A wail burst out of Brynn, before she stuffed her hands in her mouth and curled around her sob.
“I’m sorry,” I said quietly. “At least I always had my mother.”
“Your mother the ghost?” Yejun said sharply. “You’re sorry for me because you have a ghost to keep you company? That’s not a family, that’s a fantasy. “
The clocktower bells rang once, and I was glad of it, because I was running out of things to say. “We don’t have time to talk about this. We don’t have much time at all if we’re going to do this before Halloween.” I glanced back at Brynn, kneeling down with a tear-streaked face, and tried to put an optimistic spin on things. “Besides, I need to get my dogs back.”
Brynn glanced up and wiped her eyes. “Do you think you can?”
“I have to do something,” I said. “Get them back, release them, or go down trying. Something. I don’t know what will happen to me if I go home without them. My father will be so pleased.”
As I walked away, I let my inner wolf out just enough that my shadow changed. Immediately, the scents of the plaza overwhelmed my vision. I could smell my companions, and the Fiddler. I could easily detect the direction Amber went. And I could smell the mounts of the Hunt, faintly carried by the intermittent breeze: combustion engines mingled with the native scents of horses.
I thought about what we’d been following before: a magic trail created by the Fiddler that only I could follow. Why me? It wasn’t really about scent, it couldn’t be. It was more likely he was taking some other element and laying an illusion over it. But what?
I thought of how Yejun’s magic almost always made me ill. It hadn’t since my dogs had been taken. I was no longer feeling his magical manipulations from four directions at once. If the Fiddler’s trail required that multiple perception, we were in serious trouble.
“Your shadow...” said Brynn, following behind me. “Is that your magic?”
“Yes,” I said curtly.
“And you look older, too. The dogs made you look younger, somehow. I guess that makes sense. Dogs are cuter than wolves.”
“Or I’m just more dangerous now.” I looked at her out of the corner of my eye and my shadow twitched an ear. “What are you doing here, Brynn?” I asked, softly. I couldn’t resist. It was always hard for me to let go when I got my jaws into something. And Yejun was walking behind us, hands in his pockets and sunglasses back on, so perhaps he wouldn’t hear. “I’m not a victim. Before Emily, I was confused enough to bite when he said seek. And I came back.”
“But you need your dogs to cope,” she said, just as softly. “That’s not a good place to be.”
I already regretted going back to the topic, she was that good. “Look, I wish things were different, I do. I wish I had friends like you and I appreciate your worry, but I have to do what’s best for everybody. Besides, if I stay with my father, maybe I can stop him from being as bad as he would otherwise be.” I had great hopes for that argument. It sounded like something a reasonable person would respect.
“Why did you go back?” she asked, as if she hadn’t heard a word I’d said.
“Because I belong there.”
“How do you know?” she persisted.
I sighed. “Because when I was losing a fight, I called on him to help me. I thought I’d rather die than do that, but I didn’t even think of anybody else.”
Yejun made a muffled sound behind us, like he was choking back something. I was grateful for his restraint. But relentless Brynn said, “But other people were depending on you, right? You had to do something.”
“I—how do you know?” I stopped pacing around the edge of the plaza and stared at her.
“Tia knew,” she said, too casual. She wasn’t telling me something.
But if I pried more, she’d pry back.
I decided to drop it.
Besides, I’d come up with an idea. I’d inherited my magic from my father. The celestials were bound entirely to the world; they couldn’t ever be separated from it, not really, no matter how you killed them. They’d always find some way back again. Not like humans, who vanished if nothing anchored them here. The Fiddler had talked about the Horn and its song like it was from outside the world, even beyond the far reaches of Heaven and the Backworld. It was an eerie idea, but maybe it was also the answer.
I inhaled deeply, like I was taking in as much of a scent as I could, and looked for the distortion in the world.
And there it was. It was the smell of an Outside far wilder than I’d ever experienced and it made a small part of me want to crawl away and hide. But the rest of me wanted to chase it.
