Lost Ones-Veil 3 (8 page)

The nightmare had no end. He could not command the hands that murdered or the black lips that pulled back in a leer. In every way that mattered, he was the Sandman. The atrocities were not within his control, but he suffered through each moment, mind screaming in silence.

Lemon-yellow eyes glanced upward at the sky. The moon was a sliver, the heavens sable black. The stars seemed withdrawn, as though they dared not come too close to the world of the legendary in these ugly days. The monster had learned that Oliver Bascombe was being held in the dungeon at the king’s palace in Palenque. Bascombe wasn’t going anywhere, so he would kill Kitsune first. He would shred the fox-woman’s flesh, just as soon as he found her.

A rasp accompanied the Sandman as he slipped through the nighttime streets. The village slept, but fitfully. Spectral, little more than a wraith, he moved toward a building whose first floor was a candy shop. A soft glow illuminated the eyebrow windows set into the gables of the roof—an attic room, a candle still burning.

There would be children here.

Halliwell felt the thrill run through the Sandman, so much like lust. Were those terrible lemon eyes his own, he would weep.

The Sandman clambered up the side of the shop as though carried by the wind. His cloak billowed around him and then he collapsed into a flurry of sand, slipping through the open window. Once within, the sand skittered across the wood floor and the small throw rug at the center of the room. Grain by grain, he reconstructed himself, a shell that now housed three beings.

A small boy slept beneath a freshly laundered blanket. His face was so beautiful in repose, cheeks flushed, lips open slightly. His brown hair was tousled and wild on his pillow. Lovely, heartbreaking innocence.

Halliwell was sickened to realize that the Sandman saw the same beauty in that innocence. He tried to grasp at any straw of hope that his imagination could muster. The child was sleeping. The legend of the Sandman spoke of him punishing only those young ones who were still awake when he arrived, claiming their eyes in return for their insolence.

But the monster had taken sleeping victims before. Simple enough to torture them to screaming wakefulness.

In a single stride, the Sandman stood beside the bed and reached long, narrow talons down to slowly draw back the covers. The blanket smelled of lavender soap.

The sleeping boy sighed and his brow creased, troubled, until he turned onto his side and pulled his knees up to his chest, his body aware of the missing blanket.

The Sandman went still. Awareness prickled. Somehow, he had heard Halliwell scream. Or felt it. Inside the monster, Halliwell could not move. His soul had gone rigid with fear unlike anything he had ever known—a terrible denial that would drive him fleeing into the darkened streets if only he had legs with which to run. Shame cloaked him, now, but he drew it tightly around himself as though it might shield him.

This was death and dream and anguish. How could he not flee?

After a moment, the Sandman moved once more, attention no longer turned inward. With the relief and release Halliwell felt there came bitter fury both at the monster and at himself.

This had to stop.

Then the voice, welling up from the depths of their shared psyche.
Fool,
said the Dustman.
You have told him we are here.

The anger stirred in Halliwell again.
Who the hell are you to judge? What have you done but hide?

For a moment, he thought the Dustman had gone. The terror that struck him at the idea that he might be trapped within the monster alone was almost worse than the attention of the Sandman. But then he spoke again. Halliwell could not see him—he saw only through the lemon eyes of the monster—but he could feel the Dustman coming closer and his memory supplied an image of the legend—the old London gent with bowler hat and thick mustache, the collar of his greatcoat turned up, the gray dust and dirt texture of his clothes and flesh identical.

Shut your gob and listen,
the Dustman whispered in Halliwell’s mind.
Come down into the dust with me, Detective. It’s time we had a chat.

The Sandman snatched the little boy from his bed, dangling the child by one arm. The boy’s eyes snapped open and grew wide with terror. He opened his mouth in a shriek, legs twisting and kicking as he tried to pull himself loose from the Sandman’s grip. The wraith only held him more tightly, and the child cried out in pain.

The bedroom door crashed open. The father stood silhouetted in the doorway, the mother in the hall behind him, both frantic with worry.

Then they saw the monster that held their son. The mother screamed. The father backed up a step, grabbed hold of the doorframe to steady himself.

