Pure Dead Frozen (13 page)

Now, to Santino's discomfiture, the Don's nose was twitching nonstop, hinting at some deep volcanic rage bubbling just below the surface of that impeccably tailored suit. Praying that when it erupted, the rage wouldn't be directed at him, Santino drove on, keeping his eyes fixed firmly on the car ahead, so that when S'tan abruptly turned onto a wide sweep of rose quartz and slammed on His brakes, Santino followed suit, the two cars coming to a standstill, nose to tail, right outside the front door of StregaSchloss.

The Portable Portal

T
he changeling lay against Baci's breast and gazed up at her face, a barely audible hiss emerging from its half-open mouth. Baci slept, exhausted despite her earlier protestations to the contrary. The drawing room was warm, filled with the scent of a huge ash log that was crumbling to rose and silver embers in the grate. Surrounded by duckdown cushions and horsehair bolsters, her shoulders wrapped in a purple cashmere shawl, Baci drifted in and out of dreams, unaware that in her arms she held the stuff of nightmares.

Mrs. McLachlan smoothed Damp's hair away from her forehead and bent down to kiss her. No wonder the poor little mite was so tired; after her magical excursion with Ffup, Damp had wept nonstop for twenty minutes, raging against the arrival of the newborn at StregaSchloss and her consequent loss of status as the baby of the family.

“Not NOT wantit hobbible BABY!” she insisted, her words muffled in the pink furry folds of her piggy pajama case, her face hot, furious, and practically glowing in the darkness of the stuffy cave she'd retreated to beneath her bed. When Mrs. McLachlan finally found her, the little girl was so prostrate with heat exhaustion that she fell asleep within minutes. Tiptoeing out of Damp's bedroom, Mrs. McLachlan discovered Signor Strega-Borgia lurking outside, waiting for her in the corridor.

“Flora,” he began, “I…I have no idea how to…you're going to think I'm quite mad…. I…I…”

Mrs. McLachlan frowned, distracted by the distant sound of a car engine.

“It's the baby,” Luciano blurted. “It's…Oh, how can I put this? It…it's…”

“Signor. Surely not
it
. He's a little
boy
. Delightful. You must be so…proud.” Sensing his distress, Mrs. McLachlan made an effort to focus on what her employer was trying to tell her. But she
had
heard an engine. Two, in fact. She could definitely hear two distinct engine notes.

“No. That's the problem, you see, Flora. It's
not
a ‘he.' The baby's not…it's not
human
.”

Mrs. McLachlan's head jerked up and she looked straight into Luciano's eyes. All other thoughts were driven straight out of her mind by this bizarre statement. Luciano was sheet-white, as if he'd gone through some ghastly transformation since Mrs. McLachlan had last really paid him any attention.

“It's a
monster,
Flora. It hides what it is from Baci, from Minty, but not…not from me. Oh God, I don't know what to do. Baci's all alone with it—I need—can you—Oh, Flora, help us—”

“Show me.” Mrs. McLachlan ran past Luciano and was halfway down the stairs when car headlights swept across the great hall.

         

Titus had managed, with difficulty, not to scream his head off when several of the bats of Coire Crone fluttered down to cling to his shoulders, the leathery membranes of their wings folding up like fans, thereby indicating that they intended to hang on to him for a while. However, he decided, compared to Strega-Nonna he'd got off lightly: her body was almost completely shrouded in bats. Then, when Titus looked again, staring at the old woman as he tried to pick an easy route down the hillside, he saw that the bats were actually
carrying
Strega-Nonna, their combined wing power keeping her feet hovering above the path. Now they were heading for the river, sliding uncontrollably down a very steep and crumbly scree slope that felt, to Titus, alarmingly like skiing down an avalanche of pebbles. Several times he saw Pandora slip, her arms windmilling in an attempt to regain her balance. Several times Titus was convinced that he was about to plunge to his doom, rolling head over heels to the bottom, a course of action that would leave his broken body generously, if a tad gruesomely, distributed across the rocks of the river below. Over their heads, the giant dragon flew in a lazy circle, effortlessly demonstrating its species' superiority to man in terms of aerodynamic capabilities. Clinging to the humans, the little bats demonstrated their superiority to everyone by simply bumming a lift.