“This is what we want,” I announced, shivering with excitement. “We’re almost there already.” Unable to stop myself at first, I darted over to one of the plaza exits and started running down the street. But when Brynn cursed, I tangled my feet turning back and forced myself to wait. “This way,” I urged.
Brynn nodded. Her skin was very pale under her black-marked hands and arms. Yejun trailed behind her, slow enough that I wondered if he’d changed his mind about coming along.
I remembered how he’d come for me in Jen’s strange tower. I didn’t understand him at all.
There was a thump on the roof of the building beside me and I recoiled, flinging my arms up to ward off a giant bird. Nothing appeared and I picked up Amber’s scent. She liked traveling by jumping between heights, I remembered from the forest. It seemed about right: the four of us heading toward our goal, all as far apart as we could get, with mortal Brynn in the center.
The street was wide and well-paved at first. But as we hurried along, the pavement developed cracks, long black lines that radiated up and down the street, like something huge had crash-landed somewhere ahead of us. And the buildings—well, they’d always been just a little familiar before: a mortal city, just not one I knew. But as we traveled through the neighborhood around chez Wild Hunt, the buildings got weird. Exaggerated. Some of them were very large, and got bigger as they got taller. They loomed like something out of a cartoon. And between them were teeny-tiny buildings, buildings that would be cozy for a fox, or even a mouse.
Yejun’s voice drifted forward. “They curve. The buildings and the tangle under them.” And he was right. They curved out and then in again at the top, like the city was trying to hold something it hated.
I’d thought the city was the Wild Hunt’s home territory, but it wasn’t. The Wild Hunt was an invader here, just like we were. It was just an invader that the city couldn’t frighten away or swallow—although not from lack of trying. The city cringed from the place ahead of us, metaphorical hands up to hold back the assault.
We passed doors that were ten feet tall, with matching windows. Then they were sixteen feet tall, twenty feet tall, and we were mice walking in a giant’s playground, with shopfronts for crickets scattered between. There were no more intersections on the road now. What seemed to be a dead end ahead turned right instead, sending us parallel to the heart of the distortion. A single titan strip mall served as a final retaining wall.
I walked for a few minutes, until the clocktower chimed again. Then I turned to the supersized big-box stores and called, “We want to take it away. Come on, let us through.”
Nothing happened, except that after a minute, Yejun came up beside me and said, “Who are you talking to?”
“The city,” Brynn informed him, as if it was obvious. Maybe it was to her. I just wished the city had been as perceptive.
Something moved down the street: a flash of blond hair vanishing down an alley I hadn’t noticed. Amber had found something. I ran after her and looked down the alley. It went through to an open space beyond, although it was half-hidden by a stinking giant metal bin locked closed.
“Good city,” I said, and patted the nearest wall. The ground cracked underfoot in response, which was probably the equivalent of an unfriendly growl.
The space beyond the barrier of empty strip malls was paved with broken stone. Grass g
rew between the tumbled pavers, and small white flowers. Just the flowers made it far more alive than the rest of the city, and that was before I saw the Wild Hunt’s home.
It was a red brick tower, squat and square, fronted by a pair of large black doors. A low, damaged stone fence added a decorative touch, always so welcome in situations like this. Inside the fence was a shack that reeked of horses, alongside a well and a trough. It looked medieval, and totally mundane.
It also looked like a seeping wound in the city, an open sore, a fleshy spike of pain made tangible. It was one of those kinds of things, both a vase and an old woman. The transubstantiation of the Wild Hunt.
A banner of blond hair once again drew my eye. I looked up just in time to see Amber pulling herself over the ramparts of the tower. It was bigger than its proportions indicated, or she’d shrunk. Without looking back, she vanished along the top of the wall, and I wondered uneasily if she was going to make things harder for us.
“Can we do that?” Brynn asked nervously.
“It depends,” I muttered.