Come, Detective,
the Dustman whispered.
Nothing you can do for them. Not yet. Turn away.

I can’t.

Turn away.
The voice was insistent.

All along, Halliwell had been afraid that if he allowed his tenuous hold on the world—his view through the Sandman’s eyes—to go dark, he would be adrift forever in the swirl of darkness in the creature’s venomous heart. But the Dustman beckoned him deeper.

In the child’s bedroom, the father demanded that the Sandman release the boy. The monster’s laugh skittered along the floor like errant grains of sand. The mother rushed past her husband, hands raised, fingers hooked into claws to save her son. The Sandman let her come and, as her fingers dug furrows into him, covered her face with his free hand. Her scream was muffled. Sand filled her throat. His hand expanded, covering her face, scraping…eroding.

When he dropped his hand, the mother’s face had been scoured away, leaving only bloody muscle, gleaming bone, and screams. The monster batted her aside and held up the struggling boy as his prize.

“What do you want?” the father screamed.

The Sandman crouched low, holding the boy to him as though the child were precious.

“There is a secret place nearby,” the monster rasped. “A haven for Lost Ones and old legends. Twillig’s Gorge, they call it. I would know where it is.”

The father only gaped in despair and confusion.

“You’ve heard of it?” the Sandman growled.

“Yes. Of course,” the man said, desperate, trying to ignore the whimpers from his wife, trying to keep his son alive. “But I don’t know where it is.”

The Sandman narrowed his lemon eyes.

Halliwell tried to look away. The Dustman called to him.

The monster’s rasp was barely louder than the scratch of sand upon the floor as the breeze rose again.

“Pity,” the monster said. “Now I will have to ask another father. Another mother.”

Hopeless, now, Halliwell surrendered. He released his hold upon the world and let his spirit drift down into the maelstrom of the Sandman’s heart, where the Dustman whispered to him of will and grit and bone.

The gods of wine and depravity lived in bloated torpor in the ruined cellar of a palazzo in the Latin Quarter. The openings that led down beneath the ruin were treacherous. Grape vines—half withered—had grown over some of the shattered columns and fallen arches and stone blocks of the palazzo.

“Here?” Kitsune asked.

The sky had cleared and the sun beat down on the stones and made the grape leaves curl on the vines. Her copper-red fur was a part of her, but it felt too warm now, too close. Still, she would not remove it. To do so would make her feel less the fox and more human, and she was feeling too damnably human as it was.

She hated the Atlanteans and the Myth Hunters for what they had begun. She wished she had never met Oliver Bascombe. More than anything, she wished she could tear out the love in her heart.

No. No more thinking about Oliver.

Easier said than done, however. Particularly when all of her efforts now sprang from having known him. She would like to think that she might have stood and fought against the enemies that would destroy her and her kin—that would shatter the Two Kingdoms and take down fair and wise monarchs—even if she had not met him. But Kitsune could not have said that with any certainty, and this troubled her most of all.

“Here?” she repeated, turning to Lycaon.

Not even the old gods, it seemed, could escape time.

“So much for Olympus,” Lycaon said, his voice a growl. He did not look at Kitsune, or at Coyote, who climbed across the rocks, trying to keep up with them.

Kitsune stared at the opening that Lycaon expected them to climb into. “There must be others whose circumstances are less dire.”

“None who’d welcome me, or see you because I asked,” the monster replied.

“Cousin,” Coyote began.

Kitsune silenced him with a look. He sighed and came to join her in the rubble. With a glance back at Lycaon, they started down. A slab of stone shifted under her feet. If not for her natural agility, Kitsune would have tumbled into the hole.

Just a few steps lower, however, they found the original stairs that led to the wine cellar. The stink of fermenting grapes rose from below, powerful enough that the small hairs on the back of her neck rose and she was forced to breathe through her mouth. Drunken laughter rippled up from below.

Before she had even seen them, she knew the wine gods would not join them in their campaign against the invaders.

