Jack, the giant-killer (17 page)

Oh, shit, Jacky thought.

Close as she was, she could see that the impression of emptiness under their helmets was caused by visors of non-reflective dark plexiglas. The one who had lifted his head now pushed back his visor and for the first time Jacky got a glimpse at what a Huntsman really looked like. His features surprised her. He seemed quite human—rough and craggy, but human all the same. He didn’t have anything like the monstrous visage she’d imagined. Of course the way he looked wasn’t going to stop him from giving the alarm once he spotted her. His gaze settled on where she was standing.

This is it, she thought. I’m doomed.

But then a truck went by on the street and she moved quickly with it, hob-stitched sneakers lending her the necessary speed, the truck’s passage swallowing any sound she might make. When she reached the position in front of the Bingo Hall that she’d been making for, she looked back to see that the rider had dropped his visor once more, his attention turned elsewhere. Jacky glanced over at the Dairy Queen.

She hadn’t been counting herself, so she wasn’t sure how long she had to wait. Just a couple of secs, she thought, but time dragged. She peeked back down the sidewalk at the three riders. She could tell just by looking at them that they knew something was about to happen, they just didn’t know what.

Hang in there, fellas, she thought. The show’s about to start.

She wondered why she was so thirsty. Her throat felt like somebody had rubbed it with sandpaper. Come
on
, Kate. How long can it take to get to—

A hundred.

This is it, Kate thought. She got up and knocked on the door of the washroom while Arkan went outside to the car. Eilian stood by the door waiting for her. She knocked again, looked across the street to see the riders moving to their bikes, then glanced at Arkan. His head was under the dashboard looking for the ignition wires. When Judith coughed into life, he sat up and grinned at them, then tromped on the gas. The VW leapt across the parking lot with a squeal of tires. Jacky waited, her coat unbuttoned, until the VW

started. Then she pulled off the jacket and stepped out from under the awning of the Bingo Hall and onto the pavement.

“Hey, bozos!” she cried.

The riders, moving for their Harleys, paused at the sound of her voice. She couldn’t see the surprise register on their faces because of their dark plexiglas visors, but their indecision was plain in their body language.

Do it! she willed to Arkan.

At that moment the VW came tearing out of the parking lot. Jacky moved towards the riders, but slowly, making them hesitate. Then Arkan was aiming Judith at their bikes.

He hit the brakes as he neared the big choppers and the car slewed sideways. It hit the first bike and sent it crashing into the others. The riders leapt out of the way as the three machines toppled. Arkan brought Judith to an abrupt halt, backed up, popped the clutch back into first. The transmission shrieked. He floored the gas again, driving the bikes against one another and up against a streetlamp. Jacky didn’t stay to watch any more.

She ran across the street for the front door of the Dairy Queen where Kate and Eilian were waiting. They watched Arkan back Judith away from the bikes and roar across the street to where they waited. The fenders and front trunk of the little car were a mess—

crushed in, bumper hanging askew, one headlight dangling from the left side, the other shining straight up into the sky on the right.

“My car!” Kate wailed. “It’s ruined!”

Arkan pulled to a screeching stop and Eilian opened the passenger’s door. Grabbing Kate’s arm, Jacky propelled her into the car. They both got into the back—Kate under protest.

Eilian was half in when Arkan pulled away. He turned left at Riverdale, moving quickly through the gears up to third.

“It worked!” Jacky cried. She twisted around, peering out the back window. She could see the riders trying to untangle their machines. “We’ve lost them.”

“I’ve had this car for seven years,” Kate said.

“We’ll get you another one,” Jacky told her.

“You can’t buy these anymore—not like Judith.”

She glared at Jacky. “How could you do this to Judith?”

“I…” It had been such a good plan, Jacky thought. And it had worked too. But she’d never really thought about what it would do to Kate’s car. “Jeez, Kate. I wasn’t trying to wreck her.”

“God! Imagine if you had been.”

“Well, you’re the one who insisted on coming along.”

“I…” Now it was Kate’s turn to deflate. “I suppose I did. It’s just that…”

Jacky gave her a hug. “We’ll get her fixed up,” she promised. “We’ll make the Gruagagh put a spell on her.”

“Do you think he would?”

