“We should reach Hellsgate by nightfall,” Corbbmacc said, sipping from his canteen. “We won’t go into the town proper until after dark, though. We need to keep a low profile. I’ll be taking you to the Brood’s safe house there, and Paige should be waiting for us.” He shot a look at Emily. “You can ask her the rest of your infernal questions.”
“Ah, c’mon, Corbbmacc,” Celine said, letting the kitsper drink water from her cupped palms. “Yeh know Em’ll have plenty o’ questions for yeh along the way. Why keep hopin’ she won’t when yeh know it’s pointless.”
Corbbmacc scowled. Emily laughed. Michael watched them all blandly, eating his way mechanically through his rations.
“Will Paige answer my questions, though?” Emily asked, getting up and brushing pine needles from her legs.
“See, what’d I tell yeh?” Celine grinned.
Corbbmacc sighed. “I don’t know. Probably, as long as she doesn’t think you’re a threat. She’s not very good at…” Corbbmacc’s mouth snapped shut abruptly.
Emily and Celine eyed him curiously.
“Not very good at what?”
Corbbmacc glared at them, then seemed to shrug to himself and got to his feet. He looked down at Michael, and his expression softened a little. He reached down and pulled the boy gently to his feet.
Michael cooperated readily enough, a vague and absent smile on his lips. His eyes were clouded, as though he were watching events unfold that were of far greater importance than those going on right around him. Maybe he was.
Emily and Corbbmacc gathered up the saddlebags, and together, the four of them entered the small clearing beside the path where the horses were tethered.
The sun was well up now, and the sky was a paler blue than Emily could ever remember having seen it before.
Before… Such a strange word to her now. Before was another life; a life of cars and iPhones and Zambonis. And what did that make this new life that was unfolding around her? An afterlife? The thought made her smile wryly; she was too sore from the time spent riding to be in the afterlife, she guessed. She didn’t know if she would ever find her way back—she wasn’t sure she even wanted to.
She stared up into the sky’s fathomless depths, like an ocean in the stratosphere, and suddenly wished she could share this moment with Casey: the stillness of the woods at dawn, the sound of the birds in the distance, the warm sunshine on her face, the smell of pine, and that pale, ephemeral blue above.
“Yeh okay, Em?”
“Yeah, just…thinking.”
Corbbmacc was strapping his saddlebags to the side of his horse, and, putting away her own musings, Emily hurried to do the same. Celine followed, and Emily was glad to see no sign of the kitsper. Hopefully, that was the end of the wretched thing.
Celine stepped into the stirrup and swung herself up and into the saddle. She was getting used to riding, Emily saw, a whole lot faster than she had.
She was about to climb up herself, when she heard Michael’s voice behind her.
“No!”
She turned to see Corbbmacc with a hand on the boy’s shoulder, evidently trying to coax him into getting onto the horse. Michael had his arms crossed and his feet planted firmly on the ground.
“We’ve got to go,” Corbbmacc said, a bite of impatience in his tone.
“No!” Michael said again, shaking his head.
“Please…”
“No!”
Corbbmacc looked across at Emily and his gaze locked with hers. She saw something there she hadn’t before. It was a mix of uncertainty and a plea for help. She raised her eyebrows at him. His mouth twitched, almost became a smile, before settling back into its customary scowl.
Emily strode across the little clearing to face the two boys.
“Michael,” she said gently, prying Corbbmacc’s grip from his shoulder. “Please get on the horse. It’s time for us to go.”
Michael looked at Corbbmacc, then at the horse, and finally at Emily again.
“Derek,” he said. “Go with Derek.”
Corbbmacc started to say something, but Emily shot him a look and he broke off.
“You need to ride with Corbbmacc,” she pointed. “Just like yesterday, remember?”
“No!” the boy said again. “Go with Derek.”
“Christ,” Corbbmacc swore. “Just let him ride with you and let’s get going.”
Emily looked over her shoulder at Celine. The other girl was already sliding from Storm’s saddle.
