by Jim Butcher
They moved toward a bed dressed in a thick, furry coverlet and topped with a stack of pillows. Unhappiness rose around her like a mist.
“This place is bad,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Bad,” he said. “How—”
She pushed past him, not willing to stay inside. He joined her in the hall.
“Better?” he asked.
“Not really.” She looked left and right. “What happened here?”
“Like I said at the beach. They were attacked, as far as I can tell.” He made a face. “There are a lot of bones. And cages.” He pointed to an open door. “That’s my room.”
“Bones? I think we should leave,” she said. “We’ll get the stuff you need from here and go somewhere else.”
“Hmm,” he answered noncommittally.
There was a sleeping bag on the floor of his room, and a heavy wooden table. Stacks and stacks of leather-bound books balanced on a heavy wooden table and several open boxes. Candles, crystals, and herbs were spilling out of them.
“Oh, my God,” she said. It would take them days to cart all of it out of the castle.
“Ja, you see,” he replied.
Then he walked to the table and placed his palm on a black book with scrolled gold writing that she couldn’t read.
“I don’t know what it says, either,” he told her as he flipped it open. There was a loose photograph of a woman with red hair, red eyebrows, and big blue eyes. She was wearing a cat suit and body armor strapped over that. She had a black helmet on her hip with ZECHERLE in white. He tapped his finger on the lettering. “That’s her last name. Maybe it’s your father’s, too.”
Delaney Zecherle. Her mom’s last name was Martin. Her mom’s name had been Tenaya.
He turned the page, edged a small photograph from the crease with his thumbnail, and handed it to her.
She caught her breath at the sight of herself as a little girl in a school picture, grinning away, with no notion of what was to come. She was missing her two front teeth.
“I was six,” she said.
She turned over the picture. The handwriting was careful; she read, Delaney Martin (Dana.) And the address of their house, the one she had still been living in, with Jordan and the others. Then, (YOUR NIECE!)
“Is that your mother’s handwriting?” Alex asked her.
She shook her head. “I don’t know. We never wrote anything down.”
Feelings she couldn’t describe swept upward, making her feel out of kilter. She stared at the handwriting, then at the picture. Her heart tugged.
“This was… before,” she said.
“Ja,” he said. They stood shoulder to shoulder, looking down at the Delaney that had been. Stuffed animals and Disneyland, those had been her hopes and dreams. She felt the heat of his skin and wondered what his life had been like with the Cohens. Jets and flying lessons?”
“From what I can tell, your aunt was only here for a couple of weeks before everything went crazy,” he said.
There were some burned fragments of lined paper. She put down the picture and carefully sorted through them. She looked a piece of paper.
THINGS TO DO
LEARN GERMAN
On another, she read;
I think something’s going on downstairs. Something wrong.
She turned another page of the book, to see photographs of other people dressed like Meg Zecherle. They looked like riot police.
“Those were her teammates,” Alex said. “They were some kind of security guards. They patrolled along a place called the Pale.”
“What’s that?” she asked.
“A border. They had to keep something out. I think it got in.”
She looked at the massive volumes. “All this, and that’s all you’ve got?” “Most of this is written in Latin. I think. I think some was very old German.” He opened a book at random. “Here or there I found something I could read. Spells.” He looked abashed. “Imagine if you came here. Would you know what to do?”
They shared a grim smile.
“There’s nothing more about… us?” she asked, not sure which “us” she meant.
“Maybe you can find something,” he said. “There is something,” he went on, reaching for another book. Bound in maroon leather, it was enormous.
He opened it to the first page. There was a black-and-white woodblock print of a man in a three-cornered hat on a horse, and a small child clasped against his chest. The horse was cantering the night. Clouds billowed in the background, and in the largest of them, a shadowy face smiled wickedly down at them.
Alex pointed to lines of text beneath the picture. It was organized in stanzas like a poem, and he began to read aloud, in German. She listened to his voice.
“It’s Der Erlkönig,” he said. “‘The Erl King.’ Do you know it? ‘Who rides so late, through night and wind’?” When she shook her head, he said, “I keep coming back to this picture. I keep reading the poem. I don’t know why.”
“What is it about?”
“The child is sick. The father is riding with him through the forest, and the Erl King wants him. The boy can see him. The father can’t. He begs his father to save him from the Erl King. But he doesn’t.”
“Cheery,” she said.
The despair tugged at her again, almost like someone pulling on her hand. Anger skittered ratlike up her spine and she stepped away from the table.
“Delaney?” he asked.
Freaked, she looked around the room. “Is this place haunted?”
“I don’t know. His expression told her he had come to a decision. “The town’s deserted. We can look for a place—”
A sharp stab of light replaced his face. She saw a circular stone stairway. Saw herself walking down it behind Alex.
She brushed past him and went into the hall. Her thought was to go back out the front door, but instead, she turned in the opposite direction, into the pitch blackness.
Light flared behind her. She heard the thudding of his boots, and then he was beside her. He had a flashlight. He said something to her in German, gave his head an impatient shake.