At the bottom of the stairs she found a heavy wooden door, but it hung open. She glanced back at Coyote. In the gloom, his eyes gleamed with a hint of red and gold. He nodded, urging her onward. Beyond him, Lycaon hesitated. Kitsune wondered if he would betray them, but the beast would not have bothered to rouse himself from his kitchen just to lead them into trouble. No, that was the trickster’s nature, not the monster’s.

Pushing the black velvet curtain of her hair away from her eyes, she knocked loudly, but there was no reply.

“Just go in,” Coyote said.

His impatience seemed to free something inside of her, so Kitsune pushed open the heavy door and stepped through.

A dozen steps took them down into a cavernous underground chamber whose walls were lined with racks and old wooden casks. Many of them had shattered or rotted away, and the dirt floor of the cellar was muddy with old wine.

Fresh grapes grew in huge quantities in the dark, far corner of the cellar, as though they could survive in that sunless hole. They did survive, of course; the wine gods made sure of that. Blocks of stone that had once been a part of the palazzo upstairs had been brought down to construct a dais in the center of the chamber. Upon the dais, on filthy velvet tapestries that might once have been art, the two gods sprawled. Each must easily have been seven or eight feet tall when standing, but they looked as though they had not bothered to climb to their feet in some time. Bacchus and Dionysus, of the Roman and Greek pantheons, respectively, looked very little like gods of any age or culture.

They were naked and dirty, their beards overgrown tangles of gray. One of the stinking gods sniffed the air, taking in the new scents that had entered the cellar, and then sat up. When he saw their visitors, he grinned.

“What have we here, brother Bacchus?” he said, slurring his words. “A pretty thing come to the party. Strip off your garments, girl, and make your offering.”

Kitsune blinked. Then, unable to help herself, she laughed. At the sound, Dionysus gazed at her blearily. He seemed more confused than insulted. But Bacchus struggled to raise his bulk. He had a jug of wine in one hand and accidentally spilled it across his chest.

“Do you mock, girl?” Bacchus demanded. He sneered, but his head swayed with the muzzy numbness of the besotted.

Neither of the gods had even acknowledged the presence of Coyote or Lycaon. They were discarded deities, living in filth, and yet their arrogance remained. Perhaps it was all that had kept them alive.

“No, Lord Bacchus. I wouldn’t dare. I have come on an issue of dire importance, with news that threatens all of Euphrasia, an insidious evil that will find its way even here, in this haven you have made.”

Bacchus gazed doubtfully at her.

“We are gods, little fox, not merely legends. What might frighten the Lost or the legendary means nothing to us.”

Kitsune hesitated. She would have loved to correct him, to tell him that most of the beings that had once been gods were no more powerful, and sometimes far less so, than many of the legends she had met.

“Lord Bacchus,” Coyote interjected, perhaps sensing her pique, “Kitsune speaks the truth. Atlantis has betrayed the Two Kingdoms. They’ve coerced and deceived Yucatazca and murdered its king. War has begun. Invaders swarm into Euphrasia. If the races of Euphrasia don’t come together now, it will be too late.”

The Roman god belched loudly. Burgundy spittle ran down his chin.

“Get out,” Bacchus sighed.

“You’re not listening,” Kitsune growled. “You can’t just wait here to die.”

Dionysus laughed. The Greek god had apparently not forgotten they were there after all. He glanced at Kitsune.

“Little one, we’ve been waiting to die for a thousand years. Until then, we pass the time. But perhaps some of our brothers and sisters will take a greater interest in survival. They’ve lived this long, after all. So many have scattered throughout the Two Kingdoms and beyond—far beyond—and twice their number have died. But there are still a few who might listen.”

He glanced at Bacchus, as though for approval, but the other god ignored them.

“Lycaon,” Dionysus said.

The monster flinched. Strange to see the beast, the cannibal, so cowed. “Yes, Lord Dionysus?”

“You brought them?”

Lycaon lowered his head. “Yes, lord.”

“Good,” Dionysus said. “Each morning, go to Lycaon’s Kitchen and wait. If any from our pantheons wish to hear what you have to say, they will find you there.”