“It’s fine, Em. I can ride with Corbbmacc.” She smiled at him as she crossed the distance between the horses. “Mayhap I’ve got me some questions for ’im meself.”
“Jesus,” Corbbmacc muttered.
Celine was awfully chipper this morning, Emily thought as she led Michael across the clearing to Storm. He got onto the mare without further complaint, and Emily swung herself up into the saddle in front of him.
A mewing sound cut through the air.
What now?
Emily looked back at the others as Michael put his arms around her waist unselfconsciously. The feel of him behind her was oddly comforting, like slipping into an old and familiar pair of skates. For a moment, the feeling distracted her, but she pushed it aside and forced herself to focus. They’d been through a lot in the last few days, and her emotions were tangled, that was all.
Corbbmacc was already astride his horse, waiting for Celine to climb on behind him. At Celine’s feet, the kitsper sat looking up at her. His wings were folded again, and his gaze said, more plainly than words: “Hey, where you going without me?”
“Take him or don’t, but let’s go,” Corbbmacc growled, any pretense of patience gone.
Celine scooped up the creature in her arms.
“C’mon, yeh rascal.” The kitsper extended his claws and used them to climb up the front of Celine’s tunic. He perched precariously on her shoulder, spreading his wings slightly to balance himself.
Celine gave him a quick pat, then climbed awkwardly into the saddle behind Corbbmacc. The kitsper held on, only shifting his wings this way or that as she moved.
“Named him then, have you,” Corbbmacc said, his tone a little softer.
“What?” Celine asked, confused.
“Rascal.”
Celine thought for a moment, and a smile crossed her face.
“Yeah, I like that. Rascal ’tis, then.”
Corbbmacc gathered up the reins, and steered his horse back onto the path. After making sure Michael was holding on tight, Emily followed him.
* * *
By mid-morning, they’d left the path and begun following an old and rusting set of railroad tracks that cut a narrow slash through the forest. Trees had grown up around them, creating a canopy of leaves overhead, and the space between the rails was littered with the remains of broken ties, stones, and brush. Here and there, they passed discarded wheels, gears, and other disintegrating bits of machinery left by long dead travelers to decay beside the tracks. Progress was slow and tedious as they painstakingly guided their steeds through the endless series of obstacles.
Now and then, Rascal would take flight, scouting a few hundred yards ahead. He’d wait, perched in a tree for them to catch up, then flutter back down onto Celine’s shoulder again with a soft meow.
At noon, Corbbmacc called a brief halt so they could rest. They ate more of the jerky, watered the horses, then pressed on.
Celine’s high spirits of that morning had evaporated beneath the weight of Corbbmacc’s brooding silence, and they’d all eventually fallen deep into their own dismal thoughts.
Now that the terrors of that last horrible night at Seven Skies were behind Emily, she had a chance to mourn the loss of what few possessions she’d had from her old life. The pang she felt for her phone was ridiculous, of course. It wouldn’t have done her any good here. But still, she’d saved for so long to buy it, and had hardly had a chance to really appreciate it before it was gone.
Worse was the loss of the pict
ure of her and Casey that Coach Anders had copied for her. She tried to conjure an image of Casey in her mind and was alarmed to find that the details were already starting to blur in her memory. How inattentive the human mind is when the subject of its scrutiny is taken for granted. And she had taken Casey for granted, hadn’t she? And coffee, and hockey, and so many, many things she’d loved.
She looked over at Celine where she sat sullenly behind Corbbmacc’s broad back. Rascal rested comfortably on her shoulder with his wicked-looking tail curled companionably around her neck, as if he’d never been anywhere else in the world. Silently, she vowed to herself never to take Celine for granted the way she had Casey.
Remember your friends.
She looked back down at the tracks as they wended their way through the trees and realized that the woods around her had gone unnaturally still. She heard no birdsong in the branches above and no buzz of insects or rustle of brush as smaller creatures scavenged. How long had it been that way? She didn’t know. She shifted uneasily in the saddle and felt Michael do the same behind her.