“Your chance to ask him is coming right up,” Arkan said from the front seat as he pulled into the driveway beside the house that was the Gruagagh’s Tower. The front yard was all overgrown as well, though not so badly as the back. A tall oak stood sentinel on the lawn, branches bare of leaves spreading overhead. A rundown garage, its door closed and the whole structure leaning a bit to one side, crouched at the end of the driveway. The house was dark. It looked, at that moment, more deserted than ever.

“End of the line,” Arkan said.

Eilian got out first. As Jacky and Kate disembarked, he opened the garage door. There was plenty of room inside, so Arkan drove Judith in, then reached down and undid the wires, killing the engine. Eilian closed the garage door behind Arkan and they rejoined Jacky and Kate.

“Jeez,” Jacky said, looking at the dark house. Second and third thoughts were busily cluttering up her mind. Her stupid throat had gone all dry again. She swallowed with a grimace.

“I hope he’s in a good mood,” she said as she led the way to the front door and knocked.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

« ^ »

When subsequent knocking, and even a few wellplaced kicks against the Gruagagh’s door elicited no response, Jacky tried the doorknob. To her surprise, it turned easily under her hand and the door swung open. Shadows fled down the hallway, banished by the vague illumination of the streetlights behind her. But some of them seemed to move in the wrong direction. For a moment she thought she saw a coatrack against the wall by the door, but as soon as she looked at it, it was gone. There were vague sounds, creakings and stirrings that seemed more than just an old house settling in on itself.

She could remember Bhruic telling her that this was the best protected place in the Laird’s lands. Oh, really? Then how come it was so easy to get in?

“Bhruic?” she called down the hallway. It was still filled with shadows, but now they lay motionless. The creaks and stirring quieted. “Are you there, Bhruic?”

Her voice echoed through the house. The stillness that followed was absolute. A horrible feeling began to rise in her. She remembered her first visit here. It was hard to forget the tall, forbidding Gruagagh, the sly movements spied in the shadows and the ghostly furniture that never really seemed to be there when you looked straight at it. She started forward, but a quick brown hand closed its fingers around her arm and hauled her back.

“You
never
go unbidden into a Gruagagh’s Tower,”

Arkan warned.

“I don’t think he’s here anymore,” Jacky said, shaking her arm free.

“He has to be,” Kate said.

Jacky’s bad feeling grew more pronounced.

Something was definitely wrong here. Either the Unseelie Court had found a way to breach Bhruic’s defenses or… or he had left on his own. Either way, she felt betrayed.

“I’m going in,” she said. “Whoever wants to can wait out here, but I’m going in.”

She moved into the hallway and this time no one tried to stop her. Kate hesitated, then followed with Eilian. Arkan stood uncertainly on the stoop. He looked back at the deserted street, cars parked in neat rows along one side, houses spilling rectangularlyshaped yellow lights from their windows onto their lawns. Swallowing once, he faced the Tower again and went inside.

A feeling of certain doom made his chest go tight as he crossed the threshold and he found it hard to breathe. His faerie senses could see deeper into the shadows; could hear far more clearly. There was a feeling of
otherness
all about him. But as he closed the door and followed the others down the hall, and still nothing happened—no lightning bolts, no angry Gruagagh roaring at them—his initial fears quieted a little. But only to make room for new ones. If the Gruagagh
wasn’t
here, what hope was left for them? The Gruagagh held the heart of the Laird’s kingdom in trust. If he had betrayed them… The rumours that had abounded when the Unseelie Court stole away the Laird’s daughter returned to haunt him. Oh, moon and stars! If the Gruagagh was in league with the Host…

“Where could he be?” Jacky whispered. “He

promised—promised!—me he couldn’t leave the Tower.”

“Maybe he doesn’t know we’re here,” Eilian said.

“He could be upstairs, out of earshot…”

“Look,” Kate said.

She was standing by an open doorway, pointing in. The others joined her. They could see Windsor Park through the room’s windows. Phantom furniture came and went as they looked about, then the room appeared to be empty, except for a small figure lying on a huddle of blankets in a corner.

“It’s Finn,” Jacky said, crossing the room. She knelt by the little man and touched his shoulder. His eyelids fluttered at her touch. His eyes opened to look, first at her, then over her shoulder where Kate and the other two members of their small company stood.

“Where… where am I?” he asked.

“In the Tower,” Jacky said.