“Wait?” Coyote asked, taking a step toward the dais. “For how long?”

Dionysus laughed. “Until the gods deign to see you.”

CHAPTER
6

C
ollette Bascombe lay on the thin mattress that was all she and Julianna had by way of comfort in their cell. It stank and there were stains on it that she did not wish to consider, but still she was grateful. When she thought of a dungeon, she imagined sleeping on cold stone. That would have been far worse. Yet even that would not have been as terrible as her captivity in the Sandman’s castle, with the roasting sun above during the day and the creeping chill after dark.

Had they taken the mat away, she would have survived. But Collette was glad to have it, both for her own sake and for Julianna’s. Her friend—and her brother’s fiancée—had never been much afraid of anything in her life. But during the nights that had passed since their attempt to reach Frost, Julianna shivered with the cold and, perhaps, with fear that they would never leave those stone cells again. They’d had their chance at escape, and failed.

There had been periods of silence and some of tears. Conversations had been whispered, particularly those held across the corridor with Oliver. They were wary of being overheard. Not that they had developed any real plan, but the guards were cautious, now. What else could they do but wither here and wait to die?

Collette did not share these thoughts with her brother or with Julianna, but she knew her friend could see the doubt in her eyes.

The thought made her shiver. Julianna huddled close to her on the mat, sharing warmth. Collette wondered if she was awake or if the gesture was instinctive. She did not turn to find out. Sleep was a precious commodity recently, and if Julianna had managed it, Collette did not want to wake her.

Instead she lay there, trying to breathe through her mouth to avoid the stink. The bruises she had received from the guards were healing, but there was still an ache in her side where she feared their kicks had cracked her ribs. They would heal as well, but more slowly. The swelling on her face had gone down, but the flesh was still tender and Julianna had confirmed that her jaw still had a greenish-yellow hue. Her blood had stained the mat, but it had long since dried.

Curled on her side, she let her right hand trail off the edge of the mat. Her ragged fingernails traced the lines of grout between the stones in the floor. In the dark, she could not see them, but she could feel the difference in texture between the smoothness of the stone and the rough mortar.

Then her fingernail scraped something up off of the mortar groove between two stones.

In the dark, Collette frowned. She ran the ball of her finger over the same spot and felt the loose grit again. With her nail, she dug between the stones and the grout came away, not in chunks but in a soft powder, as though whatever adhesive quality it had once had no longer existed.

A tremor went through her.

She sat up, rubbing the grit from her finger with the tip of her thumb. In the dark, she bent forward and tried to see the section of floor she had been scraping. Her fingers ran over the stones and the grooves again. She found the place where she had done her small excavation and brushed away the loose powder. Once more she tried to dig between the stones.

Now, though, nothing happened.

“Shit,” she whispered, some of the hope that had begun to rise in her slipping away. Collette tried the grooves between the other stones in the floor of the cell, but found only a few grains of loose grit, normal erosion.

“What is it?”

With a sigh, she turned to regard Julianna. In the dark, all she could see was the outline of the woman sitting up on the mat. Some tiny bit of illumination must have filtered in from the corridor, because Julianna’s eyes had a wet gleam.

“I’m sorry if I woke you,” Collette said.

“I wasn’t really sleeping. What’s wrong?”

Collette gnawed her lip for a moment, wondering if she should say anything. Then she forged ahead.

“Do you remember when I told you about escaping from that pit the Sandman kept me in? What I did with the sand?”

She could still remember the way her fingers had dug into the walls. One moment they’d felt like concrete, but then they’d given way under her touch and she had been able to create handholds and footholds and climb out. Once before that and once after she had dug right through the walls of the sandcastle.

“Of course,” Julianna said. “You and Oliver figured it had to do with your mother being Borderkind.”

“Melisande,” Collette replied. Speaking her mother’s real name—if, indeed, that legendary creature had been their mother—still felt strange to her.

“That’s how you two were able to destroy those sand-things so easily, and when you hurt the Sandman—”

“Yeah. Exactly,” Collette interrupted. “It was like we could undo the things the Sandman had built. Unmake them.”

