But those pale blue eyes regarded him balefully. Oliver had said he would help.
“All right.”
He pushed away the doubts that crowded in on him. How many people touched real magic in their lives? Once more, he started for the edge. The winter man stiffened, head cocked at an angle as though he were listening for something.
“What do—”
“Hush!” Frost snapped.
Oliver listened with him. The wind nearly screamed. But after a moment he realized that it was not only the wind. Something else shrieked along with the storm, something hidden in the darkness and the driven snow.
“Move!” Frost snapped. “We must go now or all will be lost!”
It was lunacy. Complete and utter lunacy. Through the storm he could still see the Christmas lights on his father’s house, the world he had always known and trusted. But he had the weight of the winter man against him and there was something more . . .
A change in the air. Snowflakes pelted his face as he looked around. A prickling sensation played across the base of his neck as he felt an ominous presence. The storm seemed to pull against him, but Oliver was keenly aware that it was his own fear that made him feel so sluggish.
“Please,” Frost rasped.
At last he tore his gaze away from his home and turned to stagger with the injured myth through the driving snow. The edge of the bluff loomed nearer, and snow blew off that cliff in a cascade of white. If he went any closer he might truly fall. A strong enough gust of wind might end it for both of them.
“Now what?” Oliver asked, voice strained.
“Go on,” Frost replied. “Just to the edge.”
Oliver’s mind flashed back to earlier in the evening, the moments he had spent there on the bluff, the pull of the edge, the temptation to throw himself over. It was as though he were being punished for that temptation now, as if the universe was determined to make him decide for real.
He shook his head sharply. “I can’t.”
But when he glanced at Frost, the winter man was not looking at him. Instead, those misting ice eyes were staring back over his shoulder. The myth looked terrified.
“The Falconer,” Frost whispered, the words swirling up and away with the storm so that Oliver was not even certain he had really heard them.
But he knew what he would find when he turned. The hunter. Slowly Oliver turned.
Knee-deep in the snow of an extraordinary storm, a dark figure blotted out Oliver’s view of the world he had once known. The hunter was eight feet high and half that across its shoulders. Its legs and arms were wrapped in strips of leather, chest and torso clad in hammered metal that looked pewter gray through the curtain of snow. It stood like a man, but its head belonged to a bird of prey and huge wings jutted from its back, pinioned to decrease wind resistance as it advanced upon them.
The Falconer.
In its right hand it held a long, thin blade, curved like a scimitar, and the scimitar was on fire.
“I am sorry,” Frost said, a pained whisper in his ear. “He will kill you for coming to my aid.”
Not real. It isn’t. Can’t be real,
Oliver thought, gaping at it, forgetting to breathe or to blink or to allow his heart to beat.
But with each step he could hear the crunch of snow beneath leather-clad feet and the hiss as flakes fell upon that burning scimitar and melted. It paused and looked back and forth from Oliver to Frost as though trying to make sense of this new addition to its hunt.
“Oh, Jesus,” Oliver said.
He thought of his family, and of Julianna, and he wanted to say good-bye to them all. He wished he could see the house, the Christmas lights, be in his mother’s parlor again. But the Falconer was huge and terrible and blocked out the world. It opened its mouth and let out a bird-cry that pierced his ears, and Oliver shouted and clapped his free hand to the side of his head.
He felt like throwing up. He was prey, that was all.
Oliver shook his head violently. “No.” He tore his gaze away from the Falconer, backpedaling toward the edge of the bluff, feet slipping on new snow. The wind shoved him with frozen hands and even over the pounding of his own heart in his ears he could hear the crash of the surf on the rocks below, could feel the empty void that stretched out over the ocean only a few feet behind him.
He reached up and grabbed the winter man’s chin and turned the myth to face him. Wildly he stared into Frost’s eyes. He could hear the Falconer screeching again.
“Do something!”
“Get me to the edge!”
“Fuck you!” Oliver screamed, frenzied, enraged.
The mist had stopped leaking from the winter man’s eyes. The blue ice there seemed to have shrunk down to glistening, razor-edged diamonds.
“Get . . . me . . . to the edge!”
The Falconer shrieked loudly and raised the scimitar. Its huge wings beat the air and its feet left the snow and it
flew
across the bluff at them. Its beak opened wide, only darkness inside, and the fire of its blade gleamed dully upon its armored chest.
With what must have been the last bit of strength remaining to him, Frost thrust his right hand into the air, curved into a claw as though he could tear a chunk out of the sky. He ripped the air with icy talons and when he brought his hand down it was not merely air but ice, a massive blade forged of the storm itself. With a savage roar, voice like a raging blizzard, Frost swung the blade at the Falconer.
The hunter pulled up, wings struggling in the storm, and brought his blazing scimitar up in defense. It shattered, the fire doused, and the winter blade clanged off the Falconer’s armored chest. The pewter-gray chest plate was scored deeply but the sword forged by the winter man shattered.
The Falconer stumbled and went down on the snow. But he stirred almost immediately and began to rise, even as Frost fell to his knees.
“No!” Oliver cried, reaching to steady him. He stared down into those ice-blue eyes, then glanced at the winter man’s wound to find that the water that spilled from it was flowing faster.
The blue eyes began to close and again to leak cold mist.
“No,” Oliver whispered.
In a panic he turned toward that sheer cliff that overlooked the ocean and the rocks below. Less than ten feet away. He could see the huge whitecaps the storm was driving in. Numb with fear, Oliver began to move toward the edge.