“English, English,” he said to himself. “What is happening?” he asked her.“There’s something down there,” she said, halting before a hole in the floor at the end of the hall. “I saw it. It’s a cage.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “There are a lot of cages down there. But you wanted to leave, and I think we should. We can come back.”
She nodded. He was right.
But then it happened again: the flash of light. The cage.
And the horrible, horrible despair. Cold, miserable, alone. Dying.
Pleading.
“I think I have to go down there,” she said hesitantly.
“Okay, here,” he said, turning and aiming the flashlight at a curved stone wall, then downward at a circular flight of stone stairs. “I’ll go first.”
He started down, taking the flashlight beam with him. She followed for a couple of steps, but then she froze. There was no banister and she pushed herself against the wall, afraid she’d fall off the edge of the staircase and never stop falling. She was no Alice, and this was no Wonderland. Grief wafted up from the depths below and twisted around her, like people drowning on the Titanic. She recoiled and crossed her arms.
She headed back up.
Then suddenly, rage poured right in, crashing over her head.
Just go down and kick him. Kick him hard, and he’ll fall down the stairs and break his neck. It was as if someone else inside her was whispering commands. Raging because he was the enemy, and the end of the world was his fault.
“Alex,” she said, swallowing hard.
Oblivious, he kept going.
She took another step up.
Kill him. They lied. They told us we were doing a great thing. But we were not.
She teetered and on the step and went back down. The rage ebbed. Another step down. It faded.
Another.<
br />
It was gone.
“Alex, wait,” she said. “There’s something bad. Really bad.”
He was standing at the bottom of the stairs. She got to him and to her surprise, he put his arm around her protectively.
“There’s something that’s angry. It told me to…” she began. And then realized that she didn’t really know this guy, and she had watched him charm his way into her home.
“To what?” he asked.
What the hell am I doing? she thought. She felt as if she were waking up after a long, strange dream.
“It told me to leave,” she lied. “And I think—”
And then she felt the sorrow, and the terror. It was longing, and keening, and fear. She thought she heard a moan, and caught her breath. Was someone down here? Someone alive?
“I think we should hurry,” she said.
“You’re okay, though?” he asked.
“Does it matter?” she snapped, because she was afraid of him. “Why don’t you just zap me so I’ll do your bidding, master?”
He knit his brows and took his arm away, exhaled and ran his hand across his forehead. She saw how tired he was. He’d just flown halfway across the world, for God’s sake. But she hadn’t asked him to. She hadn’t asked for any of this.
He reached out a hand toward her, then lowered it. The flashlight beam glinted off the piercing in his eyebrow. No, not the beam. There was light around him, as if he were glowing from the inside. His eyes were almost luminescent.
“I feel like you’re supposed to be here. And ja, I pushed to make that happen. If things were different I would never have invaded you…” He shrugged. “But they’re not.”
“Invaded?” she repeated.
He walked on. She walked behind him, staring at the back of his head, at his shoulders. She could almost see tendrils connecting her to him. She didn’t feel like she was supposed to be in the castle, but she did feel like she was supposed to be with him. Was that his doing? Was he leading her down there to do something to her?
No, she thought, but how did she know that?
At the bottom of the next landing, a white strip gleamed. Luminous paint. There was a sign in German. EINTRITT VERBOTEN. She knew Verboten meant “forbidden.”
The sorrow came back. A silver trickle of strange sounds, like wind chimes, breathed against her ear.
“****.”
Twinkling like starlight.
“****.”
And she knew they meant “Mama.”
“Hello?” she called out.
“Delaney?” Alex said.
“Ssh,” she ordered. She listened hard.
“****.”
Mama.
“Where are you?” she whispered.
Silence. And…… weeping, and then a kind of gasping, like strangling. And another voice, higher-pitched:
“********”.
Help.
She ran forward, past Alex, who tried to reach out a hand to her. Then she stood at the beginning of a double row of cubes, or boxes, that stretched far into the darkness. The sounds were all around her now, coming from the boxes. Whispers, cries for help. Help that never came.
She ran to the closest one and stood facing it. There were bars across the front, and what appeared to be shattered glass in a semicircle on the floor. The moan again:
********”.
She felt emotions: Loneliness, misery. Shock. They hadn’t expected this to happen to them. Something else was supposed to have happened. Someone else was supposed to be waiting for them. Whatever had been in here had been abandoned, dumped into cells.
“It’s evil. So evil,” she said.
Then her knees buckled. She felt her eyes roll back in her head. Light blossomed in front of her, reaching to the ceiling in ribbons of color, like the Aurora Borealis Alex had conjured on the ocean. Shadows appeared, then snapped into sharp silhouettes. Misshapen figures rode huge black horses whose hooves sparked as they galloped six inches about the ground. Tiny, gibbering things crouched on the saddles. Dogs, breathing fire, wove in and out between the horses’ legs as they cantered along a hill. At the head of the parade, a tall figure wearing a helmet decorated with two enormous antlers turns to look at her.
The deepest fear she had ever felt shot through her soul.
Then everything vanished.