“Unravel…” Julianna said.

In the dark, Collette reached out to take her hand, afraid to hope. “I was just lying here, scraping my fingers on the floor, and I dug up some of the stuff between the stones. It might’ve just been loose. Probably that’s what it was, since I tried again and now it’s all pretty solid. But for a second, it felt the way it had at the sandcastle…like I was just, what did you say? Like I was unraveling it, somehow.”

Julianna squeezed her fingers and started to stand, pulling Collette to her feet.

“What are you doing?”

“You’ve got to tell Oliver.”

Collette hesitated. “It isn’t working, though. It’s probably just loose mortar.”

“What if it’s not?”

The question echoed in her mind. “This isn’t the first time I’ve thought about it, Jules. Ever since we ended up here, I’ve been thinking about the time I spent down in that pit. I’ve tried it. Maybe Oliver and I are half-legend and maybe we’re not, but we don’t have any special magic in us. We’re not myths. We’re people.”

“But you weren’t thinking about it this time, were you? You’re hurt and exhausted, like you were then. It just happened, like before.”

Collette took a breath, then nodded. “Maybe.”

Julianna pulled her toward the door of the cell. Collette put her hands against the wood and stood on the tips of her toes to see through the metal window grate.

“Hey,” she whispered. “You awake?”

A tiny bit of light filtered down the corridor from the torches that must have been burning up the stairs where the guards stood sentry. It gave her enough illumination to make out the door to her brother’s cell.

His voice came from the darkness within.

“Who can sleep with you two gossiping over there?”

Collette smiled. Still, after all they’d been through, her little brother could tease her. Maybe there was hope after all. She and Julianna had been whispering, but Oliver had overheard them. That meant he had been unable to sleep as well.

“You heard?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you think?” Julianna asked.

In the dark, behind that door, Oliver hesitated. Collette felt the regret coming from him, even with the space between them, and suddenly she knew what he was going to say.

“You’ve been trying too,” she whispered across the corridor.

“Not recently. Not much,” Oliver replied. “But I did when we were first thrown in here. How could I not, after what you did, Coll? I tried a million times to loosen the stones around the door or the window. No such luck.”

Collette came down off of her toes and rested her forehead against the door. She ran her hands over the wood and traced the frame with her fingers. Closing her eyes, she tried to remember the feel of the mortar giving way, the grit of that soft powder.

Her eyes opened.

“Oliver?” she said, raising her voice so it wouldn’t be as muffled by the door.

“Yeah?”

Collette looked at Julianna. In the slight illumination that came through the grate in the door, she saw her friend’s determined expression.

“Keep trying,” Collette said. “It wasn’t my imagination.”

“This was a mistake,” Blue Jay said as he and Cheval threaded their way along a narrow, curving alley alive with music and chatter and the drunken stumblings of the citizens of Palenque.

Cheval took his hand and leaned into him, smiling as though they were lovers. Blue Jay grinned. The kelpy might be a beast in truth, but her human mask was exquisite and sensual.

“What are you talking about?” she asked.

“Taking you with me,” he replied, and felt her stiffen at the insult. “Your beauty is far too conspicuous. You draw attention when what we wish is to pass unnoticed.”

Cheval squeezed his hand. Her touch was cold. “I will choose to take that as a compliment,” she said. “And I shall endeavor to be uglier.”

The trickster couldn’t help laughing. “That would be helpful.”

His good humor faded almost instantly, however. Cheval had never shown the slightest romantic interest in him, but he did not want her to think he was flirting. For only the second time in his ageless existence, he had taken responsibility for another’s heart. He would do nothing to hurt Damia Beck.

Other troubles loomed larger, in any case. The day before, at Smith’s instruction, they had stepped blindly through the Veil having only his assurance that they would emerge somewhere safe from prying eyes. He had been as good as his word. They had arrived in Palenque in an apartment on the second floor of a building that overlooked one of the narrow streets of the labyrinthine inner city.

But were there allies here in Palenque, or only enemies?

It was a question he would find an answer to while they found a way to free the Bascombes and Julianna Whitney from the palace dungeon.