Digging her heels into the scree and raising a cloud of dust, Pandora stopped, undid her shirt, and fanned herself with her hands.

“Do you
mind
?” came an outraged squawk. “First you drip sweat all over me, then you pepper me with grit, and finally you compound the insult by whipping up a Force Ten gale….” Leg by leg, Tarantella crawled out from beneath Pandora's collar and shot the bats a look of loathing. “You do realize,” she continued, “that I'm now forced into direct competition with all these dreadful creatures for what little food there is?”

“Whatever,” groaned Pandora, wearily assessing how much further they had to go until they reached the bottom. Titus skidded to a standstill behind her.

“Pan? Where on earth are we going? This isn't the way we came here…. I wish I knew what was going on. I feel like we've been walking forever. And I'm
ravenous
. Lunch must've been hours ago.”

Tarantella grinned evilly. “Buster, have
you
got a surprise coming.
I
may have to slug it out with these winged mice mutants in order to eat, but you're going to have to compete with our friendly flamethrower overhead.”

As if to underline Tarantella's point, the gigantic shadow of the dragon scudded across the scree, followed by an even bigger shadow, which, in the initial confusion, resembled nothing so much as a vast speech bubble. Titus's head jerked upward just as a large shape slid across, temporarily casting its shadow over him. Beside him, Pandora's mouth fell open as a massive hot-air balloon dropped silently out of the sky toward them.

“Catch hold,” called a voice, and a man appeared over the rim of the balloon's gondola, holding a bundle of rope and sticks out to them. As Titus and Pandora hesitated, the bundle unwound in mid-air and revealed itself to be a rope ladder that unfurled in front of them. Below them, Strega-Nonna glided toward the balloon under bat power, waving her hands as she approached, and called up to the balloonist:

“Whatever took you so
long,
boy? We've been on this blasted hill for hours, waiting for you.”

Have we?
wondered Pandora, seizing hold of the ladder in a complete daze and beginning to climb, the narrow rungs painful under her feet and her hands slick with the sweat of fear.

The ladder jolted below her as first Titus, then Strega-Nonna, climbed aboard. Then, with a dizzying rush, they were aloft, the balloon rising into the sky as if their added weight had given it wings. Pandora clung on tight, inching upward one rung at a time until her head was level with the gondola's base. Pausing for a moment to catch her breath and wipe her slippery palms one at a time on her shirt, she made the mistake of looking down at the abyss between her feet. Below, the ground spun sickeningly; Titus's face frowned up at her; Strega-Nonna shouted something she couldn't hear; a wave of dizziness rushed up from her chest to her head—an oncoming darkness in which she found herself unable to summon the will to keep going, to hang on….

A hand grabbed her wrist and hauled her upward, another hand fastening on the waistband of her jeans, dragging her in a most inelegant fashion up and over the wicker rim of the gondola and into the tar-scented safety within. Pandora opened her eyes; saw a jumble of ropes and sandbags; felt the heat from a charcoal burner positioned in the center of the gondola's floor; craned her neck to look up at a vast canopy of swelling silk overhead; and then, at last, turned her head to look at where the pilot stood with his back to her as he helped first Titus, then Strega-Nonna, aboard.

“I…I
know
you,” Pandora blurted, shading her eyes against the sun and gazing at a face almost as familiar to her as her own.

“You know
of
me, perhaps,” the pilot said with breathtaking self-confidence before helping her to stand up. Pandora swayed, clutching one of the ropes that tethered the balloon to its gondola, as she caught a brief glimpse of the dizzying drop to the land below.