The little man’s features blanched. “The… the Gruagagh’s Tower?”

Jacky nodded. “Where is he, Finn?”

“Where… ?” The hob sat up, a hand rising to rub at his temple. “The last thing I remember is the bogans grabbing you and then something hitting me harder than I ever care to be hit again…” His voice trailed off as his fingers explored his scalp. “At least I thought I was hit on the head. But there’s not even a bump.”

“The Gruagagh fixed you up,” Kate said.

“And now he’s gone,” Jacky added, trying to keep the hurt from her voice.

Why did he lie to her? Finding Finn here, alive and unhurt, proved that the Host hadn’t stormed the place. So where could the Gruagagh have gone? And why?

“I’m going to look around some more,” she said.

“Kate, can you show me that room upstairs?”

Kate nodded, but it was Arkan who spoke.

“We should go,” he said. “It’s bad enough we’re in his Tower without his leave; it’ll be worse if we go poking and prying.”

“The Gruagagh is gone?” Finn asked. “And you’re spying on him? Jacky Rowan, are you mad?”

“Angry, maybe, but not the kind of mad you mean. Come on, Kate.”

The two women left the room with Eilian and began to explore the other rooms. “This is bad,” they could hear Finn mutter behind them as they started up the stairs. “This is very bad.”

The halls and rooms upstairs were all dark, free of dust and unfurnished, and there was no one there. There were no ghostly furnishings anymore, no sense of sly movement in the deeper shadows. Jacky had an eerie feeling moving through the deserted house. She felt like a ghost, like she didn’t belong here or anywhere anymore. With the Gruagagh’s

disappearance she had to wonder how much of anything that he’d told her was true.

Why did he want her to go to the Giants’ Keep?

What if Lorana wasn’t there? Or if she was already dead? If he was in league with the Unseelie Court, he might have been setting her and Kate up for… well, God knew what. When she thought of the bogans and their prodding fingers, the hunger in their eyes… She didn’t plan to end up in a stew, that much was certain.

“I can’t find it,” Kate said.

They were on the third floor now and had been in and out of every room at least a half dozen times.

“A room can’t just disappear,” Jacky said.

“A gruagagh’s can,” Eilian said. “Our Billy Blind has places he can sit and never the one of us can see or find him until he suddenly steps out—as if from nowhere.”

“A Billy Blind’s like a gruagagh, isn’t he?” Jacky asked. “Sort of a poor man’s gruagagh?”

Eilian nodded. “My father’s Court is not so big as some— not so big as Kinrowan, that’s for certain. And we have no gruagagh to spell the Samhaine charms—

only a Billy Blind.”

“Well, what do you do on Samhaine Eve then?”

“Hide and hope.”

“Hide and hope,” Jacky repeated. She looked around the third floor landing where they were standing. “Can you hear me, Bhruic Dearg? Are you hiding somewhere near? Well, come out and talk to us, dammit!” She stamped her foot on the wooden floor, but its echoes were the only sound that replied. “Was everything he told me a lie?” she asked no one in particular.

Eilian shook his head. “There
is
a Horn that rules the Hunt and the Laird of Kinrowan’s daughter
was
stolen by the Unseelie Court—those weren’t lies. And you, Jacky. You are the only Jack we have now.”

“I wish you’d stop calling me that. I’m a woman. You make me sound like a sailor.”

“It’s a title,” Eilian said. “Like ‘Billy Blind.’ Our Billy Blind’s not named Billy, nor even William.”

She forced a small smile to her lips. “I guess we might as well go back downstairs. Do you think this place’ll be safe enough for us tonight? I don’t see us going to Calabogie tonight, but the way we all just waltzed in here… I don’t know.”

“So we’re still going?” Kate asked.

“What else can we do?” she asked. “With or without the Gruagagh, we’ve still got the Host to contend with. The only idea worth following through on is the one we started out with—get the Horn and use it to find and free Lorana. The Laird’s folk will rally around her and, if we’ve got the Horn, then we control the Hunt. After we use it to find Lorana, we can turn the Hunt on the Unseelie Court and see how they like being on the receiving end for a change.”

“This is still a gruagagh’s Tower,” Eilian said. “I think we’ll be safe here—from Gyre the Elder’s people at any rate. But if the Gruagagh returns and decides he doesn’t care to guest us…”