by Hazel Hunter
Peripherally, she was aware of Piers cleaning himself in the separate shower nearby. She waited, drowsy-eyed and pleased for him to come closer. She was not prepared to hear the door to the bathroom open and shut softly. It was so unexpected that she sat perfectly still for a moment, convinced that he was going to come back.
“Kieran,” she said finally, lifting her head from his chest. “Where did Piers go?”
“I have no idea,” he said, as baffled as she was.
“All right. I think it’s time we went and had words with that man,” she muttered.
Her concern about Piers robbed her of some of the pleasure of the bath. She stepped out of the tub quickly, reaching for one of the fluffy white towels nearby. As she dried herself, she wondered what became of all of this when they had moved on. Would anyone be out of sorts if she didn’t hang it up? Did it simply disappear when she wasn’t looking at it? She hung it up anyway.
Kieran followed her out of the bathroom. The bedroom was empty, and somehow, their clothes were folded on the chair nearby. Despite the presence of the clothing, Piers himself was nowhere to be seen.
Hailey felt her concern touch off an unexpected rage inside her. She reached for her clothes and put them on with jerky motions. Kieran did the same, watching her carefully.
“Hailey, what’s going through your mind?” he asked.
“It occurs to me that simply because we let a man be in charge some times and in certain very intimate ways does not mean that he should be in charge all the time. Let’s go find him.”
• • • • •
Hailey was steaming as she walked through the halls of the false Castle. She understood what it represented, she knew some of the trauma that lay behind it. It was just that at that moment, she didn’t quite care.
She relied on her senses to guide her to Piers. She didn’t have to look into door after door to find him. Instead, she walked unerringly back to the door to his study, throwing it aside without even bothering to knock.
“You have some nerve,” she snapped, walking in.
Piers was seated behind his desk, ostensibly working. However, Hailey noticed that he didn’t have a pen in his hands. Instead, when she walked in, he was staring out the window, watching the bruised sky.
“Hailey? Kieran? I thought you had gone by now.”
“Really? And where did you think we were gone to, hmm?”
“Away from me. Awakening. Leading the lives that you should have led if I weren’t around.”
Hailey felt her heart tug at how thoroughly he believed it. There was a real belief founded on a life of being different even for a Wiccan underneath it. She didn’t let the sympathy restrain her; she thought that Piers needed to hear what she had to say. It felt in some ways as if he had needed to hear it for quite some time.
“All right, coven master. You are going to listen to me, and you are going to listen very well. What you did in that bedroom and in this office with us? That is not going to send us screaming into the night. I don’t know what kind of weaklings you think we are, but we are made of far sterner stuff than that.”
“Hailey?”
“Quiet, you are going to let me speak. What you did to us was nothing short of what we wanted and what we wanted from you. You did not do anything that hurt us or harmed us. Because we are strong, we would have stopped you. Do you know what I am?”
Piers looked at her. While she was talking she had come around the desk to face him. Now she stood inches away from him. Seated, he had to tilt his head back to look at her. He shook his head.
“I’m a vampire. That’s what they always used to say about me. You helped me open myself to what I could truly do. Do you even understand what that means?”
“That you can pull power from anyone you touch…”
“Damn straight. What I was doing there with you involved a lot of touching, Piers. At any point, I could have taken enough power to fly away, to set you on fire, to turn into a wolf and bite your hand off. I didn’t. I could have drained you dry, but I didn’t. Do you know why?”
To her anger, he shook his head.
Growling, she reached out to grab the front of his shirt, dragging him close to her.
“Because I didn’t want to!” she cried. “Everything that happened in that room was something I wanted. I want it still, and I want more of it.”
“She’s right,” said Kieran quietly. “I wouldn’t have done something like that unless I wanted it. I’ve always dreamed of things like that, and I am glad I got to experience them with you.”
Piers still looked uncertain. Hailey sighed, her anger washing away as quickly as it had come. She leaned down and kissed his mouth sweetly. It was almost chaste except for the passion behind it. She felt some of the stiffness leave Piers’s body. When his hand came up to tentatively touch her waist, she leaned into his body, draping her arms around his neck.
“What does it mean to you that we can still kiss like this?” she asked softly. “What does it mean to you that we can still touch like this?”
“That you’re a very generous woman?”
Hailey made a displeased sound. She wound her fingers through his hair and tugged gently.
“It means that this is as much a part of us as what happened in your bedroom. It means that what we do gently and what we do roughly is all part of a whole. It is all a part of how we are, and we are like no one else in this world or out of it.”
Kieran had moved to come stand behind Piers’s chair, placing his hands on Piers’s shoulders. In that moment, it startled Hailey a little to realize how much larger he was than Piers, both in height and in breadth. Piers was not a small man, but Kieran was a giant.
“She’s right. Don’t argue with her when she’s right.” Kieran paused. “I have seen monsters, Piers,” he said finally. “I have seen the things that prey on the young and innocent. They do not make their victims strong. Instead, they make them weak. But what you have done for Hailey is to make her strong, and you have protected her. Monsters separate the weak from the herd and prey on them until there’s nothing left of them. Then they do it again. You are no monster.”