Then the Horn blew and engines roared. We scarcely had time to look at each other and pull back into the alley behind the redolent bin before the roaring of motorcycles rushed up to the strip mall and became the pounding of hooves. My poor lost dogs barked and leather creaked, as if the sounds of the Wild Hunt were all that actually existed. Then, with a crackle of lightning, the Wild Hunt manifested just beyond the fence.
The horses pranced and shied in a circle while the dogs raced around them in heartachingly familiar excitement. Beside me, Brynn caught her breath and squeezed my arm so hard it hurt.
I couldn’t look at the dogs. The black one and the red one and the one that was brownish-grey. They had names when they’d been mine. I couldn’t think about it, not until I was ready. I concentrated on the hunters instead. “They’ve got something,” I whispered. “They’ve brought something back. Look.”
The circle of horses and riders and hounds fell apart, revealing the Fiddler. He stood loosely, with his violin in one hand and his bow in the other. A golden rope wrapped around his torso, but he looked so unworried, so much like a mildly interested tourist that I half-expected him to burst into a flurry of attacks and escape.
Instead, Ion said, “And now—” and with no more warning than that, he thrust the spear he held at the Fiddler’s chest.
-twenty one-
As the First Huntsman stabbed the Fiddler, I stood frozen. Even if I’d had the courage to do something, Brynn was holding onto me so hard that it would have been impossible. She yelped, and I rallied enough to push her behind my back.
“Is he—?” she whispered.
“I saw it go in,” I whispered back. “But—”
“I did say,” said the Fiddler, his beautiful voice carrying. I stood on my tiptoes but couldn’t quite make out what was going on.
Yejun pushed on my head lightly. “He’s bleeding,” he reported.
“So you did,” said Ion angrily. “Now perhaps my companions will be content.”
The one called Ipa said, “He wants to approach the Horn, Ion. The timing on this is dangerous.” He held the golden rope wrapped around his wrist, which I thought was kind of stupid. He was tied to the Fiddler just as much as the Fiddler was tied to him.
“We do not let our prey defeat us in such a petty, ignoble manner,” Ion said coldly. “The Horn will devour him. Can’t you feel its hunger to do so?”
“His wound is healing up,” muttered Yejun. “So is his shirt. That’s a neat trick. Your clothes stay ripped up when you heal.”
Not the time, not the time, but I felt a rush of warmth anyhow, including on the skin bared by my torn top. I hadn’t even noticed until just now.
“You could let me go,” said the Fiddler hopefully. “I really can’t do anything right now. And I’d rather not be eaten by the Horn. That might be dangerous, now that I think about it.”
Ion sneered and slid off his mount. The horse grunted and backed away, out of the crowd, until Ion reached back and grabbed its spiked bridle. “It is. The Horn is like nothing else in Creation. It will absolutely destroy you.” He sounded so pleased by the notion that I realized that whatever he had been, he was something worse now. Something damaged, and embracing the damage.
With more than a little ire, Ipa said, “We are not taking this rabbit into the briar patch, Ion. Don’t be a fool, not when we are so close.”
Ion turned on Ipa, but before he could do more than glare, the Fiddler said with real puzzlement, “Rabbit? Is this the body of a rabbit? If so, that explains a few things...”
Ipa said harshly, “The trickster rabbit feigns fear of the place where he has the most power. I recognize the trickster in you, stranger.”
“Ah!” said the Fiddler, enlightened. “In that case, please! Take me to the Horn! Whatever you do, don’t turn me loose into the city again. I can’t stand it out there.”
Ion gave Ipa a smug look and yanked on the middle of the rope. “We take him in.” Then he turned and looked at the closed black door. Just the force of his look seemed pressure enough to crack the doors, because they swung open. A moment later, the Fiddler and the whole Hunt, dogs and horses and huntsmen all, had passed through.
“Do you think that was a clever plan?” murmured Yejun in my ear.