The gradual incline they’d been steadily climbing became a steep and rocky hill. The trees thinned and gave way to sandy earth and gravel. It crunched loudly beneath the horses’ hooves in the eerie quiet of the lifeless woods around them.
Corbbmacc stopped as he reached the summit, and Emily steered Storm in alongside him.
As the last of the sunlight slowly drained from the sky, they gazed down upon the city of Hellsgate in silence.
She wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but she hadn’t expected it to be…so literal. The city sprawled below her across the floor of a deep valley, against the foot of a series of jagged mountains. Flickering red fires dotted its length and breadth, blinking up and pinning them beneath their demonic gaze. Billows of black smoke drifted up from amidst the buildings and streets, casting a dark malaise over everything. Piles of white ash and soot banked the streets like snow, and the tiny silhouettes of the city’s inhabitants swarmed around them. None dallied. No one paused to greet a friend or help a neighbor. They looked like bees hard at work within their hive. She shuddered, though the evening was warm.
Michael tightened his arms around her, and she felt him press his face into the hair at the nape of her neck. Storm pawed the ground uneasily.
She looked over at the others. Celine’s expression was sad but composed. Corbbmacc sat impassively, staring down at the cityscape laid out before him.
He must have felt her gaze on him, because he lifted his head and met it. She saw an odd mixture of pride, shame, and defiance in his eyes.
“Welcome,” he said with a small, sardonic smile, “to Hellsgate.”
Part Six: Into the O-zone
“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
—Socrates
“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
—William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Chapter Twenty
As the sun finished its slow descent behind them, Corbbmacc got to his feet, brushing sand from his leggings. Everything in his manner seemed taut and keyed up. He looked down into the valley, running a hand listlessly through his hair.
Emily watched him as he went to his horse and patted its nose with a level of affection that he sometimes seemed unable to extend toward his fellow humans. There was something dark inside him behind the facade. He’d been silent and brooding as they’d waited for the sun to set, contemplating the city with something akin to wistfulness.
Something inside her stirred. What was it? Sympathy? Empathy? She didn’t know. There was something inside him she recognized from the darker places in her soul.
“We’ll have to leave the horses here,” he said, glancing down again at the flickering fires below. “They’ll be too conspicuous in town. I can send someone for them in the morning. Maybe I’ll even come myself, if Paige doesn’t have anything else for me to do.” The words were casual enough, but Emily detected a slight tinge of bitterness in the line of his mouth.
She had misgivings about leaving Storm tied at the edge of the forest overnight. During the last few days, the mare had become a kind of friend to her as they’d made their whirlwind escape from Seven Skies. Even from this distance, though, it was plain that Corbbmacc was right. She couldn’t imagine any sort of animals living in the ruinous cityscape spread out below them. If Marianne still had men out searching for them, the last thing they wanted was to draw attention to themselves. Besides, by the looks of the town, she wasn’t at all certain that the horses weren’t safer up here than down in the valley.
With one last pat on the horse’s side, Corbbmacc turned away and began leading them alongside the tracks and down toward the fires of Hellsgate.
As they descended, smoke burned Emily’s eyes and clawed at the inside of her throat. Every few yards, the fumes forced them to stop and catch their breath, coughing and choking on the ash that wafted down ceaselessly, carried by the winds that gusted through the mountains around them. It painted everything a pale and ghostly gray and clung to their hair and clothes.
Gradually, another stench assaulted their senses, hovering just below the smoke and ash. It came and went, and finally solidified into the wet reek of decay.
Corbbmacc paused on the tracks, turning toward them and rifling through the saddlebag slung over his shoulder. He pulled out an old tunic, stained with sweat and grease. With deft movements, he tore it into long, narrow strips, tied one around his mouth and nose, then passed one each to Emily and Celine, motioning that they should do the same.