At Kieran’s words, Piers’s head dropped until it was resting on Hailey’s shoulder. She wondered what was going on in his head, if his own monsters, the ones that lived in his head, were going to be stronger than her and Kieran.
Then his head came up, and he nodded.
“Thank you,” he said softly. “I think I understand now. I believe… I believe you.”
“Truly?” asked Hailey, making him meet her gaze. “Do you?”
He nodded with more decisiveness this time.
“I do.”
He kissed her on the mouth, and then to her surprise, he stood turning to kiss Kieran as well. Kieran accepted the kiss as easily as he would from Hailey, drawing back to nod.
“Don’t forget that again,” Kieran said with a shrug. “We could grow tired of reminding you.”
Piers grinned wryly, nodding.
That was it, Hailey thought. It’s only when he’s defeated that he looks so much smaller than Kieran.
“All right. Let’s get out of here.”
Hailey strode to the door with Piers and Kieran behind her. Before she opened the door. She thought out as clearly as she could. Then she opened the door.
CHAPTER SIX
INSTEAD OF THE halls of the dead Castle or the barren rocky landscape she had walked through before, they were greeted with a dark forest. As they passed through the door, it ceased to exist behind them. Now they looked as if they had been dropped in this trackless forest with no path in sight. Even the bruised sky that Hailey had been braced for was invisible.
“I’m going up to see where we can go,” Piers said, springing lightly into the air. He broke through the lower branches with a shower of leaves and twigs.
Hailey bit her lip nervously. The Shadow Walk Prison was a strange place with no logic to it, and the longer Piers stayed out of sight, the more worr
ied she became. She was just suggesting that she could fly up after him when he returned, shaking twigs out of his hair and a befuddled look on his face.
“There’s no sky,” he said.
“What?”
“There’s no sky, the trees go on as far as I can fly.”
There was something horrible about it, that the thick trees that surrounded them were as dense and as enduring as the earth itself. The idea of it made Hailey dizzy. It was like being buried alive.
“All right, if we can’t go over, we’re committed to going through,” she said.
“What’s going to keep us from going in circles?” Piers asked, eyes dark and concerned.
Hailey’s smile was regretful.
“Our own minds. I’m learning more about the Shadow Walk Prison. The more time I’ve spent here, the more I think I can see how it works. It bends to our minds whether we want it to or not. It creates the world that we are expecting, even if it is not the world we want.”
Both Piers and Kieran flinched at that. In both of their cases, it was altogether too true. Some fears could be magnified until they were their own prisons. The chains of the mind were far more powerful than chains of iron or steel.
“If we continue thinking that we are lost, if we panic, and if we fear, we will be lost and wandering around in circles forever. If we can keep our minds clear of pain and panic, we should be able to walk right out.” She hesitated. “This place doesn’t want to lose us, however. It feeds what it finds attractive, and it finds our fear and our sadness very wonderful indeed. We need to move forward without those thoughts.”
Kieran frowned.
“Then I shouldn’t be the one to lead us, and from what I know of Piers, he shouldn’t be the one to lead either.”
Hailey considered.
“I’m not someone without fear or sadness.”
“You are someone who does not let them stop her, either,” Piers pointed out.
Hailey wondered if she should protest again, but Piers took one hand and Kieran took the other. She stared for a moment, and then she smiled.
“You’re right,” she said softly. “I take my strength from myself, but I can also take it from you. With the two of you here, I can fight any pain or any sorrow.”
Kieran’s smile was slight but true.
“So lead us, little fox.”
She smiled at him, kissing first Kieran’s hand, then Piers’s hand. She dropped them, and nodded, taking her first steps into the forest.
It looked like there was no path, but she quickly realized that wasn’t true. When she started to move, she could see a deer track, a path so narrow and slight that she hadn’t been able to see it in the forest’s gloom. She wondered if there were deer in these forests or if the track was simply an aspect of her mind, something that she had conjured up when she started to walk.
It stayed dim for quite some time. She tried to keep her mind open while still concentrating on the idea of getting out, of finding a way to get home.
“I think it’s getting a little lighter,” Kieran muttered beside her.
She tried to take heart from what he said, but it wasn’t easy. It made her think about the sheer force of will that Liona must have to simply enter this place when she pleased. She resolved to speak with Liona when she returned, to learn more about this half-world and what it meant. On one level, she, Kieran and Piers were safe in the fortress in the Alps, guarded by a warrior who had lived for more than a thousand years. In the most immediate sense, however, she and her lovers were traversing a dark and silent forest, uncertain if they would ever escape.
The forest was unnatural, she realized. There were no sounds, no running water and no birdsong. The silence made her think that it was just a set piece, something that was designed to keep them right where they were.
There was a rustle in the bushes nearby, drawing their attention and making her realize all over again how silent it was.
Piers and Kieran tensed, stepping forward almost as one, but then a familiar pointy nose popped out of the bushes.
