Dandelion Fire (14 page)

He stepped forward, relaxed, his mind no longer groping. It had been grasped, pulled, and his body had followed.

He was standing on the stone floor crowded with the power and life she had poured into it. Rain fell through high windows and ran down his face. She saw him as he
was, without any illusion. His illusions would have been pointless.

She was beautiful.

Her mind lashed out faster than he could feel, and it tore through him.

“You seek the life of Nimroth,” she said. Her voice was flat and distracted.

Darius was barely hanging on to his own existence, clutching at strength in his own life. He couldn't speak.

“I am Nimiane. He is in me. He is my sire.” She looked directly at him, no longer distracted. The river quieted around him. “You are no wizard.”

Darius stepped back, horrified that she was searching him, remembering what she would see.

“You are like a man suckled by wolves, strong, hungry, but hunched on all fours, with a tongue twisted in confusion.”

Suddenly, she laughed, and her laughter echoed through the room, rattling on stone, dying slowly. “Do not be afraid. You cannot be a man to me, but you will be my wolf. Is that what you have always dreamed? Have you not already named yourself witch-dog? You shall lead my pack.”

“Against what land?” Darius managed to say. “In what warring?”

“Against the world. Against all worlds. Together, we shall out-devour death. But first, you shall go out against the home of an old enemy, against his wife and sons,
against the land that embraced his feet. There is a grudge-hunger that must be slaked.”

He felt her reach into him, and his already-twisted strength twisted further. He fell to the wet stones in pain, and his eyes rolled. He was being split, ripped open, and hollowed. The pain stopped, and something else began. He was being filled. The stones and the sky and even the rain were venting into him, and he could feel her hand guiding the flood. He filled beyond bursting, more than he could ever have grasped for himself. The strength was unbearable, but he was not angry. Anger would have released it all.

She'd finished, and Darius felt too heavy to stand. The world around him was heavier. But he found his knees and then his feet. His hair clung to his shoulders.

His queen was standing, more beautiful than the moon, than a graveyard, than spider's silk.

“Sit,” she said, and gestured toward the throne. “Let us call your pack. They are but pups and curs. You shall make me wolves.”

Frank was sitting with his back against the side of the patrol car. Penelope was asleep in the backseat with her head on Dotty's lap. Dazed, Anastasia was in the front with the raggant on hers. Frank's skin tingled all over like it was prepping for the worst sunburn of his life. Ashen hairs drifted down onto his nose whenever he turned his head.

Old Ken Simmons had pulled him out of the
house as soon as the earthquake, or whatever it had been, settled down. Zeke and Dotty had carried Penelope.

He wasn't quite sure what had happened, or how. He only knew what was. And what was, was not Kansas. The town was gone. The crops and silos and trees were all gone. The barn and the irrigation ditch were gone. The front lawn, the cop car, and the shotgun he'd dropped by the broken ladder were still there. The rest was all tall, waving grass, without variation, to the horizon. And as far as the horizon was concerned, the sun was on the wrong side. Either it was morning where they were now, or the sun did its business in mirror image to the way it worked in Kansas.

Ken Simmons was leaning on the front of the car, holding his own shotgun and watching the house. Zeke was beside him.

“Zeke,” Frank said. “Help me up.”

Zeke came over, gripped Frank's hands, and leaned back. When he was on his feet, Frank creaked from side to side and walked slowly over to the sergeant.

“We've got to go back inside,” Frank said. “He's got Richard. Doesn't much matter if he's waiting for us.”

Simmons nodded.

“No backup coming,” Frank said. “Not even crickets, judging from the silence.”

Simmons nodded again. “I don't pretend to understand any of this,” he said. “But I don't need to. I'm just waiting to wake up.”

“Tell me when you do,” Frank said. “How's your foot?”

Sergeant Simmons snorted. “Still there.”

“Um,” Zeke said, and he pointed. “Is that water on the porch?”

They watched as the screen door gently swayed, and water rushed out from beneath it.

Frank hobbled over to his shotgun and picked it up out of the grass. He fitted two more shells into the barrels and levered back the hammers.

“Give the boy a gun,” he said, and nodded at Zeke. The water was spilling off the porch.

Sergeant Simmons pulled out his handgun, chambered a round, and showed Zeke the safety. “Point at what you want to hit,” he said. “And nothing else.”

“Not your feet,” Frank said.

The two men limped, carrying the shotguns at their hips. Zeke followed with the gun pointed at the ground.

The grass around the porch had become a fast-growing swamp, and more water poured out the front door every second.

Frank pulled the screen wide and stepped into two inches of water. The living room was a pond, the stairs a waterfall.

“Zeke,” he said. “Stand right here and keep your eyes on the back of the house.”

Zeke took up his station inside the door as Frank began climbing the flowing stairs. Sergeant Simmons limped behind him.

Halfway up, Frank could see what he'd already suspected. The water was coming out of the attic, romping down the stairs. He took another step and craned his head around the landing. A black cape and tall hat had been dropped by the girls' room. Richard was sitting with his back to the bathroom door. His arms clutched his knees tight to his chest. He was soaking wet, and he was shivering. His wide eyes, watching the flood, wheeled toward Frank in fear.

Frank smiled, but Richard showed no recognition.

“Don't let the hair and face fool you,” Frank said. “C'mon.”