But their work had just begun, and already he believed he had made a mistake. Bringing Cheval along truly had been an error. They had left Li and Grin back in the apartment because they could not pass as humans and their appearance might lead to trouble. If they were identified as Euphrasian Borderkind, someone would report their presence, and Blue Jay was determined that there would be no blood spilled until the moment of his choosing.

He had removed the feathers from his hair and tied it back. Within minutes of his first excursion from the apartment he had persuaded two street gamblers to part with their billfolds and purchased a colorful serape for himself and a peasant dress for Cheval. The gossamer gowns she favored would not do. But even in that ragged dress, she still seemed far too beautiful to be one of the Lost Ones. One look at her, and a man would have to presume she was a goddess or a legend.

Foolish Jay,
the trickster thought now, as he steered them both through the busy street.

Not all of Palenque was alive like this. When last they had walked these streets, the whole center of the city had been undulating with life, the air filled with the aromas of alcohol and tobacco. From what Blue Jay and Cheval had seen, the war had dimmed the spirits of the Yucatazcans somewhat. Shutters were drawn. Some doors bore a strange, batlike symbol painted upon them in red, representing mourning for sons and daughters killed in battle.

Yet here, on Calle Capiango, it seemed the laughter had never stopped. Perhaps this was the place where Palenqueians came to hide from their fears, or perhaps those who dined in the calle’s restaurants and tavernas simply had no reason to fear.

A man stood on a street corner playing a guitar. His long hair was slick and his features dark and smoldering. Women who passed him let their eyes linger, hoping to get his attention, but he saw only his guitar.

Until Cheval walked by.

Damn it,
Blue Jay thought.

He took her by the hand and hurried along the street. He bumped into a large man and apologized, but the man cursed at him. Blue Jay swore under his breath, scanning the street and the mouths of the small alleys around them.

At last, he saw what he’d been searching for. The alley seemed indistinct save for the small blue birds painted on the shutters of an apartment on the third, uppermost floor. He led Cheval to the corner as casually as possible, then ducked into the alley.

She grabbed his arm and spun him to face her. Her eyes seemed as silver as her hair. Cheval stared at him, her lips and cheeks flushed pink from the rushing of her pulse.

“What are we doing, exactly?”

“Meeting some old friends.”

Cheval narrowed her eyes. “Old friends? I do not understand. We are supposed to infiltrate and recruit some assistance. If we had old friends here, surely we would begin with them.”

“That’s exactly the plan.”

“But Smith said nothing about old friends.”

Blue Jay smiled and pointed at himself. “Trickster, remember? I’ve been in contact with allies here in Palenque for weeks. The underground Smith wanted us to build—I started long before he asked. The Wayfarer may have my respect, but he does not have my trust. I don’t think he’s loyal to anyone but himself. That’s fine, if we have the same goals. And maybe we do. But I didn’t tell him all my secrets, and I’m damned sure he didn’t tell me all of his.”

“What secrets?” Cheval asked. Her eyes grew stormy. “Perhaps you do not trust Smith, but you had better trust me, monsieur. What old friends are we meeting?”

Blue Jay hesitated. He had kept secrets, certainly. Tricksters always did. But he remembered that Frost had kept secrets from Oliver and the trouble that had caused. Cheval might be volatile, but she had proven her loyalty as a friend.

“Sorry. I should’ve said—”

Above them, something scratched against the side of the building. Metal clanked softly. Out on the main street, Blue Jay would never have heard the sound, despite his acute senses. But there in the alley it was all too loud. He and Cheval turned as one to look up. In the moonlight, they saw a creature hanging from a windowsill by its tail. The thing had a body like a monkey but a canine head and snout with damp nose and bared teeth. The tip of its tail split into digits like fingers and it clung to the windowsill as though it had a hand there.

Cheval uttered a breathy French curse.

Blue Jay tensed, prepared for an attack.

The thing growled, but it didn’t look at them. It stared back down the alley toward Calle Capiango. Blue Jay forced himself to tear his gaze from the little fiend to see what had caught its attention.