Head bowed, shoulders hunched, he braced himself against the wind that buffeted his back, urged him on toward that fatal tumble that lay ahead. No longer was Oliver merely supporting Frost; he was practically dragging the winter man now.
Snow swept past his legs and out over the precipice. Oliver went down on his knees, two feet from the edge, Frost lying against him. The mist that leaked from the winter man’s eyes was like cloud tears.
Frigid, frozen, filled with a kind of terror he had never imagined, Oliver turned one final time to glance toward home. A dim glimmer of Christmas lights was all he could see through the blizzard. The huge silhouette of the Falconer had risen, head and shoulders and wings a dreadful void in the heart of the storm. It opened its beak, this cruel hunter, raised its taloned hands, now empty of any forged weapon and yet no less terrible, and the Falconer shrieked once more.
“You must come,”
Frost whispered weakly, and Oliver heard him as though the words had been spoken inside his head.
“Otherwise you will die.”
Throat raw, Oliver stared down at the winter man, so still in his arms. Now he saw a glimmer of blue light in those diamond eyes.
“Where?” Oliver rasped, feeling as though to speak the word had cost him his final breath. Yet somehow he knew.
The Falconer shrieked and lunged, wings battling the storm.
The winter man grasped his arms around Oliver’s waist with the last of his strength and kicked out with his legs, driving them both over the edge. They tumbled from the precipice and Oliver closed his eyes, a single warm tear burning his cheek as he went over. Together they fell. Oliver did not scream. He did not have the heart or the breath. He let go of the winter man but Frost clutched him all the tighter.
Oliver opened his eyes. The rocks were rushing up to meet him. The waves crashed against the base of the cliff, obscured by the curtain of snow, falling as Oliver and the winter man fell. They had become part of the storm, merged with the blizzard itself.
He turned over in the air and saw, above, that the Falconer had not given up the hunt. The thing streaked down after them with its wings pulled tight against its body, its arms outstretched, talons ready to catch them, capture them, tear them. But Oliver felt no fear. Instead, his entire body was filled to overflowing with one single, powerful emotion. He was crippled with regret.
The Falconer shrieked again but now it was far away, like a distant church bell, the ghost of a sound.
The scream of the hunter was cut off abruptly. Oliver cried out as a blue light erupted across the sky, enveloping everything. A spike of pain ripped through his chest as though something had been plunged into his flesh . . . or, more so, like something had been torn out. Blinded for the moment by the brilliance of that blue flare, he could see nothing. He could feel nothing save the arms of the winter man around him.
Together they struck water, sinking fast and deep.
But there were no rocks. And the water was warm. Frost let go and Oliver kicked out his legs, limbs heavy, winter clothes soaked through, dragging at him. Fighting that weight he struggled to reach the air, eyes still stinging from that light, mind awhirl with impossibility.
His head broke the surface and Oliver found that he could see again. But what he saw . . . a clear sky bright with the largest, palest pearl of a moon he had ever seen and stars too few, too large, too close. A snow-covered mountain rose up in the distance. Water, yes, but not the ocean. There came a splash to his left and Frost appeared in the water perhaps ten feet away. They were in a huge lake, so enormous that on three sides Oliver could not see the shore and on the fourth, below the mountain on the horizon, he could only just make it out. With a sudden flash of terror he looked up at the sky again, but there was no sign of the Falconer.
“Where?” Oliver asked, and he heard the echo of his own voice, the word he had spoken only moments before, when the world was still real and solid and knowable.
Frost did not smile. Jagged-edged face above the water, the winter man stared grimly at him. “Home. We are on the other side of the Veil now. It was the only way we both might live. Yet by drawing you here, I have surely doomed us both.”
CHAPTER 3
T
he night sky seemed to go on forever, stretching across the horizon as though it cradled the entire world and the sun would never return. A gentle breeze rippled the surface of the lake. The water was warm, proof that the sun had shone that day, but the wind was cool. Droplets of water slid down Oliver’s face and the back of his neck from his wet hair, but he hadn’t the strength even to lift a hand to wipe them away. The winter jacket he had put on . . . it seemed like days ago, somehow . . . was saturated and it began to drag him down. Oliver managed to unzip it, shrug out of it, and doff the gloves he had worn. At last he uncoiled the damp snake that his scarf had become and let that slither into the water.
Freed from those heavy clothes, he still had to contend with boots he was too tired to remove. He could only float there, alternately staring at Frost and then glancing about at their surroundings. The land seemed preternaturally pure. Pristine. The air itself filled his lungs with a kind of tingle and his strength began to return.
“The other side?” Oliver asked. He glanced around once more, took in the snowcapped mountain in the distance, to what he gauged must be north, and the vastness of the lake to the east.
Frost did not answer. He was staring up into the night sky, moonlight gleaming off his frozen form, eyes narrowed with worry. After a moment he nodded to himself, seemingly reassured. Oliver was not thinking clearly and so barely recognized the purpose of the winter man’s vigilance at first. Then a tremor of fear passed through him and he pictured their pursuer’s flaming sword, the twisted image of the falcon’s head on a human body . . . wings spread out behind him.
“Do you see him? Is he—” Oliver said, glancing upward.
“No. His kind cannot cross the border. He will have to find a Door, and there are very few of those.”
Oliver nodded as though he understood this far better than he did. It was enough, in that moment, to know they were not being pursued. Then another thought struck him and set off a fresh rush of alarm.
“But it’s . . . wait, that thing is still back there? Collette’s there. My sister. And . . . and my father.”
“The Hunter will not trouble them. He would not dare reveal himself to ordinary humans.”