Richard blinked and jumped to his feet, grinning. His bare feet slapped into the moving water as he lunged down the stairs and threw his arms around Frank.

Frank squeezed his shoulder, but kept his eyes on the attic. “Head right outside,” he said. “Go to the car.”

Richard didn't say a word. He let go of Frank, slid past Sergeant Simmons, and splashed down the stairs.

Frank didn't think Darius was in the attic. He didn't think he was anywhere around, not with the water running. He'd gone off to someplace. Still, he kept his gun up as he climbed and swept the attic with it before he turned to what had been Henry's room.

The two doors were open, and water was gushing out of them.

He stepped into the doorway, with the water frothing over his feet, and looked at the wall of cupboards—every last one gaping wide. Simmons stepped up beside him.

Neither of them said anything.

The water was surging out of a small, diamond-shaped cupboard by the upper corner of the compass door, splattering off the end of Henry's bed, and washing over the floor.

Frank stepped over to the wall, braced himself, and shut the door against the water, leaning his full weight against it. After a moment, the pressure disappeared, and he let go and stepped back.

The door to Endor was open as well. He squatted down, picked it up out of the puddle, and looked at the screws. They had all snapped. He fitted the door back in place, pushed the bed leg against it, and stood up.

He left the rest of the doors open.

“C'mon,” he said. “Let's go talk to Richard.”

On the way back down, he looked over at Grandfather's door, thrown wide open.

Not that it mattered. The front windows had shattered, too.

Two police cars and one ambulance were parked beside the hole. The barn was still there, and Frank's old truck was parked beside it, but the house and a chunk of the front yard had been replaced by a smooth-sided hole. For a while, water had poured in from a spot at the back, and the bottom had filled. It was slowing now.

“Smells funny,” one of the officers said.

The other tipped his hat to the back of his head. “Septic, you think?”

“No,” the first one said. “Salty. Smells like the ocean.”

“I wouldn't know. I'm a Kansas boy.”

Neither of them noticed the small, very confused crab appear at the edge of the hole and then tumble in.

He had been in tide pools before, but nothing like this. Still, the tide would come. It always did. He could wait.

wrists were bruised, and she had a scrape on one knee. She twisted her hands slowly, flexing her fingers, grateful that they were no longer tied. The room was small, but it didn't feel dirty. She was sitting on the floor, and the only thing to look at was the thin band of daylight beneath the door.

Before they'd grabbed her, she had screamed and tried to run. But the small men had been faster on the broken floor. When she'd fallen, they'd grabbed her arms and carried her between them. She'd kicked and tried to bite. She'd yelled for Henry and Richard. Finally, she'd tried to talk to the men. She'd begged and explained, but they hadn't responded. They'd never even looked in her eyes.

Through the big doorway, they'd taken her to a small flight of collapsed stairs, where they had left a ladder. One of them had climbed down the ladder first while the other held her arms pinned behind her back. Then she had been made to climb before being repinned at the bottom.

They'd led her through collapsed hallways, over
tumble-down doors, and through gaping windows. Finally, they'd come out into a courtyard, and Henrietta had stopped in her tracks. The two men, each holding a wrist, had stopped beside her. They'd let her look. They'd looked as well, and to Henrietta, it seemed like they were more affected than she was.

With crumbling walls and missing roofs, even in ruin, the city that loomed above her dwarfed anything she had ever seen. Arched walkways soared from tower to broken tower. Armies of pale statues lined rooftops in gapped rows. Windows big enough to swallow barns gaped from still-smooth walls, near seamless to any eye. A belfry, missing its crown, still held its bells aloft where no Kansas silo could have reached, and a slow swirl of crows moved around them. A web of wide paths and rubble was strewn through what had been the courtyard lawns. Fallen gutters and cornices, stone horse heads and angel wings were swallowed by waist-high swaying grass and tangles of flowers. In the center, rising up out of the green, there sprawled a fountain.

The men had led Henrietta toward it.

Marble, shaded with dirt, lichen, and grime, in places painted green with ancient water stains, was frozen in a moment of glory taller than Henrietta's house. Men and women, horses and creatures that she couldn't have imagined were all pulling themselves out of a mountain of rock. Some were laughing, others wept with what had once been joy, but now, hooded with stains and moss, could have been something else.

Perched at the very top, a bearded man sat on the back of a straining ram. Stone vines and leaves wrapped around him and curled through the ram's thick horns.

“A human shaped the font long ago, in the rich times,” one of the men had said. His voice was thick, but she'd understood. It was the first thing either man had said. “A man with senses in each fingertip. It has never been defaced.”

“A human?” she'd asked. “You're not human?”

He hadn't answered, and the other hadn't even glanced at her. They'd pulled her on, past the fountain, across the courtyard, and out through a narrow breach in a wall to a waiting wagon, loaded with timber. A large but lazy ox had been grazing in his harness. Her wrists and ankles had been twined together, and she'd been seated on and leg-tied to a beam on top of the pile.

And now she was here, after long miles on a near-invisible road, through rolling hills, sometimes wooded and sometimes grassed but always hot and dry.

She'd asked where they were going. If they knew Eli FitzFaeren. If they could take her to him. If they could tell him she'd come. But they'd ignored her and had spoken to each other in low voices she hadn't been able to understand.