Wordlessly, Alex picked her up and carried her out of the room. Up all the flights of stairs, to the main floor of the castle; and there she felt the rage again. Kick him. Stab him. Kill him. He raced across the marble floor and through the rubble; the ash of the doorway. Out to the leveled forest, in the gray, smelly snow.
He set her down on a rock and bent down in front of her. He took both her hands in his. They were cold.
“Are you all right now?” he asked her.
She blinked at him. “What was in there?” she asked him. “And what were the things with the horses?”
“Horses?” He looked bewildered. “What did you see?”
She told him. Then, still not sure it was the right thing to do, she told him about the rage.
“It told you to kill me?” he repeated, the blood draining from his face. “That I was a liar?”
She nodded.
He made a face and muttered in German. Then he said, “I guess it’s haunted, then.” His shoulders rounded and he patted her hand as he got up and plopped down beside her. He gestured to the castle. “I don’t think the answer is there.” He clicked his teeth and scratched his chin. “I thought you would find it.”
She was quiet a moment. Then she said, “You glowed. When I looked at you, I saw light.”
“I’m Mr. Electric,” he said. He opened his arms. Blue crackles shot from his fingertips. “We can go back to your home. I can make your refrigerator work.”
She heard the disappointment in his voice. “But Alex, something was going on with your family. They did something bad. And maybe we’re here to fix it.”
“You can’t go back in there,” he said.
“I think I have to,” she replied, feeling sick to her stomach at the thought.
“But not tonight.” He sighed. “I have a car. We can go to the village.”
It was a Mercedes; why was she surprised? They didn’t even go back for their stuff. They drove into the deserted village. Some shops were still filled with goods; they got toothbrushes and food, and changes of clothes. Sheets in packages. They broke into an inn and commandeered two rooms. She wasn’t sure which would make her feel better, to sleep in the same room or apart. She wasn’t sure of anything. She remembered how great it had felt to find that carton of batteries. It felt like that had happened to someone else. Not here, any way.
~
“What did you want out of life, before I came for you?” he asked her, as they shared a bottle of wine—she really wasn’t much of a drinker—and ate some canned baba ganoush. They were sitting on his bed. He was wearing a pair of black draw-string pajama bottoms and a gray T-shirt. She had on an oversized T-shirt and leggings. Not very glamorous, but in a way, that was better.
“Batteries,” she said. “Endless quantities of them.”
He smiled crookedly. “I’m older than you. I was laying plans for my adult life. We were really rich.”
“Did you, um, have a girl friend?”
“I always had a girl friend.” He wagged his eyebrows and sipped from their bottle. “I was going to follow in my father’s footsteps, be rich, then save the rainforest.”
“I think you added that last part to make yourself sound more noble.” She thought about the voice in the castle telling her that he was a liar. Maybe it had lied.
He handed her the bottle and she cradled it in her lap. “I wanted my mom not to die. And I wanted to meet my father.” Her voice dropped. “And I wanted to be safe.”
“I think you need your own bottle of wine,” he drawled. “Because you got nothing on the list.”
“Are you saying I’m not safe with you?” she asked. She meant to
tease him, but her voice shook.
He blew the air out of his cheeks. She wanted to take it back, but she decided to let it hang there, and see how he responded.
“I think,” he said, “that we should go to sleep.”
~
But she was too afraid to sleep. She went to her own room and lay down, but she felt too vulnerable that way. She paced, wondering if Alex was awake.
From her window, she could see the castle, and she made a face at it, like a little kid. She never wanted to go in there again. But her purse was in there. Her clothes. Everything. She hoped Jordan remembered to take good care of her stuff. She had her mom’s jewelry, meager as it was, and some souvenirs from the days before—report cards, birthday cards, a Barbie doll and her favorite stuffy, Clown Bear.
Sighing, she leaned her head on the glass. Coolness pressed against her cheek and then the sky exploded into colors. Blue, pink, purple, shimmering and flaring; she stared, transfixed, as gray clouds billowed into being. The moon rose and became the face in the book Alex had shown her. Staring at her. Whispering to her, in words she didn’t understand. In a rising and falling voice, like someone reciting a poem. She put her hand on the glass and felt such a pull.
“Alex!” she shouted.
She heard him spring out of his bed and race across the hall. Within seconds, he was standing beside her.
“I see it,” he cried. “That’s the Pale. I know it. I can feel it.”
“The face is the Pale?” she asked.
He cocked his head. “What face?”
She pointed. It was staring at them both.
No, it wasn’t.
It was staring at Alex.
She looked at him. He was bathed in moonlight, every inch of him. His skin, his hair, his eyes.
She told him, and he held out his arms. “I don’t see it,” he said. He gazed back through the window. “Delaney, what if I’m the lost thing that you were supposed to find?”
And she didn’t know why—maybe because he was afraid—but she put her arms around him. His body was very solid. He was staring out the window; now he gave her his attention. She raised on her tiptoes and brushed his lips with hers. Cautiously, he kissed her back. Just the one kiss, chaste, and then she unloosened her arms.