“No, I don’t,” I said, stepping out of the alley. “I think if he had a clever plan, he wouldn’t have been caught. Can you two stay hidden? I want to scout around the building. I think I can get both of you up to the top, but I’d be irritated if there was another, less dangerous way in.”
“I could try to open the doors?” Yejun suggested, flexing his wounded hands.
I considered it for a moment, then shook my head regretfully. “I don’t think blowing them off the hinges would be a good idea right now. We want to avoid getting their attention until we have to. Save it for the way out?”
He grinned at me. “All right.”
I went to move away, but Brynn was still holding onto me with an iron grip. “Brynn, I’ll be right back.” I swallowed. “I need you guys. I don’t work well alone.”
She didn’t respond, even to look toward me. She was staring at the door the Hunt had vanished through with a glassy expression. “Brynn?” I pried her fingers off my arm as gently as I could and she finally turned to look at me. “Brynn, what’s wrong? I mean right this minute?”
“I feel so weird,” she whispered. She looked down at her hands. The black marks swirled all the way up her arms, vanishing under her short sleeves. I remembered again what Tia had said when she’d pushed Brynn on me. Take this. It’s dangerous to go alone. I thought it had been a joke. It had been phrased as a joke, especially attached to innocent Brynn. But maybe she hadn’t meant Brynn herself. Maybe Brynn was just a carrier for the charms.
I felt a rush of unfair, irrational anger at Tia for using Brynn that way, immediately followed by a surge of grief. It wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right.
Then again, it almost never was.
“You’ll be okay,” I promised her, just in case this was one of those few times it was. Then I ran silently out of the alley. When I glanced back a few steps away, neither Yejun nor Brynn were anywhere to be seen. Even their scent was fading rapidly.
Wondering at how well the city hid them, wondering what else it hid, I approached the oversized red tower. The bricks were slabs of stained stone forming solid walls that ran at least ten feet up. Then there were narrow windows, almost more like arrow slits. They never widened, never became something somebody could look out of for pleasure. And it was the same on all four sides, and only one side had a door. Of course. It wasn’t someplace anybody mortal lived. It didn’t look like a place to live at all. It looked like a prison.
I was pretty sure I could get up the wall with Brynn and Yejun. It would be awkward, but it was something my dogs could have done, so as long as I was careful and used my power well, I could make it happen without them.
On
my way back to the alley, wings beat the air overhead. I pressed myself against the side of the fortress and thought red brick thoughts as the black eagle descended from the sky. Just before claws hit the ground, the eagle’s form glowed brightly. When it faded, the demon Alastor walked out of the light.
Peeking around the corner of the tower, I curled my nails against my palms as he put a hand on the door. He’d brought Tia down so that the Wild Hunt could catch her. I wanted to put him in the same position.
Alastor pulled hard and one of the two doors opened. Then he looked over at where I huddled at the corner of the building. “You can’t get them back again, Annalise.”
I stepped out from the wall, fists still clenched. “Maybe I want to join them after all.”
He hesitated, then shook his head. “If you have any sense at all, you’ll get out of here.”
“You and the Hunt stole my sense,” I said bitterly. “Why are you doing this? They destroy souls. I thought souls mattered to demons.”
His eyebrows drew together in a slash as he frowned. “They are my children. Ion is my offspring just as those dogs are yours. And the souls made a choice.” His voice was suddenly a lash. “Those souls could have faced their destiny beyond the sky, but they resisted. They allowed themselves to be drawn into bondage, or chose to linger where they no longer belong.” He inhaled, exhaled, calming himself. “Every choice has a consequence. Tia and I agreed on this. Go home, Annalise. You have no soul. This doesn’t concern you.”
Even as I tensed to launch myself at him, he stepped through the open door and closed it behind him. I leapt after him, then kicked the door once, as hard as I could. It didn’t even dent, and my toes hurt, too. Then I whirled around and loped back to where Brynn and Yejun were hiding.
Wolf Interval (Senyaza Series Book 3) Page 21