“What is it that smells so?” Celine asked, donning her own strip and watching Corbbmacc cover Michael’s face with the last.
“You’ll see,” Corbbmacc said grimly. He glanced at Emily, who was still toying uncertainly with the coarse fabric between her fingers. “Put it on. It’ll help. It’s going to get a lot worse as we get closer.”
Worse? How could it get worse? Emily shuddered, then tied the rag around the bottom half of her face. It smelled like clean air and hay, like pine and sweat and ale; it smelled like Corbbmacc.
Rascal sat still on Celine’s shoulder, his back as straight as a poker and his nose tilted up to catch the scents on the wind. Now and then, he mewed unhappily, and though Emily half expected he would, he never took flight. His wings remained folded primly against his back, and his long tail arched over them, its white bony stinger pointed at the star-strewn sky. He made her shudder, too.
By the time the ground had leveled out, the smell of rot was so thick in the air that Emily was embroiled in a constant struggle with her rising gorge.
Without warning, Corbbmacc slowed abruptly, and she nearly fell over him.
“What are you doing?” she croaked. Her stomach rolled. Corbbmacc ignored her and surveyed the fires that blazed before them, beacons in the dark. He seemed to be listening for something.
Celine and Michael, who had been trailing a few steps behind, came up beside them. In the dark, she could just make out Celine’s pallor. Firelight reflected weirdly in Michael’s wide and distant eyes. Both wheezed and coughed, and Celine clutched at a stitch in her side.
“Name yourself.”
The words rumbled from a large dark shadow on their right. A rock, Emily thought. The tone was not hostile, but rang with authority that would brook no denial. All the same, her hand fell to the hilt of her sword, and she strained to see beyond the shadows that leapt and danced around them.
“Corbbmacc of Hellsgate,” Corbbmacc said. “You know who I am, Garrett.”
“Who is your closest living kin?”
“Christ, Garrett, it’s my sister Mona, as you know very goddamn well, since you’ve been living with her for five years.”
“Who are your traveling companions?” There was a definite note of amusement in the deep voice now, and Emily relaxed a little.
Corbbmacc made a disgusted sort of sound and shot a glance at Emily.
“Your
turn to answer questions,” he muttered.
“Emily,” she said. “Emily Haven.”
“And from where do you come, Emily Haven?”
“Uh…” She looked at Corbbmacc for help, but he was staring at the fires of the city and pointedly ignoring them. “I’m from…uh…Minneapolis.” The name sounded strange to her ears now, after just two weeks in this place. It had the peculiar, alien ring of Middle Earth, or some long abandoned Biblical locale.
“And I’m Celine, from no place in particular,” Celine said. “This ’ere’s Michael, but he don’t talk much. We don’t know where he’s from…uh, do we?” She looked at Emily, who shrugged.
“Enough questions, Garrett,” Corbbmacc growled. “Come out where I can see you.”
There was a pause, then a shadow detached from the patch of darkness beside the tracks and resolved into the dim outline of a hulking man. It was difficult to make out any details beyond his sheer size in the meager light, but his enormous frame was well armored, and he seemed to have a scarf covering his face.
He went over to Corbbmacc and slapped him on the back. “Welcome back, my man. Paige thought you’d be back sooner. Especially after we got news of…of what happened at Seven Skies.” He turned toward Emily. “Sorry about that, but we can’t be too careful these days. Have to be sure people are who they say they are, right? Hell of a thing having bloody magic users running around.”
He held out his hand to her. “I’m Garrett,” he said, and Emily reached out and allowed his massive fist to close around hers. His grip was firm beneath the cool leather of the heavy gloves he wore. “Where the hell is Mini Apples? I’ve never heard of it. Do they grow them there?”
Emily smiled in spite of herself. “It’s Minneapolis, and it’s a long, long way from here. They don’t grow anything there, much.”
“But they ’ave snow,” Celine said, stepping forward. Rascal hissed at Garrett, showing his sting over one shoulder.
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