without dropping it, and Manannan’s blade wasn’t about to be cast aside by a mortal hand.
Julie fell face-first through the glass, and kept falling.
The liquefied glass sealed itself behind him, trapping him in that Otherworld.
There was no cry of outrage; the two women in the mausoleum with him were too shocked by the sudden betrayal to voice actual words. “It had to be done,” Damiola said, heading any objection off with brutal pragmatism. “Point one, Joshua would not thank us for liberating the killer of his parents, no matter his need. That justice offered him some semblance of peace. And, point two, we have no idea what the ramifications of Lockwood’s release would be. All we do know is that every time we interfere with the natural order something terrible happens. The ripples of our actions are undeniable. They have been ever since I first opened that crack into the Annwyn to fashion Glass Town for Seth. That moment is like the ripples in a lake when you drop a stone into its still surface. At first, they are concentrated very close to where the stone disappeared, but gradually they roll out and out threatening to undo everything. And that is what is happening now. I would rather not be responsible for the end of everything. Would you?”
55
Julie fell.
And fell.
Into the black.
There was no grace to it. No sensation. No wind through the hair. No flailing arms or kicking legs.
He simply fell.
Until he wasn’t falling anymore.
“Well, well, well, if it isn’t the little bent bastard,” a voice mocked. It seemed to come from all around him at once. With no light source to help orientate him, Julie was lost. He tried not to panic, gripping the sword’s hilt tight. “Did they finally get fed up with you, too? Decide you were too much trouble and banish you to their own little private prison to rot? You’re here sooner than I expected. It can’t have been more than a year since your lot banished me. I would say it feels like forever, but for me it’s only been a couple of days and time really does drag when you’ve got absolutely nothing to occupy your mind except thoughts of revenge.”
“Seth?” he said, hating the weakness in his voice.
“In the flesh, so to speak.”
“I can’t see you.”
“That’s because it’s dark, Julius. That’s how this whole light and dark thing works.”
“I need your help,” Julie said, earning a roar of laughter from the unseen man.
When he finally stopped, he asked, “Why the fuck would I help you?”
Julie didn’t have a good answer for that, or at least he hadn’t, until he’d fallen into this place. Now, maybe he did. “Because one day you’ll be free of this place, and you don’t want Josh waiting around for you when you finally get out.”
Silence hung heavy in the darkness, dragging out and out, even though the reality of it was no more than a few seconds. “Tell me more,” Seth said, finally. “But I’m making no promises.”
“Josh gave you something.”
“He didn’t give it to me. He forced it down my throat. There’s a difference.”
“Right. Yes. And you know why? If his body is divided between the two places, he won’t age the way he should. He’ll be around, waiting, even if a year in here is a hundre
d out there. He’ll be there as long as there’s a chance you might escape.”
“Yes, yes, I know all that,” Seth said impatiently.
“But what if it didn’t have to be like that? What if I offered to help you out? Take that bone out of here, meaning that his body is no longer divided?”
“And you’d do that out of the kindness of your heart?”
“Something like that.”
“You’re a lousy liar, Julius. At least Taff was straight up about what he wanted, even if he sold his soul for a fuck. So, strikes me, if you want that piece of young Joshua back, there’s a pretty fucking important reason, which means I’ve got the leverage here. And leverage is important in any negotiation. That, and frankly, I don’t trust you. Not after last time. So, I want more.”
“What?”
“I want out.”
“Not going to happen,” Julie said.
“Too bad. Can’t help you then.”
“I could just gut you and root inside for the bone,” Julie said. “I don’t need to wait for you to shit it out.”
“True, and that’s a mighty impressive sword you’ve got yourself there, but there’s one thing you haven’t considered in all of this.”
“What’s that?”
“Maybe that’s what I want?”
“I don’t buy it,” Julie said. “Not you. That’s not how you work.”
“People change,” Seth said, laughing again. This time it was little more than a chuckle that rippled through the darkness.
“People do, you don’t,” Julie disagreed.
“What’s so important about this bone? Why all the fuss?”
How was he supposed to answer that without admitting that Josh was dead and without it they couldn’t bring him back?
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
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