“Let me introduce myself properly,” the pilot said. “I am Apollonius Borgia, known far and wide as Apollonius ‘The Greek,' at your service.”

Despite his somewhat haughty delivery, his tone was playful, and his eyes sparkled as he bent at the waist to sweep one hand across the floor in a deep bow that encompassed first Pandora and then Titus. Strega-Nonna gave a disgusted
“Tchhhh”
and stepped forward.

“You're late, boy,” she stated. “Enough of your folderol. Children, this is your great-great-great-grandfather, Apollonius. Or is it four
great
s? I forget. It is of no importance. However great you may have been, boy, your timekeeping has always been appalling. What d'you have to say for yourself?”

Faced with such an enraged prune of a woman, even the greatest of heroes has been known to quail. No longer quite so proud as his portrait in the Ancestors' Room had led Pandora to believe, Apollonius hung his head and mumbled something inaudible.

“Speak up, lad. I didn't hear you.” Strega-Nonna was rummaging amongst the ropes and sailcloths littering the gondola floor, muttering balefully to herself, “Where
is
it, boy? Don't tell me you've forgotten to bring the confounded portal? First rule of being an ancestor: Never forget to bring your own escape route. Never.
That
was what nearly lost us the battle of Mhoire Ochone—”

At this, Apollonius clapped his hands over his eyes as if to block out an unwanted vision. “Stop,
vecchia,
I beg you. Enough. Do not remind me. That time was a black chapter in our history, and one to which I have no desire to return. You do me an injustice, besides—for here, I have the portal beside me. And”—Apollonius bent forward and hauled a large gilded picture frame upright from where it had lain unobserved at their feet—“I apologize for my tardiness, but I was delayed, unavoidably, by this…this vision here.”

And there, framed by the carved gilt of Apollonius's portal, was Minty, her face drawn and pale, a crowd of dark shadows milling behind, her spill of golden hair the only point of light in the midwinter gloom of the Ancestors' Room. She reached out to help Pandora climb through the picture frame, and it wasn't until she finally stood beside her that Pandora realized what the dark shadows really were. For hundreds of years, all the picture frames had held portraits of long-dead Borgias, but now they were deserted, their canvases devoid of people. Their belongings, goods, chattels, homes, lands, and mountains—all of these were still rendered in oil and tempera, but of the ancestors not a single brushstroke of paint remained. Instead, somewhat constrained by the size of Minty's bedroom, every one of them nodded and smiled and shuffled their feet as first Titus, then Strega-Nonna, climbed through the portal into their own time, only to discover that the past had decided to come and visit. Not only the past, but its dogs and horses as well, a fact that did not escape the attention of the huge dragon attempting to squeeze through the frame after Apollonius.

“Desist in your dribbling, dragon,” Apollonius commanded, trying to push the vast beast backward in a vain attempt to dissuade it from following. “Stay!” he barked as the gilded frame began to creak ominously around the dragon's midriff. “
No!
Beast—you shall not pass.”

“Hang on.” Pandora turned back and tugged at Apollonius's arm. “Let it come through. We could use its help with our wolf problem, and besides, our own dragon would probably enjoy the company.”

The door to Minty's bedroom opened, and as if summoned, Ffup's head appeared in the gap.

“Fooood,” she caroled happily; then, noticing how many humans she was addressing, her face fell. “Heavens. Where did you lot spring from? There's
never
going to be enough for us all.” Then she stopped, her mouth opening wide, her wings frozen like twin exclamation points as she caught sight of the huge dragon trying to squeeze its rear through the picture frame.

“MUM?” Ffup managed, her voice betraying that here was a surprise that was about as welcome as the Black Death. “Gosh!” she squeaked, pearls of sweat popping out all down her nose, her eyes swiveling from side to side as she tried and failed to find an escape route. “How…how ab—How absolutely fu-fuh-
fabulous
to see you again.” And unable to entirely conceal her true feelings, Ffup felt her nose and vent erupt simultaneously into flames of deep embarrassment.