“Ferret!” Hailey exclaimed. “You found us!”
“That I did,” said the animal cheerfully. “And no easy task it was after what I have been through.”
She leaned down to let the animal run up her arm. When he was seated on her shoulder again, he groomed himself for a moment before sitting up to speak.
“I’ve found you your way home,” he said proudly. “There’s a path through here that I can show you.”
Piers was eying the little creature warily.
“Hailey?”
“Oh! I’m sorry. Piers, this is Ferret. He helped me when I first came here, and he’s been helping me ever since.”
Piers didn’t lose his suspicious look.
“What are you really?” he asked Ferret, ignoring Hailey’s startled look. “I’ve heard enough of the Shadow Walk Prison to know that what wears one face often possesses another.”
Ferret chittered angrily at Piers, making Hailey stare at the little animal.
“Yeah, I guess not all of us are so lucky as you, mate. We don’t all got brave girls to come looking when we’re lost. Some of us make do, and some of us end up as ferrets.”
Piers was unmoved.
“So what are you? Show us who you used to be.”
Ferret cringed.
“Never ask a man what he once was,” he muttered. “I don’t know. I don’t remember. I get flashes, like I told Hailey here. I don’t have it anymore. I’d do anything to get it back, but I don’t got it.”
Even Piers looked a little taken aback by the small animal’s despair.
“All right,” he said, falling back. “I defer to your judgment on this, Hailey.”
Ferret indicated a path that she had not seen before. Indeed, given the nature of the place, there was a chance it had not existed until Ferret had told her to look for it. It ran off to the left, pulling them into a darker part of the forest.
“Ferret, do you swear to us that you will show us the right way?”
If anything, Ferret shrunk even further into himself.
“I swear, I swear,” he said softly. “Trust me, Hailey.”
Hailey took a deep breath, and nodded.
After a few steps on Ferret’s trail, the deer track behind them disappeared as if it had never been. Hailey understood what Piers meant. The path was dark, and there was something odd about Ferret. If she thought about how terrible the Shadow Walk Prison had been, however, she couldn’t blame him for his mixed signals.
The way became more difficult than ever. There was still a track, but it was overgrown. They had to climb over dead falls and push their way through sickly-looking saplings that wanted to foul their every step. Still, though, it was growing lighter, just as the path they had been on before had been. Hailey tried to take heart from that. Sometimes, she reached up to her shoulder to stroke Ferret under the chin. Something about Piers’s words had taken some of the spirit from the animal, making it cringe and shiver.
“When we get out of here, you could come with us, you know.”
“Oh aye?” he whispered in return. “Don’t you think I might just crumble down to dust whenever I set foot on proper ground again? Maybe I’d be nothing but a talking animal all my born days, a curiosity for them to stuff in a zoo.”
“Or maybe you would be a man again,” she said, her voice warm. “There is hope for all of us, I believe that. You could be yourself again, or learn who that was.”
Something about what she said made him laugh, a sad sound.
“Hailey, my love, on the road that I’m on, there is no looking back, and there is no version of myself from before that would make up for the man that I am now.”
She started to ask what he meant, but then she saw a light up ahead, stronger than it had been before. It was almost piercing in the gloom of the forest, and she eagerly pointed ahead.
“I think it’s the way out,” she said in excitement. “I think we can go home!”
She started to walk forward, but Kieran reached forward to grab her hand.
“Let me go first,” he said, unlimbering his sword. “I just want to make sure that…”
Almost as if his words had woken up the darkness of the forest, they were under attack.
Hailey’s mind could barely understand it. One moment, there was nothing but the dimness and the silence of the forest, and the next moment, angry howls were filling the air around them. She saw flashes of tan and black, of bodies breaking from the bushes where they had been hiding, and the clash of steel weapons.
She saw Kieran engaged in battle with two enormous hulking men that simply looked as if they were shaped wrong, and she saw Piers being borne to the ground by something that had too many legs.
She started to run to help them, their names on her lips, but something thick and slimy twined around her ankles, tripping her so that she went sprawling on the floor. When she tried to struggle to her feet, the thing wrapped around her legs, binding her with an almost unimaginable strength. She cried out, but the thing only started drawing her backwards, pulling her towards the light that they had seen.
There was a flash of brown fur, and to her shock, Ferret bounded over her back, landing on the thing that had her trapped. For a horrible moment, she thought he was going to bite the thing that held her. He was going to be crushed in a matter of moments, she couldn’t bear it. Then she heard what he was saying.
“I told you I’d bring them, didn’t I? Isn’t that what you wanted? Do I get what you promised me then?”
“You foul little monster!” cried Hailey furiously. “We trusted you!”
Ferret chittered at her, but she didn’t get a response.
Hailey, Kieran and Piers were dragged towards the light. When they emerged from the trees, she could twist to see that what they had thought was a way out was in fact a huge bonfire, one that surged up and up into the twisting, roiling sky. Despite its monstrous size, it gave no heat. The three were dumped by the side of the fire. Now they could see their captors.